Hamas Prince Tortured His Own People… Until Jesus Found Him
Every time I step onto a stage, I know I might be signing my own death warrant.
Every word I speak, every truth I expose could be my last. And you know what’s most striking?
Even knowing this, I can’t stay silent because silence also kills. Silence allows the darkness to continue destroying lives.
My name is Mosab Hassan Yusf and today there are people who would give anything to see me dead.
But it wasn’t always like this. There was a time when I was practically royalty within Hamas.
Yes, you heard right. I was born into the heart of the leadership. My father Shik Hassan Yusef was one of the seven founders of Hamas in 1987.
I grew up in Ramala breathing strategy, secret and power. From childhood, I was molded to assume a leadership role in the movement.
I had privileges, automatic respect, a guaranteed future. Everything was planned for me until life showed me something that would change everything forever.
It was in Megiddo prison. 16 months that scarred my soul in a way I never imagined.
There, locked up in that place, I witnessed horrors I couldn’t even imagine. In my worst nightmares, I saw Palestinian, my own brothers, being tortured and murdered by other Palestinians, innocent men falsely accused of collaborating with Israel, being mercilessly torn apart.
The screams still echo in my memory, the mutilated bodies, the pleas for mercy that never came.
It was there, amidst all that brutality, that the blindfold fell from my eyes. The organization my father helped build, the one I was supposed to proudly lead one day, was in reality a machine of destruction devouring its own people.
And it was in that moment of profound disillusionment that I made the most dangerous decision of my life.
I needed to do something, even if it meant becoming what everyone hated most, a collaborator.
For 10 years, I lived an impossible double life. I became the Green Prince, the most valuable agent the Israeli Shinbet ever had within Hamas.
Imagine that. The founder’s son, working for the other side. My reports prevented dozens of suicide bombings.
I saved hundreds, maybe thousands of lives, both Israeli and Palestinian. I helped dismantle terrorist cells, capture dangerous leaders.
And all this time, nobody suspected a thing. Not my family, not my closest friends, nobody.
But while I was living this deadly game of espionage, something even deeper was happening inside me.
Something that not even my contacts at Shinbet knew. I was having an encounter that would change not only my mission, but my very essence.
I was discovering Jesus. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? The son of a Hamas founder raised in the most radical Islam, reading the Bible in secret.
But that’s exactly what happened. I started reading out of curiosity. Perhaps seeking to understand the enemy.
But the more I read, the more something inside me broke and rebuilt itself at the same time.
Jesus’s words were so different from everything I had learned. Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.
Forgive 70* 7. What do you mean? That went against everything I knew. But it also made more sense than anything I’d ever heard.
Keeping a Bible secret was risky enough to cost me my life. But converting to Christianity, that cost me my family.
And when I decided to make it public, when I wrote my book telling my story, it cost me my homeland, my identity, [ ] everything I knew.
My father publicly declared that I am no longer his son. My brothers cut off all contact with me.
Hamas issued a death sentence against me. Today I live far away under constant protection using a name that is not my real name.
I live like a ghost, always looking over my shoulder, never truly safe. And you know what?
I wouldn’t trade this for anything. Because in losing everything, I gained something infinitely greater.
I gained the truth. I gained a peace that doesn’t depend on circumstances. I gained a love that doesn’t need weapons to defend itself, that doesn’t need to kill to prove its power.
I gained Jesus and he gave me a reason to live that is worth every threat, every loss, every tear.
Jesus said, “The truth will set you free and I am living proof of that.”
I grew up imprisoned by hatred, by the thirst for revenge, by the logic of violence.
But Christ freed me from all of that. He freed me to love even when it would be easier to hate.
He freed me to speak the truth even when it would be safer to remain silent.
He freed me to live, to truly live. Even when my physical life is constantly threatened, they can take away my security, my family, even my life one day.
But there is something they can never take from me. The salvation I received, the encounter I had with the living God, the transformation he worked in my heart.
If God can reach the son of a Hamas founder, he can reach anyone. If he can transform a heart trained in hatred into a heart full of love, no situation is impossible for him.
My story is proof that there is no darkness so dense, hatred so deep, or heart so hardened that the light of Christ cannot penetrate.
He found me in the most unlikely place possible. And if he found me there, he can find you wherever you are.
This is my story and it continues to be written every day that I wake up and choose to follow Jesus no matter the cost.
This is my story and I need to be honest with you from the start.
It’s not an easy story to tell nor a comfortable one to hear. But it’s a story that needs to be told because it proves something many find impossible.
That the power of God can take even the son of one of the founders of Hamas and completely transform him into a messenger of peace.
Let me take you back to the moment that marked my childhood forever. I was only 10 years old when I saw my father for the first time in an Israeli prison.
I can still feel my mother’s hand holding mine tightly as we passed through the checkpoints one by one.
The metal detectors beeped. The guards searched us. The metal doors banged shut behind us with a sound that echoed through the icy corridors.
The smell of that place is etched in my memory. A strange mixture of cheap disinfectant, the sweat of dozens of nervous people, and something else I couldn’t identify at the time.
Today, I know what it was. The smell of fear ingrained in the wall. When we finally reached the living room, there he was, my father on the other side of a thick frosted glass.
Shake Hassan Yusef wearing that gray prisoner’s uniform that seemed to swallow his figure. We couldn’t touch him, only observe him through that cold barrier.
But you know what impressed me most? Even behind that glass, even in that humiliating uniform, he radiated an impressive dignity.
He smiled at me. And in that smile, there was something that deeply touched my childhood heart.
Pride. He was proud to be there, proud to suffer for the cause. And all I wanted at that moment was to grow up and be exactly like him.
I was born in Ramallah in 1978, the eldest of nine children. I grew up knowing that my father was someone special.
He was a true legend in the Palestinian territories. Not just because he was a respected leader, but because he was different.
