My father sentences me to death.
This man’s name is Mosab Hassan Yousef.
He’s the son of one of the founders of Hamas, a group recognized as a terrorist organization across the civilized world because of its bloody attacks on Israel.
From childhood, everyone had high expectations for Mosab.
to follow one path, to become his father’s successor, the next face of the movement.
But something happened that no one could have imagined.
He turned away from the ideology he grew up in.
He left Islam and became a Christian.
And then he did something Hamas sees as worse than death.
He switched sides and began helping Israel.
Hamas is a terrorist organization.
For years, he lived a double life, the son of a Hamas legend and at the same time a Shin Bet agent, Israel’s most valuable spy inside the heart of the organization.
He passed intelligence, stopped attacks, and saved thousands of lives, fully aware that one mistake meant execution, no trial, no mercy.
Today, he lives in the United States under a different last name.
He wrote books >> >> and for the first time, he openly told the world what really happened.
Why did the son of Hamas grow to hate the movement he was born into? What pushed him to secretly work for Israeli intelligence? >> >> And the biggest question, how did he survive when even his own father turned
away from him? This story isn’t just a confession, it’s the testimony of a man who walked through hell and chose a side where he had no one.
Mosab Hassan Yousef was born in Ramallah, a place where every stone is tied to politics, religion, and a never-ending conflict.
His family wasn’t just religious, they were known as one of the most devout families on the entire West Bank.
>> >> His grandfather was a respected Imam, a spiritual leader people traveled from nearby towns and villages to seek advice from.
And his father, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, was already known as a young preacher studying Sharia and teaching Islam at the local mosque.
In a family like that, religious rules mattered more than any government law.
The adult world wasn’t shaped by politics or street life.
The first and last word was always Islam, its rules, and its discipline.
Mosab was the oldest son in a big family, six kids, all younger brothers and sisters he was expected to look after.
As the firstborn, he felt not just love, >> >> but the weight of expectations.
One day, he was supposed to follow his father’s spiritual path.
But by the late 1980s, everything changed.
Sheikh Hassan Yousef’s work with the Muslim Brotherhood, the movement that later gave birth to Hamas, took more and more of his time.
He was barely home.
The organization was growing fast, gaining influence, and in 1986, he became one of the seven founders of the new movement.
Hamas, created to unite Palestinians in the fight for statehood and independence.
For Mosab, this meant one thing, his father was becoming a legend, but disappearing from the family.
And with him, stability vanished, too.
In his book, Son of Hamas, Mosab describes his childhood as a chain of hard years.
His father was constantly being arrested and taken to Israeli prisons, >> >> and the boy was left to grow up almost on his own.
His mother carried the entire family by herself.
Money was so tight that sometimes they didn’t even have bread at home.
Relatives and neighbors who respected his father as a religious leader weren’t in a hurry to help.
On the contrary, the higher his father’s status, the more was expected from the boy.
>> >> He had to go to the mosque every day.
But it wasn’t a peaceful place for him.
According to Mosab, he faced harsh discipline and even physical punishment, and often because he was the Sheikh’s son.
Nothing he did was ever good enough.
The smallest mistake meant punishment.
For most kids, the mosque was a place of spirituality.
For him, it was a place of fear and pressure he could never live up to.
Meanwhile, life at home kept getting harder.
To feed six children, his mother started baking baklava.
Mosab walked around the city selling sweets, a teenager with a tray in his hands trying to help his family survive.
He remembers times when they were so poor, they didn’t know how to feed the youngest kids.
And all of this was happening while his father’s influence kept growing, a man admired by thousands who still couldn’t protect his own family from poverty.
When Sheikh Hassan Yousef returned from one of his prison terms, things at home became a little calmer.
For the first time in a long while, the children finally felt their father’s presence, a man who for years had lived between prayers, secret meetings, and Israeli jail cells.
But life under Israeli occupation was still harsh.
Tensions on the West Bank were rising, the first Intifada was beginning, and teenagers like Mosab grew up surrounded by conflict, anger, and the constant expectation of violence.
He later admitted he sincerely supported Hamas back then.
He wanted to be a fighter, just like every teenager in Ramallah was expected to.
At 10 years old, he was arrested for the first time for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, a kind of coming-of-age ritual in those neighborhoods.
