LONDON: Israeli police shot and killed a man in his twenties in the city of Lod, southeast of Tel Aviv, after an alleged attempted stabbing on Wednesday.
The man was identified as Sami Ahmed Jasous, the sixth Palestinian citizen of Israel to be killed by Israeli police since January, according to the Palestine News Agency.
Lod, once a thriving Palestinian town before 1948, is now a Jewish-Arab city with a population of about 105,000 people, almost 70 percent of whom are Jewish. The rest are Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship.
The Arab community in Israel has long faced house demolitions for building without permits, as well as an increase in violence and homicide cases, including shootings and stabbings.
On Wednesday, a crime figure from the Arab community was killed in a car explosion in Haifa in northern Israel during the daytime. He was the seventh homicide fatality in three days. Two separate incidents on Wednesday in Basma and Shfaram towns left two more young men dead.
Knesset members representing the Arab community in Israel have long urged the government to take action against crime and scrutinize police actions. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister responsible for the police, has been blamed for deliberately failing to disarm gangs.
In 2025, a record-breaking 252 Arab citizens were killed, representing 80 percent of total homicide-related cases, despite the community making up only 21 percent of the Israeli population.
