Discrimination and attacks against American Muslims and Arabs rose by 7.4% in 2024 due to heightened Islamophobia caused by US ally Israel’s war in Gaza and the resulting college campus protests, a Muslim advocacy group said on Tuesday.

The Council on American Islamic Relations said it recorded the highest number of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab complaints – 8,658 – in 2024 since it began publishing data in 1996.

Most complaints were in the categories of employment discrimination (15.4%), immigration and asylum (14.8%), education discrimination (9.8%) and hate crimes (7.5%), according to the CAIR report.

Rights advocates have highlighted an increase in Islamophobia, anti-Arab bias and antisemitism since the start of Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza following a deadly October 2023 Hamas attack.

The CAIR report also details police and university crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protests and encampments on college campuses.

Demonstrators have for months demanded an end to US support for Israel. At the height of college campus demonstrations in the summer of 2024, classes were canceled, some university administrators resigned, and student protesters were suspended and arrested.

Human rights and free speech advocates condemned the crackdown on protests which were called disruptive by university administrators. Notable incidents include violent arrests by police of protesters at Columbia University and a mob attack on pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“For the second year in a row, the US-backed Gaza genocide drove a wave of Islamophobia in the United States,” CAIR said. Israel denies genocide and war crimes accusations.

Last month, an Illinois jury found a man guilty of hate crime in an October 2023 fatal stabbing of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy.

Other alarming US incidents since late 2023 include the attempted drowning of a 3-year-old Palestinian American girl in Texas, the stabbing of a Palestinian American man in Texas, the beating of a Muslim man in New York and a Florida shooting of two Israeli visitors whom a suspect mistook to be Palestinians.

In recent days, the US government has faced criticism from rights advocates over the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student who has played a prominent role in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.

The United Nations’ migration agency has reinstated humanitarian assistance to Rohingya refugees in Indonesia, its chief of mission in Jakarta told Reuters on Tuesday.

The reinstatement follows a Reuters report last week that the agency had been forced to reduce aid to over 900 Rohingya refugees due to massive funding cuts by its biggest donor, the United States.

Jeff Labovitz, chief of mission to Indonesia for the International Organisation for Migration, confirmed the reinstatement of services to Rohingya sheltering in the city of Pekanbaru, on the western island of Sumatra.

“Our largest programme to provide humanitarian assistance has been reinstated. I can confirm there is no current planned reduction in services,” he said, providing no further details.

Separately, the agency said in an emailed statement that it “explored various options in response to potential funding challenges” and that necessary resources remain available that would allow it to continue its humanitarian efforts.

The US embassy in Jakarta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

There are about 2,800 Rohingya in Indonesia, the UN says.

Many ethnic Rohingya – who are mostly Muslim, originally from Myanmar and constitute the world’s largest stateless population – escape squalid camps and persecution in Myanmar and neighbouring Bangladesh each year, sailing aboard rickety boats to Thailand or Muslim-majority Indonesia and Malaysia.

The plans to reduce aid followed the turmoil surrounding the global humanitarian sector, after US President Donald Trump took office in January vowing to halt most US foreign aid and dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Ukraine launched its biggest drone attack on the Russian capital on Tuesday with at least 91 drones targeting Moscow, killing at least one person, sparking fires, closing airports and forcing dozens of flights to be diverted, Russian officials said.

A total of 337 Ukrainian drones were downed over Russia, including 91 over the Moscow region and 126 over the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces have been pulling back, the defence ministry said.

The massive dawn drone attack unfurled just as a team of Ukrainian officials prepare to meet a U.S. team in Saudi Arabia to seek grounds for possible peace talks in the three-year-old war, and as Russian forces try to encircle thousands of Ukrainian soldiers in the western Russian region of Kursk.

As rush hour built, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said air defences were still repelling attacks on the city, which along with the surrounding region has a population of at least 21 million and is one of the biggest metropolitan areas in Europe.

“The most massive attack of enemy UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) on Moscow has been repelled,” Sobyanin said in a post on Telegram.

Moscow Region Governor Andrei Vorobyov said at least one person was killed and three injured, and he posted a picture of a wrecked apartment with its windows blown out.

Vorobyov said that some residents were forced to evacuate a multi-storey building in the Ramenskoye district of the Moscow region, about 50 km (31 miles) southeast of the Kremlin.
There was no sign of panic in Moscow, commuters went to work as normal in central Moscow.

Russia’s aviation watchdog said flights were suspended at all four of Moscow’s airports to ensure air safety after the attacks. Two other airports, in the Yaroslavl and Nizhny Novgorod regions, both east of Moscow, were also closed.

Though U.S. President Donald Trump says he wants to deliver peace in Ukraine, the war is heating up on the battlefield with a major Russian spring offensive in Kursk and a series of Ukrainian drone attacks deep into Russia.

Russia has developed a myriad of electronic “umbrellas” over Moscow and over key installations, with additional advanced internal layers over strategic buildings, and a complex web of air defences to shoot down the drones before they reach the Kremlin in the heart of the capital.

Kyiv, itself the target of repeated mass drone strikes from Russian forces, has tried to strike back against its vastly larger eastern neighbour with repeated drone strikes against oil refineries, airfields and even Russian strategic early-warning radar stations.

DRONE WAR

The war, the biggest in Europe since World War Two, has combined grinding World War One style attrition trench and artillery warfare with the major innovation of drones.

Moscow and Kyiv have both sought to buy and develop new drones, deploy them in innovative ways, and seek new ways to destroy them – from using farmers’ shotguns to advanced electronic jamming systems.

Both sides have turned cheap commercial drones into deadly weapons while ramping up their own production.

Soldiers on both sides have reported a visceral fear of drones – and both sides have used macabre video footage of fatal drone strikes in their propaganda, with soldiers shown being blown apart in toilets or running from burning vehicles.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has sought to insulate Moscow from the rigours of the war, has called Ukrainian drone attacks that target civilian infrastructure such as nuclear power plants “terrorism” and has vowed a response.

Moscow, by far Russia’s richest city, has boomed during the war, buoyed by the biggest defence spending splurge since the Cold War.