US woman attempting to drown 3yrs old Palestinian girl risk jail

A woman in Texas, United States (US) has been formally indicted by a grand jury in the attempted drowning of a three-year-old Palestinian American girl earlier this year that police said was motivated by racial hatred.

The suspect, identified as Elizabeth Wolf, aged 42, from Texas was arraigned by a grand jury in Tarrant County for hate crime enhancement.

Wolf, whose representative could not immediately be reached for comment yesterday, was charged with attempted capital murder of a person under 10 years and intentionally causing bodily injury to a child.

A guilty verdict could lead to a more severe punishment for Wolf, considering the indictment’s hate crime allegations.

According to a police report, the attack in May occurred at an apartment complex swimming pool in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Euless.

At the time, the suspect approached the mother of the three-year-old girl, who was accompanied by her six-year-old son at the pool, and inquired about their origin.

Then she attempted to drown the three-year-old girl and also tried to seize the six-year-old boy.

However, the mother was able to pull her daughter from the water, police said, adding that local medical officials responded to the scene and the children were medically cleared.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Texas) said earlier that the accused approached the mother of the children with ‘racist interrogations’ and then grabbed the children, who were in the shallow end of the pool, pulling them into the deep end in an alleged attempt to drown them.

Human rights advocates have warned about rising threats against Palestinian Americans, Muslims, Arabs and Jews since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza.

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.

A month earlier, a six-year-old Palestinian American boy was stabbed to death in Illinois. Police charged a 71-year-old man with murder and a hate crime for stabbing the child to death and seriously injuring his mother.

According to the police, the elderly attacker targeted the victims as a response to the war in Gaza and their religion.