Two More Arrests in the Benyahu Raz Killing, One Suspect at Large

Israel Police said investigators had arrested two more suspects in the past 24 hours in the investigation into the killing of Benyahu Razi, and that the force would ask the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court to extend their detention. The two are a minor aged 16 and a second suspect aged 18, according to the police statement.

The investigation is being run by the Unit for Combating Crime in the Zion District (the Jerusalem district investigative unit known in Hebrew by the acronym Yalap), which the police described as continuing intensive work on the case. In parallel, the statement said, extensive efforts were under way to locate a suspect named as Avi'or Sasson, who is on the run. Anyone with information about his whereabouts was asked to contact the police on the national emergency number, 100.

Why the next step is a courtroom, not a charge sheet

In Israel, police cannot simply hold a suspect while they investigate. Detention has to be authorised and then repeatedly renewed by a judge, and prosecutors file charges only once the evidentiary file is complete. The pattern is visible in other recent cases: in a killing in Petah Tikva, the Central District Court approved the State Attorney's request in May 2026 to extend the detention of 16 arrested minors, with indictments expected only afterwards. A request to extend detention, in other words, is a routine procedural stage and not a finding of guilt.

The minor in the case

One of the two arrested is 16, and the police statement did not name him, as it did not name the second suspect. Israeli courts handle the remand of suspects under 18 as a distinct matter: in the Petah Tikva case, the detention of 16 minors was extended by court order while the file was completed, as The Jerusalem Post reported in May 2026, with defence applications for release heard and rejected before any charges were filed.

Where the case sits in the police structure

The Israel Police is a national force divided into six regional district commands, according to the force's published structure, one of them the Jerusalem District, which covers the capital and is subdivided into regions and stations. Serious violent cases are handed from the responding station to a district crime-fighting unit; the heaviest national files go to Lahav 433, the umbrella major-crimes body created in 2008 out of five separate investigative arms and based in Lod. This case has stayed at district level.

A high national baseline for lethal violence

Israeli homicide numbers remain far above the levels of a decade ago. The Abraham Initiatives counted 252 crime-related killings in Arab society in 2025, its highest recorded total and more than 80 per cent of all violent killings in the country that year, The Times of Israel reported. The Taub Center found in February 2024 that homicides in the Jewish population had also turned upward, from 38 in 2022 to 66 in 2023, after more than a decade of decline. The police did not connect this case to any wider trend.

What the statement did not say

The police did not say what happened, where in Jerusalem it happened, or how the two newly arrested suspects are alleged to have been involved. It gave no total number of people held at that point, no indication of what Avi'or Sasson is suspected of, and no account of the relationship between any of the suspects and the man who died. The victim's name also appears in different transliterations across the force's own releases: Benyahu Raz and Binyahu or Benyahu Razi.