Israeli Arabs have had enough of violence, arms
The surge in crime over the past few weeks, and especially the number of murder cases, has mobilized Israeli Arabs to declare a general strike.
On Oct. 2, the Arab Higher Monitoring Committee called upon the Arab population in Israel to go on strike the next day in order to protest a spike in murder rates plaguing their communities. A video clip posted on social media Oct. 2 told the whole story in 85 seconds. It documented two or three masked young men firing bursts of automatic fire into the air from a rooftop adjacent to a family gathering in the northern Israeli Bedouin village of Tuba Zangaria. The uninterrupted echoing bursts of ammunition were clearly reminiscent of armed Islamic Jihad or Hamas combatants in the Gaza Strip.
Also on that same day, a surveillance camera in the Arab village of Fureidis caught a masked man firing off automatic bursts at a car on a street bustling with people. The footage showed a frightened schoolboy running for cover from the shooting, which slightly injured a woman who was taken to Rambam Hospital in the nearby city of Haifa. Several hours later, in the central Arab town of Kfar Qassem, an armed man broke into a local business and shot a 26-year-old woman at close range, slightly injuring her.
