•     Relatives have identified the three victims as Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ahmed. Awartani is a student at Brown University, Abdalhamid is a student at Haverford College, and Ahmed is a student at Trinity College.
•     Two of the victims were wearing keffiyehs, police said, and they were speaking Arabic, according to the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee.
•     The three victims were graduates of the Ramallah Friends School in the West Bank. Burlington police said two of the three victims are U.S. citizens and the third is a legal resident.
•     Police described the shooter as a white man with a handgun who didn't say a word before he fired at least four times.
•     The war between Israel and Hamas has sparked heated protests and fiery rhetoric at college campuses. Jewish and Muslim students have been forced to confront violent threats.

    The FBI late Sunday indicated that it has been investigating the shooting, following an earlier statement that information about "a potential federal violation" would be needed to trigger its participation.

    "The FBI continues to actively investigate the shooting in Burlington alongside our partners at Burlington Police Department, ATF, and several other federal, state, and local agencies," the agency's Albany, New York, office said in its latest statement.

    The FBI said it has already devoted resources to the probe, including personnel and gear for computer and cellphone analysis. It asked members of the public who might have information about the attack to step forward.

    Earlier, the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee called on federal law enforcement to investigate the attack as a hate crime.

    BURLINGTON, Vt. — Two witnesses said they heard gunfire last night in Burlington and were jolted by the violence.

    Machara Renz, a graduate student at the University of Vermont, and Alexander Wehr, who works at a nearby middle school, had just gotten back from dinner when they heard gunfire.

    "We heard four gunshots," Renz said today near the scene of the shooting. "We looked at each other and we confirmed" the sound was gunfire, she said.

    She said she looked out a window and saw nothing. But when the sound of sirens got closer to the location, the pair looked outside again and saw two figures on the ground.

    "We heard a man screaming in pain," Wehr said. "It was very scary."

    Tensions have been high across the U.S. amid the war between Israel and Hamas. Renz noted that a recent event in Burlington organized to support Palestinians was peaceful but also attracted some people who were “spewing a lot of hate.”

    The two said they were shocked and angered by the violence they witnessed.

    "I feel angry for those three young men that had to experience that," Renz said. "I feel sad for the person that thought that that was the right thing to do."

    While a keffiyah is a traditional scarf worn by Arabs across the Middle East, the Palestinian variation has a specific design that has become a symbol of Palestinian solidarity across the region.

    Two of the students shot in Burlington were wearing the scarf at the time of the attack, police said today.

    The Palestinian keffiyah, sometimes spelled kufiya, has many modernized iterations, but the original is a black and white scarf that symbolizes the Palestinian economy: block lines for trade routes, an olive leaf pattern and a fishnet design throughout.

    It was frequently worn by Palestinian politician Yasser Arafat, who was chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and later president of the Palestinian National Authority.

    According to Hirbawi, the last textile factory producing keffiyahs in the occupied Palestinian territory, the scarf initially became a symbol of Palestinian nationalism in the 1930s, when Arabs in the region revolted against British colonialism. On its website, Hirbawi writes that the scarf means two things to Palestinians: "Palestine will live on. Palestine will be free."