In Vermont, a mother and father marvel at a son who will not be stopped by bullets

Hisham Awartani, 20, was groggy, just out of surgery when they arrived, Price said.

BURLINGTON, Vt. — After a hellish 36-hour trip from their home in the West Bank, Elizabeth Price and her husband, Ali Awartani, finally got to their son’s hospital bedside Wednesday.

Ali Awartani bent down and kissed his son’s hand.

Five days after Awartani and his lifelong friends Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad were shot on a quiet street near the University of Vermont campus, some of their families arrived at the University of Vermont Medical Center. Price spoke to the Globe by phone from the hospital and in an interview in the hospital lobby.

At the moment they were attacked Saturday evening, the victims, who are Palestinians attending college in the United States, were speaking a mix of English and Arabic and wearing keffiyehs, Palestinian scarves. Investigators are trying to determine whether they were targeted specifically because they are Palestinian, though the victims and their families are certain they were.

Price’s brother, Rich, who had hosted his nephew and two friends for Thanksgiving dinner at his home in Burlington, called her not long after the three young men were shot.

“I couldn’t get my head around it,” Elizabeth Price said Thursday. “I felt a terrible sense of guilt, that these boys had been hurt because my family had invited them to Burlington.”

Hisham Awartani and his two friends went to school together in Ramallah. Growing up, Abdalhamid and Ali Ahmad were regulars at the Awartani house, and Abdalhamid’s mother, Tamara, is one of Price’s closest friends.

Ali Awartani, who had given up smoking, chain-smoked five cigarettes after they got the phone call at their home in Ramallah early Sunday.

When Hisham was able to talk to them on the phone from his hospital bed, Ali Awartani told his son, in Arabic, “Stay strong.”

Hisham Awartani has done just that, even though he is, his mother said, paralyzed from from the mid-chest down. Doctors have said he may never walk again.

Abdalhamid, who was shot in the glute area, has been released from the hospital, and Ali Ahmad, who was shot in the chest, is expected to be released soon.

Tahseen Ali Ahmad (left), Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Hisham Awartani, together in an undated photo.

Rich Price/Associated Press

But Awartani, a junior at Brown University, faces a much longer hospital stay. He will soon be transferred to Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, his mother said. Someone has offered Ali Awartani and Price a place to stay during what is expected to be a long rehabilitation.

Price believes her son is up for it.

“Hisham is incredibly resilient,” she said. “He keeps making jokes, to make us feel better.”

She said his case manager and doctors told her and her husband that patients often have difficulty accepting and engaging with their condition in the immediate aftermath of a diagnosis of paralysis.

“Hisham is totally engaged,” his mother said. “He’s asking questions, understanding what’s going on, prepared to do what’s necessary.”

Price, whose father was an American international banker, lived in six countries before she was 9. She was born in Ireland and has American and Irish citizenship. Her son embraces his American and Irish identities. But it is his Palestinian identity that he feels obligated to represent, she said, an obligation that has only grown since the bullet smashed into his clavicle and lodged in his spine.

Price said her son is the personification of “sumud,” an Arabic word that means “steadfast perseverance,” a characteristic that is central to Palestinian culture and identity.

Rich Price hosted his nephew Hisham Awartani and two friends for Thanksgiving dinner at his home in Burlington, Vt.

Caleb Kenna for the Boston Globe

After Israeli airstrikes killed more than 15,000 Palestinians in Gaza in retaliation for the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that killed 1,200 Israelis, Awartani sees his personal situation in a wider context.

“Hisham recognizes if he had been shot in Palestine, he would not be alive,” his mother said. “If he had been shot on the West Bank by a settler, they would have let him bleed out.”

On her phone, she called up something her son wrote from his hospital bed.

“What was my crime? What heinous deed did I commit for me to deserve to get shot and lose control of my legs? I was Palestinian,” he wrote.

He pored through a document from the Gaza Health Ministry that named the first 6,500 Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli airstrikes. He found 13 victims named Hisham.

“Had I been one of those Hishams in Gaza my picture would not have been on the BBC or CNN,” he wrote. “Instead of being interviewed, my mother would be fleeing south or already killed, trapped under the rubble with me. I am the Hisham you know. I lived. My story is being told. The 13 other Hishams were killed, their stories forever erased. They were human and they did not have to prove that to anyone. They knew no respite, no justice, no peace.”

With this privilege, his mother said, comes responsibility.

“Hisham and his friends feel strongly about this,” she said. “All three of the boys are frustrated the attention is on them. They want the attention to be on their people. They feel like they are being humanized as individuals, but that privilege is being denied to so many other Palestinians. Yesterday, the most emotional Hisham got was when he was talking about how lucky he was compared to all the people in Gaza.”

It is for those people, Price said, that Awartani will grit his teeth and endure the pain that comes from intense rehabilitation. He is already talking about getting back to school, where he is pursuing two degrees, one in math, the other in archeology.

On Thursday morning, Ali Awartani stepped outside the hospital to have a cigarette. A woman walked by wearing a keffiyeh. He asked her if she was worried about getting shot. The woman, who had no idea who Ali Awartani is, told him she was not afraid, that she was wearing it to show support for the three Palestinian boys.

Ali Awartani said he started crying. And, he said, the woman did, too.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe reporter and columnist who roams New England. He can be reached at .