19-Year-Old Asma Abu Ghanem Shot Dead in Ramla After Years of Family Violence

Asma Abu Ghanem, 19, from the Juarish neighborhood of Ramla, was shot dead overnight Wednesday in a car near her home. Police from the Shfela District and the Ramla station, together with Border Police fighters from the National Guard Central unit, opened an investigation, collected evidence at the scene and launched a manhunt for the shooter.

Police said they had received information months earlier that Abu Ghanem was under threat. A police source said she was summoned for a meeting and told her life was at risk over what was described as “family honor.” She was offered shelter in a women’s refuge, but refused and chose to continue her daily life. Women who knew her said that at one point she did stay in a shelter. Investigators are now checking whether her recent separation from her husband was connected to the murder.

The killing adds another chapter to a long family blood feud. On September 5, 2024, her father, Mahmoud Ali Abu Ghanem, was killed in a car explosion near kindergartens in Ramla. Her mother, Narmin Masoud, was murdered in December 2010 while in her ninth month of pregnancy, allegedly by her then-husband, Abu Zaid Masoud, who was not Asma’s father. After months of searching, police found Narmin’s body in late 2011 in the Muslim cemetery in Lod, with severe signs of abuse.

The violence also touched the wider family in March, when Narmin’s aunt, Lilian Masoud, was shot dead in a parking lot in Lod’s Ganei Yaar neighborhood. Women’s Lobby in Israel CEO Gali Singer said, “There is no ‘family honor’ in a girl being murdered by someone who wrongly thinks he owns her.” She said Asma was only 19, orphaned from both parents, and had received threats. Singer added that the murder came amid a surge in violence against women and called for prevention, enforcement and deterrence. The latest killing brings the number of murder victims in Israel’s Arab community this year to 135.