Three people were killed within a single hour early Wednesday morning — a well-known rabbi and two young Arab Israeli men — as violent crime continued to rock the country.

Amos Guetta, a 75-year-old rabbi from Netanya, was found with stab wounds at around 5:40 a.m. in the yeshiva where he lived and taught. Medics rushed him in critical condition to a hospital, but he succumbed to his wounds en route.

Further north in Shfaram, a bus driver was shot dead in a killing reportedly linked to a bitter dispute between two families in the Arab city. A young man from the northern Bedouin village of Basmat Tab’un was gunned down half an hour later outside a shopping center in Yagur, south of Haifa.

The spate of killings brought this week’s homicide death toll to eight, seven of them Arabs, continuing an especially bloody four days amid a years-long surge in violent crime.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who oversees the police in his ministerial role, mourned the death of the rabbi but declined to comment on the two Arab citizens killed the same hour.

“This is a shocking and grave act, and the Israel Police will act with determination in order to capture the murderer, determine the circumstances of the incident and prosecute him to the fullest extent, even if this man is mentally ill as it seems,” the far-right minister wrote on Facebook.

Police launched investigations into all three killings. So far, they have only arrested a suspect in the fatal stabbing of Guetta.

The suspected perpetrator is a man in his 20s who formerly studied under the rabbi, law........

© The Times of Israel