On Monday, a jury found Jason Eaton guilty of the attempted murder of Kinnan Abdalhamid, Tahseen Ali Ahmad, and Hisham Awartani, Palestinian students who Eaton shot in November 2023 as they walked past his home in Burlington. The students, who were 20 years old at the time, were visiting Awartani’s uncle and grandmother in town for Thanksgiving weekend.
Eaton’s attack sent shockwaves through the community and brought international attention to Burlington, a grim reminder of the local impacts of a genocide unfolding half a world away.
At the next Burlington City Council meeting in early December, a resolution sponsored by Independent Councilor Ali Dieng and Progressive councilors condemning the attack on the students and calling for a ceasefire in Gaza failed on a 6-6 party line vote, with all Democrats voting against the resolution (including Mark Barlow, who at the time was Independent but has since registered as a Democrat). The vote came at a time when Democrats across the country had already soured on Israel’s attacks: a mid-November Ipsos poll found that 62% of Democrats believed that Israel’s attacks on Gaza were “excessive” and 77% of Democrats believed Israel should call a ceasefire and negotiate.
The next month, in January 2024, the Burlington City Council also voted to reject putting a voter-initiated “Apartheid-Free Burlington” resolution onto March’s Town Meeting ballot, breaking with decades of precedent of approving the inclusion of almost all resolutions that garner sufficient signatures.
Of those councilors who voted against the resolution and the voter initiative, Mark Barlow, Sarah Carpenter, and Ben Traverse remain in office. Traverse is widely expected to run for Mayor of Burlington in next year’s election.
During the trial, Eaton’s public defender did not contest that he was the shooter, but argued that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. After a few hours deliberating, the jury returned a guilty verdict.
Eaton will next be sentenced, and he faces up to life in prison for each count. The physical and mental wounds inflicted upon the young men, now three years older, will remain regardless of sentencing.
Hisham Awartani, who was struck in the spine and suffered the worst of the injuries, remains paralyzed from the chest down and uses a wheelchair. Despite the arduous recovery and healing process, he graduated from Brown University in May with a degree in archaeology and mathematics.
While the attack shocked the community, it came when Vermonters were already moving against the unfolding horrors in Gaza: at the exact time Eaton shot the three Palestinians, 6:25pm, community members were holding a vigil at Burlington’s annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony several blocks away on Church Street, holding banners against the war and projecting the then-current death toll in Gaza on a nearby wall. At the time, over 14,000 had been killed. Since then, the official death toll has crossed 70,000. Internal data from Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, leaked in August 2025, indicated that at least 83% of those killed in Gaza were civilians.
In the wake of the verdict, the families of the students released a joint statement:
Joint Statement from the Families of Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad
Justice has been rendered for Hisham, Kinnan and Tahseen. After three years of sorrow, loss, and struggle, our families finally feel relief.
On November 25, 2023, our sons — college students and friends since childhood — were far from home on a Thanksgiving weekend. They wrapped themselves against the cold in scarves that reminded them of their distant home and went for a walk down a leafy block of Burlington, Vermont. They were joking with each other in Arabic and English, as they have done since they played together on the playground of their Quaker school in Ramallah. Within minutes, Jason Eaton tried to kill them. Our three children were badly wounded. Hisham was left paralyzed from the chest down and now lives with paraplegia.
Today, a jury has convicted Jason Eaton of three counts of attempted second-degree murder. The verdict cannot undo what happened or erase the trauma our families still carry. But it affirms something fundamental: Jason Eaton is responsible for what he did. Eaton’s defense argued that he should not be held accountable because he was delusional. The jury rejected this argument. We also reject this. We do not accept what this wrongfully implies about the millions of people in the US and the world who struggle with their mental health challenges.
Jason Eaton never disputed that he was the shooter. During the trial, we had to listen to him use hateful words to describe our sons—over and over again. They were not the words of a man confused about who he shot, or why. They are the words of a man who saw three young men celebrating their friendship and wearing what made them feel closer to their far away families and home – and decided to kill them because of his own prejudices. We do not need a jury to tell us why our sons were targeted. We heard it, in his own words. This was a hate crime. We have said so from the beginning. The law never made him answer for it. But we know what he did.
We are grateful to State’s Attorney Sarah George, Deputy State’s Attorney Sally Adams and their team for pursuing this case with rigor. We thank the medical professionals who saved our sons’ lives and supported their recovery and the law enforcement professionals who made this conviction possible.
We remain grateful to the Burlington and Vermont communities. From the first hours after the shooting, they stood with our sons—not just as crime victims, but as three young friends whose lives, wellbeing, and futures matter. That solidarity has mattered even more with each passing year, because our sons’ recovery unfolded alongside the genocide and destruction of Gaza and the escalating ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. While our children fought to heal from being shot in Burlington, they watched Palestinian children lose their lives, their homes, their land, their families. We are grateful our sons’ suffering commanded attention and support. We grieve that so much Palestinian suffering never does.
Hisham, Kinnan and Tahseen have spent three years rebuilding their bodies and their lives after a hateful act almost killed them. We are profoundly relieved. And we continue to work toward a world where hateful violence against Palestinians is called out for what it is – and stopped.
The Vermont Coalition for Palestinian Liberation, a grouping of allied organizations from across the state, also released a statement:
Justice is Served for Hisham, Kinnan, and Tahseen! Now Justice for Palestine!
