Israelis outraged by the violence its own police commit (or ignore)
Dina Kraft — April 27, 2026
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
The image is stomach-turning: a man beaten so severely his right eye is one large purple welt swollen shut, there are deep lacerations on his blood-stained forehead, nose and chin, and a thick trail of blood runs into his beard. The photo and story behind it are being shared widely on the Israeli news and social media, further igniting outrage over a growing sense of lawlessness within the country.
The man’s name is Salah Khalil Na’ameh, 35, a lawyer who serves as a state prosecutor in Beersheva and he is an Arab citizen of Israel.
The perpetrators? According to Na’ameh, they are Israeli police who arrived at his home in Beersheva on May 1 in response to a noise complaint about music he was listening to from his balcony. When three non-uniformed police officers arrived and asked to enter, he asked if they had a warrant. They did not and agreed to leave. But they returned later that night as a larger group, masked and wearing helmets and still without a warrant in hand. They burst through the door, according to Haaretz. Two of Na’ameh’s relatives present, one a doctor, another a nurse, were also injured.
The police initially blamed Na’ameh and his relatives for their wounds. They accused them of assaulting the police officers, but video footage since emerged and appears to refute the police account.
The story of Na’ameh, who works in the southern district prosecution’s criminal division, where he represents the state, including the police in criminal cases, is being pointed to as the latest example of increasing lawlessness within Israel itself. The national conversation, three years into Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right provocateur appointment as National Security Minister (putting him in charge of the country’s police force) is about violence going unchecked by the police and in some cases being perpetrated by it.
Critics say Ben-Gvir has thoroughly politicized the police force, rewarding those who crack down hard on dissent against the Gaza War by Palestinian citizens or any kind of dissent at all (see the detention of an Israeli academic for the “crime” of wearing a kippa featuring both the Israeli and Palestinian flags). He has also failed to address the crime epidemic in Arab communities.
A letter of support being circulated for signing in Israel for Na’ameh and his family closes with this sentence: “We must not get used to the reality in which citizens are attacked by those who are supposed to protect them.”
The country is reeling from the highest number of homicides on record, 107 this year alone to date, the majority of which go unsolved. Police brutality is regularly seen at political protests, including recent ones against the Iran War in which among those injured were older Israelis thrown to the ground. Holocaust survivor, retired senior diplomat, and former Knesset Member Colette Avital was among them.
There’s a surge in youth crimes, including by gangs in the Tel Aviv area. This week 16 teenagers were charged in the murder by stabbing of Yemanu Binyamin Zelka, a 21-year-old pizzeria worker of Ethiopian descent in Petah Tikvah. The premeditated attack has outraged the country. It came after he told a group of teenagers not to spray foam used as part of Independence Day celebrations inside the Pizza Hut where he was serving them the night Israel turned 78.
It took several days for the police to make any arrests and there were reports of violent attacks between teens in a nearby square shortly before the attack on Zelka that police had ignored.
Avi Yalew, an Israeli-Ethiopian activist, wrote on X after seeing the video of the attack "It is unbelievable that dozens of youths carried out a lynching and murdered… Not a single person stepped in. This horrifying case must shake the country."
"Why did it take the Israel police so long to open an investigation and make arrests, when the entire incident was filmed?" Yalew added.
The majority of those murdered in Israel are Palestinian citizens of Israel. For years there have been warnings that the police overlooking those murders and other acts of violence in that community would spill into Jewish-Israeli communities as well.
Another long-time warning: that the violence imposed against Palestinians in the West Bank, including the recent spike of extremist settlers’ violence against Palestinian farmers and shepherds and their families would seep into Israeli society as a whole.
From the end of February to the end of April alone, 13 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank in such attacks according to the United Nations.
“The police should be there to protect us not attack us,” Colette Avital, the 87 -year-old former diplomat who was pushed to the ground at an anti-Iran war protest, recently said in a CNN interview, “These are practices which never existed in our country. I am sorry to say police receive orders and it’s not [happening] by chance.”
“Everything that was good is being destroyed,” she added, and argued there’s a connection between ongoing Israeli control and occupation of the West Bank and violent behavior domestically.
“I think we are paying a high price right now, and despair is not a recipe so we are fighting to make Israel a normal country again… Israel’s democracy is something we cannot afford to lose.”
Na’ameh told his family, according to Haaretz, that he told the officers he said were beating him, “You are killing me, I’m a prosecutor… But they didn’t care.”
His father Khalil Na’ameh, who reportedly did outreach with the Gaza border communities after the October 7 attack, said in an interview with Haaretz, “Do you know what kind of pride it was to see my son's name representing the State of Israel on the first indictment he filed? And now to see police officers who work with him every day beating him – it broke me."
Dina Kraft is a journalist, podcaster and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, My Friend Anne Frank, together with Hannah Pick-Goslar. She is a creator of the podcast Groundwork, about activists working in Israel and Palestine, and was formerly the opinion editor of Haaretz English.
