A 27-year-old man faces two counts of second-degree murder after shooting an Israeli father and son 17 times in Miami Beach on Sunday night, whom he confessed to mistaking for “Palestinians.”
“While I was driving my truck, I saw two Palestinians and I shot and killed them both,” the man said when he was arrested minutes later, but none of the victims (a father and son visiting from Israel) have been killed.
The shooter, named Mordechai Brafman, was driving through Miami Beach in his truck when he made a U-turn and stopped right next to the victims’ vehicle. The attacker then got out of the truck and fired 17 shots at the car, according to a security camera at the scene.
The individual “fired 17 times, without provocation, hitting both victims,” according to police documents revealed by local media.
One of the victims was shot in the left shoulder, while the other saw a bullet graze her left forearm. Neither of them previously knew the shooter.
The state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) called for federal hate crime charges to be filed following the shooting, based on “the alleged perpetrator’s statements to police, which reportedly claim an “anti-Palestinian” motive,” the Cair office in Florida said in a statement today.
The two men who were shot after the incident (Video capture).The two men who were shot after the incident (Video capture).
In October 2023, a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy was stabbed 26 times and his mother was seriously injured in the state of Illinois, in an attack that authorities say was motivated by the war between Israel and Hamas.
Later that year, as the conflict in Gaza escalated, three Palestinian-American college students were also shot by a man in Vermont as they walked down the street speaking Arabic and wearing kufiyas (traditional headscarves in the Middle East), one of the most common forms of violence in the country. The victims’ lower body remains paralyzed.
EFE Agency.
