Police arrest dozens in raid targeting Israel’s two largest crime families

Israel Police carried out dozens of arrests on Monday morning targeting members of the country’s two largest organized crime families.

The arrest of 23 members of the Abu Latif and Hariri crime families came at the end of a year-long investigation, which focused primarily on extortion and protection schemes. The raids targeted the homes of senior members of the two criminal organizations. 

The Abu Latif and Hariri criminal organizations have been linked to a significant increase in criminal activity around the country in recent years. Their activities include collecting protection fees, taking over public tenders, taking over businesses, extortion, shootings and other serious violent incidents, and even involvement in a number of brutal murders. The organizations had targeted public tenders in some of Israel’s largest cites, including Rishon LeTzion and Netanya. 

At the center of the investigation was an undercover agent, nicknamed “The Prince,” who operated for months and incriminated dozens of criminals, including senior leaders in the country's two largest criminal organizations. According to police, during the investigation, an evidentiary infrastructure was constructed against the organizations' senior leaders. 

The arrests were carried out in a large-scale operation involving hundreds of policemen, Border Police troops, and special forces soldiers throughout Israel, including Judea and Samaria. 

The operation on Monday morning came several months after a similar series of arrests made in February, when police arrested 36 members of the Abu Latif organization. Those arrests resulted in 24 indictments for extortion and blackmail in order to obtain local government contracts. 

Northern District Commander, Chief Meir Eliyahu, said, “We have declared war on the crime organizations, and we are marking targets clearly. It will take time, however long is required, but we will reach them all. Every criminal organization will receive its blow, both on the investigative level, which will lead to their imprisonment behind bars, and through the advancement of additional measures along the way.” 

Eliyahu noted that the police have already put the leaders of the Abu Latif organization, the brothers Nidal and Latif Abu Latif, as well as 13 of its senior officials in prison, and are now working against the next generation of the organizations' leadership. 

Police Chief Commissioner Danny Levy, emphasized that the police are primarily working to protect the Arab sector, which has suffered from an extreme increase in criminal violence over the past three years. That wave of criminal violence has already claimed the lives of over 230 Israeli Arabs in 2025. 

Levy said that police were working hard “so that the country’s residents can get up in the morning, go to work, and return to their families without fear.”