The race was opened when Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, the first Black woman to represent New Jersey in Congress, announced her retirement in November 2025 after six terms. Watson Coleman, a progressive champion on criminal justice reform, health equity and economic opportunity, was comfortably re-elected in 2024. Whoever wins Tuesday’s primary in the safely Democratic district will almost certainly succeed her.
Hamawy is a still-practicing trauma plastic surgeon who covered medical missions during the Bosnian war in the 1990s and was deployed to Iraq as an army combat surgeon a decade later. He was part of the medical team that saved Duckworth’s life after her Black Hawk helicopter was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq.
On a volunteer medical mission to Gaza in 2024, Hamawy spent nearly three weeks trapped at the European hospital in Khan Younis after Israeli forces closed the Rafah border crossing. He operated while the city was bombed around him. Duckworth ultimately helped secure his evacuation after delivering a letter of his to the White House.
“I could only define it as a genocide, because I saw the bodies of the people that came in,” Hamawy said while canvassing in Trenton earlier this month. “And it wasn’t an accident. You can’t have an accident, every single day for three years.”
After returning from Gaza, Hamawy traveled to Washington to describe the crisis to lawmakers, only to find, in his words, “too many doors that were closed, that didn’t even want to listen.” One of the few representatives who met with him was Watson Coleman, his own congresswoman. When she announced her retirement months later, Hamawy decided to run for the seat himself.
The race has drawn 11 other candidates, including an assembly member, multiple mayors, a former White House aide and several local officials. The field’s fractured nature, transformed by the collapse of New Jersey’s once-powerful county-line ballot system that previously allowed party leaders to influence primaries, means the threshold for victory may be relatively low.
Hamawy has raised more than $1 million, fueled significantly by small donors in Muslim and Arab American communities. American Priorities, a pro-Palestinian Super PAC, has pledged $2 million in television advertising on his behalf.
His campaign platform flows directly from his medical and military experiences. Hamawy has called for Medicare for All, an arms embargo and sanctions on Israel, the abolition of ICE, cancellation of medical and student debt, the dismantling of the Department of Homeland Security, and federal codification of abortion rights. He has said he cannot support Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer.
“We’re told we don’t have enough money for Medicare for All,” Hamawy said. “But at the same time we just started another war. We have plenty of money for the bombs.”
Hamawy was born in Egypt and moved to New Jersey as an infant. He grew up in Plainfield and Old Bridge before attending Rutgers University. After his military career, he built a surgical practice in Princeton and remains on call during the campaign.
At a May forum hosted by Princeton University’s Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter, Hamawy laid out his platform. “Human rights is my red line,” he told the room. “I would vote against all bills that attack anyone’s rights.”
“He’s blatantly progressive, and you wouldn’t expect a middle-aged vet to resonate with young people,” said Christopher Quire, the chapter’s co-chair. “The students were really focused on what he’s saying.”
Voters across the district expressed a range of priorities. Simran Riar, a 30-year-old city planner who came to the US through asylum, said Duckworth’s endorsement made Hamawy “the most viable” candidate, but what settled it was his “heartfelt” objections to war. Elijah Dixon, an organizer and community development professional who briefly ran for the seat himself before endorsing Hamawy, said domestic frustrations over housing, utilities and healthcare are front of mind for many voters. “People are doing everything right, and yet the future is still slipping away right in front of them,” Dixon said.
Gaza comes up too, Dixon added — everywhere. “You can’t go to a town hall or to a community meeting without someone mentioning that.”
Hamawy’s work history has also drawn scrutiny from conservative media outlets. As a medical student in his 20s, Hamawy appeared as a defense witness in the 1995 trial of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the so-called “blind sheikh,” who was later convicted of seditious conspiracy tied to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plot. Hamawy testified about statements he had heard Abdel-Rahman make at religious gatherings. He was never accused of wrongdoing and dismissed the renewed attention as a smear, saying Abdel-Rahman was one of the few widely known Muslim religious figures in New Jersey at the time.
Conservative outlets have also highlighted that Hamawy volunteered in Bosnia in 1994 with a charity later shut down for providing logistical support to al-Qaida — though at the time, a US envoy under Bill Clinton had visited the organization’s leadership and praised its humanitarian relief work.
“As a Muslim, they’re always going to find something to attack,” Hamawy told reporters. “I’m used to this all my life.”
Hamawy, who wears a Jolly Roger pin from the anime One Piece on his lapel — a symbol that has become shorthand in antiwar left spaces in support of oppressed people — has sought to explain how his life led him to this moment. His campaign’s core argument is that so many of the people making decisions about wars, healthcare and medical debt answer to interests far removed from the patients and families he has encountered in two decades of trauma surgery.
Asked how he would define his politics, Hamawy paused for only a moment.
“My politics is based on my work,” he said.