As the oldest son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, everyone saw him as the future successor, the boy who would one day continue his father’s mission.
But the older he got, the harder it became to ignore reality.
Hamas, the movement he once saw as the voice of Palestinian hope, was sinking deeper into hatred, radicalism, and the idea of violence at any cost.
Mosab saw bombings, suicide attacks, and innocent people dying.
And when he became an adult, he simply couldn’t accept that path anymore.
By the mid-1990s, Mosab was in his early 20s.
He was still the son of one of Hamas’s leaders, a young man raised to believe his duty was to fight, resist, and become part of the great mission of liberating Palestine.
But this was the moment when everything in his life flipped forever.
In 1996, he was arrested by Israeli forces.
It wasn’t his first arrest, but this one became the breaking point.
He was sent to Megiddo prison, a place where hundreds of Palestinian inmates lived side by side, watched closely with every step, every word, every move.
And there, he came face to face with a reality he had never seen before.
Megiddo wasn’t just a prison.
For many, it was pure hell, but not because of the Israeli guards, the hell was created by Hamas inmates themselves.
Inside the prison, there was an unwritten order, hunt down traitors, hunt down anyone suspected of cooperating with Israel.
The manhunt for collaborators lasted a full year.
Hundreds were accused.
Hundreds were tortured.
Some died within days, others were tortured for months.
Mosab saw it all with his own eyes.
He remembered the screams of men who had done nothing.
Their only crime was suspicion.
“I’ll never forget their screams,” he later said, “and I’ll never forget the people who did this to them.
” These torture sessions weren’t done by Israelis.
They were done by Hamas members, the same people who claimed to be defenders of the people.
Every day in that prison shattered another piece of his old beliefs.
For the first time in his life, he started asking questions no one in his family would dare to think about.
What happens if Hamas wins? If they take power? If they build the state they dream about? The answer hit him fast and painfully.
They would destroy their own people the same way they were destroying these prisoners now.
For Mosab, it was a shock.
He grew up believing Hamas stood for justice, that it was a resistance movement fighting for the oppressed.
But in Megiddo, he saw that the victims, the oppressed, were Palestinians themselves, and the executioners were also Palestinians.
He began asking himself, “Who is my real enemy? The ones who arrested me or the ones torturing their own people to death?” And month after month, the answer became clearer.
At the same time, another pillar of his world was collapsing, his belief that religion makes people better.
He saw how Islamic slogans were used to justify torture, how Hamas leaders hid behind words like holy struggle while sending teenagers to die, how children suffering became a tool, not a tragedy.
He later wrote that he began to hate the cynicism with which Hamas used the pain of civilians for its own goals.
“If they treat their own people like this,” he thought, “what will they do to everyone else if they ever get real power?” Eventually, he was called in for questioning by Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service.
>> >> He expected hatred, brutality, threats.
But instead, he saw people who were strict, but not cruel.
>> >> The contrast with what he had seen from Hamas inside the prison was impossible to ignore.
His conversations with the Israelis went on for months.
Shin Bet observed him, studied him, and he observed them.
At some point, they made him an offer that would change his entire life, to cooperate, not for money, not for fame, but to prevent violence and stop those who were bringing death to both Palestinians and Israelis.
And one day, Mosab realized the answer had been forming inside him for a long time.
He had just been afraid to say it out loud.
After 16 months in prison, he made his choice, a choice that split his life into before and after.
That’s how he began his secret work for Israel, work no one knew about, not his family, not even his father.
After he was released from prison in 1997, it felt like Mosab’s life split in two.
On the outside, he was still the same guy from Ramallah, the son of a famous Sheikh, the heir of a respected religious family.
But inside, everything was different.
He had seen too much blood, too many screams, too many dead men in Megiddo, a prison where Hamas brutally tortured their own people accusing them of helping Israel.
He saw what the organization he grew up admiring was really capable of.
And that’s when his double life began.
Shin Bet didn’t just give him a mission, they gave him a legend, a code name, the Green Prince.
>> >> Green, the color of the Hamas flag.
Prince, because he was the oldest son of one of the movement’s seven founders.
He was the perfect candidate.
Too one of them to be suspected.
Too close to the heart of the organization to ever be ignored.
