Bernie Sanders meets anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil as latter refuses to condemn Hamas

US Senator Bernie Sanders meets with Mahmoud Khalil, the anti-Israel protest leader at Columbia University who the Trump administration is seeking to deport for supporting Hamas.

In a post on X alongside a photo of them together, Sanders writes that Khalil was “imprisoned for 104 days by the Trump administration for opposing Netanyahu’s illegal & horrific war in Gaza. Outrageous.”

“We must not allow Trump to destroy the First Amendment and freedom to dissent,” Sanders adds.

The meeting comes as Khalil is interviewed by CNN, which asks him if he “explicitly condemns Hamas, a designated terrorist organization in the United States, not just for their actions on October 7.”

Khalil responds by saying he condemns “the killing of all civilians,” prompting one of the interviewers to ask twice again if he will specifically denounce Hamas, noting that the Trump administration is accusing him of sympathizing with the Palestinian terror group.

“I simply asked and protested the war in Palestine. That’s what I did. That’s my duty as a Palestinian, as a human being right now, is to ask for the stop of the killing in my home country,” he says, before claiming that asking him to specifically denounce the terror group is “disingenuous and absurd.”

“That’s why I wouldn’t really engage much into such questions on condemnation or not. Because selective condemnations is not, wouldn’t get us anywhere. It’s just like hypocrite, to be honest,” Khalil states.

I met with Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, who was imprisoned for 104 days by the Trump administration for opposing Netanyahu’s illegal & horrific war in Gaza. Outrageous.

We must not allow Trump to destroy the First Amendment & freedom to dissent. pic.twitter.com/2iaIi8dUWF

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 22, 2025