Arab Mother Shot Dead in Galilee Town

A 35-year-old mother of two was shot to death yesterday in the Galilee village of Rama while she was driving her car.

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• A string of murders highlights the status of Israeli-Arab women

Police arrested and are questioning the husband of Lina Ahmed-Ismail, whose children are 4 and 5 years old. The family is known to the police from earlier domestic violence complaints.

Police are looking into whether the killing of Ahmed-Ismail might have any connection to the murders of Anwar Fares and his neighbor, Said Saman, in Rama last October. Those killings are still being investigated, with police believing that Fares was actually the target and Saman was killed by mistake.

Ahmed-Ismail is the eighth woman from Rama to be murdered in just over a decade. In 2006, Noel Hassan, 24, was murdered and her father convicted of her murder. In 2007, Rim Kassem, a Rama native, was murdered in her rented apartment in Haifa, and the same year Maryam Baroud, 80 and her daughter, Varda, 59, were murdered in the village. In 2011, Maya Fares, 20, was murdered and in 2015, Ra’ida Najem Abu Latif, a Rama native who lived in Beit Jann, was murdered and her son was arrested in connection with the killing. Last year Samira Ismail, 40, was killed.

MK Aida Touma-Suliman (Joint List) said after Ahmed-Ismail’s killing, “This is the third case in less than a week. We cannot continue to count bodies and go about our normal routine. When there are repeated murders and the murderers aren’t found, as in Rama and Lod, everyone can feel that he won’t pay a price if he commits murder. The helplessness of the police and the authorities convey the message that anyone can murder and walk around free.”

Also yesterday, the police announced that they have detained five people suspected of involvement in the murder of Siham Zabaraja, a women’s rights activist, in Lod last week. The five, relatives of the murdered women, are suspected of murder, conspiracy to commit a crime, interfering with judicial proceedings and accessory after the fact. In the afternoon they were brought for an extension of their detention in the Rishon Letzion Magistrate’s Court.

Zabaraja, 29, was shot and critically wounded, and died two days later in Assaf Harofeh Medical Center. According to a close friend of the victim, she was sitting in her home with her 20-year-old brother when a masked man entered carrying a handgun with a silencer and shot her. The friend said that her brother began to shout and the murderer aimed the gun at him, threatening to kill him if he didn’t keep quiet, and left.