“First, They Came for Mahmoud Khalil”
Those close to him tell the story of a man whose journey took him from being a "double refugee" to scholar to political prisoner.
Editors’ Note: Meghnad Bose reported this story along with two student journalists from Columbia University. They are choosing to not be named at the moment due to the heightened concerns around their safety. Likewise, for fear of doxxing and retaliation by the university, some of the student sources requested to be identified by first name only.
At 5:18 p.m., around three hours before he was arrested on Saturday, March 8, Columbia University graduate and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil responded to a message from his friend Carly, a Jewish-American graduate student at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). She had sought help regarding a prospective legal effort by a national civil rights organization, one trying to counter the Trump administration’s threats to deport individuals imminently. The administration’s draconian rhetoric was having a chilling effect among students, faculty, groups of organizers, and protesters.
Khalil asked Carly, “Do they have to be US citizens?”
“The plaintiffs could be citizens and non-citizens,” began Carly’s reply.
Around thirty-five minutes before he was arrested, at 7:55 p.m., Khalil replied, “Cool. Please put us in touch.”
By the time Carly responded later at 10:40 p.m., “Perfect…,” Khalil had already been taken into custody by agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Earlier in the evening, Khalil and his wife, Noor Abdalla, an American citizen of Syrian descent who is eight months pregnant, had been at a friend’s place for iftar, breaking the day-long fast observed by many Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan. Sueda Polat, one of his close friends and fellow organizers also present at the iftar, recalled that “it was really nice. We sat together, talking about baby names, and where the baby was going to be born. Khalil had just got an offer letter for a job from a prestigious NGO. We were talking about when he was going to start, and I was happy they were going to stay in New York.” Minutes after Khalil and his wife left the gathering, Polat received a distress call from Abdalla, frantically saying that DHS agents were at their building.
When Polat dashed off from the iftar without mentioning where she was going, Dalia, another friend at the iftar, was alarmed. Dalia was in communication with other organizers at Columbia, and the group chats were blowing up with claims that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were raiding Columbia residential buildings that night. When a fellow organizer whispered to her that it was Khalil who had been arrested, she couldn’t believe it. “I was shell-shocked. I didn't even cry because I just couldn't fathom what had happened… I’d seen him just a few hours ago.”
By the time Polat arrived outside Khalil’s residence, the DHS cars were still there, and Khalil had been arrested. In the span of the next few seconds, Noor ran to the officers, as they placed Khalil in a car. She kept asking the men for a name, mentioning that Khalil’s lawyer needed to speak to one of them. “Go back please. Go over there. We don’t give our names,” the officer responded.
Finally, one of the officers let her know that Khalil was being taken to immigration custody at 26 Federal Plaza. Noor asked them to specify which agency was taking him. Despite asking multiple times, she received no response. Noor told the lawyer on the phone that “they are literally running away from me.” The officers then asked her to wait on the sidewalk, before driving off with Khalil in an unmarked silver SUV. As the cars sped off, Abdalla and Polat went upstairs and resumed their urgent calls to Khalil’s lawyers.
A day and a half later, on Monday, it was strange and deeply unsettling for Dalia to “see business go on as usual at Columbia University,” she said, “I was part of a group that was trying to mobilize faculty and staff, having to basically plead that I shouldn't have to go to my class about decolonial theory when my friend is being detained by ICE.”
A week and a half since his arrest, Khalil’s friends, peers, and professors continue to feel the void created by his abduction.
Dalia says she hasn’t been able to get herself to go to a single in-person class since her friend was taken away. Polat, who continues to visit Abdalla at their apartment, remarked, “It's really weird just feeling an absence of Khalil in his home.” Carly said, “He was the person people would call when they wanted to cry, or when they felt scared.”
Khalil, a permanent resident of the United States, is currently housed in a detention facility in Jena, Louisiana. A 23-year-old Columbia graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in human rights, Polat told Drop Site that, while in detention, he has continued fasting in observance of Ramadan. Khalil has mentioned that he led prayers at the facility, too, she added. From his cell at the LaSalle detention center in Louisiana, Khalil expressed concern for his fellow detainees. Sending a message to Drop Site through Abdalla and Khalil’s lawyer Amy Greer, Khalil said those paying close attention to his case should “also attend to the cases of those who have been languishing in the detention center without counsel, without connection to the outside world, and without the support of a community.”