While other leaders lived in mansions and wore expensive clothes, my father lived exactly like the people he served.
He ate what they ate, wore what they wore, prayed where they prayed. He was genuinely one of the people, and that’s why the people truly loved him.
Our house in Ramala was quite simple. Rough stone walls, perpetually cold ceramic floors, small windows that seemed to let in more desert dust than sunlight.
But this modest house was always crowded. People were constantly coming and going. People came seeking advice, venting their problem, asking for help.
My younger siblings ran from one room to another, shouting and playing. And there were those whispered conversations between adults that stopped abruptly when I entered the room.
Even as a child, I sensed there were secrets in that house. Late night meetings where they spoke quietly about things I shouldn’t hear.
Men with intense gazes would suddenly arrive and greet my father with a bow that intrigued me.
The phone would ring at odd hours and suddenly my father would disappear for days, sometimes entire weeks without any explanation.
Only much later did I understand what really went on inside that house. My father wasn’t just a preacher or community leader.
He was one of the seven men who founded Hamas. The organization was born in 1987 during the first inifada as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and my father was at the center of it helping to build the structure that would become one of the most feared organizations in the world.
But to me in those innocent years he was simply Baba, my hero, the bravest and most admirable man I knew.
Violence was as much a part of our routine as bread and tea in the morning.
I grew up seeing heavily armed Israeli soldiers patrolling our streets. The sound of military helicopters flying overhead was a constant soundtrack.
Sometimes in the middle of the night, the ground would tremble violently when they bombed a nearby building.
I learned early on to recognize the different sounds of war. I could distinguish a rifle shot from a grenade explosion, the noise of approaching tanks, the whistle of missiles before impact.
And I learned to hate. But you see, it wasn’t something I was taught directly.
No one ever sat me down and said, “Mosab, you need to hate Jews.” I didn’t need to.
The hatred was in the very air we breathe. It was in the stories the adults told around us.
In the funerals I attended of children killed in bombings. In the tears of mothers who lost their children.
In the daily humiliation at military checkpoints where soldiers treated all of us, including the elderly and children.
Like dangerous criminals simply for existing for being Palestinian. Hatred grew on its own inside me naturally like weeds that sprout without anyone planting them, taking over an abandoned plot of land.
And so my childhood was shaped between a deep love for my father and my people and an equally deep hatred for those I saw as our oppressor.
I was being prepared without even knowing it to follow in my father’s footsteps to become part of that legacy of resistance and violence.
But God had other plans for me. Plans I could never have imagined in those days in Ramla when all I wanted was to become a man like my father.
I was only 10 years old when I was arrested for the first time. It seems absurd, doesn’t it?
A 10-year-old child being detained, but that was our reality during the first inifat. That day, I was doing exactly what all the other Palestinian children did, throwing stones at a convoy of Israeli settlers.
It was our way of resisting, the only weapon we had. Suddenly, soldiers grabbed me, threw me into a military jeep, and took me to a delegation.
I spent a few hours there, scared, but trying to appear brave until they released me that same day.
After all, I was just a child. But do you know what happened when I got home?
I became a little hero in my neighborhood. The other kids looked at me with admiration.
Mosab faced the Israeli soldiers. Mosab was captured and returned. I had confronted the enemy face to face [ ] and survived to tell the tale.
That ignited something inside me, a feeling of courage mixed with pride. That was my first real contact with the Israeli system.
Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be the last, not even close. Throughout my adolescence, my father went in and out of Israeli prisons as if it were an endless cycle.
Sometimes he would be imprisoned for months. Other times, entire years would disappear. And each time they took my father away, I felt as if I were being forced to grow up faster, to mature before my time, to become a man when I should still only be a boy.
As the eldest son, heavy responsibilities fell on my shoulders. I needed to take care of my younger siblings, help my mother with difficult decision, and represent my father in certain situations when he was absent.
It was a lot of pressure for someone so young, but at the same time, I was being prepared for something much bigger than just taking care of the family.
Look, in the world of Hamas, lineage matters a lot. Being Hassan Ysef’s son gave me automatic status, almost like royalty.
I was treated with special respect, with define. People saw me as the prince of the movement, the natural heir to my father’s legacy.
Doors opened for me simply because of my last name. But all this privilege came with overwhelming pressure.
The constant pressure to meet expectations, not to disappoint, to live up to the name I carried, to continue the path that my father and the other founders had forged with so much sacrifice.
Gradually, I was introduced to the inner workings of the organization. I began to participate in meetings where strategies were discussed in hushed tone.
I overheard tense conversations about operation that could completely change the course of the conflict.
I got to know the leaders up close, the planners who orchestrated the attacks, and even some of the executives who put the plans into action.
Although I was still too young to formally be part of the Hamas structure. I was clearly being molded, prepared, trained.
I absorbed the ideology like a sponge. Their worldview became my worldview. Their way of thinking shaped my own way of thinking.
The narrative was powerful and compelling. We were the good guys in the story. We were fighting against a brutal and unjust occupation.
We were the weak people bravely resisting an infinitely more powerful enemy using the few tools we had at our disposal.
I was taught that sacrifice was noble, that dying for the cause was the greatest honor a man could have.
I was taught that any concession, any yielding of ground was an unforgivable betrayal. And for a long time, I believed all of that wholeheartedly, completely.
But there were cracks in this perfect narrative. Small fissures that were beginning to appear and that I couldn’t completely ignore no matter how hard I tried.
Like that time, I witnessed a Hamas commander brutally beating a Palestinian man accused of collaborating with Israel.
The man was on the ground pleading, swearing he was innocent, desperately shouting that he had a wife and children depending on him.
It didn’t matter. They kept beating him relentlessly until he was unconscious, bloodied on the ground.
Then, still disturbed by what I had seen. I timidly asked if they were absolutely certain of the man’s guilt.
