Pittsburgh ‘Hamas operative’ allegedly bought explosives, vandalized Jewish buildings — and donated to Squad Democrats
The FBI and Pittsburgh police arrested two Pittsburgh-area residents Wednesday on hate-crime charges for allegedly damaging or defacing Jewish buildings in July.
Shockingly one of those individuals, Mohamad Hamad, self-identified as a “Hamas operative,” purchased and tested explosive materials for a future fireball and was a Pennsylvania Air National Guard member stationed near Pittsburgh International Airport, according to the criminal complaint.
“In Pittsburgh, we’ve seen an infiltration of the Democratic Party by anti-Israel extremists who frequently target the Jewish community,” Jeremy Kazzaz, executive director of the Beacon Coalition nonprofit fighting antisemitism in the political sphere, told The Post.
The frightening charges come after three Jewish University of Pittsburgh students were assaulted this semester, and 62% of Jews nationwide are concerned with antisemitism in the Democratic Party.
“Imagine the terror they saw if they had cams. Hamas operative ripping off their flags in white suburbia,” Hamad, from Coraopolis to Pittsburgh’s northwest, said to an FBI-known individual over Signal.
The encrypted messaging app is similar to Telegram, which Hamas members used to share first-person videos of the Oct 7 attack, in which more than 2,000 armed terrorists invaded southern Israel and killed and kidnapped more than 1,400 people.
Hamad used Signal to share his desire to die a martyr for Islam.
He sent a likely photo of himself wearing a green headband with the Hamas logo and a black sweatshirt that read, “RESPECT EXISTENCE OR EXPECT RESISTANCE” and messaged, “my heart yearns for being with my brothers overseas.”
Emails show he bought two pounds of Indian Black aluminum powder and two pounds of potassium perchlorate used to form explosives.
And messages show Hamad made plans to light a “big shell” July 6 as a practice run for a future explosion and relished over video shared the next day of “what appears to be the detonation of an explosive device and corresponding fireball,” FBI Special Agent Brian Collins reported.
After reading the criminal complaint, Kazzaz feared Hamad was plotting to attack the Jewish community in Pittsburgh.
Hamad also messaged with Lubit, a Jewish activist living in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood, about spraying graffiti on Jewish buildings the days before red spray paint spattered the synagogue at Chabad of Squirrel Hill July 29 with the words “Jews 4 Palestine” and an inverted triangle, a symbol Hamas has used to mark Israeli targets in Gaza.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh was also sprayed, with the words “Funds Genocide Jews, Hate Zionists.”
Lubit appears to have struggled to reconcile her Jewishness with her anti-Israel activism.
“I can literally feel myself starting to see Jews as my enemies,” the recent graduate from Dickinson College in central Pennsylvania messaged Hamad the night before the vandalism, also sending a group chat an image of the Israeli flag with a Nazi swastika in the center under the alias “Warsaw,” the complaint alleges.
“Every day I think, ‘I don’t want to be Jewish anymore,’” she told Hamad, finding it conflicted with “being anti-oppression.”
Kazzaz said that worldview, divided between oppressors and oppressed, “led to a radicalization of two people from very different backgrounds” to not only vandalize Jewish buildings but for Hamad to “procure explosive materials, attempt to build bombs, aspire to martyrdom.”
And Kazzaz argued Democratic elected officials have fueled the danger with anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric.
“The way that Summer Lee views the world and has used her bully pulpit has legitimized these extremists,” Kazzaz said about the freshman congresswoman who calls Israel’s war for survival a “genocide” and advocates resistance.
“That allows them in some perverse way to justify acts of terrorism against random, innocent people,” he said.
“Jews are always viewed as the oppressor in this binary.”
Both Hamad and Lubit are connected to anti-Israel politics and Squad members in the Democratic Party.
Hamad donated $10 to Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar in Nov. 2023, after she called for an Israeli cease-fire the day Hamas attacked the Jewish state Oct. 7.
Hamad also sent $5 to Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib in April, after Congress censured the Palestinian-American congresswoman in November 2023 for defending Hamas’ attack against the “apartheid government” of Israel as “resistance.”
Lubit was among over 130 people in the Jewish community who signed a letter defending Lee, who called for a cease-fire 11 days after the Oct. 7 massacre, after 40 Jewish leaders in Pittsburgh pleaded with Lee to show solidarity with Israel and Jews.
Harris campaign staffer Sam Wasserman also signed the letter, as did many other signers who went on to support a county council resolution seeking an immediate cease-fire and release of all Palestinians in Israeli prisons, including known terrorists, in exchange for innocent hostages imprisoned by Hamas since Oct. 7.
“If this is a war, it did not start on October 7,” Lubit said in March to advocate for the resolution that was defeated but won the votes of three Democratic council members, foreshadowing the statement by Lee, Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey and Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato blaming the Oct. 7 massacre on Israel.
“This is the dangerous situation that many of us in the situation have been trying to convey to elected officials and our neighbors, that the use of violent rhetoric, the misuse of language, and the leaning on age-old antisemitic tropes makes us and our community less safe,” Kazzaz said.
He blamed Democrats pandering to pro-Palestinian voters to win elections for empowering these anti-Israel voices in the party.
Though Sen. Bob Casey condemned Lee’s statement blaming Israel for the deadliest day since the Holocaust, the Pennsylvania Democrat continues to endorse Lee, leading many Jewish Democrats to consider voting for his Republican opponent Dave McCormick.
“When [Democrats] are putting party over country, they are sweeping these dangers under the rug. And these arrests are a reflection of that,” Kazzaz said.
“Jewish hatred can actually morph into actually dangerous situations and violence.”
By Ethan Dodd