From the moment he was released, he became the most valuable agent ever planted inside Hamas leadership.
He saw plans before they turned into attacks.
He overheard decisions that later became blood on the streets of Jerusalem.
And he passed everything on, quietly, carefully, leaving no trace.
Every message he sent could change the course of events.
He warned about suicide bombers who were already wearing their explosive belts.
He relayed the routes of buses and markets where attacks were planned.
He shared the coordinates of safe houses where Hamas built bombs.
He exposed terror cells before they even finished making explosives.
Dozens of planned attacks, literally dozens, were stopped because of his information.
He saved Jews, Arabs, tourists, students, children, anyone who might have been in the blast radius.
But he had one rule that he repeated again and again.
Arrest them.
Don’t kill them.
He didn’t want to become a tool of revenge.
His goal was different.
>> >> To stop the blood, not create more.
Because of his intel, >> >> Israel caught some of the biggest players on the West Bank alive.
Ibrahim Hamed, one of Hamas’s most dangerous commanders, Marwan Barghouti, a major political leader and architect of the Intifada.
And once, >> >> he stopped a plot that could have changed Israel’s history.
An assassination attempt on Shimon Peres, then the foreign minister, the man who would later become president.
If not for Mosab, the Middle East might have had one more tragic date etched into its history.
>> >> His handler was an officer known as Captain Loai, a man who eventually became like a brother to him.
Together, they stopped mass killings and saved countless people who would never know their names.
But outside those secret meetings, his personal life was falling apart.
His family began to avoid him.
His father, a spiritual symbol for many Palestinians, disowned him in prison as soon as he heard the accusations.
His brothers stopped talking to him.
In Ramallah, people whispered his name or avoided it completely.
Hamas publicly insisted it was all just psychological warfare.
But Mosab knew when terrorists deny something that loudly, it means you’ve hit their weakest, most painful spot.
He kept working because he saw how Hamas turned death into politics and children into cannon fodder.
>> >> He saw fanaticism swallowing everything around it.
And he knew he could no longer be part of it.
That’s how his real war began, the war of one man against a massive machine of hate.
And then came another turning point, just as deep, but spiritual.
In 1999, he met a British Christian missionary.
It was a random encounter, a small, polite conversation that somehow turned into an endless chain of questions.
Years later, Mosab said that for the first time in his life, he heard about God, not as a judge or an executioner, but as someone connected to love, freedom, and choice.
He doubted for a long time.
At 12 years old, Islam wasn’t just religion, it was the foundation of his family, his community, his traditions, even his identity.
But in 1999 to 2000, his world view slowly started to change.
He began reading things he had never read before.
He began praying in ways he had never prayed.
In 2005, in complete secrecy, >> >> he was baptized in Tel Aviv by a missionary who never revealed his own name.
For Mosab, it wasn’t an escape from Islam, it was an escape from fear.
In 2007, he left the West Bank and moved to the United States.
He lived in San Diego, attended Barabbas Road Church, and for the first time in years, felt like a free human being.
And in August 2008, he took the step that changed everything for good.
He publicly announced his conversion to Christianity and cut all ties with Hamas, with Palestinian political leadership, and with most of his own family.
He’d put his life and the safety of his relatives in real danger.
>> >> But he knew there was no turning back.
He said, “I wanted only one thing, to bring peace.
One day I’ll go home, but only when there’s peace there.
” When Mosab arrived in the United States in 2007, he felt like he could finally breathe.
He dreamed of starting over.
No war, no secret operations, no fear that every thought would be watched and every word twisted against him.
But that freedom didn’t last long.
As soon as his book Son of Hamas was published, US authorities didn’t see what he saw in it.
Where Mosab tried to expose Hamas, immigration officials saw something else.
Sentences that could be interpreted as an admission of involvement with a terrorist organization.
Even though he explained in detail that everything he did was against Hamas, not in support of it, the law was strict.
>> >> Any contact with a terrorist organization, even to undermine it, could legally count as material support.
His request for political asylum was denied.
The next step was deportation.
Going back to Ramallah meant one thing, death.
And this wasn’t the opinion of journalists or analysts.
His own lawyers said it plainly, Hamas saw him as a traitor.
>> >> The Palestinian Authority viewed him as an enemy just as dangerous.
