According to official police statistics, which were transmitted to the Knesset by the Knesset's own Information and Research Center, and confirmed to Arutz Sheva, a total of eight women were murdered by their partners and ex-partners in 2015.
This is the lowest number of murders of women by partners since 2009, when there were seven murders in this category, according to the police.
For reasons that are not clear, Meretz Head MK Zehava Galon presented the number of such murders as 17 – more than double the official statistic – in a speech before the Knesset plenum on November 25. Does MK Galon know about nine unreported murders, or did she purposely inflate the statistics?
A similarly embarrassing event was reported by Arutz Sheva on the previous year. MK Aliza Lavie (Yesh Atid) convened the Committee for Advancement of Women's Status for an emergency session in September of 2014, after claiming on television that nine women had been murdered by partners since the summer's Operation Protective Edge. The real number murdered during that time period was two.
Critics of the radical women's movement claim that its leaders, including MKs Galon and Lavie, routinely and unabashedly inflate domestic violence statistics in order to create an atmosphere that is more conducive to the achievement of their political and budgetary goals. One of these goals is to make it more difficult for Israeli Jewish men to receive licenses for firearms, under the pretext that they are likely to use them against their wives. This, in turn, means that fewer Jewish men are able to thwart terror attacks as they occur.