A woman is charged with attempted murder as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) urges US authorities to investigate the incident as a “hate crime”.
A Texas woman has been charged with attempted murder after she tried to drown a three-year-old Palestinian girl, according to US media reports citing local police.
The incident, which took place on May 19 in Euless, Texas, is being described by civil rights groups as racially motivated.
According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Texas), the defendant, Elizabeth Wolf, 42, attacked the girl in the pool of her family's apartment complex. The child's mother and her six-year-old brother were also present.
“Mrs. H, the mother, who wears hijab. [Islamic headscarf] and modest swimsuit, was watching her children in the shallow end of the pool when a white American woman entered the pool area,” CAIR said in a news release Friday.
“The alleged attacker allegedly approached the mother with racist interrogations, then jumped into the pool and grabbed the children to the bottom of the pool to allegedly drown them,” the civil rights group said, after which the mother jumped in to rescue to his children. , and Wolf responded by tearing off the handkerchief.
Local Euless police arrived on the scene and arrested Wolf for public intoxication, according to news reports.
“We are American citizens, originally from Palestine, and I don't know where to go to feel safe with my children. My country is facing a war and we are facing that hatred here,” CAIR quoted the boy's mother as saying.
“My daughter is traumatized; Every time I open the apartment door, she runs out and hides, telling me that she is afraid that the lady will come for her and submerge her head in the water again.”
'Hate has no place' in Texas
Euless' Texas House member Salman Bhojani said he was “horrified” by the incident.
“I am shocked and dismayed by this alleged racist and Islamophobic event that took place in my city. Hate has no place in Euless, District 92, or anywhere else in our great state,” Bhojani said.
The attack comes in the shadow of Israel's war against Gaza, in which at least 37,598 Palestinians have died. The war began on October 7, after a Hamas-led attack against Israel, in which 1,139 people died and dozens of them remain captive in Gaza.
In late November, three Palestinian men in their 20s were shot near a university campus in Vermont, United States, and all three were injured.
A month earlier, police in the US state of Illinois charged a 71-year-old man with murder and a hate crime for stabbing a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy to death and seriously injuring his mother.
According to police, he attacked the victims in response to the war in Gaza and their religion.
In its press release, CAIR said it had received 3,578 complaints of bias and discrimination in the last three months of last year.
