Mahmoud Khalil worked at UNRWAand got rigorous security clearance as British gov staffer in Lebanon years before he helped lead anti-Israel Columbia University protests

Detained anti-Israel protester Mahmoud Khalil worked for the controversial United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees while pursuing his graduate degree at Columbia University. The campus rabble-rouser’s stint at the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees came after he held a senior position at the UK office for Syria in Lebanon for four years, according to multiple reports.The role would have required a thorough background check and “rigorous security clearance,” Andrew Waller, one of Khalil’s former co-workers there, told The Guardian.He was involved, too, with a British government program, known as the Syria Chevening Program, which dishes out fully-funded scholarships to foreign students who “show potential to inspire” so they can study in the UK.Khalil — a Syrian-born Palestinian who is also a citizen of Algeria — stopped work there roughly two years ago — right before he relocated to the US in 2022 to enroll at Columbia.Just about three years leader, he would become the poster boy for President Trump’s crackdown on anti-Israel college protesters. Khalil, 30, was grabbed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents Saturday at his Columbia-owned apartment building and later transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana, where he faces deportation.The new details about his trajectory before he became a student leader of last spring’s riotous campus protests emerged as Khalil, now a permanent legal resident, continues to fight the Trump administration’s push to revoke his green card and boot him from the US.Born in 1995, Khalil was raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria after his grandparents were displaced from Tiberias, his lawyer has said in court papers.After civil war broke out in Syria, he fled for Lebanon at 18, the Guardian reported, pursuing an undergraduate degree in computer science at the Lebanese American University in Beirut.He then got the gig at the UK office for Syria, a diplomatic mission w...