Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Hamas founder Hassan Yousef, is urging Israel to continue targeting and killing Hamas’ leaders despite the ceasefire that went into effect late this week.
“Assassinating Hamas leadership will not destroy Hamas, but it will teach them a lesson and hold them accountable,” Mosab Yousef said in an interview with the New York Post’s Jon Levine. “Next time, before you get civilians on both sides involved in a bloodbath, you need to think 1,000 times. This is my personal suggestion.”
“Hundreds of children have paid the price. These type of people cannot get away with what they did. They should not feel safe for a day,” he said. “Hamas hates Israel more than they love their own children.”
The Post highlighted Mosab Yousef’s incredible life story, from being groomed by his father to be a top leader in the Palestinian terrorist organization to rejecting the group and working secretly with Israeli intelligence where he became one of Israel’s “most valuable intelligence assets.” He later “turned toward Christianity” and recently became a U.S. citizen after seeking political asylum in the U.S.
The Post reports:
Mosab Yousef said top Hamas leaders like his father likely rode out the recent violence in secure underground bunkers, while using the deaths of their own people to score foreign propaganda points. …
Another brother, Suheib Youself, defected from Hamas in 2019, telling Israeli media he had become fed up with corruption and called the group a “racist terror organization that is dangerous for the Palestinian people.”
In the interview, Mosab Yousef said that his views toward Hamas changed when he was imprisoned inside Israel and he witnessed jailed Hamas operatives torturing and killing people that they thought were working with the Israelis.
“I will never forget their screams,” he continued. “I started asking myself a question. What if Hamas succeeded in destroying Israel and building a state. Will they destroy our people in this way?”
He said that Hamas “is not prepared to accept” the Abraham Accords that were signed during the Trump administration, which normalized relations between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, and Morocco.
“Hamas was very disappointed by the Abraham Accords that ignored them completely,” he said of the peace deals Israel signed with several Middle Eastern states last year. “It’s the new reality that President Donald Trump made in the region. This is a new reality and Hamas is not prepared to accept it.”
Mosab Yousef further noted that he has not had contact with his family in over a decade and has no plans to ever return because he knows that he will be killed.
“[My father] publicly declared, ‘He is not my son’, which means if you want to get him, I am not going to stop you or come after you,” Mosab Yousef said. “He made my blood halal.”