In a statement shared by him on Tuesday, Khalil said he sees the arrest as “a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night,” referring to Israel's resumption of its brutal aerial bombardment of Gaza this week that killed over 180 children in a matter of hours. Israel has now unilaterally broken the ceasefire, and as Khalil described the situation, “families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs.” In his statement, he added that “it is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom."
One Name at a Time
In October 2024, a year into the genocide in Gaza, Dalia had joined Khalil and a group of students gathered on the steps in front of the Alma Mater statue on campus. Dalia, a 19-year-old Palestinian-American, stood next to Khalil as they read out the names and ages of tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in Gaza over that past year. There were hundreds of children aged zero or one. One by one, they read each name, a world lost.
At the feet of the Alma Mater statue—whose left arm is “outstretched, welcoming visitors and new students to the campus,” according to the university website—students laid rose petals, draped a Palestinian flag at the center, and placed a beige banner that read “Free Palestine.” Vigils ran from late afternoon into the evening, an extended moment of silence and reflection. Khalil and Dalia each took turns reading out the names and, as it turned dark, they held a phone to the papers to read, while passing the microphone to one another.
Many of the names read were akin to their own. “Mahmoud read his own name so many times without flinching, and was so composed,” Dalia said, because he was “the necessary pillar that our community needed at the time.”
Before starting at Columbia, Dalia had not been around a larger Palestinian community. She and Khalil met for the first time mere days after October 7th. Dalia felt alone in her grief and identity on campus, knowing only a few Palestinians who could relate to what she was going through. When she met Khalil, a welcoming senior, Dalia felt she had found community. Khalil’s home became a safe space for the Palestinian community at Columbia, offering a haven for students like Dalia when the environment on campus became too overwhelming.
“Professor Mahmoud,” the Teacher, and His Song and Dabke
The youngest of four brothers, Khalil grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, where he was born in 1995. Descended on his mother’s side from Algerian revolutionaries, who had been displaced to Ottoman Palestine, Khalil is an Algerian citizen. In 2013, partly due to his vocal opposition to the government of Bashar al-Assad, he was forced to flee Syria amid the civil war. He had to leave by himself, and he soon arrived in Lebanon when he was only 18. Once again, Khalil had become a refugee. Given his indefinite detention, he’s now even further from his family, especially his parents who currently live in Germany.
Khalil’s grandparents had lived in a small village in historic Palestine close to Tiberias, a city on the western bank of Lake Tiberias. His grandmother would often talk about how they shared a piece of land for farming with their Jewish neighbors, Khalil said in a documentary for BreakThrough News. “Tiberias was one of the first cities that the Zionists targeted in 1948 with ethnic cleansing. In April 1948, a month before the Nakba, the Zionist militias burnt one of their villages. When they heard the news about it, they had to leave immediately,” he added, explaining his family’s decision to flee to Syria, where he was eventually born in a refugee camp.
Lauren Bohn, a journalist who was covering the Syrian refugee crisis at the time, remembers meeting Khalil in Beirut, where he described himself as a “double refugee”—a Palestinian refugee in Syria, then in Lebanon for asylum. “I used to meet him at cafés in Beirut, where he would come across as this very shy but very smart and incisive 18-year-old. He was teaching himself English, and so would constantly be watching YouTube tutorials to learn the language. I found it very indicative of who he is as a person,” Bohn estimated. “He did everything he could to create a better life for himself from scratch, given the systemic marginalization he was born into.”
Not long after he arrived in Beirut, Khalil began working with Jusoor, a non-profit that empowers youth populations in Syria, where he led scholarship programs for marginalized students and refugees. “Despite the enormous challenges he faced,” Bohn observed, “he wanted to make sure he extended a hand to other refugees, even as he was just a refugee himself.”
Over the years, despite the growing geographic distance between them, Bohn stayed in touch with Khalil and closely watched his journey. She last saw him three years ago, during Ramadan in 2022. The two had met in Istanbul for iftar. Just days before their meeting, Khalil had learned of his admission to SIPA, from which he had received a partial scholarship. Khalil was inching closer to his dreams.
Bohn said she is in awe of his journey over the last twelve years. “This is someone who was born into a world order where the odds were stacked against him. I think Columbia should feel honored to have someone like him affiliated with them,” she added, “instead of refusing to stand by him.”
Bohn never perceived him as someone who sought out the spotlight. “He has a private Instagram account, and he would post so infrequently that whenever he did post, we would joke that he is done with his one post of the year. This is not a person who is fame-hungry,” she said. She considers Khalil a principled “humanitarian.”
