Man convicted of attempted murder over 2023 shooting of Irish-Palestinian student in US

A man was convicted by a US jury on Monday of attempted murder in the shootings of three Palestinian university students, including one with Irish citizenship, in Burlington, Vermont, in November 2023. Irish-Palestinian student Hisham Awartani was paralysed from the waist down and his friends, Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid, were wounded in the attack by Jason Eaton (51). All three victims are now 23 years old.After deliberating for two hours, a jury rejected Eaton’s defence of insanity. Eaton’s lawyers argued that he was suffering from a delusional disorder and believed he was acting on orders from the CIA and Mossad to protect his Jewish neighbours. The three young men, who were childhood friends in the occupied West Bank, gave testimony wearing traditional Palestinian keffiyehs. READ MOREIn court, Awartani, who is also a US citizen, recounted how he was visiting his grandmother in Vermont during the Thanksgiving holiday period when he and his friends were approached by Eaton. Awartani was shot by Eaton in the chest, which caused permanent damage to his spinal cord.Elizabeth Price, Awartani’s mother, was born in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin. He was raised in the family’s home in the West Bank before becoming a maths and archaeology student at Brown University in Rhode Island.The gun attack on the three students, who were all studying in the US, took place in the weeks after the attacks of October 7th, 2023, on Israel, which triggered a devastating war on Gaza. US authorities reported an increase in reported anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish attacks after October 2023. Classmates from Ramallah Friends School in the West Bank, including Tahseen Aliahmad (second from left), Kinnan Abdalhamid (centre) and Hisham Awartani (right), all three of whom were shot and injured by Jason Eaton in Burlington, Vermont, in 2023. Photograph: Courtesy Elizabeth Price The local state attorney responsible for prosecuting Eaton for the gun attack was criticised for not including hate-crime charges in the indictment. The state attorney suggested it would be difficult to prove hate-crime charges beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard required for criminal convictions. In a statement after the verdict, the victims’ families said: “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.”