New Delhi: Israeli police have opened a murder investigation after a 40-year-old Indian national was found dead in an apartment in Jerusalem’s Katamon neighbourhood on Thursday. A 31-year-old Israeli man from the southern resort city of Eilat has since been detained on suspicion of involvement in the killing and has been transferred for interrogation.
Eilat is well over 300 kilometres from Jerusalem.
According to the Times of Israel, the commander of the Moriah police station, Yuval Reuven, said officers who reached the scene found the victim “stretched out in a house with a lot of blood surrounding him”. Reuven added that the exact cause of death had not yet been established, and forensic teams remained at the site to gather evidence.
Local news outlets reported that a preliminary probe pointed to a criminal motive behind the incident, and that the case had been handed to the central investigative unit of the Jerusalem district police for further inquiry.
The Israel police spokesperson’s unit told Indian media that officers from the city’s Moriah station, along with forensic investigators, had reached the scene quickly after the discovery and begun an initial assessment. The unit said the area was cordoned off while investigators worked, and that the arrest of the Eilat resident followed swiftly once a person of interest had been identified.
The Jerusalem district commander, Avshalom Peled, arrived at the scene and held a situational review with senior district officers, the police said.
Neither the identity of the deceased nor that of the detained suspect had been made public by the time of filing, and police have not disclosed what relationship, if any, existed between the two men. Investigators are continuing to analyze forensic material recovered from the apartment as they work to establish the precise circumstances of the death.
Indian workforce in Israel
The case has drawn attention in India partly because of the scale of Indian labour migration to Israel in recent years. Under a bilateral framework agreement signed by the two countries in November 2023, thousands of Indian nationals have travelled to Israel to work chiefly in construction and caregiving, sectors that faced acute shortages after Israel restricted the entry of Palestinian labourers following the outbreak of the Gaza war in October 2023.
The Ministry of External Affairs told Parliament last year that more than 20,000 Indian nationals were employed in Israel as of August 2025, with the overwhelming majority engaged in construction work and a smaller number employed as caregivers for the elderly. In February, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, agreed to expand this arrangement by a further 50,000 workers by 2030, with new protocols also covering commerce, manufacturing and the restaurant trade.
The ministry has separately said that its embassy in Tel Aviv keeps in regular touch with the Indian community in Israel and conducts periodic consular visits to migrant workers, coordinating with Israeli authorities on matters of safety, medical treatment and, where required, compensation. It is not yet known whether the victim in the Katamon case arrived in Israel under the government-to-government framework or through private recruitment channels.
This is not the first fatal incident involving an Indian worker in Israel since large-scale recruitment began. In March 2024, an Indian agricultural labourer was killed in a cross-border attack from Lebanon and Indian construction and caregiving personnel have periodically been affected by the wider regional conflict, prompting advisories from the Indian mission over the past two years. The investigation into Thursday’s death remains ongoing, with Jerusalem police yet to confirm the cause of death or bring formal charges against the detained suspect.