While Bohn agrees with the descriptions that other friends and acquaintances have used for Khalil, such as “kind” and “compassionate,” she is wary of giving over to the trope of “the good protester.” “He could have been a terrible human being and still did not deserve to be treated this way,” she said, “he doesn’t have to be a perfect person for this action against him to be called out as unjust. It just so happens that he is this wonderful soul.”
In 2018, Khalil began working at the U.K.’s Foreign Office in Beirut, where he was responsible for managing the prestigious Chevening scholarship program for Syrian students. Andrew James Waller, who served as a British diplomat for a decade, worked closely with Khalil at the Foreign Office. “I relied heavily on Mahmoud for a deeper contextual understanding of the region,” Waller said, “he was extremely generous with his time and thoughtful about the advice he would give.”
In the four years that Khalil worked at the office, Waller knew him as a professional colleague. In October 2022, Waller quit his job and moved to Beirut to learn the Arabic language. There, he developed a close friendship with Khalil. Both are big soccer fans. They would often go watch games together at a café close to where Khalil lived. “After the match, he would insist on driving me back home, which was all the way across the town, on his moped,” Waller recalled.
As Waller developed a personal relationship with Khalil, he learned that inside the shy young man is someone who loves to sing and dance. “He would really come alive each time there was live music around us. I would often joke with him that he knows more songs than Umm Kulthum (legendary Arabic singer).”
In December 2022, weeks before Khalil left for New York to join SIPA, Waller attended Khalil’s and Abdalla’s wedding. Abdalla had met Khalil in 2016, when she briefly worked at Jusoor in Beirut. “My main recollection of the wedding is just endless dancing,” Waller said, “they had a traditional Palestinian band, and Khalil was trying to teach us all how to do the Dabke, somewhat unsuccessfully.”
The couple is expecting their first child soon. Waller remembers speaking to Khalil about this just weeks ago. “I was so excited for them and hyping him up. Mahmoud was somehow so calm and composed even while discussing this,” Waller had observed, “he was looking forward to being a father. I hope he gets released in time for his child’s birth.”
Over the years, one thing seems to have remained constant in Khalil’s life: his love for Dabke. Khalil led the Dabke circle for students at the annual Arab gala hosted by Turath, the Arab Students Association at Columbia University. After his arrest, friends shared videos of him doing the Dabke and attempting to teach others. Popular in Palestine and countries across the Levant, Dabke is a traditional Arab folk dance. Khalil’s love for song and dance persisted through his challenging circumstances.
Since Khalil’s arrest, he has been referred to as a “radical foreign pro-Hamas student” by President Trump and has been similarly characterized by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. When Waller first learned the news of Khalil’s arrest, as he followed along with the way he’s been depicted by the government, Waller said he was in “disbelief bordering on despair.”
Khalil’s activist role on campus has overshadowed his contributions within the classroom and to the larger community at SIPA.
Despite mass arrests and disciplinary hearings dividing his attention, Khalil was still working last semester as a Teaching Assistant for one of the core curriculum courses in the master’s program in Public Administration-Development Practice, which Khalil completed in December.
Ruchira, a graduate student at SIPA, said Khalil took initiatives as her teaching assistant that he didn’t have to do. Recalling the time her dog passed away back home in India, she said, “I went down a very bad spiral, but Mahmoud was there for me 100 percent. I would not respond to the professors’ emails, but he would make sure that he reached out to me via WhatsApp separately. He made accommodations for me in case I didn't want to go to class, or I wasn't going to show up for a presentation.” The acts of kindness went a long way toward making Ruchira feel better, and it stuck with her that they came as Khalil was “going through an extremely horrific time” witnessing the continuing genocide in Gaza.
His dedication to his job and his students earned Khalil a moniker to which he wasn’t officially entitled, Ruchira chuckled as she revealed: “The actual professors were fine with us calling them by their [first] names, but because he was so on top of everything, they insisted we address him as Professor Mahmoud.”
“A Diplomat, in Every Sense”
Last year, at 4:00 a.m. on April 17, hours before then-Columbia President Minouche Shafik testified before Congress over allegations of antisemitism at the university, a group of pro-Palestine student protesters assembled a string of tents on a campus lawn. They called it the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. The move caught the university administration off guard, and their hostile response would send far greater shockwaves.
