After earning a doctorate in physics at Utah State University, he was employed and funded by NASA for a number of projects[7] before taking up positions in Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
[9] His research papers, which concentrate on plasmic physics cover several topics ranging from the phenomenon of polar wind and ion outflow, Ionosphere-magnetosphere coupling to Coulomb collisions.
[8] Two months later, in October, he praised Hamas's Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, called upon Palestinians to resist the occupation and liberate Muslim holy places such as Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa.
[15][16] He was released on 18 January 2015, after the directors of Euroscience addressed a letter of concern to the then Israeli ambassador to France, Yossi Gal, stating that in the absence of public evidence, the group considered his detention as a serious infringement of academic freedom.
[15][13] In a later interview with the journal Nature, Barghouthi stated that his problems started when he began to express his opposition to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and when he uploaded on his Facebook profile a picture of himself wearing the green scarf and hat of Hamas.
29 May[7] Just three days before his release date[18] Israeli military authorities filed charges that he was culpable of incitement[7] and argued he be moved to Ofer Prison.
His release order was cancelled[7] and he was subsequently transferred to a facility run by the Shin Bet for further interrogation,[17] and eventually prosecuted for incitement on Facebook.
[b] He was sentenced in September to six months in prison by an Israeli military court for incitement on Facebook and fined $500 (6,000 shekels), becoming one of 150 Palestinians arrested or imprisoned for comments on that medium since October 2015.
[21] One element in the indictment listed as evidence an allegation that he had praised a member of his family connected to the Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing two decades earlier.
[21] On 10 August he made public a letter requesting either his release or conditions of detention that would enable him to teach online and continue to supervise his graduate students in the academic year beginning September.
According to Scientists for Palestine, Barghouti's colleagues and family are gravely concerned about his health, citing widespread reports of increasingly brutal conditions for Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
[13] Barghouthi's most recent arrest has been interpreted as part of a wider pattern, with the administrative detention of American Palestinian academic Ubai Aboudi, executive director of the Bisan Center for Research and Development in late 2019, and the arrest of Suhail Khoury and Rania Eliaa, a couple who direct classical music cultural associations in East Jerusalem[21][25] and of writer Ahmad Qatamesh.