On May 11, 2025, President Donald Trump took to his Truth Social app to proclaim that his administration had secured the release of one of the last and most high profile Israelis held in the Gaza Strip. He had been held captive for 584 days, and according to Trump, he was also a US citizen. “I am happy to announce that Edan Alexander, an American citizen who has been held hostage since October 2023, is coming home to his family,” Trump declared.
Two days later, Alexander appeared alongside his Israeli-born, US-based parents for a photo in the lobby of Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center with Steve Witkoff, the president’s personal Middle East envoy, and Adam Boehler, the State Department Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs. There, Witkoff presented Alexander with a gold Star of David necklace worn by his late son, Andrew, who died from an opioid overdose in 2011. “You would be doing a great honor to my son if you keep wearing this,” a visibly emotional Witkoff told Alexander.
A photo of the meeting between Alexander and the US diplomats posted on Twitter/X by the US Embassy in Jerusalem described the former captive as “the American Edan Alexander.”
During the final days of his captivity in Gaza, and after his release, ABC News and many other media outlets referred to Alexander as “the last living American citizen held by Hamas,” or as a “dual Israel-American citizen.”
The Trump administration ultimately took the unprecedented step of negotiating directly with Hamas for Alexander’s freedom on the grounds that he was a US citizen. During the talks, Trump’s hostage negotiator, Adam Boehler, implicitly threatened US military action against Hamas if a “hair on [Alexander’s] head is hurt.”
However, The Grayzone has learned that Alexander was not an American citizen at all. According to a source who has been in contact with Alexander’s family, Alexander filed an application in the summer of 2025 with the US Department of State to become a naturalized citizen of the US.
The Grayzone has independently verified the ongoing nature of Alexander’s attempted naturalization.
Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, Alexander was raised in Tenafly, New Jersey, a heavily Jewish suburb of New York City. For several years, according to the source, he has been a permanent legal resident of the US. Alexander is therefore a resident alien under US law.
The source informed The Grayzone that Alexander is currently a client of the Immigration Department of the Los Angeles, California-based law firm, Mitchell, Silberberg and Knupp, or MSK.
Reached by phone, David Wulkan of MSK’s Immigration Department, responded affirmatively when I told him I was calling to ask about the naturalization application filed with the State Department on behalf of his client, Alexander. “Yes,” he exclaimed.
However, when asked to confirm that Alexander was not a US citizen, Wulkan suddenly grew tense and replied, “Wait, who are you again?”
When I inquired if he was representing Alexander on an immigration-related matter, Wulkan stated that he could not confirm or deny, and insisted that he had to seek his client’s permission to answer any questions about his citizenship status. A follow-up email from The Grayzone to Wulkan went unanswered.
Howard Shapiro, the co-chair of MSK’s Immigration Department, confirmed that Alexander was his client. However, he deflected questions about the application for his naturalization. “You should know that attorney-client privilege – it’s just, I don’t gossip about my work,” Shapiro grumbled before abruptly hanging up.
On its website, Shapiro’s firm boasts: “MSK’s immigration department has worked for decades with companies seeking counsel in navigating the maze and increasingly complex laws governed by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Labor, Department of Justice, and State Department.”
Emailed questions to Adi Alexander, the father of Edan, and calls to several numbers associated with him, received no response.
The State Department did not respond to questions from The Grayzone. Numerous calls made over the course of several days to the State Department’s Office of Press Operations received no answer.
If Alexander was not in fact a US citizen when Hamas took him captive, his family and the Trump administration apparently engaged in a cynical deception to initiate and justify high-level diplomatic efforts on behalf of a prisoner of war who fought for a foreign army. While the Trump administration intervened directly to rescue a permanent legal resident from captivity, Palestinian citizens of the US filed a lawsuit late last year accusing the White House of “abandoning” them in the besieged strip.
The alleged naturalization application by Alexander also raises questions about the corruption of the immigration system by Trump officials under Israeli and pro-Israel influence.
In order to become naturalized, a foreign national not married to an American citizen must live in the US for five years without leaving before even applying for citizenship. However, Alexander returned to Israel in 2022 to join Garin Tzabar, a program that assists youth from around the world seeking to join the IDF. From there, he joined the IDF’s Golani Brigade, taking an assignment to serve on a base enforcing the siege of Gaza. Given that he did not return home to New Jersey until May 2025, Alexander would not fit the requirement to become a naturalized US citizen.
There is only one caveat which could provide Alexander a route to US citizenship under current law. Section 317 of the Immigration and Naturalization Act enables some legal permanent residents to count time they spent abroad for religious missionary work or other religious duties toward citizenship requirements.
However, Alexander left for Israel to join its military, not to perform any religious activities. If he were somehow granted a Section 317 exemption to his naturalization application, it would set the stage for any former Israeli soldier seeking US citizenship to claim their military service as a religious mission on the specious grounds that they were defending their “ancestral homeland.”
