Majed Bamya, Palestinian Deputy Permanent Observer to the UN, resides in an Upper East Side building with 24-hour doorman, full gym, and parking garage
He’s leading the Prada Intifada.
A Palestinian diplomat who regularly blames Israel for “famine” in Gaza has lived in splendor in a luxury New York City apartment, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
Majed Bamya, the Palestinian Deputy Permanent Observer to the United Nations, lives with his wife and children in the luxury Regency Towers in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Rents in the building—which has a 24-hour doorman, full gym, and private garage for residents—stretch up to $11,000 for a three-bedroom apartment.
Bamya’s wife, Sahar Salem, works with her diplomat husband as an adviser to the Palestinian mission to the United Nations. She states on her LinkedIn profile that she previously worked at the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, an organization with members that took part in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel.
Bamya has used his position to speak about deprivation and hunger in Gaza—blaming the conditions on Israel—while spending his time far away from the people he claims to represent.
“There are people starving only a few feet away from aid and yet unable to reach it,” Bamya told the United Nations in May 2024. “Israel has made sure that famine sets in.”
He has repeated those sentiments numerous times, as a July X post shows.
“The journalists reporting on the famine are themselves starving,” Bamya wrote. “The health workers receiving those dying of hunger are starving. The humanitarians trying to help with no means and at the peril of their lives are starving. The rescuers trying to save people are starving.”
Bamya is one entry on a long list of Palestinian leaders—past and present—living in luxury. Palestine Liberation Organization founder Yasser Arafat squirreled away more than one billion dollars, mainly diverted from Western aid, over the course of his life. At the height of his power, Arafat and his cronies owned an airline in the Maldives, a Greek shipping company, banana plantations, an African diamond mine, and real estate across the Middle East.
Bamya’s current boss, Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas, has an estimated fortune of about $100 million. That wealth extends to Hamas leadership as well. In November 2023, the New York Post reported that the top three officials in the terror group—which included the since-deceased Ismail Haniyeh—had a combined net worth of $11 billion.
The Trump administration revoked visas for Palestinian officials ahead of the U.N. General Assembly, but preexisting agreements between the United States and the United Nations meant that staff of the Palestinian Authority’s mission to the international organization—including Bamya—received waivers.
Other Regency Towers residents, many of them Jewish, have concerns over Bamya’s presence in their apartment building.
“Eighty percent of the apartments on his floor have a mezuzah,” one resident told the Free Beacon. “It’s a very Jewish building—a lot of religious Jews, too.”
The resident said that, while Bamya has always been polite, she and others in the building cannot help but wonder about his past.
“This has been discussed in the elevator,” she said. “Is he a murderer? Did he become an ambassador by killing Jews? This is a thought process in my head.”
Those concerns are fueled by Bamya’s record of support for terrorism that goes back far before Oct. 7.
“We are ready once again to rise against the Israeli occupation,” he proclaimed in a 2012 blog post. “We are ready to fight once more to protect our cause, to be faithful to the past, and to pave the way for another future. We are ready…and we await a signal to go beyond a fragmented destiny, land and resistance, and to launch a common fight for freedom!”
Before joining the Palestinian mission to the United Nations, Bamya served on behalf of the Palestinian Authority as “Coordinator of the Free Marwan Barghouti and All Palestinian Political Prisoners Campaign,” records show.
Barghouti, a terrorist leader during the Second Intifada, was convicted in 2004 of murdering five Israelis and sentenced to life in prison. Bamya has described him as a “new Mandela” and said he should receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
Neither Bamya nor Regency Towers responded to Free Beacon requests for comment.
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