A Texas woman was accused of trying to drown a three-year-old Palestinian-American Muslim girl, and police said on Monday that the incident was motivated by bias and that the suspect had made racially motivated statements. The incident occurred in May but received media attention on Monday after the Council on American-Islamic Relations provided support to the victims and issued a press release specifying religion and lineage.

The Euless Police Department believes the crime was committed out of bias or prejudice, and this is part of the case presented to the Tarrant County Prosecutor’s Office,” police said in a statement. The district attorney’s office said it was reviewing the case. The police report indicates that the incident occurred in a swimming pool in an apartment complex in the Euless suburb of Dallas-Fort Worth.

The suspect quarreled with the mother of the three-year-old girl, and the mother was also in the pool with a six-year-old son after the suspect asked the child’s mother where she was from. The police report said that the suspect, 42-year-old Elizabeth Wolfe, tried to drown the three-year-old girl and tried to grab the six-year-old boy.

The police said that the mother could pull her daughter out of the water, paramedics rushed to the scene, and medical authorities confirmed the safety of the children. The suspect was arrested and charged with attempted premeditated murder. Human rights defenders have observed a rise in rates of Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian bias, and anti-Semitism in the United States since the outbreak of the most recent conflict in the Middle East.

For his part, President Joe Biden said that he was “very disturbed” by the reports received about the incident. Other American incidents that occurred during the Gaza war included a stabbing incident in October in which a six-year-old boy was killed in Illinois, and the police said that it was a targeting because he was of Palestinian American origin.

A Palestinian-American man was stabbed in Texas in February in an incident that police said qualified as a hate crime. The shooting incident targeting three students of Palestinian origin in Vermont in November was considered a suspected hate crime.