The campaign to convince Trump to negotiate directly for Edan Alexander’s release gathered critical momentum on the one year anniversary of the October 7 attacks on Israel. At the Brooklyn, New York grave of Menachem Schneerson, the late Rebbe of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement, the Israel-aligned Republican podcaster Ben Shapiro introduced Trump to Alexander’s parents, Adi and Yael.
The following day, on Shapiro’s podcast, Trump pledged to help the Alexander family: “Whatever I can do, and you know this, whatever I can do, I’ll do for them. Let’s see what happens. Maybe I’ll be able to help them.”
Behind the scenes, Alexander’s parents had hired SKDK, an elite Washington DC PR firm with ties to the Biden administration, which was still in power at the time. They had also gathered support from Miriam Adelson, the Israeli Likudnik mega-donor who contributed over $100 million to Trump’s re-election campaign, and the American Jewish Committee.
While the Alexanders and other family members of Israeli captives in Gaza pushed for a comprehensive deal for the release of their loved ones, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had embraced a “back to war” policy of continuous escalation. The Israeli leader was determined to preserve his narrow governing coalition by mollifying its most fanatically genocidal ministers, while postponing the trials for corruption which he is all but guaranteed to face once he leaves government.
As Israel’s assault on Gaza grew bloodier by the day, Hamas recorded a video of Alexander in which he invoked his supposed US citizenship to appeal to Trump for a deal. “I am an American-Israeli citizen currently being held captive in the Gaza Strip,” Alexander stated on November 30, 2024. “As an American, I’ve always believed in the power of the United States. And now, I’m sending my message: please, use your influence and the full power of the United States to negotiate for our release.”
Alexander’s family authorized the Hostages and Missing Families Forum to promote Alexander’s recorded message from Gaza, in which he described himself as a US citizen.
By April 2025, US government efforts to return Alexander from Gaza were in full swing. That month, Trump’s hostage envoy, Adam Boehler – who also happened to have been the college roommate of Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East negotiator Jared Kushner – delivered a blunt warning from the US government to Hamas during an interview with Al Jazeera: “If Edan gets sick, if Edan gets a cold, guess who’s getting blamed? Hamas. And so I think the best thing for them is not to accept risk or blame from the United States on these things. So I hope no hair on his head is hurt, or we’re going to come for them, and it’s not going to be pretty.”
Prior to this point, American officials had avoided language presenting the US as a direct belligerent in the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza. But now, with the Trump administration fixated on the release of an Israeli soldier they presented as the last American captive in Gaza, the mask was off.
By May 2025, the terms of an agreement to free Alexander had been established. The only obstacle was Netanyahu. “We want to bring the hostages home, but Israel is not willing to end the war. Israel is prolonging it despite the fact that we don’t see where else we can go and that an agreement must be reached,” Witkoff complained on May 11.
Witkoff ultimately sealed the deal by circumventing Netanyahu entirely, then promising Hamas that the US would push for a permanent ceasefire and compel Israel to allow humanitarian aid into the besieged Palestinian enclave.
Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas’ negotiating team, told journalist Jeremy Scahill that Witkoff personally assured him, “If we release [Alexander], Trump will speak out thanking Hamas for its gesture, obliging Israel on the second day to open the borders and allow aid to come into Gaza, and [Trump would] call for an immediate ceasefire and to go for negotiations to end the war.”
But once Hamas released Alexander, Naim said, “He did nothing of this. They didn’t violate the deal. They threw it in the trash.”
In the days and weeks after Alexander’s release, Gaza remained under strict cordon by the Israeli military, with all food, water, medicine and fuel blocked by force. As hunger tore through the population, even Trump acknowledged that a famine had arrived: “A lot of people are starving. A lot of people,” the president lamented.
Yet the Trump administration exploited the starvation crisis to establish an American footprint inside Gaza, which Trump pledged to transform into a “freedom zone.” Its vehicle for infiltration was the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF.
The GHF was a shadowy US-Israeli non-profit which established a series of dystopian aid hubs throughout ruined areas of Gaza in a scheme to replace UNRWA as the primary aid agency in the strip. Staffed by poorly trained US mercenaries who collaborated closely with the Israeli military, the GHF hubs became the site of regular massacres of starving Gaza aid seekers.
On June 1, 2025, Israel carried out the first of a series of gruesome killings which Gaza residents sardonically referred to as “Witkoff massacres.” In one assault, over 40 desperate aid seekers were killed and 150 injured when Israeli troops mowed down famished residents descending on newly established aid sites run by the GHF.
Two days later, Trump welcomed Alexander in the Oval Office. From behind Trump’s desk, the former captive Israeli soldier beamed for the cameras alongside self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“I came to thank the person responsible for saving my life,” Alexander declared. “It was deeply moving to be in the White House, the same place where my parents had fought for my release so many times, but this time together with them.”
Despite the intensive and unprecedented US efforts to secure his release, and an apparently pending application for naturalization, Edan Alexander’s heart remained in the country where he held citizenship.
“Next month, God willing, I will return to Israel,” he pledged during a September 2025 fundraising gala in New York City for the Friends of the IDF. “I will once again put on the IDF uniform, and I will proudly serve alongside my brothers.”
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