The answer I received chilled me. We can’t take any risks, Mosab. It’s better to heir by eliminating an innocent man than to leave a true traitor alive.
Those words were etched into my mind like a branding iron. How could it be better to kill an innocent person?
How did that make sense? Or the times I heard leaders coldly discussing how to use Palestinian civilians, our own people, as human shields or purposefully placing them in dangerous situations to generate shocking images that would fuel propaganda in the international media.
They showed no real remorse if Palestinian children died in these situations as long as the images served the organization’s political objectives.
The ends always always justified the mean. Always. But I was young. And when you’re young and completely surrounded by people who believe in something with such unwavering conviction, it’s incredibly difficult to question.
It’s much easier to push your own doubts to the back of your mind. Silence them.
Pretend that discomfort doesn’t exist. It’s easier to say to yourself, “They know more than I do.
They understand the bigger picture. Who am I to question?” And that’s exactly what I did for a long time.
I swallowed my doubts and kept moving forward, being molded into what they expected me to become.
But God was preparing something completely different for my life, something that would shatter all of that into pieces.
So, as I told you, I carried on. I remained the obedient son, the faithful prince of the movement.
After all, that’s what they expected of me. That’s what I thought I should be until everything fell apart.
I was only 17 when I got involved in buying weapons for Hamas. It wasn’t anything sophisticated, you know, nothing like you see in the movies.
It was just a young guy doing a favor, transporting some rifles from one place to another.
Routine stuff. Dozens of kids my age did it every day. It was almost common place, but they caught me.
Israeli forces invaded my life like a violent summer storm. Sudden, brutal, overwhelming. Heavy boots breaking down doors in the middle of the night.
Shouts in Hebrew. I barely understood. Rough hands pushing me forcefully against the wall. Metal handcuffs biting my wrist.
And then the ride in the dark back of an armored military vehicle. My face pressed against the cold metal floor, feeling the bitter taste of fear filling my mouth.
They took me to an interrogation center, and it was there, in that windowless place, that I began my true learning about the meaning of the word fear.
They tortured me. I won’t go into graphic details because there are things that even after so many years, even now that I’m free, I simply prefer not to relive in words.
But it was brutal. It was merciless. It was meticulously planned to break me completely and they almost succeeded.
I spent three interminable months in that interrogation center before finally being transferred to Megiddo prison.
Three months in which every day, every hour was a fierce battle to maintain my sanity to avoid revealing information that could harm my father or compromise the movement’s operations.
Three months simply fighting to survive. When they told me I would be transferred to Megiddo, I felt immense relief.
[ ] I naively thought the worst was behind me. I had no idea how wrong I was.
I couldn’t possibly imagine what awaited me there. The enormous iron gates of Megiddo prison slammed shut behind me with a sound that still echoes in my nightmares.
A final definitive metallic bang like the sound of a coffin lid closing. The guards shoved me through the narrow, damp corridors that smelled of mold, urine, and accumulated despair.
I was assigned to the Hamas prisoner section. And you know what I thought? I thought it would be a relief to finally be with my own people.
I thought I would find camaraderie, brotherhood, that solidarity we were so proud of having.
That first night when I heard the screams, I knew immediately that nothing would be as I expected.
The screams always started after midnight. At first, that first night, awake in my cell, I thought they were part of some normal prison procedure.
Maybe some prisoner resisting the guards. Maybe someone having a horrible nightmare. My mind, after months of torture and sleep deprivation, tried to find rational explanations.
But on the second night, the screams returned. And on the third and on the fourth and on the fifth, always after midnight, always coming from the same hallway.
That’s when I finally understood what was happening. And what I discovered shocked me to the core.
Hamas was torturing its own people. Look, Megiddo wasn’t just an ordinary prison. It was a brutal microcosm of the entire Palestinian conflict.
Inside those cold concrete blocks surrounded by barbed wire, prisoners from Hamas, Fata, Islamic Jihad, and common criminals lived crammed together.
Each group controlled its own territory within the prison. Had its own unwritten rule, its own violent hierarchy of power.
And Hamas, as always, was completely obsessed with one thing. Finding Israeli collaborators among us.
Hamas’s internal security known as Maj had established an absolutely brutal system within those walls.
Every night, like a macab ritual, they would choose someone. Sometimes because there was real evidence, however small, of collaboration with Israel, but most of the time it was because someone had accused the person out of personal revenge, envy, [ ] or old rivalry, or simply because they needed a scapegoat, someone to torture.
And punish as an example and then the interrogation would begin. But it wasn’t interrogation.
It was pure torture. Pure savagery. And the worst part, it was Palestinians torturing Palestinians.
Brother torturing brother. All in the name of the movement’s security. I lay awake in my cell listening to those cries of agony tearing through the silence of the night.
And something inside me began to break in a different way. It wasn’t the kind of break my Israeli interrogators tried to cause.
It was something much deeper. My faith in the movement was beginning to crumble. The first time I saw what they were doing, my body reacted before my mind could process it.
I vomited. I literally doubled over and vomited against the cold wall of my cell.
While other prisoners watched me with that strange mixture of pity and contempt for my weakness, they had dragged a man to an isolated cell at the end of the corridor.
An ordinary Palestinian, probably in his early 30s, father of three young children. He had been arrested for something routine, throwing stones during a protest.
Nothing special, nothing extraordinary, just one more among thousands of Palestinian prisoner in the Israeli system.
But someone accused him of passing information to the Israeli and that sealed his fate.
The screams lasted all night. They weren’t normal scream. You know when you hear something that just doesn’t sound human, something that comes from a place deeper than physical pain.
They were screams born from a soul being literally destroyed piece by piece. The next day, when I saw his body being carried on a makeshift stretcher through the hallways, it took me a few seconds to process that it was the same person.
I couldn’t recognize him immediately. His face was so swollen, so deformed, so destroyed that it looked like a grotesque caricature of a human being.
