‘Healthcare not bombs’: How Gaza shaped Adam Hamawy’s path to US Congress

Adam Hamawy has seen death, devastation and the effects of hate on others for decades – as a first responder after the September 11 attacks, while serving in Iraq as a United States military surgeon, and more recently, on trips to Gaza while it has suffered under Israel’s genocide.

On Tuesday, he stood in front of supporters in Plainsboro, New Jersey, celebrating “hope” that he said he had gleaned from some of those victims of violence.

“To the men, women and children of Gaza and Palestine: Your smiles give me the hope and the courage to fight for a better world,” said the Egyptian-American surgeon, set to become New Jersey’s first Muslim US congressman.

It was the culmination of a winding path into politics for 56-year-old Hamawy, a US Army veteran and reconstructive surgeon who was one of eight Muslim Americans to win election races on Tuesday night, as Democrats took commanding control of both chambers of the US Congress.

Hamawy entered politics after participating in medical missions to Gaza in 2024 and 2025, experiences he said made it impossible for him to return to normal life.

He campaigned for New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District on a platform of “healthcare not bombs”, pledging to challenge a system that “funds genocide [in Gaza] while trapping us all here in medical debt”.

But Hamawy’s bid for the House of Representatives was met with a wave of attacks that he described as “anti-Muslim”, as well as scrutiny over his past association with a sheikh later convicted of seditious conspiracy.

“I have never seen anti-Muslim hate as open and as loud and as accepted as it is today,” said Hamawy, who served for eight years as a US Army officer, including a deployment to Iraq as a combat surgeon.

“Let me say this to anyone who still believes that Muslims are strangers here. To every Muslim child who’s been told that you don’t belong: You belong,” he said.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) welcomed Hamawy’s victory, along with those of other “principled candidates”.

“Hamawy witnessed the horrors of Israel’s genocide in Gaza firsthand,” the ADC said. “Now, he will take his place in the very Congress that funded and enabled those atrocities, bringing the testimony of what he witnessed directly to the lawmakers responsible for sustaining US support for Israel’s genocide.”

‘The doctor who saved my life’

Hamawy was born in Egypt, and his family moved to New Jersey when he was a baby. Raised in Old Bridge, New Jersey, Hamawy completed his undergraduate studies at Rutgers University and earned a medical degree from New Jersey Medical School.

He later joined the New Jersey National Guard and worked as a combat trauma surgeon for the US Army, including on a nine-month deployment to Baghdad, Iraq in 2004.

It was there that Hamawy treated now-Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, who at the time was a US Army helicopter pilot. Duckworth was badly injured when her helicopter was shot down by Iraqi fighters in November 2004, and says Hamawy saved her life and one of her limbs.

“He is the doctor who not only saved my life, but was able to prevent me from becoming a triple amputee by employing a vascular procedure that he’d just learned in medical school,” said Duckworth, who lost both her legs.

The Illinois senator was the first serving US congressperson to endorse Hamawy back in January, calling him a leader with the courage to “speak truth to power” and “willingness to call out injustices at home and abroad”.

Hamawy retired from the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel in 2011. In the years leading up to and following his retirement, he put his medical skills to use in numerous humanitarian missions abroad, including treating victims of war and disaster in Haiti, Jordan, Lebanon and Gaza.

‘Complete destruction’ in Gaza

During Hamawy’s first mission to Gaza in 2024, he said the level of destruction was unlike anything he had ever seen before.

“This is not like a war. This is just like complete, utter destruction,” said Hamawy in an interview from the enclave, adding that he could only define what was happening there “as a genocide”.

“When the hospital shakes and I see the bodies come in, I’m paying for it with my tax dollars,” he later said in an interview with The Guardian. “I don’t want my tax dollars doing that.”

While he treated patients at Gaza’s European Hospital in 2024, Israel seized the Rafah border crossing, temporarily trapping Hamawy and his colleagues in the enclave. Hamawy refused to be evacuated until he was assured non-American members of his team would also be able to leave.

‘Bigoted’ attacks

Hamawy declared his congressional candidacy in January after the retirement announcement of Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman. He quickly faced fierce criticism from opponents, including Democratic challenger Adrian Mapp, who called him a “radical extremist”.

Mapp and other critics pointed to Hamawy’s past association with Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the “Blind Sheikh”, who was later convicted of several “terrorism” charges, including in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Hamawy, in his early 20s, travelled to a conference with Abdel Rahman and others and later was called as a defence witness at Abdel Rahman’s trial.

Hawamy has condemned Abdel Rahman’s “violent rhetoric and actions” and says he testified at his trial out of a sense of “civic duty”.

Still, several New Jersey politicians accused Hamawy of failing to answer for his connection to Abdel Rahman, who died in 2017.

“As a Muslim, they’re always going to find something to attack,” Hamawy told local media earlier this year, as his campaign called the scrutiny “gross and bigoted”.

After winning his congressional race, Hamawy said the hate he had faced had also been “targeted against my family, my coworkers, my friends”, and that his “loyalty” and “patriotism” had been questioned.

Selaedin Maksut, executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said, “Islamophobic rhetoric employed by so many candidates miserably backfired this election season.”

“New Jersey is a better place because American Muslims are standing up, speaking out, and fighting for a more just future for all,” said Maksut.

‘Broken and rigged system’

Hamawy’s platform priorities included healthcare for all, ending medical and student debt, and abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which he has called an agency “full of neo-Nazis”.

He has said the push for universal healthcare is personal for him, as a physician “who sees firsthand how insurance companies and the rest of our absurd system fail patients and providers alike”.

On foreign policy, Hamawy opposes the war on Iran, which he has called “illegal and immoral”, and advocates an end to US military aid to Israel. He has pledged to fight for “for justice and equal rights for Palestinians, including support for the Palestinian right of return under international law”.

The surgeon-turned-congressman has described his policy goals as “interconnected”.

“They are solutions to a crisis that was born out of a broken and rigged political and economical system,” he said after winning a hard-fought Democratic primary race in June.

“A system that floods money overseas to bomb children’s schools while at the same time [saying] that childcare here in America [is a] pie-in-the-sky idea.”