Less than thirty-four hours later, Shafik called in the New York City Police Department onto campus to oversee the arrests of more than a hundred individuals, the largest mass arrests at the university since the protests against the Vietnam War in 1968. Minutes after the arrests, the students set up a second, larger encampment on the lawn right next to the encampment where the arrests had taken place. In the days that followed, facing down a repressive administration, these actions sparked a wave of solidarity encampments for Gaza across the United States and around the world.
The Columbia protesters were then faced with an important choice. They needed to choose a negotiator who would represent them in talks with the university administration about the initial arrests and to attempt to compel Columbia into accepting their core demands: for the university to disclose its direct and indirect investments in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories and to divest from them. The first name protesters proposed to speak on their behalf was Mahmoud Khalil.
Associate Professor of Classics Joseph Howley is one of several Jewish members of the Columbia faculty who had spoken out “in defense of the right to protest and against the instrumentalization of antisemitism.” The protestors asked Howley to convey to the administration that Khalil was someone who might be able to mediate with the university. “I had no problems about doing so, because I could already tell that he was a trustworthy and open and principled person,” Howley said, adding that he “could see that Jewish students in the movement felt safe around him—that he was welcoming and inclusive of everyone in the movement.”
Polat met Khalil for the first time on the day that the group had chosen him as its lead negotiator but, she said, “Mahmoud wanted somebody else with him.” Polat’s name was floated and, soon, the encampment had two negotiators. In the week and a half that followed, the two of them were at the heart of it all: intense negotiations with university administrators, passionate discussions about strategy and direction with fellow encampment organizers, interviews with several media outlets—some of whom were pursuing editorial lines that framed the encampment as a hub of antisemitism.
Polat said that, even amid all the pressure, Khalil would go out of his way to be there for her—“like an older brother.” Once, she was crying in a stairwell after a particularly charged negotiation meeting with Columbia administrators, she recounted. “He never left me alone. He was waiting outside the door of the stairwell so that I could finish crying, and he could then come in and console me. I have an immense amount of anxiety, and he would really help alleviate a lot of it.”
The negotiations lasted for around ten days. Polat remembered Khalil being “firm, but not rude.” She tells Drop Site that his approach toward the administration was that of engaging as equal parties, “not, like, I’m a student and you’re an administrator but, rather, we’re two parties coming to the table to discuss things.” She added, “he wasn’t deferential. Through and through, that man is a diplomat, in every sense.”
On Monday, April 29, at 8:03 in the morning, Columbia president Minouche Shafik announced that “the university will not divest from Israel” and that negotiations had fallen through. Without mentioning Khalil and Polat by name, Shafik characterized the discussions as a “constructive dialogue with student organizers to find a path that would result in the dismantling of the encampment and adherence to university policies going forward.” She concluded that “regretfully, we were not able to come to an agreement.”
Maryam Iqbal, 19, had enrolled into the university in 2023, and she was passionate about Palestine and other political causes when she met Khalil. Khalil’s unassuming and shy demeanor notwithstanding, he often intervened when situations became heated. Iqbal recalled a time when, during one of the sit-in protests against Hillary Clinton’s SIPA class, security became aggressive with the students. “He physically stepped in between the security and the female protesters,” she said, “few men tend to do this, but he always took it upon himself as his duty to do so.” “Mahmoud was always able to ground me and keep me from being reckless, reminding me to channel my anger into something productive.”
Khalil was unapologetically comfortable with his name and identity being associated with the pro-Palestine protests. Paras, a classmate of Khalil’s at SIPA, had been working for months on an oral history project of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. One of her key interviewees was Khalil, with whom she had spoken at length. “I was concerned about his safety, about whether we should put his name or mention him anonymously. He would always say, ‘use my name, I don't care.’” Earlier this month, she wanted to check this with him once again. Yet, before Khalil could respond to her query, she received news that he had been arrested. Her worst fear had come true.
Khalil had been part of student delegations seeking stronger actions from the university to counter the doxxing of pro-Palestine students, often with dissatisfying responses, Paras says, even as doxxing campaigns escalated. An online campaign organized by pro-Israel groups and certain zealous actors—like Columbia Business School professor Shai Davidai—targeted Khalil for two days straight. They tagged Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Attorney General Pam Bondi in posts demanding that Khalil be arrested and deported.