And her hands, my god, her hands. I’ll never forget them. You could clearly see where the needles had been stuck under her fingernails.
Her fingers were broken, twisted at absolutely impossible, unnatural angles. He died 3 days later.
Officially, it was recorded as a heart attack. No one questioned that version. No one dared to question it.
And that was only the first time. During the 16 months I spent in Megiddo, 16 months that felt like an eternity, I saw hundreds of men tortured in this way.
Hundreds. And the vast majority of them didn’t die at the hands of Israeli guards.
They died at the hands of other Palestinian, their own brothers, the same men who were supposedly fighting for the liberation of our people.
There were specific methods they used, methods that were branded into my mind like a hot iron.
Images that I will never ever be able to erase from my memory, no matter how much time passes.
The needles under the fingernails were just the beginning. They also used electrical wires connected to the most sensitive parts of the human body.
They burn the skin with melted plastic because the plastic sticks to the flesh and keeps burning even after you remove the heat source.
You understand? The agony just doesn’t stop. They broke the bones methodically in a calculated way, one by one, making a deliberate pause between each break so that the victim could fully feel the pain of each fracture before moving on to the next.
And the worst part of all, they did all this in the name of the purity of the movement, in the name of security, in the name of the sacred cause for which we were all supposedly fighting.
I was Hassan Ysef’s son. That fact gave me a certain protection within that hell.
No one dared touch me directly, but they forced me to testify. They forced me to be present, to see with my own eyes, to hear with my own ears.
They wanted me to learn what happens to traitors. But what they were really doing [ ] was unintentionally showing me the true face of the movement I had admired my whole life.
They were showing me the hell we ourselves had created. There was one man in particular I will never forget.
His name was Ibraim. He was exactly my age, 17. He was thin with deep, dark eyes that always seem to be searching for something, a way out, a hope, anything to cling to.
We became friends or the closest thing to friendship that’s possible to build in a place like that where trust is a dangerous luxury.
We shared whispered stories about our families, about our dream, about everything we would do when we finally got out of there.
Ibraim wanted to be a teacher. His eyes shone when he talked about it. He wanted to teach Palestinian children to read, to write, to dream of a better future than the present we were living.
He had simple, beautiful plans full of hope. One night they took Ibraim away. Someone accused him.
He said he saw him talking in a very friendly way with an Israeli guard.
That was all. Just that vague accusation without concrete evidence, without a real investigation, just the word of another prisoner who, for reasons I never discovered, decided to point the finger at Ibraim.
[ ] When they dragged him out of the cell, his cries were different from the others I had heard.
They were cries of genuine confusion, of indignation, at the absurd injustice. I didn’t do anything.
I swear by Allah that I am innocent. I have a family waiting for me.
Please. His desperate pleas were ignored. The following morning, when they returned Ibrahim’s body to the common area as a warning to all of us, he could no longer see.
They had gouged out his eyes. Ibraim was 17 years old. He wanted to be a teacher.
And he died being tortured by his own Palestinian brothers, accused of a crime he never committed.
It was at that moment, looking at my friend’s mangled body, that something inside me died, too.
It wasn’t my humanity that paradoxically [ ] was beginning to awaken. What died was my blind loyalty to the movement, my unwavering faith in the cause, my conviction that we were on the right side of history.
That wasn’t liberation. That was simply another kind of prison, another kind of slavery. And for the first time in my life, I began to question everything I had been taught.
All the word collaborator was carved into Ibrahim’s chest with an improvised knife. His eyes had been gouged out.
[ ] He was 17 years old, the same age as me. That night, I couldn’t sleep.
I lay on my hard bed, staring at the damp, stained ceiling. And for the first time in my entire life, I asked myself a question that would change absolutely everything.
Who are my real enemies? The Israelis arrested me, tortured me, threw me in that prison.
Yes, all of that was true, but they were the declared enemy. The occupiers, that was their role in our narrative.
I expected that from them. But these men, these Palestinians who tortured their own people with a brutality that surpassed anything I had ever seen Israeli soldiers do.
These men who killed other Palestinians, who destroyed families, who created widows and orphans, who sowed absolute terror among those they swore to protect.
Who were they in the story? Who were they really? I started observing everything with different eyes.
I began listening to conversations more attentively. I started noticing patterns that I had previously simply ignored or justified.
And I discovered something devastating. The overwhelming majority of the men executed there in Megiddo were completely innocent.
They had done absolutely nothing. Many were framed by personal rivals who simply used Hamas’s security [ ] system as a convenient weapon of revenge.
Others were just cruy unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, to have been seen talking to the wrong person.
And what about the real collaborators? Those who actually passed information to Israel? They were almost never caught because they were smarter, more cautious.
They knew exactly how to manipulate the system to their advantage. Hamas wasn’t protecting [ ] the movement.
It was killing its own people based on paranoia, unfounded rumors, and internal political intrigue.
There was no real justice. There was no serious investigation. There was no concrete evidence, only fear, pure terror.
And that’s when the Shinbet agents came to me. One morning, they took me from my cell and led me to an interrogation room.
But it was different from the rooms where I had been tortured months before. It was smaller, more intimate.
It had only a simple table, two chairs, and a man sitting on the other side waiting for me.
He was Israeli, obvious. He must have been about 35 years old. He had a completely ordinary face, nothing memorable.
He was wearing civilian clothes. He wasn’t in uniform. And when he started talking, his Arabic was absolutely perfect without an accent.
Mosab, he said, [ ] and the mere fact that he used my first name like that so naturally, [ ] without titles, so informally, completely took me by surprise.
I’ve been watching you and I think you’re starting to ask the right questions. [ ] I didn’t answer.
I just stared at him trying to understand where this was going. I know what’s happening in your sector, he continued calmly.