Statement from the Vermont Coalition for Palestinian Liberation
On November 25th, 2023, Jason Eaton committed a horrific hate crime in Burlington, Vermont. Amidst the racist hysteria the US and Israel whipped up to justify their genocidal war on Gaza, he attempted to murder three Palestinian college students—Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad. He heard them speaking a mix of Arabic and English, saw two of them wearing the traditional Palestinian scarf, the keffiyeh, and shot them on the street where they were visiting Hisham’s grandmother for Thanksgiving.
Luckily, all three survived the shooting, but Hisham was left paralyzed from the waist down. After three years of waiting and worrying that justice delayed would again be justice denied, Eaton stood trial over the last week. His defense and its psychiatric expert claimed he was not guilty by reason of insanity, while the state prosecution and its experts argued he was not and was therefore responsible for his actions. On September 21st, a jury found Eaton guilty on all three counts of attempted murder, finally delivering a modicum of justice for the three students and their families.
The trial became a metaphor of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equal rights, and dignity. So much injustice has been done by the US government to the Palestinian people here in the US and in Palestine. Therefore, many doubted that a court and a jury would rule in favor of Hisham, Kinnan, and Tahseen. But the movement against Israel’s genocidal war has transformed mass consciousness and won the people of this state, country, and world to solidarity with Palestinians and their struggle for liberation. As a result, the all-white jury did the right thing, convicting Eaton for his terrible crime.
In doing so, they challenged Burlington’s political establishment, which has stood lock step with the federal government’s assault on Palestinians and Palestine solidarity activists. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have launched a New McCarthyite witch hunt, repressing protests, shutting down encampments, criminalizing speech in support of Palestine, and attempting to deport Palestinians like Mahmoud Khalil and Vermont’s own Mohsen Mahdawi.
The Democratic Party majority on Burlington’s city council joined their pro-war chorus at the start of the genocide, staged a rally in support of Israel, voted down a ceasefire resolution, and for three years in a row blocked an Apartheid Free Communities resolution from appearing on the ballot. In the statehouse, five legislators went on an all-expenses paid junket to Israel, where they received coaching on how to pass legislation criminalizing speech in favor of Palestine. They even had the gall to plant a Vermont flag on Palestinian land.
All that underscores the fact that Palestine is a Vermont issue. Like our national political establishment, our local one has economic, political, and ideological stakes in supporting Israel’s settler colonial apartheid state and enforcing US dominance over the Middle East and its strategic energy reserves. It therefore approves our tax dollars funding Israel, our state’s military industrial complex arming Israel, and our legislature defending Israel and its impunity even as it commits genocide.
The establishment’s prejudices were on full display at the trial. When dozens of Palestine solidarity activists wearing keffiyehs joined the audience to support Hisham, Kinnan, and Tahseen and their families, the defense objected and demanded that the judge have us remove them, contending they would pressure, intimidate, or influence the jury. The judge agreed and had us take off the scarves but did allow the three students to wear theirs. But why did he order them removed? The only conceivable answer is the establishment’s anti-Palestinian racism.
In the trial itself, the prosecution effectively proved that Eaton was not someone with a serious mental illness or disorder. Eaton’s statements proved he was cogent and capable of rational argument. As a result, the insanity defense had no foundation. What Eaton’s statements did display was the racism he had imbibed from the political establishment and media. He claimed he was defending Jews and a Burlington Kibbutz from Palestinian terrorists wearing keffiyehs. He compared his actions to Anne Frank defending herself against Hitler. Eaton is a bigot who committed a hate crime.
The verdict against him is a blow to all the injustice our government and society has meted out to Palestinians. It offers Hisham, Kinnan, and Tahseen and their families some closure to this horrible episode in their lives and hopefully opens up the possibility for all of them to thrive now and in the future. It also is a blow to the establishment’s ongoing campaign to intimidate and criminalize solidarity with Palestine on campuses and in the community.
The verdict is, however, a drop of justice in the ocean of injustice done to Palestinians. Mahmoud and Mohsen still face the threat of deportation for exercising their first amendment rights to speech, assembly, and protest. State legislatures, including Vermont’s, have passed or are planning to pass legislation criminalizing Palestine solidarity as antisemitic. Israel continues its genocide in Gaza, has escalated its ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, and enforces its apartheid system within its border that denies equal rights to Palestinians.
Even worse, the verdict has only sentenced a retail vigilante to jail. But the wholesale murderers, who poured their hatred and bigotry into Eaton, continue to rule our country and Israel’s with impunity. Biden, Harris, Trump, Vance, Netanyahu, and the whole Israeli political establishment are guilty of genocide. Why are they not put on trial and convicted of that crime against humanity? Only when they are will Palestine have justice.
That’s why the Vermont Coalition for Palestinian Liberation emerges from this trial and its verdict with renewed commitment to fight for justice for all Palestinians in the Middle East and here in the US. We will double down on our campaign to make Vermont an Apartheid Free Community that implements Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against the state of Israel. That is our small contribution to the global struggle to free Palestine and its people from colonial rule. Until Palestine is free, none of us are free.
Patrick is a writer and organizer based in northern Vermont. He is on the editorial collective for The Rake Vermont.
