By Johnny Diaz, Mitch Smith and Robert Chiarito

CHICAGO — Authorities in suburban Chicago accused a man of fatally stabbing a 6-year-old boy Saturday (14) and seriously wounding the boy’s mother because they were Muslim, an attack that officials tied to the violence in Israel and the Gaza Strip.

The killing in Illinois alarmed Muslim leaders, who called on American politicians and journalists to more fully reflect the humanity of Palestinian people as they address the conflict overseas.

“This was directly connected to dehumanizing of Palestinians,” said Abdelnasser Rashid, a Democratic Illinois state representative who is Palestinian American.

Investigators in Will County, southwest of Chicago, described a gory scene. They said a 71-year-old landlord turned on the boy and his mother, who were his tenants, at their home in Plainfield Township on Saturday morning, stabbing them repeatedly with a serrated knife that had a 7-inch blade.

The boy, identified as Wadea Al-Fayoume by a family member and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, was stabbed 26 times and pronounced dead at a hospital, according to the sheriff’s office. The boy’s mother, 32, was in serious condition with more than a dozen stab wounds, officials said. Officials said she ran into a bathroom and continued fighting off the attacker as she dialled 911. Relatives said the family is Palestinian American.

The Will County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Sunday (15) that “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 statement did not specify how investigators knew the motive, but it said they had conducted interviews and reviewed other evidence.

The man accused in the attack, Joseph Czuba, was being held on charges of first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, two counts of a hate crime and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.

Czuba was scheduled to make an initial court appearance in Will County on Monday (16), according to online records. It was not clear whether he had hired a lawyer.

Saturday’s assault came amid mounting violence between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls the Gaza Strip. On Oct. 7, Hamas launched a surprise attack against Israel that left more than 1,300 Israelis dead, prompting intense retaliation that has killed 2,670 people in Gaza, according to officials in Gaza. Across the Middle East, fears of a widening conflict and worsening humanitarian crisis are mounting.

Suburban Chicago has a large Palestinian American community, including an area with many Arab restaurants and shops that some refer to as Little Palestine. Saturday’s attack happened in a different part of the Chicago suburbs, in a home along a busy stretch of highway near a Chevrolet dealership and a barbecue restaurant. That property, about 40 miles southwest of downtown Chicago, was adorned with several American flags, an advertisement for organic honey and a sign asking people to pray to end abortion.

Mariola Jagodzinski, who lives two houses away, said she had never had any negative interactions with the suspect. She said that she had given toys to Wadea’s mother and that she was speechless and distressed when she heard about the killing.

“He was a playful child — really full of energy,” Jagodzinski said. “Kids are innocent. This really destroys so many hearts.”

On Sunday, the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, denounced the stabbing and called it “our worst nightmare.”

“Our hearts are heavy, and our prayers are with the darling boy and his mother,” Ahmed Rehab, executive director of CAIR-Chicago, said in a statement.

Authorities did not confirm the names of either victim. Attempts to reach the prosecutor and coroner in Will County on Sunday were not immediately successful.

The Illinois State Police said in a statement Sunday that it was coordinating with other agencies “in response to the elevated level of threats of violence and hate crimes related to the current conflict.”

“Everyone in Illinois — both law enforcement and community members alike — must remain on guard against both terrorism and hate crimes during this period of volatility,” said State Police Director Brendan Kelly.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, said in a statement that “to take a 6-year-old child’s life in the name of bigotry is nothing short of evil.”

“Wadea should be heading to school in the morning,” Pritzker said. “Instead, his parents will wake up without their son.”

CAIR officials said they had reviewed text messages, written in Arabic, that the boy’s mother sent to his father from the hospital. In those messages, CAIR officials said, the mother indicated that the landlord had been angry with what he was seeing on the news. The organization did not make the text messages available for review by news organizations.

According to CAIR’s account of the text messages, the landlord knocked on the family’s door, and when the mother opened it, he tried to choke her and attacked her with a knife, yelling, “You Muslims must die!”

When she ran into the bathroom to call 911, the text messages say, she came out to find that he had stabbed her son.

“It all happened in seconds,” she texted, according to CAIR.

-New York Times