I know what Hamas is doing to its own people, and I know you saw it all with your own eyes.
The question now is, what are you going to do with this information? I’m not going to betray my father, I replied automatically.
It was my programmed response, my instinctive protective shield. He smiled, but it wasn’t a mocking or arrogant smile.
There was something about him that seemed genuine understanding. I’m not asking you to betray your father, he said calmly.
I’m asking you to save lives. Palestinian lives, Israeli lives, all the lives that will be lost if this spiral of destruction continues.
And what do you get out of it? I asked suspiciously. Because in my world, nobody ever did anything without a completely selfish motive behind it.
Peace, he replied simply. He paused, then continued. I know it sounds naive. I know you probably don’t believe me now, but there are some of us on both sides who truly [ ] believe that this conflict can end someday.
And for that to happen, we need courageous people willing to make extremely difficult decision.
I remained silent, processing. [ ] My mind was a whirlwind of conflicting thoughts. Everything I’d been taught my whole life screamed at me to refuse, to spit in his face, to maintain my loyalty.
But then I thought of Ibraim, of his gouged out eyes, of the screams I couldn’t erase from my memory, of the hundreds of innocent men tortured and killed by their own brothers.
And something inside me began to give way. It wasn’t an instant decision. It wasn’t a dramatic moment of revelation.
It was more like a crack in a dam that slowly grows until the entire structure finally collapses.
I didn’t know it yet, but that conversation was changing the course of my life forever.
It was transforming me from a Hamas prince into the most valuable informant the Shinbet had ever had.
And in the midst of all this, God was preparing something even greater, something I could never have imagined at that moment.
Sitting in that cold room talking to an Israeli intelligence agent. [ ] He was preparing my heart for the most important encounter of my life, the encounter with Jesus Christ.
He offered me a deal. If I cooperated, if I provided information about planned terrorist activities, they would reduce my prison sentence.
They would protect me. And most importantly, they would ensure that the people captured based on my information were in prison, not killed.
We don’t execute our targets, he said, looking directly into my eyes. We arrest them.
They go to trial. They have a chance to live to see their families again someday.
He paused, then added weightily. Hamas can’t say the same about the men it executes every night here in this place.
Those words pierced something deep inside me. For three whole days, that proposal wouldn’t leave my head.
I thought about it in the morning when I woke up, during the day while trying to keep myself busy, and at night when I couldn’t sleep.
I thought of Ibraim, of his simple dreams of becoming a teacher. I thought of the hundreds of men I saw torched and killed because of false accusation without trial, without defense, without anything.
I thought of the shattered families, of the children who would grow up orphan, of the mothers who would eternally mourn innocent children who would never return home.
And I thought about my father. I imagined his face, the utter disappointment and pain [ ] if he ever found out what I was considering doing.
But I also thought about something he himself taught me from a young age.
That justice is the foundation of everything. That without true justice, [ ] there is no real honor.
That a true leader protects his people. He doesn’t sacrifice them in the name of paranoia and power.
And what I was seeing there in Megiddo was not justice at all. It was pure brutality disguised as security.
It was terror masked as protection. On the fourth night, I finally made my decision.
When they called me back into that room, when they sat me down again in front of that Shinbet agent, I said just two words that would completely change the course of my life.
He is well. I agreed to become an informant. I agreed to collaborate with those I had always been taught to consider my absolute enemy.
I agreed to cross that invisible but definitive line between loyalty and betrayal. But in my mind, there was another narrative unfolding.
A story I told myself that allowed me to keep breathing, to keep existing with that decision.
I wasn’t betraying my people. I was saving them from themselves. I was preventing more Ibrahims from dying unjustly.
I was becoming exactly what I hated most, a collaborator. But I was also becoming something more, something that didn’t yet have a name, something I would only fully understand years later.
I was becoming the green prince and my true education was only just beginning. I was released from Megiddo prison in 1997 after 16 months.
It felt like 16 whole years. I was 19 years old chronologically, but I felt like I was 50.
I had aged decades in [ ] that cursed place. I saw things that no human being should ever witness.
And I made a decision that would change the destiny of thousands of people, Palestinians and Israeli.
When I finally passed through those enormous metal gates and stepped out into the bright Palestinian sunlight, my whole family was there waiting.
My mother cried nonstop, hugging me as if I were about to disappear again. My younger siblings ran and jumped on me, all talking at once.
And my father, who had been released just a few weeks before, placed his heavy hand on my shoulder with that look of pride that literally broke my heart into pieces.
“You did very well, my son,” he said. His voice choked with emotion. “You are strong, strong as a Yousef should be.
If only he knew.” The first few months after my release were extremely strange. I desperately tried to reintegrate into normal life, into family routine, into social gatherings with Hamas leaders who came to our house specifically to congratulate me for having survived Israeli imprisonment without giving in.
And all this time, I carried a secret that weighed on me like a giant slab of concrete, an overwhelming weight that was always there, no matter what I did.
I was a collaborator, an informant, a traitor in the eyes of my people. But it was also something more.
He was now an active agent of the Shinbet, actively working from within Hamas.
My main contact identified himself only as Captain Loey. Obviously, that wasn’t his real name, just an alias, a fabricated identity to protect him from possible reprisal if he were discovered.
And so began the most dangerous and surreal phase of my life, living a constant lie, one foot in each world.
Son of the founder of Hamas by day, Israeli informant by night. Little did I know that God was using even that impossible situation to prepare me for something infinitely greater.
Our meetings always took place in carefully chosen secret locations. Anonymous safe houses, vehicles moving along the roads, offices disguised behind the facades of legitimate businesses, always changing, never in the same place twice in a row.
At first, they only asked for basic information. Names of people present at certain meetings, general descriptions of conversation, details about Hamas’s organizational structure.
Nothing that seemed extremely dangerous. Nothing that sounded like direct and serious betrayal. But gradually, like water rising slowly, the demands became increasingly specific, more important, more lethal.
