News Desk - The Cradle
190 people from Israel’s Arab community have been victims of homicides since the beginning of the year, compared to 112 in 2022.
.jpg)
The calls came after five members of a Bedouin family were shot dead in their home on 27 February as part of a dispute between rival Arab gangs.
The family members were allegedly killed in response to the killing of a sixth person, 50-year-old Ataf Abu Kalib, who was shot dead in his car in broad daylight by masked gunmen on a highway in Haifa earlier that morning.
“The murder today shows just how severe the neglect is and how widespread and deep the treatment must be,” National Unity leader Benny Gantz said. “The current government, which appointed Ben-Gvir, who is busy with provocations instead of saving human life, is not qualified to handle this problem.”
Gantz stressed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “must fire Ben-Gvir not only because of his actions, but mainly because of his neglect.”
Yesh Atid MK Ron Katz voiced a similar sentiment, the Jerusalem Post reported. “This morning, a man was assassinated in the north,” he said, “and the idle minister is busy with interviews, TikTok videos, and planning prayer services to divide the people.”
“In what other country would this minister be kept in his position? How can it be that there is no price for failure in the State of Israel?”
The Jerusalem Post also reported National Unity MK Yifat Shasha-Biton saying: “There’s no governance, there’s no security, there are more and more victims, more and more crime, and there’s no light at the end of the darkness that has befallen us. Israel’s citizens are living in fear on [Netanyahu’s] watch.”
According to Haaretz, 190 people from Israel’s Arab community have been victims of homicides since the beginning of the year, compared to 112 in 2022.
Many Arab officials say Ben Gvir has prioritized fighting crime in Jewish areas and deliberately neglected it in Arab areas since his appointment as National Security Minister earlier this year.
“Ben-Gvir promised governance, but he is busy dealing with crime that affects Jews, not Arabs,” said Fida Shehada, a former city council member from Lod, a mixed Jewish-Arab city in central Israel, and an advocate for victims’ families.
In a statement on Wednesday evening, Ben Gvir said that he is “deeply shocked” by the “bloodshed in the Arab society.”
“In recent months, we have managed to provide the police with quite a few resources and secured legislation that would assist its fight against such murderous incidents. We will continue to push for further legislation that would enable the usage of biometric cameras that may save lives,” he stated.
A biometric security camera system is currently being used in the occupied West Bank.
In May, Amnesty International published a report detailing how Israeli authorities use an experimental facial recognition system, Red Wolf, to track Palestinians and automate harsh restrictions on their freedom of movement.
According to Amnesty, “Red Wolf is part of an ever-growing surveillance network which is entrenching the Israeli government’s control over Palestinians, and which helps to maintain Israel’s system of apartheid. Red Wolf is deployed at military checkpoints in the city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank, where it scans Palestinians’ faces and adds them to vast surveillance databases without their consent.”
“In addition to the constant threat of excessive physical force and arbitrary arrest, Palestinians must now contend with the risk of being tracked by an algorithm or barred from entering their own neighbourhoods based on information stored in discriminatory surveillance databases. This is the latest illustration of why facial recognition technology, when used for surveillance, is incompatible with human rights,” the group said.
No comments:
Post a Comment