News - Middle East: 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.