Mother of Palestinian student shot in Vermont: 'Hateful rhetoric’ aided attack

The mother of Hisham Awartani, one of the Palestinian students shot in the US state of Vermont on Nov. 25, said that her son’s struggle to recover from his serious injuries is part of a wider effort by Palestinians to persist through the Gaza war.

“He has seen other Palestinians keep on going,” Elizabeth Price told Al-Monitor. “What’s keeping him going is his strength and the understanding that things could be a lot worse if you were in Gaza.”

Awartani, a 20-year-old Palestinian-American, grew up in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank before moving to the United States in 2021 for his studies. He is currently an archaeology and mathematics student at Brown University. On the evening of Nov. 25, Hisham and his friends Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad were walking home on Prospect Street in Burlington after visiting a relative when they were shot. All three survived, but Awartani suffered an incomplete spinal injury, meaning the communication between his brain and lower body is disrupted. Though he was shot in the front, the bullet ended up in his spine, specifically his thoracic 2. He may not be able to walk again.