Palestinian-American boy stabbed to death in Gaza war-related killing in US

#Islamophobia

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#Chicago

16 Oct 2023

#IsraelHamasWar

Police in the United States have charged a 71-year-old man with murder and hate crime for fatally stabbing a six-year-old boy and seriously wounding his 32-year-old mother, alleging he singled out the victims because of their faith and as a response to the war between Israel and Hamas.

"Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis," the Will County Sheriff's Office in suburban Chicago said in a statement on Sunday.
The Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) for the Chicago chapter identified the victims as Wadea Al-Fayoume, a Palestinian-American boy who had recently turned six, and his mother Hanaan Shahin. A senior official of a Muslim American advocacy group has strongly denounced the attack of a Muslim family in the Chicago area that left a six-year-old boy dead.

"There's no place for hatred for anybody," Ahmed Rehab, the executive director of the the Chicago chapter of CAIR, said in an interview with Al Jazeera. "There's no place for anti-Semitism as well as Islamophobia" in the US, Rehab said.

According to the autopsy report, Wadea was stabbed 26 times by the 71-year-old perpetrator, who is now facing two hate crime charges, Rehab said. Police alleged that the killer was motivated to carry out the attack after hearing reports of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

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