Mosab had become a man no one could protect, except for one person.
On June 24th, 2010, something happened that nobody expected.
A man in a suit walked into the immigration courtroom in San Diego, a man who until that moment existed only as a code name.
Captain Loai.
>> >> His real name was Gonen Ben Yitzhak.
He was a Shin Bet officer, >> >> Mosab’s handler, his friend, the person Mosab had trusted with his life.
And now, Gonen was breaking protocol, revealing his identity and risking his own career.
All to save Mosab.
He said one simple, powerful sentence.
“He risked his life every day to save others.
He is my true friend.
” Words worth more than any official document.
Judge Richard Bartholomew listened to everything.
The story of a double life, the evidence of cooperation with Israeli intelligence, the warning that returning to Palestine would be a death sentence.
A few days later, on June 30th, 2010, he delivered his decision.
“Mosab Hassan Yousef may remain in the United States.
” He still had to go through the usual process, >> >> fingerprints, background checks, security clearances.
But the most important part was settled.
America was giving him a chance at a new life.
For many years, Mosab avoided speaking publicly about his legal status.
He knew that the quieter he lived, the safer he would be.
But in October 2023, as an adult and long past the chaos of his past, he finally said it publicly in an interview with Jake Tapper.
He had become a US citizen.
It was a final chapter, not just in his legal journey, but in a path that began long ago in Megiddo prison, >> >> when he first wondered what freedom really meant.
He survived.
He gained a new country.
He embraced a new faith.
But the price was enormous.
His family, his home, his name, his past.
And ahead of him waited a new chapter, the life of a man who once chose to defy the destiny written for him from birth.
Today, Mosab Hassan Yousef lives a completely different life from the one that was once prepared for him in Ramallah.
He no longer hides, no longer uses code names, and no longer serves any organization that once tried to control him.
Now he speaks openly, on his own terms, and he speaks loudly.
After moving to the United States and spending years in silence, isolation, and extreme caution, Mosab suddenly became a public speaker.
He’s invited to major conferences, television studios, universities.
And every time he steps up to the microphone, he does it with the same calm he once had while passing intel through the alleys of Ramallah.
His work today isn’t about chases, secret drop points, or coded messages.
It’s about words.
And his words have become a far more powerful weapon.
He talks about what he saw from the inside, about how Hamas transformed from a religious movement into a machine of destruction, about how ideology can rot a society as fast as war.
People listen to him not because he’s an analyst, an academic, or a politician.
They listen because he grew up inside the system, saw it without makeup or masks, and then walked away from it.
Today, he consults research centers and think tanks, helping them understand how radical movements operate, how they recruit teenagers, and why Palestinian society got trapped in an endless cycle of conflict.
His perspective is priceless because he isn’t a theorist.
He’s a former heir of Hamas who once said, “No.
” and walked the other way.
And the more time passes, the louder his voice becomes.
He warns the West that radical Islamism isn’t a regional problem, not a local tragedy, and not someone else’s war.
He says Europe could follow Lebanon’s if it keeps ignoring the rise of Islamist movements that use Western freedoms while rejecting those freedoms at their core.
He talks about universities receiving millions in funding from the Middle East, money that acts not economically, but ideologically.
His position on Israel is now clear and direct.
He supports Israel’s right to exist and defend itself because he’s seen what happens where those rights aren’t protected.
He says Israel is not just a country, but a barrier.
The wall where the wave of radicalism breaks, and if that barrier falls, the whole region will collapse and Europe will be next.
People listen, argue, criticize, but they don’t ignore him.
His story is too heavy to dismiss.
And despite everything, there is no hatred in his words.
He has said many times that he is not fighting against Palestinians and wishes them no harm.
He’s fighting against an idea that turns people into weapons, against a culture that uses death as a political tool.
He hopes that one day he’ll return home, not to the Palestine we see on posters or in political speeches, but to a peaceful place where his people stop being victims of their own illusions.
Today, Mosab is a US citizen, a Christian, and a man who lives without a flag, without a party, without ideology.
All he has left is his voice, and he uses it the best he can.
Living in a country where no one comes for him at night, where his name doesn’t spark fear, he chose the simplest and most dangerous job of all, to speak the truth that many would rather never hear.
