Mohamad Hamad has spent more than a year in a maximum-security Pennsylvania prison without being convicted of a crime. The 24-year-old Lebanese-American activist and former Penn State student was arrested amid a federal investigation stemming from pro-Palestine graffiti and allegations involving materials used to make homemade fireworks. In a July 2026 interview with The New Arab, his first media interview while incarcerated after what he described as a “no-media rule” under his former public defender, Hamad gave a detailed account of what happened before a jury ever heard the evidence against him: FBI raids on his family’s home, physical and aerial surveillance, a tracking device discovered on his car, encounters with police, the disruption of his education and employment, and repeated attempts, according to Hamad and people present at his detention hearing, to portray him not simply as a defendant but as a terrorist and Hamas operative.

Hamad’s experience raises questions that reach beyond whether the government can ultimately prove the charges against him. His case shows how thoroughly the state can transform accusation into punishment long before a verdict is reached, particularly when the accused is Arab and associated with Palestine solidarity. It also demonstrates the power of a familiar American political ritual: construct someone as dangerous enough, and measures that would otherwise appear extraordinary, such as constant surveillance, militarized raids, indefinite pretrial incarceration, can then be made to seem reasonable.

The case began publicly in July 2024, when the Squirrel Hill synagogue and the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh office were spray-painted with “Jews 4 Palestine” and an inverted red triangle. Hamad and Talya Lubit were charged that October with damaging religious property and conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States, then placed in home detention. Lubit later pleaded guilty and received five years of federal probation. A separate FBI investigation focused on Hamad and Micaiah Collins over their alleged possession of materials used to make and ignite homemade fireworks. Collins remained under house arrest while, on April 23, 2025, more than ten agents and law-enforcement officers arrived at Hamad’s family home and took him into custody. According to Hamad and his supporters, he had not violated the conditions of his home detention. His driver’s license had meanwhile been suspended for eight months, limiting his ability to find work; Hamad said agents arrested him two days before he expected to regain it, despite having jobs lined up.

The campaign against Hamad, according to his account, began well before his imprisonment. During the first FBI raid on his family’s home, he says he discovered federal agents digging through the family’s trash at five in the morning. After he refused to answer their questions, agents approached his father at work and asked to search the house. They eventually secured the home while waiting for a warrant, forcing the family to remain together in a room as additional officers arrived.

For Hamad, the raid was not an abstraction about constitutional procedure or investigative authority. He was a university student trying to attend classes and prepare for a final exam while federal agents searched his home. “I wanted to make my prayers, and they wouldn’t even let me do wudu,” he told The New Arab. Agents also prevented him from joining his classes. His sister Lulu described agents pulling clothes from closets, searching her car and taking her school scrubs and shoes as evidence while suggesting that she, too, was “part of this.” Their father became so distressed during the search that he was taken to an emergency room after falling and nearly suffering a stroke. On another visit, according to the family, agents asked Hamad’s mother whether her son had constructed tunnels underneath their house.

That question is difficult to separate from the political and racial context surrounding the investigation. A Lebanese-American Muslim activist who supports Palestine was asked whether he had built tunnels beneath his family’s Pennsylvania home, invoking one of the most relentlessly repeated images in American coverage of Hamas and Gaza. Whether consciously or not, the question reveals the framework through which Hamad was being viewed. He was not merely a young man under investigation. He had already been inserted into an existing archetype: the Arab or Muslim whose politics can be transformed into evidence of hidden terrorist intent.

After the raid, Hamad says the surveillance intensified. He described drones, helicopters, unmarked vehicles and ground surveillance teams following him, all of it involving the FBI’s counterterrorism task force, and said aerial footage focused on his family’s home later appeared in discovery materials. He also says law enforcement repeatedly stopped or ticketed him for reckless driving or speeding without radar evidence. After authorities towed his car following one such incident, Hamad says it was returned with a GPS tracking device installed beneath it, a broken hood latch, scratches to the body and damage inside. According to Hamad, an officer denied to his lawyer that the vehicle had been searched. At one point, after recognizing what he believed was a surveillance vehicle outside his home, he honked, flashed a peace sign and drove away. He says police pulled him over shortly afterward and issued another reckless-driving and speeding citation.

Hamad’s account shows how surveillance extends the reach of the state far beyond the courtroom or prison cell and into the ordinary rhythms of a person’s life. Drones, helicopters, unmarked vehicles, traffic stops and a tracking device meant that a drive to get food, attending class, leaving home, interacting with family or going to work could all become encounters with state power. This is precisely what makes sustained surveillance a form of coercion in itself: it does not need to culminate in an arrest to discipline its target. To know that you are being watched is to know that every ordinary action can be observed, documented, interpreted and potentially turned against you. The state does not merely monitor a person under these conditions; it forces itself into the way that person moves through the world.

