As right-leaning social media is abuzz with hand-wringing over the prospect of Hamas-style violence springing up in the United States - and with the FBI warning of the same - the first domestic death linked to the Hamas-Israel war is that of a Muslim, Palestinian-American child.
On Saturday morning, an Illinois man stabbed a 6-year-old Muslim boy to death and slashed the boy's mother, in a brutal assault motivated by last week's Hamas attack on Israel, police say. The accused attacker, 71-year-old Joseph M. Czuba, is their landlord in Plainfield Township, about 40 miles southwest of downtown Chicago.
“Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis,” the Will County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) says it reviewed text messages sent by the mother from the hospital where she was being treated after the attack. According to CAIR's reading of her account, Czuba had been angered over the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
He knocked on her door shortly before noon, she said, and when she opened it, he tried to choke her and started stabbing her, yelling "you Muslims must die!"
She said she fled to the bathroom to call 911 and when she emerged, she found her son had been viciously stabbed, over and over again. "It all happened in seconds," she reportedly said in a text. CAIR has identified the dead boy as Wadea al-Fayoume and his mother as Hanaan Shahin.
Czuba used a 12-inch, military-style knife with a seven-inch, serrated blade, which was found in the boy's abdomen, police say. An autopsy determined that the boy was stabbed 26 times. His mother suffered more than a dozen wounds but is expected to recover.
Police say that, when they responded to the 911 call, Czuba was sitting on the ground outside the home, with his forehead bleeding. He's been charged with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, two thought hate crimes, and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. "[Czuba] always had signs around times of elections...that were pretty angry about what was going on politically and locally here," neighbor Jim Stein told CBS.
