A 43-year-old woman was found dead in Petah Tikva on Sunday night shortly after midnight, according to police and emergency medical responders. After receiving reports of a violent incident, emergency personnel discovered the woman with severe wounds, no pulse, and not breathing, and ultimately pronounced her dead at the scene.
Police are still investigating the incident as of press time; however, the woman was allegedly beaten with an axe in her apartment in front of her four children, the oldest of whom is 12 years old. Her husband was found a few hundred meters from the crime scene, having apparently taken his own life.
Initial police investigations indicated that the couple had no history of domestic violence, and neighbors were shocked by the news.
The issue of femicide has plagued multiple sectors of Israeli society for several years, although it largely fell out of the mainstream news cycle with the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in 2023. Nevertheless, Israeli activists and researchers have continued to document and battle the pattern of violence toward and murder of women.
'This murder could have been prevented'
"While politicians are busy playing musical chairs, a murderer has taken a woman's life with an axe in front of her children," said Tal Hochman, head of the Israel Women's Network (IWN). "The most devastating part is that this murder could have been prevented; violence against women never begins with murder."
According to the IWN, 17 women have been murdered in 2026 in cases of gender-based violence, and the main suspect in 80% of those cases is a spouse or ex-spouse.
What is more, according to a 2025 IWN report, in over one-third of femicide cases, welfare services or police were aware of domestic violence in the home before the murder happened. In a few cases, welfare services were even aware that the suspect was unstable before the murder.
The Michal Sela Forum, an Israeli non-profit dedicated to combating domestic violence, also issued a statement pointing out that the latest murder was the fourth case of femicide since the beginning of October, and that 2026 has seen a total of 25 people killed in domestic settings, including four men and four children.
"The murder of women in their own homes is merely the tip of the iceberg," the Michal Sela Forum said in its statement on Monday. "We must not accept a reality in which women are murdered in their own homes—sometimes even before the eyes of their children."
'The murder of women is not an inevitable fate'
Rivka Neuman, who chairs the Women's Status Advancement Division at the Women's International Zionist Organization (WIZO), noted that, behind the statistics, "lie lives cut short, families shattered, and children left orphaned at a young age—bearing the weight of lifelong trauma."
"The murder of women is not an inevitable fate," Neuman added. "We must not wait for the next victim before taking action."
Alon Hachmon contributed to this report.