We need to know who is planning the next suicide attack. We need to locate Ibraim Huhammed urgently.
We need exact details about the meeting scheduled for next Thursday. And I provided everything.
Every piece of information I could get, I passed on because with every hesitation, every moment I felt the crushing weight of what I was doing, I mentally returned to Megiddo.
I remembered the screams that still echoed in my memory. I remembered Ibraim with his [ ] eyes gouged out and that word etched on his chest.
I remembered the hundreds of innocent men brutally executed by their own people. And I kept repeating to myself like a mantra.
I’m saving lives. I’m doing the right thing. But was it really? Shinbet gave me an official code name.
Green prince. Green because of the color of the Hamas flag. Prince [ ] because I was the son of one of the seven founders of the organization.
It was a name I carried with completely contradictory feelings. A strange mixture of pride and deep shame.
Pride in being considered so valuable to Israeli intelligence. Shame for what exactly that value represented.
[ ] My privileged position within Hamas gave me access to absolutely incredible information. As Hassan Ysef’s eldest son, I automatically participated in very highlevel meeting.
I could overhear conversations about strategic planning that were kept in absolute secrecy even from most ordinary members, details about future operations, discussions about targets, identification of who would be the next suicide bomber, where and when they would attack, and I passed absolutely everything on to Shinbet.
For 10 whole years, I lived this impossible, divided life. 10 years of constant lies every [ ] day, all the time.
10 years of perpetual acting. 10 years literally dividing my mind into two completely separate compartment because it was the only way to function without completely losing my mind.
By day, I was Mossab Ysef, the loyal son, the heir to the great legacy, [ ] the prince of Hamas.
I faithfully attended mosque. I participated in all important meetings. I helped organize protests and demonstrations.
I perfectly fulfilled all the expectations that my powerful surname demanded of me. At night, in the shadows, I transformed into the Green Prince, the most valuable informant the Shinbet had ever had infiltrated the Hamas structure in its entire history.
I relayed critical information that prevented deadly attacks. I saved lives on both sides. >> [ ] >> I exposed entire terrorist cells.
The numbers are truly impressive. Although it’s difficult for me to talk about them even now, so many years later, without feeling that characteristic knot in my stomach.
According to official Shinbet records, the information I provided during those 10 years helped prevent dozens of suicide bombings, dozens of planned operations that would have easily killed hundreds, perhaps even thousands of innocent Israeli civilians, people on buses, in markets, in cafes, living their normal lives.
I also contributed directly to the arrest of some of Hamas’s most dangerous leaders, such as Ibrahim Hamemed, the Hamas military commander in the West Bank, a man personally responsible for coordinating multiple devastating attacks, training suicide bombers, and planning complex operation that left dozens dead and maimed.
[ ] We tracked Ibrahim Hamemed for months on end. I used all my privileged access to discover his movement, his secret hiding places, his communication pattern.
Every detail I could uncover, I passed on. When he was finally captured, he was completely bewildered.
How had they managed to find him? Who had leaked such precise information about his location?
No one ever suspected Hassan Yusef’s son. I also helped in the arrest of Marwan Barguti, one of the most prominent figures of the second inifada.
And I even prevented a planned assassination attempt against Shyon Paris, who years later would become president of Israel.
I was saving lives. That was undeniable. Both Israeli and Palestinian lives because every attack I helped prevent also averted the inevitable violent retaliation that would have followed, killing innocent Palestinian civilians.
But the weight of living that lie, that constant betrayal against everything I had been taught, against my own family, was something that slowly consumed me from the inside day after day.
And yet, in the midst of all that darkness, all that duplicity, God was working, preparing my heart for something I could never have imagined, he was preparing me to find the true truth.
Each successful operation was simultaneously a victory and a heavy burden on my chest because I knew I knew perfectly well that each person arrested thanks to the information I provided meant that I had betrayed someone’s trust that I had used my privileged position, my respected surname to destroy the lives of people who genuinely considered me one of their own.
There were nights when I simply couldn’t sleep. I would lie in the dark, staring at the ceiling of my room, listening to my younger siblings snoring peacefully around me, and I constantly wondered, “Who was I really?
Was he a hero saving innocent lives, or was he a cowardly traitor handing his own people over to the enemy?”
The answer depended entirely on who you asked. My father never suspected a thing. And that was both an immense relief and a constant agony.
Seeing him every day, hearing him speak passionately about loyalty, about sacrifice, about the supreme importance of standing firm against the enemy.
It was like receiving repeated stabs to the heart. There were times, several of them, when I was on the verge of confessing everything to him.
Times when the crushing weight of that secret was so unbearable that I literally felt like I was suffocating, that I couldn’t breathe anymore.
But then I remembered what would happen if I actually did it. Not only would they brutally and publicly kill me, but they would probably execute my entire family as well for the unforgivable shame of having created a collaborator.
So I continued I continued lying every day. I continued living that completely fragmented, divided, impossible life.
But something else was happening inside me simultaneously. Something that not even Shinbet knew about.
Something that would change everything in a much deeper and more permanent way than any intelligence operation ever could.
I was starting to ask questions about God. Look, I grew up completely immersed in Islam.
It was absolutely all I knew. The five obligatory daily prayers, the strict fasting of Ramadan, the teachings of the Quran memorized since childhood, total and unconditional submission to Allah.
All of this formed the complete basis of my identity. It was the unshakable foundation of my world view.
But after Megiddo, after seeing with my own eyes what supposedly pious and devout men did to each other in the name of Allah, I began to seriously doubt.
Is this really what God wants? Torture, murder of innocence, absolute terror? I sought answers from respected religious leaders, but the explanations I received never truly satisfied me.
They spoke of context, of the greater struggle, of how temporary suffering was absolutely necessary for the glorious final triumph of the cause.
