Andrew Heifler, 26, was taken into custody and charged with making and possessing destructive devices. Eight completed Molotov cocktails were recovered from his residence when law enforcement executed a search warrant. He made his first appearance in federal court in New Jersey on Friday afternoon.
Kiswani, the 31-year-old co-founder of the activist group Within Our Lifetime, said the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force notified her late Thursday that a plot against her life had been imminent and that agents had conducted an operation in Hoboken connected to it. “I feel very blessed that they were able to thwart this,” she said. “But it’s something that is a constant possibility for people who speak up on behalf of Palestine.”
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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani identified Heifler as a member of an offshoot of the Jewish Defense League, a far-right extremist organisation with a documented history of violent attacks targeting Arab American activists in the 1970s and 1980s. Mamdani added that Heifler had planned to flee to Israel after carrying out the attack. “No one should face violence for their political beliefs or their advocacy,” Mamdani wrote on social media. “Our city must meet hate with solidarity.”
The arrest was the product of a weeks-long undercover operation. According to the federal complaint, Heifler discussed his plans with an undercover agent during that period, including details about obtaining Kiswani’s home address and his intentions to throw incendiary devices at the property. On March 4, Heifler drove with the undercover agent to surveil the activist’s residence. On Thursday, when the two met at the Hoboken apartment, Heifler was in possession of a large bottle of Everclear — a high-proof liquor commonly used as an accelerant — alongside other materials needed to construct the devices.
The role the undercover agent played in shaping or facilitating the plot beyond monitoring it has not been fully disclosed, and the complaint did not address the question directly. The tactic of using undercover operatives to develop relationships with suspects before arresting them carries a fraught history in American law enforcement. In the years after September 2001, the FBI ran numerous operations in which agents cultivated relationships with individuals in Muslim communities, sometimes providing material, encouragement and logistical assistance before arresting the targets on terrorism-related charges. Critics, civil liberties organisations and several courts characterised some of those operations as entrapment rather than genuine threat interdiction. The NYPD’s Racially and Ethnically Motivated Extremism unit, which conducted Thursday’s operation, was formed in 2019 specifically to monitor far-right hate groups — a mandate created partly in response to the very criticism that the post-9/11 surveillance apparatus had been focused almost exclusively on Muslim communities.
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Kiswani said Thursday’s arrest did not emerge from a vacuum. She stated on social media that “Zionist organizations like Betar and politicians like Randy Fine have encouraged violence against my family and me” for several months. Fine, a Republican congressman from Florida, posted on social media last month suggesting that Muslims were inferior to dogs — remarks that drew condemnation from civil rights organisations but no formal congressional censure. The New York Attorney General’s office had previously announced that far-right pro-Israel group Betar US would end its activities in New York, citing the group’s targeting of Palestinian rights advocates.
The arrest lands at a moment of sustained and documented pressure on Palestinian activists across the United States. The Iran war and the ongoing conflict in Gaza have sharpened the political environment around Palestinian advocacy, with rights groups reporting elevated levels of harassment, surveillance and threats against individuals and organisations publicly associated with Palestinian causes. Kiswani and Within Our Lifetime have been among the most visible targets of that pressure, drawing attention from both government scrutiny and organised far-right campaigns.
“I will not stop speaking up for the people of Palestine,” Kiswani said in her statement.
Heifler’s case now moves through the federal court system in New Jersey. The charges he faces carry significant penalties, and prosecutors have yet to indicate whether additional charges may follow as the investigation develops. Whether the operation that led to his arrest represents effective counterterrorism or a more complicated entanglement between law enforcement and suspect will be a question his defence attorneys are already positioned to raise.