A man has been arrested in Burlington, Vermont, in connection with the shooting of three college students of Palestinian descent. The incident, which occurred near the University of Vermont on November 25, is being investigated as a potential hate crime. The suspect, a white man named Jason J. Eaton, allegedly shot and wounded the victims while they were walking to dinner. Two of the students were wearing traditional Palestinian keffiyehs at the time of the shooting. They had been speaking English and Arabic when the suspect wordlessly shot at them four times before fleeing the scene on foot. The family members of one of the victims, 20-year-old Hisham Awartani, have revealed that he has been left paralyzed as a result of the shooting. Awartani, a student at Brown University, had a bullet lodged in his spine, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down. The other two victims, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ahmed, both 20 years old, are expected to make a full recovery. The three victims, who are friends and graduated from the Ramallah Friends School in the West Bank, were walking to Awartani’s grandmother’s house for dinner at the time of the shooting. Authorities have found no additional information about Eaton’s potential motive, other than the fact that the students were of Palestinian descent and were wearing keffiyehs. The families of the victims have urged authorities to investigate the incident as a hate crime. This incident is part of an alarming trend of Islamophobia and antisemitic bias and violence in the US. Since October 7, there have been reports of increased incidents, including the fatal stabbing of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy in a suburb near Chicago. The federal government has opened discrimination investigations at six universities, including Columbia and Cornell, over complaints of antisemitic and anti-Muslim harassment. Awartani’s mother, Elizabeth Price, has expressed her concern about her son’s safety in America and his struggle to make sense of the incident.
