In November 2015, Dr. Dubravka Simonovic, former UN Special Rapporteur Commissioner for the Elimination of Violence against Women, called for establishing Observatories or Femicide Watches in all countries. Accordingly, the Israel Observatory on Femicide (IOF) was established in 2020 by Prof. Shalva Weil at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Apart from sporadic reports by different NGOs and organisations, data on the phenomenon in Israel had not been collected until the establishment of the IOF: only in 2012, the Knesset's Women's Rights Committee decided that women's murders should be reported annually, but data from the Knesset and from other sources do not overlap with police reports, non-profit organizations, and media reports.  Moreover, no comprehensive or in-depth attempts have been made to understand the motives for the murder of these women.

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The purpose of the Observatory is to collect and monitor data and narratives about the murder of women, both quantitative and qualitative, and provide means for building an updating body of knowledge to eradicate the phenomenon. Since it was founded, the Observatory has produced yearly reports in English, Arabic and Hebrew, in which data and statistics on femicide throughout the year are reported.

Prof. Shalva Weil, the founder of the IOF, was the head of an initiative called "Femicide Across Europe" on behalf of COST (European Committee for Cooperation in Science and Technology) between 2013-2017 and chaired a committee that included 80 representatives from 30 European countries. At the end of the project, Shalva was instrumental in establishing the European Observatory on Femicide in Malta (which is today run from Cyprus and Germany), as well as other Observatories in Georgia and Macedonia. Aside from implementing innovative projects globally, Prof. Weil pioneers theoretical work on femicide, and has published multiple articles, including op-eds, and has edited two books on femicide: 'Femicide Across Europe' (2018), and 'Femicide in War and Peace' (2023).