Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of Hamas founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef who fled to the US in 2007 after admitting he spied for Israel for a decade. Picture: AFP
One year has passed since the Israeli-Hamas war erupted, with no sign of the conflict nearing an end. Thousands of people have lost their lives, families have been torn apart, and entire neighbourhoods are reduced to rubble.
Despite efforts to stop the fighting, the wounds are still fresh, and the possibility of peace feels far off. For many, this anniversary is a painful reminder of the devastation that war brings, and the hope for a future where both Israelis and Palestinians can live in safety and dignity remains as crucial as ever.
Mosab Hassan Yousef is the eldest son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, one of the seven founding members of Hamas, who later became one of the top informants of the Israeli security agency, better known as the Shin Bet.
Since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas on 7 October 2023, Mosab has granted several interviews in which he provides an insider’s perspective on the conflict and ideology behind Hamas.
His book Son of Hamas, in which he tells about his life as a child and young adult in Ramallah in the West Bank and the long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, was published in 2010 after he fled to America in 2007. He now lives in exile in California.
In the documentary The Green Prince, which followed the book, Mosab and Gonen Ben Itzhak, his handler in the Shin Bet, tell about his espionage work for the Israelis.
Mosab writes that peace in the Middle East has been something that diplomats, prime ministers and presidents have been striving for for more than 50 years.
Every new face that appears on the world stage thinks he/she will be the one to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. And each one fails just as miserably as the last.”
The fact is that few Westerners understand the complexity of the Middle East and its people, he says. “I understand it from a very unique perspective. You see, I am a son of that area and that conflict. I am a child of Islam and the son of a man accused of terrorism. I am also a follower of Jesus.”
He says that before the age of 21 he saw things that no human being should ever see: great poverty, abuse of power, torture and death.
“I have been behind the scenes to see the actions of Middle Eastern leaders who make headlines worldwide. I was trusted at the highest levels of Hamas and participated in the first intifada (the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip which started in 1987).
“Detained in Israel’s most feared prison, I have made choices for which the people I love consider me a traitor. My unlikely journey has taken me through dark places and given me access to extraordinary secrets.”
Mosab was 10 years old when the first intifada broke out. “In 1986, a secret and historic meeting was held in Hebron, south of Bethlehem. My father was there. The seven men who attended the meeting were ready to fight. They decided to start with simple civil disobedience such as to throw stones and burn tyres. Their goal was to unite and mobilise the Palestinians and make them understand the importance of independence under the banner of Allah and Islam,” he writes.
“Hamas was born that night.” He says that every day more corpses arrived at the cemetery near their home. “Anger went hand in hand with grief. Palestinian groups began throwing stones at the Jews who had to drive past the cemetery to the nearby Israeli settlement. Heavily armed Israeli settlers shot Palestinians at will.
“When the Israeli army (IDF) entered the West Bank, there was more shooting, more wounded and more people died.” There was so much violence that I got bored in the rare times it was quiet, he writes.
“My friends and I also started throwing stones to command respect as fighters in the uprising. Since Israel controlled the border posts, it was practically impossible to get hold of weapons. I don’t remember that at this time I ever saw a Palestinian with a gun. The weapons were stones and ‘Molotov cocktails.’
A “Molotov cocktail” is an incendiary bomb, typically a bottle filled with a flammable liquid and a wick that is lit before being thrown.
During this time Sheikh Hassan was arrested several times by the IDF. As the family fell into poverty without his income, it took months before they found out where he was being held.
“We later found out he was in Maskobiyeh, an Israeli interrogation centre where he was tortured and interrogated.
“The Shin Bet knew he was part of Hamas’s leadership and assumed he knew everything that was being planned. They were determined to get it out of him.”
Sheikh Hassan ended up serving 24 years in Israeli prisons and was also deported to Lebanon during that time before being released for the last time in 2023.
“On 13 April 1994, a horrific threshold was crossed when Amar Salah Diab (22) detonated the first suicide bomb on a bus in Tel Aviv. After two failed attempts, the Hamas bombmaker JahJa Ajash was successful, and he also had his friends begin learning to make bombs. Ajash was ultimately responsible for the deaths of 39 people in five more attacks and the transition of Hamas to a full-fledged terrorist organisation was complete.”
According to Mosab, moderate political leaders like his father did not want to tell the militants that they were wrong. “They couldn’t; on what basis could they declare that they were wrong? The militants had the full power of the Koran to support them. Even though my father never killed anyone himself, he did not condemn the attacks.”
He says that many painful years would pass before the Shin Bet began to understand that Hamas is not an organisation with rules and a hierarchy. “It’s a ghost, an idea. You cannot destroy an idea. You can only stimulate it. Hamas was like a flatworm. Cut off its head and a new one grows.”
Filled with rage and a desire to take revenge for everything that happened around him, at 18, Mosab devised a plan to acquire weapons. However, the IDF intercepted a call about it. He was arrested and sent to Maskobiyeh.
Here he was questioned about his connection with Hamas and how the organisation intersects. He was held alone in a cell for weeks before his interrogator made him an offer to work for the Shin Bet. Mosab agreed to the initial plan to become a double agent, after which he was transferred to Megiddo prison.
“I was sitting on my bed one day when someone came in and shouted that we had to evacuate the tent. The tent was empty in seconds. A man was taken into the tent and it was closed. I didn’t know what was going on there, but I have never heard a person scream like that. I wondered what he had done to deserve it. The torture lasted for half an hour before the man was taken to another tent where he was questioned further.”
Another prisoner told Mosab that the man gave information about Hamas to the Israelis and that his fellow prisoners tortured him from time to time about it.
“The torture included sticking needles under his fingernails, melting plastic food containers on his skin, burning off the hair on his body and forcing him to sit on his knees for hours. He was also not allowed to sleep. Hundreds of Hamas prisoners were tortured and killed by their own people. Here I began to wonder what would happen if Hamas came to power.”
Mosab was released after 27 months, after which he became an informant for the Shin Bet. Mosab says that his culture, not his father, taught him that the Israelis and the IDF are the enemy. However, the Shin Bet treated him with respect and even paid for him to study.
“So who was the enemy now? The world I knew began to dissolve. I got to know another world that I began to understand. “Every time I met with the Shin Bet, I learnt something new, something about my life, about other people. It wasn’t brainwashing through repetition, starvation and sleep deprivation. What the Israelis taught me was more logical and more real than anything I ever heard from my own people.”
After being invited to a Bible study group, he began to study the Bible. “I have come to know a God who not only commands me to love and forgive my enemies as he has, but empowers me to do so. Forgiveness is the only solution for the Middle East.”
Mosab worked for the Shin Bet between 1997 and 2007 and, through the intelligence he gathered, during the second intifada prevented the death of many innocent people in suicide bombings and other attacks.
After he was converted to Christianity, however, he gradually realised that he would never be able to live out his faith safely if he stayed in his own country. He moved to America in 2007.
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