On March 7, Khalil sent an email to Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong. “Since yesterday, I have been subjected to a vicious, coordinated, and dehumanizing doxxing campaign led by Columbia affiliates Shai Davidai and David Lederer who, among others, have labeled me a security threat and called for my deportation,” he began. “Their attacks have incited a wave of hate, including calls for my deportation and death threats. I have outlined the wider context below, yet Columbia has not provided any meaningful support or resources in response to this escalating threat,” he added in the email, first reported by Zeteo. “I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home. I urgently need legal support, and I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm.” The DHS arrested Khalil the next day. Four days after federal agents snatched him, the Columbia administration sent an email announcing a “New Anti-Doxing and Online Harassment Policy.”
Slated to graduate in May of this year, Khalil and Paras completed their program in December last year. “It would be really nice to see him graduate, to see him do the graduation walk”, she said, but added that “Columbia doesn't even deserve him walking.”
“A Peacekeeper”: Seder, Shabbat, and Solidarity
Carly became friends with Khalil under unpleasant circumstances. “A pro-Israel student had actually made an antisemitic comment toward me, questioning my credentials as a Jew because of my anti-Zionist politics,” she tells Drop Site. The comment had been made on a WhatsApp group. “Mahmoud reached out to me privately and checked in on me. He wanted to see if he could be of any comfort in that situation. That was when we started being friends.”
She recalled numerous times when “Khalil had brought up how uncomfortable he was with the rampant antisemitism against anti-Zionist Jews at Columbia.”
Carly described multiple occasions where pro-Israel students were going out of their way to antagonize Jewish students, those like her who held critical views of Israel’s actions in Gaza. When things would heat up, she says Khalil would always try to calm the situation. “He would really just truly want to keep the peace. He’s such a peacekeeper.”
Khalil often expressed solidarity with his Jewish friends by participating with them in community events. “The anti-Zionist Jewish community always felt very loved and supported by him. Khalil would often come to our Shabbats.” Howley remembers seeing him at the Passover Seder in the encampment last spring. “Every opportunity that Mahmoud was given,” Howley said, “he expressed that hatred or bigotry were not welcome in the movement.”
A few weeks before the encampment, Khalil helped organize a screening at Columbia of “Israelism,” a documentary exploring the deepening generational divide among Jewish Americans and their relationship with Israel.
Howley recalled how “Mahmoud was someone who had already chosen the hard path of understanding people who are on the other side of an issue, and also the exceptionally hard path of not blaming people who are on the other side of an issue, but instead figuring out what motivates them, how did they end up there, and where can you find common ground.” Howley added that “the only thing I ever heard from Mahmoud was a vision of peace and collective liberation that aligned better with my values than almost any mainstream Jewish organization in this country.”
Remarking on Khalil’s absence on campus and in their community, Carly said, “Mahmoud was somebody who essentially went out of his way to protect those around him to such an extent that he ended up being harmed himself.” Yet, quick to remember the lighter side of things, she reminisced that “some of us friends were a few years younger than him, so we used to jokingly call him Dad. He is like this fatherly mentor-type figure, and we really did feel safe around him. We looked up to him, really valued his advice, and he truly was always there for us.”
At a recent student town hall at the university, Carly spoke up against the antisemitism from pro-Israel Jews that she has faced at Columbia. While doing so, she also registered her protest against Khalil’s arrest, by wearing a white t-shirt that said, “Free Mahmoud Khalil. Free Palestine.”
Students at SIPA are organizing a letter-writing campaign in the lobby of their building, where there’s an installation set up in support of him. On Tuesday, March 11, several students and faculty members staged a walkout at noon to voice their solidarity with Khalil, demanding his release and advocating to get “ICE off our campus.” That same day, a sit-in organized by Jewish students featured signs that read “Mahmoud is our brother,” and “First, they came for Mahmoud…”
Despite the continued crackdown by the Trump administration—including a second Palestinian, Leqaa Kordia, being arrested, and an Indian PhD scholar, Ranjani Srinivasan, having their student visa revoked—the protests for Palestinian rights within and outside Columbia have continued.
A key difference, now, is that they include Khalil’s name in the chants—with their demands to release him printed on t-shirts worn by the protesters. His face is also plastered on their placards. His image stands alongside the phrase “Free Mahmoud Khalil.”
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Thank you. How misrepresented is he. Utter shame. He is a hero of our times.
Khalil should be recruited by the US State Department.
US has been a hegemon for so long that the US has lost the skill of diplomacy. He could teach the US a thing or two.
He is a threat because he is so competent.
He is a threat because his life is a model of what is needed in troubled times.
His life shows the risk to the US constitution from Zionism.
Thank you for this wonderful article.