Mosab Hassan Yousef, also known as the “Green Prince,” the son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, has joined Israel’s public diplomacy campaign amid Israel’s war against the terrorist group. Yousef, who rejected terrorism and set to work fighting it, arrived in Israel and visited the areas of the October 7 massacre in the western Negev.
Referring to the Hamas Charter calling for the genocide of the Jews, he said: “The people who wrote the Hamas Pact are a bunch of crazy people,” adding: “The Arab world must pay attention to the dangers present there.” . Hamas, he said, “doesn’t care about people. In fact, they sacrifice the lives of children and non-combatants to achieve cheap political goals. The concept of jihad must be stopped, and it must be stopped now.”
Yousef has strongly criticized any negotiations with Hamas and since October 7 has called on Israel to destroy the terrorist group.
Yousef, 45, was born in Ramallah and became involved in Hamas activities as a youth. He was considered a possible successor to his father within the terrorist organization. But while in Israel’s Megiddo prison, in his early adulthood, Yousef began to question Hamas’s ideology and tactics and became disillusioned with the organization. He accepted an offer from the Israeli Security Agency to become an informant on the condition that Israel attempt to arrest, not kill, its intelligence targets. As the son of Sheikh Yousef, he was aware of many Hamas plans. For about a decade, the intelligence he provided to the ISA foiled numerous suicide bombings and assassination attempts and exposed terrorist cells. Within the ISA, he was nicknamed “The Green Prince”.
In 2010, Yousef published his autobiography, “Son of Hamas.” He converted to Christianity and currently lives in the United States. Sheikh Yousef has been in and out of Israeli prisons for years. Israel arrested him in Ramallah on October 19 during a crackdown on Hamas following the October 7 attacks. In November, Mosab Hassan Yousef called on Israel to set a deadline for Hamas to release the remaining 136 Israeli hostages and to kill his father and other Hamas leaders if they did not do so.
“Hamas must be given a period of time – one month, two or six months – to return the hostages, and if it does not return the hostages within the allotted time, Israel must execute the main Hamas leaders in prison, especially mass murderers,” Yousef said in a video message posted online. “When I talk about executing Hamas’s top leaders, I don’t mean an exception. This includes my own father, co-founder of the Hamas movement. In this war, there are no exceptions,” Yousef added. “I made a mistake 10 or 15 years ago when I saved his life several times… He was supposed to die for his actions. I saved his life. Things have not changed, they have gotten worse,” he added.
He warned that Hamas was intentionally dragging out negotiations to extend the ceasefire with Israel: “Hamas is not going anywhere, and if we continue to negotiate with them, they will continue to drag out these negotiations, dragging us into a burrow that will never end. And this is their goal: to escape their crimes. We cannot allow this to happen,” he stressed.
This article is originally published on .tribunejuive.info
