Following the shooting death on Monday morning, April 2, of a 35 year-old Arab woman in the town of Rameh in northern Israel, a demonstration against femicide was held in Lod on Wednesday, April 5.

The killing in Rameh was the third murder of a woman in the last week and sparked outrage from women’s-rights activists, especially those in the Arab-Palestinian community in Israel, against the lack of police efforts to stop such crimes. According to police, Lina Ismail, the mother of two children, was shot several times while driving her car. The victim previously had filed complaints about abuse from her husband.

Women demonstrate in Lod against femicide, Wednesday, April 5. (Photo: Al Ittihad)

Ismael’s murder came in the wake of two earlier recent femicides. One was of Adele Goldstein, 33, who was presumably killed and decapitated by her ex-husband, Meir, in Tiberias on March 29. The suspect is currently undergoing psychiatric observation after he was found carrying the head of his ex-wife in the streets of that city. Adele’s headless, burned body was discovered in her apartment. The previous week, 30-year-old women’s-rights activist Siam Azbaraja was shot at her home in Lod and died of her wounds the next day.

“If three murders in a week do not switch on a red light for the authorities, then what will?” said Hadash MK Aida Touma-Sliman (Joint List), who chairs the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality. Touma-Sliman called an emergency session of the committee to discuss the series of killings.

According to Touma-Sliman, a leading member of the Communist Party of Israel, there is a systemic failure of the authorities and welfare departments regarding such murders. “When there is a recurrence of murders and the killers are not exposed, as in Rameh and Lod, anyone may feel that he will not pay a price if he commits murder,” she said.