They cited specific verses from the Quran that supposedly justified violence against infidels, against collaborators, against anyone who dared to oppose the sacred cause.
But something deep inside me rebelled violently against these explanations. Something screamed that this was wrong, fundamentally wrong.
And then in 1999, something seemingly small happened that would initiate the most profound and radical transformation of my entire life.
I was in Jerusalem in the old city, strolling leisurely through the narrow ancient streets that smelled of exotic spices mingled with the weight of centuries of history.
Suddenly, a man approached me. [ ] He was clearly a tourist, British, judging by his strong accent when he spoke.
He had a genuinely kind smile and eyes that seemed to see beyond the masks we all constantly wore.
“Excuse me,” he said in broken but determined Arabic. “Would you happen to know where there is a Christian church nearby?”
I gave him the basic instruction. He should have stopped there. That’s all, but he kept talking.
“Have you ever read the Bible?” He asked [ ] suddenly, casually. The question caught me completely off guard.
“No,” I replied almost automatically. I am Muslim. I know, he said, maintaining that same warm smile.
But have you read what Jesus taught about loving your enemies? About forgiving people who hurt you?
About turning the other cheek when someone strikes you? Something in his words struck me like an electric shock.
Loving your enemies was such a completely foreign concept, so radically opposed to absolutely everything I knew and had been taught my whole life, that it almost seemed ridiculous.
“Why would I love my enemies?” I asked, not with hostility or sarcasm, but with genuine curiosity.
Because it really didn’t make any sense to me. He looked me in the eyes with quiet seriousness and replied simply, “Because it’s the only way to break the cycle.”
“What cycle?” I asked, increasingly intrigued. “The cycle of hatred, revenge, and violence. You hurt me, so I hurt you back.
You kill someone I love, so I kill someone you love.” And it goes on forever, generation after generation, without end.
Someone needs to have the courage to stop. Someone needs to love when it would be easier to hate.
His words kept echoing in my head for days, weeks, months, to love when it would be easier to hate.
This idea fascinated and disturbed me at the same time because part of me recognized the profound truth in it.
The cycle he described was exactly what I saw happening around me every day. Attacks and counterattacks.
Revenge be getting more revenge. Violence feeding more violence. An endless cycle of blood and tears.
But another part of me strongly resisted because accepting that idea would mean questioning everything.
Absolutely everything. Even so, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And slowly, almost without realizing it, I started looking for a Bible.
He replied with profound simplicity, “Hate breeds more hate. Violence fuels more violence. But love, true love, can transform.”
Absolutely everything. We talked for almost an hour right there, standing on that old street in Jerusalem.
Before leaving, he invited me to a lecture he was giving that same evening about Christianity.
Out of pure curiosity, or perhaps something more that I didn’t yet understand, [ ] I went and I heard things I had never ever heard before in my life.
I heard about a God who loved the world so much, all of humanity so much that he sent his own son to die and not to die for friends, but for enemies, for sinners, for people who rejected him.
I heard about completely unconditional forgiveness, about grace that is not earned through merit or good works, but simply received as an undeserved gift.
I heard about a kingdom that is not established with swords, bombs, or military power, but with sacrificial love.
Everything was so radically different from anything I knew. That night, when I finally got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I had heard.
The words kept echoing in my mind, refusing to leave me alone. And for the first time in my entire life, I felt a curiosity that wasn’t related to military strategy, survival, or politics.
It was something completely different. I felt a genuine spiritual thirst. I bought a Bible.
Don’t ask me how risky, dangerous, and potentially fatal that was. If anyone found out, if my father found that book, if any Hamas leader knew, but I bought it anyway, and I started reading.
At first, only absolute secrecy. A few minutes each night after everyone else was fast asleep.
He would read by the dim light of a flashlight under the covers, hidden like a child reading a forbidden book.
And what I read deeply fascinated me. It challenged me. It disturbed me. And [ ] strangely, it comforted me as well.
Jesus’s words in the sermon on the mount were completely different from anything I had ever heard or read before.
Blessed are the peacemakers. Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to them the other also.
In Islam, I had learned from a young age to be strong, to resist firmly, to never give ground to the enemy, to defend oneself, to fight back, to avenge injustices.
But there was a man here, Jesus, speaking of a completely different kind of strength.
The strength of gentleness, the strength of radical forgiveness, the strength of sacrificial love that seeks no reward.
And something [ ] deep within my heart reacted to those words like a completely withered flower finally reacts to rain after a long drought.
I started attending secret classes about Christianity. They were clandestine meetings obvious. I met people who patiently taught me who answered my thousands of questions who guided me on this spiritual journey that I didn’t even fully understand yet.
And all this time I remained the green prince. [ ] I continued providing critical information to the Shinbet.
I continued saving lives through the intelligence I passed on. I continued betraying my people to try and save them from themselves.
But now there was a third layer to this absurdly fragmented life. I was no longer just Moab and [ ] the Green Prince simultaneously.
I too was becoming something completely new, something that didn’t even have a defined name yet.
I was becoming a follower of Jesus. And this transformation would be infinitely more dangerous than any intelligence operation I had ever carried out in my entire career as an informant.
For six whole years, I lived in a spiritual limbo that I simply cannot fully describe with adequate words.
Imagine yourself with one foot firmly planted on a boat and the other foot still on the dock and the [ ] distance between them progressively increasing more and more until you are completely stretched out about to fall into the water.
That was me trapped between two utterly incompatible world belonging entirely to neither. During the day I was still a Muslim in everyone’s eyes.
He [ ] prayed the five obligatory daily prayers, although he felt less and less real conviction in the words he recited mechanically.
He fasted during Ramadan because not doing so would raise immediate and dangerous suspicion. I used to attend the mosque faithfully alongside my father.
I listened to the fiery sermons about jihad, about sacrifice for the cause, about holy war against the infidels, and I nodded in agreement at the appropriate moments.
