A 42-year-old Texas woman has been charged with attempted murder after she tried to drown a three-year-old Palestinian girl, as per CNN.
The horrific incident took place on May 19 in Texas when the accused, identified as Elizabeth Wolf, attacked the girl playing in the swimming pool at her family’s apartment complex. The child’s mother and six-year-old brother were also present there.
“Mrs H, the mother, who wears hijab and modest swimwear, was watching her children in the shallow end of the pool when a white American woman entered the swimming pool area,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a press release on Friday.
“The alleged attacker reportedly approached the mother with racist interrogations then jumped into the swimming pool and grabbed the children to the deep end of the pool to allegedly drown them,” the statement added, after which the mother jumped in to rescue her children, with Wolf responding by ripping off her headscarf.
Local police arrived at the scene and arrested Wolf for public intoxication.
“We are American citizens, originally from Palestine, and I don’t know where to go to feel safe with my kids. My country is facing a war, and we are facing that hate here,” CAIR quoted the child’s mother as saying.
“My daughter is traumatised; whenever I open the apartment door, she runs away and hides, telling me she is afraid the lady will come and immerse her head in the water again.”
Texas House of Representatives member Salman Bhojani, from Euless, said he was “appalled” by the incident.
US President Joe Biden said he was “deeply hurt” by the incident.
The attack comes in the wake of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which at least 37,598 Palestinians have been killed.
In late November, three Palestinian men in their early 20s were shot near a university campus in Vermont in the US, injuring all three of them.
One 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 the police, he targeted the victims as a 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.
