WASHINGTON — A man who wrote “Hamas is Comin” on a DC monument last year has been sentenced to 10 days in federal prison.
Zaid Mohammed Mahdawi, 26, the president of the Richmond, Va., chapter of American Muslims for Palestine, will also have to pay $1,500 in restitution and serve 80 hours of community service following his release, US District Judge James Boasberg ruled Friday.
Mahdawi pleaded guilty to destruction of government property, a misdemeanor, for his actions during July protests against visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Prosecutors said video showed Mahdawi lowering the US flag from its pole in front of the Union Station train hub — with that flag then stolen by a fellow protester — before he climbed atop a monument to explorer Christopher Columbus and spray-painting it with the pro-terrorist group message.
The prison sentence comes as the Trump administration takes action to deport students living in the US on visas who partook in anti-Israel activism during the Jewish state’s war with Hamas, which was triggered by the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of about 1,200 people in southern Israel.
President Trump previously urged a heavy hand toward monument vandals in DC — after Black Lives Matter activists lassoed and attempted to pull down a historic statue of President Andrew Jackson facing the White House in 2020.
“I announced that anybody that touches any of our monuments or statues goes to jail for 10 years… I watched their asses from the back. That’s all I could see, is thousands of asses. And that stopped,” Trump said last August following the anti-Israel graffiti by Mahdawi.
“The other day you see them starting to do it again. They’re taking the spray paint, and they’re spraying those gorgeous limestone tigers… You know, when you spray limestone, you’ll see it in 100 years from now because it’s a very porous stone.”
Boasberg is also the judge who recently ordered the Trump administration to cease deportation flights of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador — for which President Trump has demanded his impeachment.
