Combat surgeon who treated Gaza’s wounded could become New Jersey’s first Muslim member of Congress

TRENTON, New Jersey (MNTV) — Adam Hamawy has lived several lives that most people would consider complete on their own: battlefield surgeon, plastic surgeon, humanitarian volunteer trapped in a war zone.

On Wednesday, he added another chapter, winning the Democratic nomination for New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District and putting himself on a likely path to Washington.

According to results reported by multiple outlets, Hamawy emerged from a field of 13 Democratic candidates with roughly 27 to 28 per cent of the vote, comfortably ahead of his nearest rivals.

He will face Republican Gregg Mele — who ran unopposed in his primary — in November, in a district that stretches across central New Jersey from Trenton to Plainfield and that Democrats have held firmly for years. If he wins, as the district’s history suggests he will, Hamawy would become New Jersey’s first Muslim member of Congress.

A life of consequential moments

Hamawy’s biography reads unlike that of a typical congressional candidate. Working as a combat surgeon in Iraq in 2004, he was part of the medical team that saved the life of Tammy Duckworth — now a U.S. senator from Illinois — after her helicopter was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade, an attack that cost Duckworth both her legs.

Duckworth, who credits Hamawy with helping save her life, endorsed his campaign and has remained a vocal supporter.

In 2024, Hamawy travelled to Gaza as part of a volunteer team of American doctors providing medical aid to Palestinians wounded in Israel’s military campaign.

The mission took a dramatic turn when Israel seized and closed the Rafah border crossing, leaving the team unable to leave.

Hamawy was among three American doctors who chose to remain behind until the non-American members of their team could be evacuated — and it was Duckworth who personally intervened to help secure their eventual departure.

The experience appears to have shaped his politics profoundly. Hamawy has become a sharp critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a position that became central to both his campaign’s identity and the attacks levelled against him.

A progressive coalition

Hamawy ran as an unambiguous progressive and assembled a coalition to match. He was endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Ro Khanna, and former representative Jamaal Bowman, among others.

He drew backing from progressive organisations including Justice Democrats and Our Revolution, and from a pro-Palestinian super PAC, American Priorities, which spent more than $1.5 million supporting his campaign.

He also appeared on the show of left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, visiting an immigration detention facility days before the vote.

His allies framed the victory as both a rebuke of the attacks against him and a validation of progressive, people-first politics.

Justice Democrats executive director Alexandra Rojas said Hamawy had won by out-organising the establishment and building a coalition rooted in working families.

On his own campaign website, Hamawy struck a less ideological note, arguing that both major parties had failed to address the everyday problems facing American families — affordability, healthcare, and education chief among them.

Attacks and scrutiny

The campaign was not without controversy. Hamawy faced scrutiny over a past association with a cleric convicted in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; a spokesperson said Hamawy condemns that individual’s violent rhetoric and actions.

After his win, New York Republican Representative Mike Lawler questioned the nomination and called for an investigation into Hamawy’s associations should he be elected — the kind of guilt-by-association attack that has become a familiar feature of campaigns involving Muslim and Arab American candidates.

What it represents

Hamawy’s likely path to Congress reflects two converging shifts in American Democratic politics: the growing electoral viability of candidates who openly criticise Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the steady rise of Muslim and Arab American political representation.

He would succeed retiring Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman, who has held the seat since 2015.

For a man who has spent much of his career making split-second decisions to save lives — on battlefields in Iraq and in the ruins of Gaza — the move into electoral politics represents a different kind of public service.

Whether the voters of New Jersey’s 12th district send him to Washington in November will be answered in the autumn.

But the primary result suggests that a candidate defined by his medical service in two of the most consequential conflict zones of the past two decades — and by his willingness to speak plainly about both — has found a constituency ready to be represented by him.