Mourners place flowers at the grave of Wadea al-Fayoume at Parkholm Cemetery where his burial took place. The six-year-old Palestinian-American boy was stabbed to death in an attack that targeted him and his mother amid Israel's war on Gaza, in LaGrange, Illinois, US on October 16, 2023. (Photo by Reuters)

Washington, July 31 (RHC)-- The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) advocacy group says discrimination and attacks against Muslims and Palestinians in the US increased by about 70% in the first half of 2024, amid Washington’s unwavering support for Israel's genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.

On Tuesday, CAIR said it received 4,951 complaints of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian incidents in the first six months of 2024, a rise of around 70% compared with the same period last year.  The report noted that most of the complaints were in the categories of immigration and asylum, employment discrimination, education discrimination and hate crimes.

Last year, CAIR registered 8,061 such complaints, about 3,600 of them in the last three months of the year alone after the war erupted.  The fatal stabbing of a six-year-old Muslim boy in the state of Illinois by a 71-year-old white man motivated by anti-Palestinian rhetoric was among the alarming US incidents in the last nine months.

They also included the stabbing of a Palestinian-American man in Texas in February, the November shooting of three students of Palestinian descent in Vermont, and the attempted drowning of a three-year-old Palestinian-American girl in May.

These come as human rights advocates have reported a global rise in Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian bias since the eruption of Israel’s war on Gaza.

A 71-year-old white man in the U.S. state of Illinois motivated by anti-Palestinian rhetoric has stabbed a 6-year-old Muslim boy 26 times and seriously injured his mother.

The report also pointed to numerous protests in the US, Israel's key ally, against the war in Gaza since October, but highlighted the crackdown by US police and university authorities on pro-Gaza protests and encampments on campuses in particular.

Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime's decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.

Since then, the United States has supplied the Tel Aviv regime with more than 10,000 tons of military equipment, and used its veto power against all United Nations Security Council resolutions that called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

The regime’s bloody onslaught on Gaza has so far killed 39,363 Palestinians, mostly women and children, leaving 90,923 others injured. Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under rubble.