Three college students from the Palestinian territories were shot in Burlington, Vermont, on Saturday evening, according to their former school in the occupied West Bank. Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad said in a news release that officers responded to a call and found two shooting victims, with the third a short distance away, all close to the University of Vermont campus. The victims were transported to the University of Vermont Medical Center, the news release said. The shooter or shooters have not been identified or apprehended, Murad said, and the police department is “at the earliest stages of investigating this crime.”
The three students had graduated from Ramallah Friends School, a Quaker-run private nonprofit school in Ramallah, according to the school. The school identified the students as Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdelhamid and Tahseen Ahmed. According to Ramallah Friends School, all three are students at American colleges. Haverford College in Pennsylvania confirmed in a statement that Abdelhamid, a junior at the college, is recovering from gunshot wounds at a hospital.
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Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Kingdom, posted on X about the incident, naming the students and identifying them as “three young Palestinian men.” “The hate crimes against Palestinians must stop. Palestinians everywhere need protection,” Zomlot wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Burlington police did not specify the ethnicity of the three and whether they were targeted for that reason. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee said in a news release that they “have reason to believe this shooting occurred because the victims are Arab.” The civil rights organization added that two of the students are still in intensive care and one has “very critical and serious injuries.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations announced it was offering a $10,000 reward for “information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator or perpetrators” of the shooting.
The shooting comes amid heightened tensions and hate crimes in the US in the weeks since October 7, when Hamas launched a deadly attack in Israel and Israel responded with devastating airstrikes across Gaza. In October, a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy was stabbed to death by his family’s landlord in a case authorities are calling a hate crime.
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CNN has reached out to the University of Vermont, the University of Vermont Medical Center, the students’ universities, Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger and Gov. Phil Scott for comment.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
