14 Charged in the Money Maze Case That Drained Nazareth

Israel’s State Attorney’s Office filed a preliminary indictment against 14 people over what authorities describe as a mafia-style takeover of the finances of Nazareth, the largest Arab city in Israel. Among those charged are the head and the deputy head of the Bakri criminal organisation and the city’s former mayor, Ali Salam. Investigators called the case the “Money Maze” affair.

The charges followed a months-long inquiry. “During the open investigation, which lasted about 80 days and included the detention of many defendants, the team uncovered serious offenses rarely prosecuted under the Law for Combating Criminal Organizations,” police said, noting that the law allows significantly harsher penalties for organised crime figures. The indictment alleges that Samir Bakri, 35, and his deputy Muhammad Fakhuri, 33, effectively controlled the municipality’s finances and siphoned off tens of millions of shekels through inflated contracts, fabricated tenders and fictitious projects, while Salam, 74, and his aides acted as facilitators, laundering money and using blackmail and threats. Authorities estimate Salam personally took about NIS 25 million ($8 million) between 2015 and 2022, with a further NIS 26 million ($8.3 million) taken after Bakri seized control of a security company contracted by the municipality, roughly NIS 51 million ($16.4 million) in total. Acting on information from a state witness, investigators found a backpack holding “live” cheques worth about NIS 109 million ($35.1 million) in a Nazareth flat.

Nazareth, the city at the centre of it

Nazareth sits in Israel’s Northern District, in the hills west of the Sea of Galilee. It is the largest Arab city in the country and functions as a cultural, political, religious and commercial centre for Arab citizens of Israel, with a population that is almost entirely Arab and divided roughly two-thirds Muslim and one-third Christian, according to the city’s demographic profile. The release put its population at around 78,000. Its municipal collapse is not abstract: Israel’s High Court of Justice heard a petition from environmental officials about daily fires caused by the city’s uncollected rubbish, and in June 2025 the interior minister, Moshe Arbel, dismissed Salam and the city council over the mounting deficit and intelligence linking municipal officials to criminal activity, appointing a committee headed by Yaakov Efrati to run the city.

Why a town hall case is really a violent-crime case

Organised crime in Arab towns in Israel has become one of the country’s most serious domestic problems. In 2025, 252 Arab citizens were killed in 218 incidents of crime and violence, the deadliest year on record, up from 230 in 2024, with 88 per cent of victims shot dead and more than 72 per cent aged between 18 and 40, the Jerusalem Post reported in late December 2025 on figures compiled by the Abraham Initiatives. As of June 2025, just 10 per cent of that year’s murders in the Arab community had been solved by police, and 57 per cent of the killings were in the north of the country, the Times of Israel reported. The Bakri network is regarded as one of the main forces driving that violence, the same outlet reported when the charges were filed. Municipal contracts, in that reading, are not a sideline to the shooting: they are how the organisations are funded.

The legal tools police are reaching for

Police said the offences uncovered here are rarely prosecuted under the Law for Combating Criminal Organizations, which they noted allows significantly harsher penalties for organised crime figures than the underlying offences would carry alone. A separate instrument, the Law for the Protection of the Public from Organized Crime, lets the state impose restrictions on someone merely suspected of taking part in racketeering (barring them from leaving the country, limiting their access to communications, or placing them under house arrest) on a standard of proof lower than the beyond-reasonable-doubt test used in a criminal trial. Writing in November 2025, a constitutional law scholar on the I-CONnect blog warned that the lower threshold left the law open to misuse against political opponents.

A reputation that ran the other way

The allegations sit awkwardly against Salam’s former standing. The release noted that the then police commissioner, Roni Alsheich, visited him in 2017, and that in 2021 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called him energetic and successful. The current police commissioner, Danny Levy, used the announcement to make a broader claim about the force: “We will crush the criminal organizations,” he said, adding that cynicism had taken hold in the country but that the police were serious people.

What is still unclear

This is a preliminary indictment, which in Israeli practice can be followed by a fuller one after a hearing, so the counts and figures may change. The release recorded no pleas and no response from any defence lawyer, and did not say whether the cheques found in the backpack were recovered as evidence or frozen. It also did not say when the case would first come before a court.