Issa Amro was a young engineering student in 2003 at the Palestine Polytechnic University in Hebron. He was in his final year of a five-year engineering degree, staying up and solving complicated calculus equations. At 23 years old, Issa had no interest in politics. His dream was to become a professor of engineering and to work on developing sources of renewable energy.

One day, he arrived at class to find that the Israeli army had shut down his university. In a moment of panic, realizing that he stood to lose his degree and the previous five years of hard work, Issa rushed home, turned on his computer, and typed “how to make a revolution” into the search bar. His research led him to nonviolent leaders such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela. He read everything he could about the practice of nonviolent change, including theories of nonviolence by scholars such as Gene Sharp.

Issa soon rallied a large group of students and led them in a series of nonviolent actions, including teach-ins, demonstrations, media work, and other initiatives. The student protestors did not only protest the army; they also protested and petitioned their own municipality, demanding that it help pressure the Israeli army to reopen the university. After half a year, the student protestors succeeded.

Issa returned to school and graduated as both an engineer and an advocate. This success inspired more than twenty years of intense human rights work and nonviolent activism in the Hebron community. Soon afterward, Issa’s journey led him to establish a community center for nonviolent resistance next to an illegal Israeli settlement and Israeli military base, as well as to found the grassroots initiative Youth Against Settlements and eventually Working for Peace and Justice Inc. / Friends of Hebron.

Popularly referred to as the “Palestinian Gandhi,” Mr. Amro has received numerous awards and recognition for his work encouraging peaceful resistance against Israeli occupation. In 2009, he won the One World Media Award for his role coordinating B’Tselem’s video camera distribution project in Hebron to document human rights violations by Israeli soldiers and settlers. In 2010, he was declared Human Rights Defender of the Year in Palestine by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). In 2011, Issa was a guest of the U.S. State Department as part of its International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP). In 2013, he was declared a Human Rights Defender by the European Union. His EU Human Rights Defender status was reaffirmed in 2016, and he was indicted by the Israeli military court that same year. In 2017, he was featured as part of Amnesty International’s Write for Rights campaign. In 2023, Amro received the Global Advocacy Award from the Harvard Law School Advocates for Human Rights and the Harvard Human Rights Journal. Issa is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, the 2024 Right Livelihood Winner along with the group he founded, Youth Against Settlements and in 2025 was named on the TIME 100 NEXT list for influential leaders.

Issa Amro has been featured on CNN, BBC, France 24, Al Jazeera, NPR, and in The New York Times, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Haaretz, and other outlets. 

He has faced numerous assaults and incidents of torture.