A man charged with attempted murder over the shooting of two Israeli visitors in Florida, the United States, believed the victims were Palestinians, police have said.
According to the Miami-Dade County Corrections website, Mordechai Brafman, 27, was charged with two counts of attempted murder on Sunday and booked following the previous night’s shooting in Miami.
According to the police, Brafman “spontaneously stated that while he was driving his truck, he saw two Palestinians and shot and killed both.”
Both victims, identified in local media as a Jewish father and son visiting Miami from Israel, survived.
One of the men suffered an injury to his shoulder, and the other was wounded in his forearm, according to local news reports.
Ari Revay, the shooter, claimed in an interview with WPLG Local 10 that he and his father had opened fire on them.
“‘ Boom, boom, boom ‘ and he randomly started shooting”, Revay was quoted as saying in an interview that was reportedly translated from Hebrew by his cousin.
“He put the window down, driver’s seat and just blasted”, Revay was quoted as saying.
Since the beginning of the war in Gaza on October 7, 2023, there have been numerous violent attacks on Palestinian Americans, according to advocacy groups’ warnings.
On October 14, 2023 six year-old Palestinian Wadea al-Fayoume was killed after his family’s landlord stabbed him 26 times, in suburban Chicago.
In another incident,  , a 41-year-old woman allegedly attempted to drown a three-year-old Palestinian-American girl in Texas, while three young Palestinian men were injured after they were shot near a university campus in Vermont in November 2023.
“This is just the latest example of the hate targeting the Palestinian-American community in this country and Palestinians in their homeland”, Nihad Awad, the national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement on Monday.
Source: Aljazeera
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