Gender equality in Israel is getting worse |
On the evening of September 11, Hodaya Fadida, 26, who was three months pregnant, was shot to death outside her home in the Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem by her ex-husband, Matan Fadida. He used a licensed firearm he held through his work as a security guard. After shooting her, he shot himself.
Hodaya was not on any “at-risk” lists of the Welfare Department or the police, despite the fact that she told her mother that she was scared that her ex might do something with the gun he owned. They were separated, so some people might have assumed she was no longer at risk. The weapon was licensed. No emergency order had removed it from his possession. No mechanism intervened before the encounter turned lethal.
And yet, he shot her and killed her. Nobody protected her.
This killing was reported as a murder-suicide. But that doesn’t really tell the story. It was femicide, a case of murder committed against women against the backdrop of systemic misogyny, a culture in which violence against women is just part of the landscape. It is one of 35 cases this year in Israel alone in which women were killed, mostly by current or former partners or other family members, often with legally owned guns. As I wrote last week, women in Israel are being murdered at a rate of roughly one every nine days. Even though many of these cases involve men who were known to authorities, known to welfare systems, or known to pose risk, the women were not protected from the men who sought to kill them, men who retained access to weapons and proximity to their victims.
The case in Gilo did not occur in a vacuum. It occurred in a policy environment in which enforcement tools are limited, risk assessments are narrow, and gender-based violence prevention is treated as secondary to other priorities.
That environment is now documented in data.
The Gender Index 2025, published this month by Women in the Public Sphere (WIPS) at the Van Leer Institute, founded by Prof Naomi Hazan, Prof Hannah Herzog, and Hadass Ben-Eliyahu, shows a measurable deterioration in women’s status in Israel over the past year. According to the report, overall gender equality declined by 6 percent, primarily due to a sharp drop in women’s political and economic power and their exclusion from centers of decision-making during the tenure of the current government. The Gender Index in Israel 2025, courtesy of WIPS
A Long-Term Trend, Not a One-Year Anomaly
The Gender Index has been........