In October 2024, Hamad was summoned to the Pennsylvania Air National Guard base where he served as a Traditional Guardsman. He says the request itself seemed unusual because he had not been invited back after the first raid, and he told friends that he suspected he was either being discharged or taken into military custody. When he arrived, a guard took his military identification rather than scanning and returning it, then instructed him to park and exit his vehicle. According to Hamad, between ten and fifteen federal agents emerged from three unmarked vehicles and arrested him. He was taken to the federal building in downtown Pittsburgh and waited approximately six hours before being transported to court.

Hours later, he entered his detention hearing shackled at his arms, legs and waist. Friends were waiting in the courtroom to support him, but what they describe hearing from the government is crucial to understanding the political character of the case. Aaron Kuhn, a Jewish friend of Hamad who attended the hearing and submitted a character letter on his behalf, told The New Arab that Hamad was repeatedly described as a terrorist and Hamas operative and even referred to as “Mr. Hamas.” Kuhn also said prosecutors sought restrictions preventing Hamad from entering Jewish-owned businesses, despite the fact that Kuhn himself was a Jewish business owner publicly supporting him.

When Hamad’s detention was litigated again after his April arrest, supporters attended all three days of the hearing. Alexandra Weiner, a former University of Pittsburgh faculty member involved in the campus Palestine solidarity encampments, recalled Hamad’s father crying after the ruling while people she identified as opponents of the campaign laughed and attempted to overhear him. The image captures the unequal worlds being produced around the case: for one side, a public security narrative and political victory; for the other, a son taken from his family before trial.

This is where the language surrounding Hamad becomes inseparable from the power exercised against him. The government did not need to convict him of terrorism for terrorism to shape the conditions under which he was understood. By invoking Hamas, prosecutors could situate allegations involving graffiti and homemade fireworks inside the enormous ideological apparatus created by the War on Terror. The alleged acts remain subject to adjudication, but the identity constructed around the defendant begins operating immediately.

That construction did not remain inside the courtroom. Far-right publications described Hamad as a “self-proclaimed Hamas member” or “Hamas sympathizer,” while some coverage invoked the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre in the same city. An anonymous friend of Hamad told The New Arab that repeatedly placing washable graffiti beside the murder of eleven worshippers made potential supporters afraid that defending Hamad would itself be interpreted as antisemitic or supportive of violence. The comparison did political work: it borrowed the horror of an antisemitic mass killing to surround a Palestine activist accused of property damage with the atmosphere of lethal threat.

The institutional response continued as supporters organized publicly around his detention. In June 2026, after the campaign for Hamad received greater attention, Shawn Brokos—the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh’s community security director and a former FBI agent—issued a community “security update” addressing the case. The significance is not that Jewish community institutions should remain silent about damage to their property. It is that a criminal case involving a Palestine activist was repeatedly processed through the vocabulary and infrastructure of communal security, reinforcing the association between Hamad’s political identity and an implied terrorist danger before he had been tried.

For Arab and Muslim defendants, that construction carries decades of political baggage. The United States has spent more than twenty years developing an expansive security apparatus around the figure of the potentially radicalized Arab: surveillance programs, informants, watchlists, counterterrorism task forces and prosecutions in which political and religious associations can take on sinister meaning. Palestine solidarity enters an environment already conditioned to collapse distinctions between Palestinian resistance, Hamas, terrorism, Arabs, Muslims and political dissent. Once those categories begin bleeding into one another, the state’s coercive response can escalate while still presenting itself as neutral law enforcement.

Hamad’s case exposes something larger than the conduct of individual agents or prosecutors. The problem lies in the concentration of state power itself: institutions given the ability to surveil, pursue, prosecute and confine, operating within a system capable of authorizing its own escalating forms of coercion. The FBI investigates and surveils, prosecutors construct the government’s narrative, judges authorize detention and prisons impose the physical consequences. Responsibility is dispersed across this chain until no single institution appears responsible for the totality of what has been done, while the person at its center experiences all of it at once. Procedure becomes a means of laundering violence through bureaucracy. A cage does not become less of a cage because the paperwork preceding it was properly filed, and surveillance does not become less invasive because the state gave itself permission to conduct it.

Pretrial detention makes this contradiction particularly stark. American courts continue to invoke the principle that defendants are innocent until proven guilty while incarcerating people who have not been convicted for months or even years. Hamad told The New Arab that he has lost significant weight from stress, repeatedly become ill from the food and seen meat arrive in bags marked as unfit for human consumption. He says he has been placed in solitary confinement at least four times without notice or explanation. His education, employment, relationships and ordinary life have been interrupted while he waits for the government to prosecute him. Even if every procedural requirement governing his detention has been satisfied, those experiences cannot meaningfully be described as anything other than punishment.

His ability to challenge that punishment has also been constrained by failures of representation. Hamad’s family wanted his lawyers to contest his detention immediately, but, according to The New Arab, a motion was not filed until six months later. At a November 2025 hearing, Hamad sought new counsel and described his former public defenders as having mentally checked out after his arrest. The replacement lawyer, Hamad says, has been extraordinarily difficult to reach and failed to register as his attorney on the jail’s calling system, leaving their conversations on a recorded line. Hamad eventually stopped trying to call. The right to counsel offers little protection when the person confined cannot reliably or confidentially communicate with the lawyer tasked with defending him.

