Shocking data presented this morning in the Knesset reveals that 2025 is shaping up to be the deadliest year in the past decade, but the police are reporting a stagnation in the number of complaints.
Over 300 women have been murdered in Israel in the past decade, but new data reveals an unusual and particularly worrying picture regarding the current year.
A report to be presented today to the Committee for the Advancement of the Status of Women shows that in the first eight months of 2025, the number of murdered women has already equaled the number of murdered women in all of 2024. The report was prepared at the request of the committee's chairman, MK Meirav Cohen, in preparation for the debate to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
According to the data, in the past decade, 269 women were murdered, an average of about 27 women per year, with 35 women murdered last year - the highest number in the past decade up to the current year. The study also presents an ongoing phenomenon in which Arab women constitute the majority of those murdered, but the police response to them is deficient: 46% of the murder cases of Arab women in the last decade have not been solved at all, compared to only 9% of the murder cases of Jewish women that remained without indictment.
Examination of the solved cases provides a glimpse into the identity of the murderers: in half of the cases the murderer is the spouse, in 30% of the cases another family member, and in the remaining cases the suspect is known to the victim but is not a relative. In most cases solved among Jewish women, the murderer was their spouse (59%), while in the case of Arab women the murderer is usually a family member other than the spouse (41%). However, the authors of the report reserve the right to say that the picture in the Arab sector is incomplete given the low percentage of cases solved.
Another disturbing statistic concerns the writing on the wall: Almost half of the Jewish women murdered and a third of the Arab women had previously complained about domestic violence, although not necessarily against the suspect in the murder. Although the number of reports of violence and contacts with women's organizations, welfare and legal aid has increased significantly, the number of complaints to the police has hardly changed.
Since 2022, between 3,000 and 3,200 complaints have been filed with the police each year for assault that caused actual injury (an increase of 9% by 2024). In contrast, there has been no increase at all in the offenses of "simple assault" - violence that did not lead to actual injury, and about 9,500 such complaints are filed each year. The data also indicates a decline in enforcement: the number of complaints about "unprovoked assault" that lead to indictments has decreased by about 9% in recent years, and about 80% of these cases are closed, compared to half of the cases that are closed in cases of assault offenses that cause damage.