A man charged with attempted murder over the shooting of two Israeli visitors in Florida, the United States, believed the victims were Palestinians, police have said.

Mordechai Brafman, 27, was on Sunday charged with two counts of attempted murder and booked after the shooting at Miami Beach the previous night, according to the website of Miami-Dade County Corrections.

In an arrest report, police alleged that Brafman had “spontaneously stated that while he was driving his truck, he saw two Palestinians and shot and killed both”.

Both victims, identified in local media as a Jewish father and son visiting Miami from Israel, survived.

One of the men suffered an injury to his shoulder, and the other was wounded in his forearm, according to local news reports.

In an interview with WPLG Local 10, one of the victims, identified as Ari Revay, said the shooter had opened fire at him and his father from a passing truck.

“‘Boom, boom, boom’ and he randomly started shooting,” Revay was quoted as saying in an interview that was reportedly translated from Hebrew by his cousin.

“Window down, driver’s seat and just blasted,” Revay was quoted as saying.

The shooting comes amid warnings by advocacy groups that incidents of anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic hate have surged since the start of the war in Gaza on October 7, 2023, including several violent attacks on Palestinian Americans.

On October 14, 2023 six year-old Palestinian Wadea al-Fayoume was killed after his family’s landlord stabbed him 26 times, in suburban Chicago.

In another incident, a 41-year-old woman allegedly attempted to drown a three-year-old Palestinian-American girl in Texas, while three young Palestinian men were injured after they were shot near a university campus in Vermont in November 2023.

“This is just the latest example of the hate targeting the Palestinian-American community in this country and Palestinians in their homeland,” Nihad Awad, the national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement on Monday.

“Policymakers in our nation should stop fomenting the anti-Palestinian hate that led to the genocide in Gaza and to hate crimes in America.” (Al-Jazeera)