San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Shooting hits a world away from West Bank
BURLINGTON, Vt. — A week after three college students of Palestinian descent were shot and seriously wounded while taking an evening walk, relatives of two of the victims have arrived in Vermont from the war-torn West Bank, grappling with a new reality that has shattered their lives and a place they thought was a safe haven.
Elizabeth Price and her husband Ali Awartani flew in Wednesday just as their son, Hisham Awartani, underwent surgery. After the Israel-Hamas war erupted in early October, they decided it would be safer for Hisham to stay in the United States instead of coming home for the holidays.
Now they don’t know if he will ever walk again.
“When my nephew came to this country to pursue his studies and when he came to stay with me for Thanksgiving in Burlington, Vermont, it never occurred to me that he may be victim to this type of violence,” Awartani’s uncle Rich Price said in an interview with the Associated Press on Friday. “And so I feel a sense of shame, I feel a sense of outrage, and it’s been a really difficult awakening to the
fact that even here — even in this country, even in this town — that many of the risks that exist for my nephew and his friends in Palestine exist for them here.”
Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad, all age 20 and attending colleges in the eastern U.S., were visiting Price and his family for the holiday break. The three have been friends since first grade at Ramallah Friends School, a private school in the West Bank. While they were out for a walk Saturday evening after a family birthday
party, a man approached them and shot them without saying a word, they told police.
The young men were speaking in a mix of English and Arabic and two of them were also wearing the black-and-white Palestinian keffiyeh scarves when they were shot, Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad said.
Abdalhamid ran when the man started shooting and jumped over a fence. He hid in a backyard for a minute shaking, fearing the man was after him and that his friends were dead,
before going to a house that had lights on and urging them to call 911, he told the AP on Friday. He learned at the University of Vermont Medical Center that his friends were alive but more seriously injured and asked to be placed in the intensive care room with them, he said.
“Palestinians in general and in the U.S. are suffering from hate. I don’t think any race or ethnicity should be targeted like that,” Abdalhamid said in the hotel where he’s staying with his mother, Tamara Tamimi, after being released from the hospital earlier in the week.
Tamimi arrived in Vermont Wednesday from Jerusalem. After she and her husband got the 3 a.m. phone call that her son and his two friends were shot, she said she was relieved to talk to Kinnan from the emergency room — that he was alive. But she later fell apart, she said.
“I remember the overwhelming feeling was enough. It’s just enough. It’s enough pain for Palestinians. We’re already grieving. We’re already carrying so much grief,” she said. “I really just fell apart and started throwing things around with so much anger saying, ‘There’s nowhere safe for us. There’s nowhere safe for Palestinians. Where are we supposed to go?’ ”
Ahmad’s parents were expected to arrive in Vermont on Saturday.
The shooting came as threats against Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities have increased across the U.S. in the weeks since the war began.
The suspected gunman, Jason J. Eaton, 48, was arrested Sunday at his apartment. Eaton has pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted murder and is being held without bail.
Authorities are investigating the shooting as a possible hate crime.