Haverford College holds vigil for Palestinian student shot in Vermont

Haverford College held a vigil on Tuesday in support of a Palestinian student who was shot in what authorities are investigating as a potential hate crime in Vermont on Saturday.

About 200 Haverford students, alumni, and staff gathered in Founders Hall around 4:30 p.m. to light candles and offer support for Kinnan Abdalhamid, the West Bank-born biology major and member of the school’s track team, who was one of three victims of Saturday’s shooting.

Abdalhamid remains hospitalized in Burlington along with his two friends, Hisham Awartani and Tahseen Ahmed. The three college students, all 20, were visiting Burlington for the holiday weekend when a man opened fire on them without warning.

Haverford’s vigil was structured in the Quaker tradition where students held long moments of silence broken only when someone was motivated to speak. One Palestinian student broke down in tears as she addressed the room. As two friends flanked her for support, she said there was no doubt in her mind the shooting was a hate crime.

“Palestinians’ suffering has to be recognized,” she said. “We’re humans.”

Authorities said the men were walking to a relative’s house in Burlington after a family gathering when Jason J. Eaton stepped up onto a nearby porch and, without a word, fired four shots from a Ruger .380 pistol, injuring all three.

While the motive remains unclear, authorities noted the victims were speaking in a mixture of English and Arabic, and two of them were wearing keffiyehs. The U.S. Department of Justice is assisting with an investigation into whether the unprovoked attack was a hate crime. Eaton, 48, was arrested Sunday and pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted murder on Monday.

The attack’s reverberations were felt from the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories to the sleepy college campus that Abdalhamid attends in Delaware County. Threats against Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities across the U.S. have risen sharply since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, and tensions remain high over the conflict, particularly on college campuses.

Dean of the College John McKnight said as students have tried to make sense of the war, administrators have aimed to make the Haverford campus a place of safety and connection where they can process whatever emotions they’re feeling. Abdalhamid’s shooting has only complicated those feelings, McKnight said.

“Now that things have come so close to home for us as a community with one of our students being shot —we believe just for his identity as a Palestinian American — there’s fear, there’s outrage, there’s sadness, there’s uncertainty,” he said.

Tuesday’s candlelit vigil was one of several supportive gestures at Haverford in the wake of the shooting.

“The attack has the power to terrify because it shows how vulnerable we are, in so many ways,” Haverford president Wendy Raymond wrote to students in a Monday email. “Together, we will walk in and through it.”

Colleagues of Abdalhamid described him as a bright student and a well-known Palestinian activist who often organized rallies on campus. He recently spoke at a schoolwide meeting about the demands of Students for Justice in Palestine.

McKnight, who paid Abdalhamid a visit in Vermont as he recovers, said he has a large network of support between family and peers in Haverford.

Abdalhamid’s family urged him to attend school in the U.S. due to concerns about his safety in the West Bank — a decision that has been cast into doubt after Saturday’s shooting, according to the victim’s uncle, Radi Tamimi. “We’re just trying to come to terms with everything,” he said at a news conference in Burlington on Monday.

Abdalhamid and Ahmed were each shot once and are in stable condition, authorities said Monday, while Awartani faces a long recovery after the bullet hit his spine, his family said.