A Scorpion Gun, Boxes of Ammunition and 2.5kg of Explosives

Israeli police seized a submachine gun, a hunting rifle, ammunition and about 2.5 kilogrammes of explosive material in two separate searches in central Israel, the second of them near Kfar Qasim, according to a statement issued by the Israel Police on 3 August 2026. The force said the operations were part of its campaign against the possession and use of illegal weapons.

In the first, the statement said, officers searching the area found an abandoned vehicle whose number plate was suspected of being a duplicate. A search of the car produced a Scorpion submachine gun and a hunting rifle. Further searches nearby turned up several plastic-wrapped boxes that raised the suspicion of explosive devices; a police bomb-disposal officer was called, ruled out that suspicion and, on examination, the boxes were found to contain ammunition. In the second operation, carried out over the preceding weekend, detectives from the Kfar Qasim station searched open ground near what the statement called the Hamis Stadium, between Kfar Qasim and the neighbouring village of Kafr Bara, looking for weapons hidden in the area. They found a cache inside an abandoned lorry containing five items of standard explosive material weighing about 2.5 kilogrammes in total. The explosives were seized and sent for forensic laboratory testing.

Where the second search took place

Kfar Qasim is an Arab city in Israel's Central District, about 20 kilometres east of Tel Aviv on the Israeli side of the Green Line, at the southern end of the cluster of Arab towns known as the Little Triangle. It had a population of just under 28,000 in 2024 and was designated a city in 2008. Kafr Bara is a smaller village immediately adjacent to it.

Why weapons caches are being hunted in Arab towns

The searches sit inside a national policing effort against illegal firearms in Arab communities, where gun violence has risen sharply. Data compiled by the Abraham Initiatives and reported by the Times of Israel at the end of 2025 recorded 252 Arab citizens killed in crime-related homicides that year, the highest annual toll on record, with 88 per cent of victims shot. The same report noted that as of June 2025 only about a tenth of murders in Arab communities had been solved.

A 2021 policy paper by the Institute for National Security Studies traced the supply of those guns to two main channels - weapons stolen from army bases and weapons brought in from Palestinian Authority areas - and argued that enforcement alone would not work without parallel investment in employment, education and family services. A 2020 Knesset estimate, cited when parliament introduced mandatory minimum sentences for weapons offences in December 2021, put the number of illegal weapons circulating in Israel at around 400,000.

Part of a wider sweep

Kfar Qasim has featured in recent enforcement operations. On 29 July 2026, Israel National News reported that police and Border Police seized an M-16 rifle, a 9mm pistol, two flare guns, a fragmentation grenade, sights and ammunition in Kfar Qasim, and an anti-tank missile allegedly stolen from the army in Kafr Qara, arresting five suspects across the two towns. Weeks earlier, on 13 July 2026, the Jerusalem Post reported a countrywide operation against illegal weapons and drug trafficking in which at least 34 people were arrested by hundreds of police and Border Police officers.

Who the bomb-disposal officer was

The officer sent to examine the suspicious boxes belonged to the Israel Police bomb disposal unit, whose technicians are stationed in the major cities and in each police district and handle suspicious objects, improvised devices and military ordnance. Members are typically drawn from police officers who previously served in combat or engineering units of the army.

What the statement did not say

The police did not say whether anyone was arrested in connection with either find, or whether the abandoned vehicle and lorry had been traced to an owner. The statement gave neither a date nor a location for the first operation, saying only that officers had been searching "in the area". It did not specify what the five items of explosive material were, and did not say what the explosives were thought to be intended for. It also did not say whether the ammunition found in the plastic-wrapped boxes matched any of the weapons seized.