A glowing piece by a New York Magazine site highlighting Miss Palestine Nadeen Ayoub’s life and background claiming she’s “seen some things” made a glaring omission —never mentioning her marriage and child with the son of a convicted terrorist who Hamas wants released from Israeli prison.
Ayoub, who competed in the Miss Universe pageant on Friday, was featured in a glam article by The Cut for being the first-ever woman to hold the Miss Palestine title, heralding her for her dedication to humanitarian work — painting her as a voice for unity, hope, and a people “more than their suffering.”
But the glossed-up, glowing profile titled “The First Miss Palestine Has Seen Some Things” glaringly left out a segment of her life — anything that happened between graduating college and 2022.
It was during that time that she married Sharaf Barghouti — the son of the infamous Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti serving five life sentences in Israel for orchestrating terror attacks that killed five people in 2001 and 2002 — and later had a son they named after the convicted terrorist, according to an exhaustive investigation by The Post.
Old social-media snapshots and rambling family posts — many of when have since been scrubbed from the internet — show Ayoub calling Sharaf her “fiance” ahead of their 2016 wedding.
In posts from 2019, family members congratulated she and her husband on the birth of their son, wishing he would grow up to be like his terrorist grandfather.
“May he be raised with your dignity my dears and hopefully he will be like Mr. Marwan the great,” one person wrote.
She also taught fitness classes at a gym in Ramallah called “IQ Fitness,” owned by another of Marwan Barghouti’s sons. In at least one Instagram post, the gym referred to her as “Nadeen Barghouti.”
But none of that made it into the glowing profile, which instead the glamor of her pageant participation — noting the “30 gowns she brought for the competition”; her garnering of support from celebrity Bella Hadid and sponsors like Huda Beauty and behind-the-scenes gossip about other beauty queens.
“Miss Canada and Miss Kyrgyzstan want her to win for Palestine. But sometimes it’s like “Mean Girls, Ayoub says” the outlet wrote. “Miss Iraq keeps stirring the pot, trying to get Ayoub to sympathize with Shiraz. ‘Like, hello, you’re Iraq,’ Ayoub says. ‘Do you not remember what happened to you?’”
It also throws under the bus Miss Israel Melanie Shiraz, who received death threats after Ayoub posted an unofficial video that appeared to have been edited to make a momentary glance in Miss Palestine’s direction look as if the woman representing the Jewish state as a look of disgust at the controversial beauty queen.
“Head turning is not a news story,” Shiraz wrote with a video showing side-by-side footage pointing out the distorted angle of Ayoub’s post in an Instagram post at the time. “This platform is meant to empower women. Using it to tear women down, sharing images without consent, and staying silent while a fellow competitor is attacked all undermine what we are meant to represent.”
The article notes that Ayoub was “approached by modeling agents throughout her life” before entering her first pageant “Miss Earth” in 2022 — a competition that Ayoub should have been disqualified from entering based on her marriage and motherhood status.
It also gives a saintly description of her upbringing, detailing her youth spent in Canada, the US and the West Bank, earning a degree in psychology and literature, working with NGOs supporting children in war-torn areas, and founding organizations aiming at sustainable development and women’s empowerment under the “Miss Palestine” banner.
The piece wraps with an explanation that Ayoub was not concerned about losing the pageant to Miss Mexico despite making the pageant’s top 30 competitors — because he eyes are now turning to the another geopolitical stage.
“She’s fielding requests from Greenpeace and has plans to speak at the United Nations,” the article alleged, citing Ayoub’s manager Mai Jawadah, who told the magazine she “doesn’t give a f–k about pageants despite raising funds for the Miss Palestine program.
“I’m doing it for Nadeen, for Palestine,” Jawadah said, according to the magazine.
The Cut did not immediately respond to a request for comment asking why Ayoub’s ties to Barghouti were not included in the article.
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