Discrimination and attacks against Muslims and Palestinians rose by about 70 per cent in the US in the first half of 2024 amid heightened Islamophobia due to Israel’s offensive in Gaza, the Council on American-Islamic Relations advocacy group has said, Reuters reports.

In the first six months of 2024, CAIR said it received 4,951 complaints of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian incidents, a rise of nearly 70pc compared with the same period in 2023.

Most of the complaints were in the categories of immigration and asylum, employment discrimination, education discrimination and hate crimes, CAIR said.

In 2023, CAIR documented 8,061 such complaints in the whole year, including about 3,600 in the last three months after the conflict broke out.