“They don’t care about the Palestinians, they have no appreciation for life,” said Mosab Hassan Yousef in an interview with the US television channel Fox News. He continues: “Hamas is not a national movement. Hamas is a religious movement that aims to establish an Islamic state. As I understand it, they are just using the Palestinian cause to achieve their goals.”
Son of Hamas co-founder: “It sounds terrible, but I see no other option”
Yousef is convinced that the terrorist organization Hamas is not solely responsible for the attack on Israel around two weeks ago. “Iran is the real mastermind in this picture. Hamas does not serve the Palestinian people, Hamas serves Iran. “These are the leaders of Hamas,” the now 45-year-old told Fox News.
Yousef went on to say that Israel should consider using gas after evacuating civilians in Gaza. “It sounds terrible, but I see no other option. The tunnels are connected and gas could be one of the solutions. But it has to happen at the right time. We can’t just invade Gaza. There is no modern army prepared for this kind of war. And most importantly, we take civilians out of the game. As long as there are civilians there, the operation could be incomplete,” he said.
“And that’s when I decided that I couldn’t be associated with this movement.”
Yousef was born in 1978 as the son of the later founder of the radical Islamic Hamas, Sheikh Hassan Yousef. “I was born in the heart of Hamas,” he says about himself. He grew up in Ramallah and was arrested for the first time at the age of ten for throwing stones at Israeli settlers. At the age of 18, as a student at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, he was considered a radical Hamas activist. When Israeli soldiers found a pistol on him during a search, he ended up in Moskjobiyeh prison, known as the “slaughterhouse,” in northern Jerusalem.
“I witnessed their violence firsthand in 1996 when I was in Meggido prison for a year and a half,” Yousef told Fox News. “At that time, they killed so many Palestinians, and that’s when I decided that I couldn’t be associated with this movement.” Under torture, he agreed to switch sides in prison.
After almost a year and a half in prison, he then became active for the Israeli domestic secret service Shin Bet and regularly revealed important Hamas internal affairs. In 2002 he even helped put his own father in prison. But after his most important Israeli confidant, Gonen Ben-Itzhak, was withdrawn from the secret service, Mosab fled to the United States under a medical pretext, where he applied for political asylum and published the 2010 book “Son of Hamas. My Life as a Terrorist” was published. Since then he has been giving public lectures and talking about his past with the terrorist organization.
