Car theft is skyrocketing in Israel, the news site Haaretz reports, with a growing number of stolen cars taken across the Green Line into the occupied West Bank where Israeli police and car theft prevention services can’t follow.
Among the more popular targets are electric cars, with the site reporting that the battery from a Tesla can be used to light up a West Bank home for days.
Many gasoline-powered cars are chopped up for parts, either sold domestically or shipped abroad. But with electric cars, resourceful thieves are lifting them to use as mobile generators that can power other appliances. "There are electric cars with monster batteries," Eyal Saar, operations manager at Ituran Location and Control, a stolen car recovery firm, told Haaretz. "They can light up a house for a few days."
In Palestinian sections of the West Bank, where blackouts are frequent, there is demand for such "generators." In some cases, batteries taken from electric cars are used to power greenhouses. The most stolen electric car is the Hyundai Ioniq 5.
Elon Musk’s famed Tesla, the pioneer of modern mass-market electric cars, has seen its market share plummet in Israel, as cheaper competitors like Hyundai hit the market.
Between January and November 2023, 6,334 new Tesla cars were delivered to Israel, only 13.5% of all new electric vehicles sold in the country, compared with 22% in 2022 and down sharply from 60% when Tesla cars first entered Israel's market.
Israeli police say the number of stolen vehicles of all kinds jumped from 9,000 in 2019 to 21,000 last year.
That’s sent insurance rates skyrocketing, too. According to the Wobi insurance comparison site, premiums rose 11% in the first 11 months of last year, Haaretz reported. And for hybrid and electric cars, insurance costs have doubled.
Private firms that track down stolen cars warn that once a car leaves Israel for the occupied West Bank, it gets “a lot more complicated,” as Ilan Goldstein, CEO of Pointer Telocation told Haaretz.
"At roadblocks on the Green Line, they don't check whether cars entering the territories are stolen, and if we don't get there on time, the car may be lost. There have been cases where we reached a chop shop two hours after a theft and only the car's body remained. Everything is taken for parts. Pointer only enters Area B with an army escort,” he said, referring to the portion of the occupied West Bank where the Palestinian Authority exercises political control. “But the main objective is to stop the cars before they reach the territories, a very difficult task."