Mahmoud Khalil, who faces a deportation effort from the Trump administration, said ‘we couldn’t avoid’ Oct. 7
Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D., N.Y.) broke bread Sunday night with an anti-Israel radical who said “we couldn’t avoid” Oct. 7, whose group called for “death to America,” and whom the Trump administration has long attempted to deport.
Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of the pro-terrorist protests at Columbia University after Oct. 7, 2023, smiled alongside the mayor and his wife, Rama Duwaji, at dinner at Gracie Mansion, a photo Mamdani shared on X shows.
“Last night, as we marked the one year anniversary of his detention, Rama and I were honored to welcome Mahmoud, Noor, and their son Deen to Gracie Mansion to break our fast together,” Mamdani wrote Monday evening. “Mahmoud is a New Yorker, and he belongs in New York City.”
Khalil, a Syrian native and Algerian national, first came to prominence as a leader in the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) movement, a coalition of student groups that Columbia does not recognize as a legitimate organization. During the months after Oct. 7, Khalil took part in illegal protests where agitators disseminated Hamas propaganda, participated in an occupation of Barnard College’s library, and served as a negotiator on behalf of the Columbia encampment. He told reporters he and his movement would push Columbia to divest itself from Israel “by any means necessary,” and his organization said immediately after Oct. 7 that it supports “liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance.”
CUAD posted the Islamic Republic’s refrain of “marg bar amrika,” which translates to “death to America,” after the beginning of Operation Epic Fury, and described the October 2024 Iranian ballistic missile fire targeting Israeli civilians as “a significant leap in the resistance.”
Representatives for Khalil and Mamdani did not respond to requests for comment.
The Trump administration detained Khalil in March 2025, not long after families of Hamas’s Oct. 7 victims filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing Khalil and his allies of being “Hamas’ propaganda arm in New York City and on the Columbia University campus.” The Trump administration pulled Khalil’s visa and green card, with a State Department official telling the Washington Free Beacon that, “under this administration, if you support terror groups, we will deport you.”
Though a federal judge ordered Khalil’s release in June, an immigration judge found in September that the pro-terror radical “willfully misrepresented” both his campus activism and his work for the Hamas-tied United Nations Relief and Works Agency at the time of the Oct. 7 attacks, failing “to disclose his involvement, association and participation” with UNRWA and CUAD on his green card application.
In the meantime, Khalil used a series of media interviews to justify anti-Semitic violence. In an appearance on ABC News, Khalil said the string of attacks against Jews in the United States over the past several years is a “direct result of the U.S. unconditional [sic] support to Israel,” adding that violent acts amount to “desperate attempts to be heard.” On CNN, he called requests that he condemn Hamas “disingenuous and absurd.” And in an interview with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, Khalil said, “we couldn’t avoid such a moment” as the Oct. 7 attacks. He went on to say that Hamas committed the massacres “to break the cycle, to break that Palestinians are not being heard.”
Mamdani’s meeting with Khalil came just days after news emerged that Duwaji liked multiple Instagram posts celebrating the Oct. 7 attack and calling reports of sexual violence against Israeli civilians a “mass rape hoax.” It also closely follows an attempted ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in New York City on Saturday. Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi, the two individuals charged with the crime, said they wanted to cause more casualties than the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Mamdani’s initial statement noted that the attempted attack came at an anti-Islam protest led by far-right provocateur Jake Lang, but failed to note that one of the suspects yelled “Allahu Akbar” as he was arrested and appeared to blame the far-right protesters for the attack.
Mamdani has associated with many supporters of terrorism over the course of his time in public life. He appointed three officials who cofounded a Muslim group that blamed Israel for Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack to prominent roles, the Free Beacon reported last month. He also hired Alvaro Lopez—who called those who ripped down flyers of Israeli hostages “heroes”—as his Brooklyn borough director and brought in Waleed Shahid, who also blamed the Jewish state for the Hamas attack, as a deputy communications director for economic justice.
During the 2025 mayoral race, Mamdani refused to condemn slogans like “globalize the intifada,” instead telling a group of New York CEOs that he stands by “the idea” of the phrase, and campaigned with a radical Islamist cleric who once urged “jihad” against New York City.
Khalil is not the only member of CUAD to be welcomed into Mamdani’s New York. Zainab Khan, now a New York City social worker, posted on Instagram earlier this month that “Every zio and every sympathizer can burn in hell.”
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