The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization that purports to advocate for Muslim Americans, has accused Israel of “moving the genocide from Gaza to the occupied West Bank,” lambasting the Jewish state for committing a litany of alleged human rights abuses in recent days.

In a Monday statement, CAIR accused Israel of displacing thousands of Palestinian civilians, destroying Palestinian neighborhoods, murdering a pregnant woman and her baby, and unjustly raiding a Palestinian bookstore. 

“The radical Israeli government is clearly trying to move its genocidal campaign of slaughter and destruction from Gaza to the West Bank, where Israeli occupation forces are driving thousands of Palestinians from their homes, destroying entire neighborhoods, kidnapping hundreds, and randomly shooting others, including an eight-months pregnant woman and her baby,” CAIR said in its statement. “Indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu is a sociopath leading an army of war criminals, and our government must stop spending American taxpayer dollars on his latest campaign of murder, ethnic cleansing and destruction in the West Bank.”

In the 16 months following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s cross-border invasion of and massacre across southern Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, the Jewish state has ramped up operations to uproot terrorists in the West Bank.

These efforts intensified last month, when Israel launched a counterterrorism effort in the West Bank coined “Operation Iron Wall”” Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops, gunships, and drones operated in Jenin to extract Palestinian terrorists from the town and its adjacent refugee camps. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the operation was greenlit “on the directive of the security cabinet” with the aim of “bolstering security in Judea and Samaria [Israel’s preferred terminoloy for the West Bank].”

Jenin Mayor Mohammad Jarrar claimed that 150 buildings had been destroyed in the town as a result of the operation, suggesting that Israeli officials approved the operation with the intent of driving out the Palestinian population from the West Bank and annexing the territory. 

Israel has long accused Iran of supplying armed factions in Jenin, particularly its refugee camp, with weapons. Palestinian terrorists have long been active in the city. Israel has been especially alarmed by the rise of the Jenin Brigades, a new armed group. 

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN body responsible for Palestinian refugees, alleged that Israel inflicted “forced displacement” on some 40,000 Palestinians. The Israeli government and research organizations have publicized findings in recent months showing numerous UNRWA-employed staff, including teachers and school principals, are active Hamas members, some of whom were directly involved in Hamas’s Oc t. 7 atrocities, while many others openly celebrated it.

CAIR’s latest accusation against Israel was not its first time stepping into controversy. In the 2000s, the organization was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that “US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association’” of CAIR with Hamas.

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.’”

CAIR leaders have also found themselves embroiled in further controversy since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7.

The head of CAIR, for example, said he was “happy” to witness Hamas’s rampage of rape, murder, and kidnapping of Israelis in what was the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on Oct. 7,” CAIR co-founder and executive director Nihad Awad said in a speech during the American Muslims for Palestine convention in Chicago last November. “And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”

CAIR has accused Israel of committing atrocities beyond Gaza and the West Bank. In December, the Islamic group said the Jewish state was guilty of “ethnic cleansing” in Syria following the recent collapse of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s regime, despite the limited nature of Israel’s military operations in the neighboring country.

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