The state does not enter this conflict as a neutral arbiter of guilt. It arrives with investigators, prosecutors, intelligence resources, police cooperation, detention facilities and enormous financial capacity, while the accused enters that machinery with their body, their lawyer and whatever community can be organized around them. This imbalance is not incidental to the system; it is the system functioning as designed. When political demonization is added to it, the state possesses not only the power to surveil, prosecute and imprison, but the power to construct the public meaning of the person it has targeted before that person has any meaningful opportunity to resist it.

Hamad’s experience also belongs to a much longer history of American political policing. The Palmer Raids targeted anarchists and immigrants; COINTELPRO infiltrated and disrupted Black liberation movements, socialists and anti-war organizers; Muslim and Arab communities were subjected to mass surveillance and informant networks during the War on Terror; environmentalists, Indigenous water protectors and racial-justice organizers have repeatedly encountered state monitoring and criminalization. These campaigns differed in scale and context, but they share a political logic: movements challenging existing power are translated into questions of security, and security permits forms of state intervention that would otherwise provoke greater resistance.

Palestine solidarity has increasingly been subjected to this logic. Protesters have been doxxed, students assaulted, arrested and disciplined, encampments raided and activists portrayed as supporters of terrorism. In this environment, Hamad’s case cannot be understood solely as an isolated criminal prosecution. Melanie Ridden of the Drop the Charges campaign told The New Arab that the unusual decision to pursue the property-damage case as a federal misdemeanor was consistent with Project Esther and its effort to demonize Palestine solidarity. That is an organizer’s analysis rather than proof that Hamad’s prosecution was formally directed through Project Esther, but it identifies the broader political program in which supporters understand the case: transforming Palestine solidarity from political dissent into a category of suspicious activity, particularly when that solidarity comes from Arabs and Muslims who can already be placed within the racial architecture of the War on Terror.

There is an obvious counterfactual worth confronting. If a white American with no connection to Palestine were accused of possessing materials for homemade fireworks, would prosecutors construct the same narrative around him? Would counterterrorism resources become involved? Would helicopters and drones watch his family’s home? Would his political beliefs become central to arguments about his dangerousness? The answer cannot be known with certainty, but the ease with which many Americans can imagine a different response reveals something important about whose behavior the state teaches us to interpret as threatening.

The power of the word “terrorist” lies precisely here. It does more than describe violence. In American political life it can operate as permission: permission to surveil more aggressively, incarcerate more readily and ask fewer questions about what happens afterward. The label identifies someone whose rights can be treated as conditional because the threat they supposedly represent is imagined to exceed the protections normally owed to an individual.

Hamad has described the isolation this produced even before his incarceration. “After the first raid, almost everybody abandoned me,” he told The New Arab. That abandonment is part of how political repression works. State power is most effective when it convinces everyone surrounding its target that proximity itself is dangerous, that defending the accused might implicate the defender, and that remaining silent is safer than asking whether what is happening is just.

Today, Hamad remains imprisoned awaiting trial, more than a year after the state removed him from his family and placed him behind bars. At the time of The New Arab’s report, his next hearing date had not been determined. His continued detention lays bare the fiction that punishment begins only after conviction. The punishment is already happening—in the loss of his freedom, the disruption of his education and relationships, the deterioration of his health and the isolation of confinement. No future verdict can erase what has already happened. More than a year of his twenties has been taken from him without the due process of a conviction. His family has endured raids and surveillance. His name has been publicly intertwined with terrorism. His body has already experienced the prison system and its violence. The state may call this pretrial detention, but changing the language does not change the material reality of a person being caged.

Hamad’s case demands more than the comforting conclusion that the system has failed and could be corrected through better procedure. What happened to him was carried out through institutions exercising the powers available to them: surveillance, prosecution, detention and confinement, each reinforced by another arm of the state and obscured beneath the language of security and public safety. Political repression rarely identifies itself as repression. It is made bureaucratic, procedural and ordinary. It requires a target the public can be taught to fear and a vocabulary capable of making violence against that target appear necessary. For Arab and Muslim activists organizing around Palestine, the language of terrorism has long served precisely this function. Once a person has been placed inside that category, the question quietly shifts from whether the state should possess such power at all to how much of that power we are willing to watch it use against them.

Mohamad Hamad’s experience asks us to refuse that shift entirely. He is not an abstraction, a security category or the political caricature constructed around his name. He is a 24-year-old whose family home was raided, whose movements were surveilled, whose political identity was folded into a narrative of terrorism, and whose freedom has already been taken for more than a year without a conviction. His case should not leave us waiting for a courtroom to tell us what to think about what has already been done to him. It should force us to confront how easily accusation becomes permission for state violence, how readily racism and political demonization determine whose suffering becomes acceptable, and how repression depends upon the rest of us accepting the categories authority creates for its targets. The state teaches us whom to fear so that we will not question what it does to them. Solidarity begins by refusing the lesson.

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