Mahmoud Khalil Sues Columbia University Over Persistent Anti-Palestinian Discrimination
Por Areeba Fatima — Drop Site News
Mahmoud Khalil, Mohammed Ibrahim Zubairi, and other members of the Palestine Working Group (PWG) at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) filed a federal civil complaint on Monday accusing the university of failing to protect Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students from doxxing and harassment. Columbia suspended PWG—the last remaining named student organization with “Palestine” in its name—in September 2025.
The complaint names SIPA Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo, who was born in Israel and served in Israeli intelligence during her mandatory military service, claiming she helped contribute to a hostile environment on campus by enacting discriminatory policies and ignoring repeated reports of severe and coordinated harassment against Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students as far back as 2019.
Speaking to the press, Khalil said the university hired private investigators to investigate him, a Columbia graduate student, while he led negotiations between protesters and the university administration during the 2024 pro-Palestine campus encampments that called for the university to disclose and divest from Israel. In March 2025, ICE agents abducted Khalil from his campus residence despite his status as a permanent resident. He spent 104 days in a Louisiana immigration jail, missing the birth of his first child before he was released in June 2025 by a federal judge who ruled that his arrest and detention likely violated the Constitution. Since then, the university has reached out to him only once—to ask him to leave his campus housing.
“We are suing Columbia because of its blatant disregard for our safety and well-being,” Khalil told Drop Site News. “Columbia put us through hell over the past three years,” Khalil said the university administration joined pro-Israel groups in targeting the Palestinian movement on campus.
Campus Public Safety officers attempting to remove Mahmoud Khalil from campus just a few days before ICE abducted him from Columbia property. Video: Ibrahim Zubairi.
The suit is just the latest against Columbia’s administration over its policies around the pro-Palestine student encampments. Last month, a group of Palestinian students and faculty filed a lawsuit against Columbia alleging that the university engaged in “anti-Palestinian discrimination and fostered a hostile learning and work environment.” In February 2025, three students filed a complaint against the school administration for their suspensions related to their pro-Palestine activism on campus, claiming the university violated its own policies during the disciplinary process and that the university targeted the students for their views.
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Mohammed Ibrahim Zubairi, a SIPA graduate who succeeded Khalil as PWG president, was likewise accused of being intolerant and aggressive by other students after calling the U.S. deportation process violent. “An American, a white student, basically accused me of being aggressive and told me to check my violence at the door,” he said.
Zubairi told Drop Site News he was treated like he was not an “acceptable or tolerable Muslim on campus” because of his speech. The lawsuit also states another incident where Dean Yarhi-Milo directly expressed repulsion over Zubairi’s allegiance to Palestine despite not being from there.
Speaking to the crowd outside the university gates, Khalil asserted, “Dean Yarhi-Milo is not only a terrible administrator, is not only a failed dean but a manipulative one who weaponizes her identity to shield herself from legitimate concerns and criticisms.”
When students reported doxxing and harassment, according to the plaintiffs, Yarhi-Milo refused to acknowledge their complaints and instead accused them of destroying campus culture. While she was engaged in organizing rapid support for Israeli students and their gatherings, Palestinian students said they had to wait several weeks for approval despite repeated requests.
Yarhi-Milo serves on Columbia’s executive board and co-leads SIPA’s Institute of Global Politics (IGP) alongside former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, according to the university’s website . In a conversation last year, Clinton recalled meeting a woman from the Israeli military’s Unit 8200 in October 2023 who told her she wanted to grow up to be like Yarhi-Milo.
Students say the institute’s policies reflect a longstanding pattern of prejudice against Arab and Muslim students on campus. Another IGP leader, Jacob Lew, told Israeli general Amos Gilead in a recorded conversation in June 2024, “We’re not of the view that there is a famine [in Gaza].” Lew has also repeated the claim that Hamas uses civilians as human shields.
Layla Saliba, a graduate of Columbia’s School of Social Work who now helps underprivileged New Yorkers find affordable housing and healthcare, told Drop Site that students faced hate crimes with no accountability from the administration. She said one student created a “nuke map” of Gaza and posted it publicly on social media. “They had a map of Gaza, and they listed specific locations that they thought should be targeted with nuclear bombs,” she said. “The same student also publicly stated that all Palestinian men over the age of twelve should be executed.”
Saliba continued, “Students were having their hijabs ripped off, students were being called terrorists,” she said. “We had university professors publicly calling students terrorists on their social media platforms, doxxing students.”
In October 2023, students observed doxxing trucks displaying PWG members’ full names and photos on digital screens, labeling them “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites.” When PWG students reported the doxxing trucks to the Yarhi-Milo, she reacted with hostility and accused the students of being “harmful to campus culture.”
Bhavana Bellamkonda, another plaintiff and a former PWG board member, described a pattern of physical hostility and verbal abuse. Bellamkonda was doxxed by Accuracy in Media, a right-wing nonprofit that built a website revealing her name, photograph, and school.
During a Columbia alumni weekend in June 2024, she said, “We had a Columbia alumni yelling things at participants of the encampments, including saying that they hoped that participants of the encampment were raped.”
The suit alleges that a research assistant to Yarhi-Milo, called Bellamkonda, “our resident terrorist,” threatened her with physical violence for wearing a keffiyeh.
Khalil and other plaintiffs are demanding the full reinstatement of the Palestine Working Group as an officially recognized student organization, monetary damages (determined at trial), a jury trial, and a court injunction enjoining the university and the SIPA dean from discriminating against Arab, Palestinian, or Muslim students.
“This case is Mahmoud’s first opportunity to ask the court to offer accountability for all that he endured and all the discrimination that he faced,” said Brittany Finley, a civil rights attorney representing Khalil.
“While he was in ICE detention, [Columbia] kept targeting [PWG members]. They were scared, they were afraid because their friend had been picked up off campus property and put in an ICE detention center,” she said.
William Reynolds, another attorney representing Zubairi, Khalil, and the other plaintiffs, said he hopes the lawsuit will hold the university accountable for creating a hostile environment. “They were targeted disproportionately for their speech, they were disproportionately targeted for their ethnicity and their support of Palestine,” he said.
Speaking to the crowd outside the university gates, Khalil said, “President Mnookin, you must do the right thing and fire the disgraced dean of SIPA, Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo. What we are asking for is very simple: equal treatment.”
Fonte: Drop Site News