Keeping my mask perfectly in place. But at night, alone in my room, I would read the Bible in secret.
I would pray to Jesus silently. I felt my heart being slowly transformed by something I could barely understand.
I was becoming a Christian. And in my world, that was worse than being an Israeli collaborator.
Much worse. Because collaboration could be motivated by money, by pressure, by fear. But conversion that was apostasy, spiritual betrayal, unforgivable.
And the punishment for apostasy in Islam is absolutely clear. Death. But at night when everyone was asleep, I would open that hidden Bible and read about Jesus.
And something extraordinary was happening inside me. It wasn’t just intellectual knowledge. It was a profound transformation of the heart.
The more I read about Jesus, the more I saw the stark difference between what he taught and everything I had experienced.
Jesus did not come to conquer by the sword. He came to serve and give his life.
He did not come to destroy enemies. He came to transform them into children of God through love.
And for the first time in my life, I saw [ ] a path that truly led to peace.
Not the peace that would come after defeating all enemies, but a true peace that began in the heart of each person.
I remember the exact day everything changed forever. I was reading the Gospel of John 8:32, “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Those words exploded inside me like a bomb, but not of destruction, rather of liberation.
I had spent years believing I was fighting for the freedom of my people. But I myself was imprisoned.
Imprisoned by hatred, imprisoned by revenge, imprisoned by an ideology that promised freedom through violence, but in reality only generated more slavery, [ ] more death, more suffering.
And there was Jesus offering something completely different. True freedom. Not through conquering my enemies, but through loving them.
Not through killing for a cause, but through living for Christ. At that moment, alone in my room, I fell to my knees and cried like I had never cried before.
I cried for Ibraim and for all the innocent victims I saw die. I cried for the lives I helped destroy, even if it was to save others.
I cried for the unbearable weight of all the lies, of all the duplicity. And for the first time, I prayed to Jesus.
I didn’t recite memorized words. I simply spoke from the heart. Jesus, I don’t know if I am worthy of you.
I have blood on my hands. I have lied, betrayed, lived a false life. But if you are real, if you can truly set me free, I need you.
I surrender to you. And you know what happened? Nothing dramatic outwardly. There were no lightning flashes or voices from heaven.
But internally, something fundamental changed. I felt an immense weight being lifted from my shoulders.
I felt for the first time in years, perhaps in my entire life, a genuine peace filling my heart.
That was the night I was truly born again. But accepting Jesus secretly was one thing.
Living that faith openly would be something entirely. For several more years, I continued living that double, now [ ] triple life.
But more and more, I knew I couldn’t go on like that forever. Jesus taught me about truth, about integrity, about living in the light.
And I was living in the shadow. In 2007, I made the hardest decision of my life, harder even than becoming an informant.
I decided to leave everything behind and follow Jesus openly, no matter the cost. I stopped providing information to Shienb.
They were shocked. They tried to convince me to continue. But I explained that my life had changed, that I had found something bigger than any intelligence operation.
And then came the most painful part of all. I had to tell my father.
I remember that day like it was yesterday. We sat together, just the two of us.
And with a broken heart, I told him, “Baba, I’ve become a follower of Jesus Christ.
I can’t live lying anymore. You deserve to know the truth.” The silence that followed was deafening.
I watched my father, that strong man, that respected leader, collapse before my eyes. Tears streamed down his face, not of anger, but of profound grief.
“You are my firstborn,” he said, his voice breaking. “How could you do this? [ ] How could you abandon everything, your family, your faith, your people?
I am not abandoning my love for our people, Baba,” I replied, also weeping, “I am following the truth I have found, and this truth teaches me to love even more, not with hatred and violence, but with the love of Christ.”
He looked at me for a long moment and then said the words that completely shattered me.
You are no longer my son. From that day forward, I was disowned. My family cut off contact with me.
Hamas issued a death sentence. I lost my homeland, my identity, everything I knew. I had to flee.
Today, I live in another country under constant protection with a different [ ] name. I can’t visit my mother.
I can’t hug my siblings. I live knowing that there are people who would give anything to see me dead.
But you know what? I’ve never felt freer in my life because Jesus truly set me free.
He freed me from the hatred that consumed my soul. He freed me from the endless cycle of revenge and violence.
He freed me from the darkness that I thought was light. Today, when I tell my story around the world, I don’t do it to attack anyone.
I do it to [ ] testify to the transformative power of Christ. To show that there is no person so lost, no heart so hardened, no darkness so deep that the love of Jesus cannot reach them.
If God can transform the son of a Hamas founder into a messenger of peace and love, he can transform anyone.
If he can take someone trained from childhood to hate and teach them to love, nothing is impossible for him.
I paid a high price for following Jesus. I lost my family, my homeland, my safety.
I live constantly under threat. But I gained something infinitely more valuable. I gained eternal life.
I gained true peace. I gained real purpose. I gained Jesus. And he is more than enough.
Jesus said, “What [ ] good is it for someone to gain the whole world yet forfeit their soul?
I could have kept everything, my position, my family, my secure future within Hamas, but I would have lost my soul in the process.
Instead, I chose Jesus, and he gave me abundant life even in the midst of the most difficult circumstances.
Today, my message is simple. There is hope. No matter how deep in darkness you are, no matter how much hatred you have in your heart, no matter how many mistakes you have made, Jesus can reach you.
Jesus can transform you. Jesus can set you free. He found me in the midst of terrorism, lies, and violent, and he completely transformed me.
If he did it for me, he can do it for [ ] you, too. The truth truly sets you free.
And that truth has a name, Jesus [ ] Christ. This is my story. From the son of a Hamas founder to a follower of Christ.
From the darkness of hatred to the light of love. From the prison of violence to [ ] the freedom of grace.
And I wouldn’t trade that freedom for anything
