Campus protest leader Mahmoud Khalil explains Oct. 7 attack reasoning

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Anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil claims Oct. 7 terror attack was ‘desperate attempt’ for Gaza to be heard

Anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil rationalized Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack in a new interview with The New York Times published Tuesday.

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Anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil rationalized Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack in a new interview with The New York Times posted on Tuesday.

Appearing on the Times' podcast, "The Ezra Klein Show," the Columbia University graduate student said that though he thinks the Hamas attack that killed more than 1,200 people in Israel in late 2023 was wrong, he saw it as a desperate attempt to make sure the world knew the plight of Gazans at the hands of Israel.

"And to me, it’s a desperate attempt to tell the world that Palestinians are here, that Palestinians are part of the equation. That was my interpretation of why Hamas did the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel," Mahmoud told host Ezra Klein.

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Mahmoud Khalil said on a New York Times podcast that he believes the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 was a "desperate" plea for Gazans to be heard by the world. (Rashid Umar Abbasi for Fox News Digital)

When asked about his perception of the deadly attack, he said it was an act to "break the cycle, to break that Palestinians are not being heard."

"Because at that point, there was no political process. It was clear that the Saudi-Israel deal is very imminent, and Palestinians wouldn’t have any path to statehood and self-determination," he said.

The activist clarified he does not believe Hamas’ actions were justified, stating, "So they had to do that, according to their calculations — which, it’s obvious, were not right."

He added that "targeting civilians is wrong."

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Columbia University anti-Israel protest ringleader Mahmoud Khalil told podcast host Ezra Klein how he felt about Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Tuesday.  (Screenshot/The Ezra Klein Show)

Khalil, born to Palestinian parents in Syria, has become a central figure in recent months for the anti-Israel protests on American college campuses following the Oct. 7 attack. Immigration authorities arrested him in March at Columbia University for being a ringleader of anti-Israel activism on campus. 

An immigration judge ruled that Mahmoud, who was in the U.S. on a student visa, could be deported after Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote a memo stating that his campus protests were contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests.

In separate statements, Rubio declared that the U.S. could revoke anyone’s visa, especially if they support Hamas or promote chaos on college campuses. "So when you apply for a student visa or any visa to enter the United States, we have a right to deny you for virtually any reason," he said. 

"But I think being a supporter of Hamas and coming into our universities and turning them upside down, being complicit in what are clearly crimes, vandalization, complicit in shutting down institutions…If you told us that’s what you intended to do when you came to America, we would have never let you in. And if you do it once you get in, we’re going to revoke it and kick you out," Rubio added.

Despite the effort to deport Mahmoud, a federal judge ordered him to be released on bail while his immigration and civil cases proceed through the courts.

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