Vermont Shooting Victim May Not Walk Again

One of the three young Palestinian men shot while in his grandmother's neighborhood over Thanksgiving weekend in Vermont may not walk again, his parents say. Hisham Awartani's family lives in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and the 20-year-old Brown University student typically would have returned home for the holidays, but his parents decided he should remain in the US after the Israel-Hamas war broke out. "My husband didn't want Hisham to come back for Christmas," Awartani's mother, Elizabeth Price, tells NPR. "He thought our son would be safer [in the US] than in Palestine." Instead, he was shot just around the corner from his "granny's house," where his parents thought he should spend the holidays, on "a street he's basically grown up on," his mom tells NBC News.

He was with two friends he's known since they attended school together in the West Bank, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad, one of whom was released from the hospital Monday, CNN reports. Though the media outlet did not give names, it noted one of the other students had a spinal cord injury that would require long-term care; Awartani's family says doctors told them he may never regain use of his legs. An uncle of Abdalhamid expresses similar sentiments about what happened to the young men in America: "Kinnan grew up in West Bank and we thought that would be more risk in terms of his safety, and sending him here would be the right decision and we feel betrayed in that decision," he tells ABC 6. Ali Ahmad is reportedly still in a lot of pain, but his college says he "seems to be in good spirits," NBC Connecticut reports. (More Vermont stories.)