‘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.
