JERUSALEM: Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Monday his ministry would unblock funds for Arab communities that he suspended saying the money was fuelling crime, triggering outrage from Arab mayors and some Arab and Jewish lawmakers.
Smotrich, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nationalist-religious government, said this month that some of the budget funds meant for Arab local councils were a political pay-off by the previous cabinet that could end up in the hands of “criminals and terrorists”.
Arab councils held a strike last week in protest and community leaders demonstrated outside government offices. The National Committee of Arab Local Councils in Israel accused Smotrich of racism.
In a statement on Monday, Smotrich appeared to reverse course and said an oversight mechanism had been created to transfer funds to the Arab communities.
“We are stopping the criminal organisations from taking over the budgets that go to the Arab authorities,” Smotrich said.
Arab citizens of Israel, most descendants of Palestinians who remained in Israel after the 1948 war surrounding its creation, make up about a fifth of the country’s population.
Crime in the Arab sector communities is disproportionately high to their makeup of the overall demographic.
At least 157 Arab citizens in Israel have been murdered since January, more than double the fatalities over the same period last year and the highest toll since 2014.

JERUSALEM: Israeli security forces stormed into a town in the north of the West Bank on Tuesday, leading to fighting that killed a 17-year-old Palestinian, according to Palestinian health officials, the latest violence to grip the occupied territory. The Israeli military conducted an arrest raid before dawn in the town of Zababdeh south of Jenin, local medics said.The Palestinian Health Ministry reported that 17-year-old Othman Abu Kharj was fatally shot in the head.
The raid came as Israeli security forces were still searching for the Palestinian gunman who carried out a shooting in the northern Palestinian city of Hawara that killed an Israeli father and son on Saturday.
The Israeli military said its forces arrested 15 Palestinian suspects in several northern West Bank towns. In Zababdeh, Israeli security forces said they opened fire at residents who threw explosive devices at them.
In the southern West Bank, the Israeli army captured two Palestinians who were suspected in a shooting the day before that killed an Israeli woman and seriously wounded a man.
The Israeli military said the two suspects confessed during interrogation to involvement in the attack near the Palestinian city of Hebron.
Israeli security forces said they also confiscated the rifle used to shoot at the car on Monday. A car without a license plate that was allegedly used to carry out the attack was found burned north of Hebron, said mayor of the town of Halhoul.
Palestinian media identified the two suspects arrested near Hebron as Saqer and Muhamad al-Shantir.
The Israeli military said that its forces further conducted large-scale searches and arrest raids throughout the West Bank, interrogating 20 Palestinians, confiscating illegal vehicles and arresting an additional 13 suspects near Hebron.
Nearly 180 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank since the start of this year, according to a tally by The Associated Press. Israel says most of the Palestinians killed were militants. But stone throwing youths protesting the incursions and those not involved in the confrontations have also been killed.
Some 30 people have been killed by Palestinian attacks against Israelis during that time.
Israel says the raids are meant to dismantle militant networks and thwart future attacks. Palestinians say the raids undermine their security forces, inspire more militancy and entrench Israeli control over lands they seek for a hoped-for future state. Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.