RAMLA, Israel — The Abu Ghanem women are buried just inside the main gate of the old Muslim cemetery, eight in the last seven years.
Reem eloped with a lover to escape an arranged marriage. Her brothers, one a pediatrician, are on trial for murder. Sabrin rests under a bare concrete slab with her name roughly scratched on by hand. She is said to have been killed by a cousin whom she refused to marry. Shirihan, 15, the youngest of the dead women, is also said to have rejected a marriage. Her stepbrothers are suspected of having killed her.
Others lie in crudely marked graves, covered with plain marble or a mound of earth marked with an oval of stones — all a few minutes’ drive from Israel’s gleaming new international airport, here in this hardscrabble town of 64,000 Jews and Arabs.
So-called honor killings among Muslims are a phenomenon across the Middle East, including in Israel, where Arabs, most of them Muslim, make up almost 20 percent of the population. The Israeli police and courts have caught and convicted some of the killers; unlike the laws in some Arab societies, Israel’s do not make allowances for such acts.
Yet among the Abu Ghanem clan here in Ramla — where family honor can be tainted by a woman’s desire to go study at a university or her use of a telephone — the bloodletting has carried on. Some women’s advocates have accused the police of a dismissive attitude toward Arabs, while a Jewish district police official speaks of the “ambivalence” of Israel’s Arab citizens, who do not always want to cooperate with investigations “for nationalist or local reasons.” So far, the Abu Ghanem cases have ended without convictions, the police say, mainly because relatives maintained a conspiracy of silence and washed all the evidence away.
Then in January, after the last killing, of Hamda Abu Ghanem, 18, female relatives decided to speak up. Twenty of them.
The most incriminating testimony came from a witness the police identify only as Y for her protection. She came forward to say that she had heard shots, then saw someone she believed to be Hamda’s brother Rashad, 30, fleeing Hamda’s home. The police found traces of gunpowder on the brother’s clothes.
Hamda’s mother said her daughter, who had hoped to be a nurse, had done nothing wrong although she had been beaten by her brother a few months earlier and complained to the police, possibly setting off the brother’s anger. According to the police, Hamda had refused to marry a man her family had arranged for her as a husband.
“In most cases we manage to bring circumstantial evidence to court, but it’s not enough to convict for murder,” said Superintendent Yigal Ezra, a Jew who is the head of investigations and intelligence at the Ramla police station. This time, he believed, there was a solid case.
But Y, the police said, had refused the police protection they offered, and in late February she disappeared. Now, with Rashad Abu Ghanem’s trial under way, it is still unclear whether she is in hiding, has been abducted or is dead. Without her, the case could fall apart.
“It won’t be easy to convince the judge to convict a man of murder without the witness appearing,” said the defendant’s lawyer, Giora Zilberstein. Mr. Abu Ghanem denies killing his sister, Mr. Zilberstein said.
Police officials concede that if the court fails to convict him, the likelihood of witnesses coming forward in future cases would be slim.
Ramla was once an entirely Arab town, but most of its residents fled or were exiled during the 1948 war. The Abu Ghanem clan, which is Bedouin, arrived in the 1950s, settling on the edge of Ramla and in the nearby town of Lod.
The meeting between traditional desert culture and modern urban living has not been particularly successful here.
“They all use drugs,” Amama Abu Ghanem, the mother of Hamda and Rashad, said of the clan’s criminal, controlling core, an observation echoed by the police.
While many of the Abu Ghanem seem to live on welfare, Mrs. Abu Ghanem washes dishes at a no-frills wedding hall in the town center. Some of the cut-price stores here have signs in Russian, to cater to the more recent arrivals. Ramla is about 80 percent Jewish today.
Mrs. Abu Ghanem said even if her son, who she says has an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old Jewish woman in another town, had not killed her daughter, she did not want him back. “Give me 10 years for my soul to dry out,” she said.
Mrs. Abu Ghanem, 52, had nine children before her husband left 16 years ago to move in with a new wife in an apartment below hers. He now has 11 more children, none currently in school though education is supposed to be compulsory from age 5.
A reporter and photographer were angrily shooed away from Mrs. Abu Ghanem’s apartment by her eldest son, Muhammad, who said the family did not need more scandals. “They are still in shock about Hamda,” Mrs. Abu Ghanem said, sitting in the apartment of the second wife.
Aida Touma-Suliman of Women Against Violence, an Israeli group that works in the Arab sector, said 8 cases of honor killings were reported in Israel last year, 11 the year before. Yifrach Duchovny, the commander of the Coastal Plain district police, said there were 17 cases in Ramla and Lod in the past five years.
Ms. Touma-Suliman blames years of neglect by the local police and social welfare services. But she acknowledges that even Jewish women at risk of domestic violence can be reluctant to go to the police, and Arab women are all the more so, given the political history and tensions between Arabs and Jews.
Superintendent Ezra keeps a package of black body bags on the shelf behind his desk, below a tray for outgoing mail.
“They’re not there for nothing,” he said grimly.
“These are clever girls who write diaries and poems,” he said of those he has helped find refuge. “But once they are no longer minors, they often say they’re going back home. We say, ‘You’ll end up in one of those.’ ”