[guest post by JVW]

I don’t mean to be so flippant in the post’s title, but it is an encouraging sign to see that not all of Hamas’s indoctrination has taken hold among the youth of Palestine:

The son of a Hamas co-founder recorded himself on video granting Israel “permission” to assassinate all of the terrorist organization’s leaders, including his own father, if all hostages are not released within a specific period of time.

Mosab Hassan Yousef, the 45-year-old son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, recommended Israel give Hamas a set timeframe to release all the remaining hostages, after which Israel should assassinate the terror group’s leadership.

“Israel cannot continue like this,” he said in a ten-minute video posted to X on Tuesday. “Hamas must have a timeframe – a month or two or six months – to return the hostages and if they don’t return the hostages within the time frame, Israel must execute top Hamas leaders in prison, especially the mass murderers.”

“When I say execute top leaders, I mean no exceptions, that includes my own father,” the son added, wishing he didn’t save his father’s life numerous times ten to 15 years ago. “He was supposed to die for his actions. I saved his life. Things did not change, things got worse.”

What Mosab Yuosef is alluding to is his early radicalization which saw him arrested numerous times as a young boy for throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers. Aspiring to the life of a Jihadist, the younger Yousef was seen as a natural heir to his father, who was a co-founder of the Hamas terrorist organization. As a teenager, Mosab Yousef served a jail sentence in Israel’s Megiddo Prison, where he witnessed Hamas-affiliated inmates plot a brutal reprisal against fellow Palestinians whom they believed were secretly aiding Israel. According to Mr. Yousef, he witnessed Hamas operatives carry out brutal summary executions against alleged collaborators, even those who he believed had no connection at all to the enemy but were dispatched based upon family grievances and other flimsy pretexts. It was at this point, he relates, that the scales began to fall from his eyes and he started understanding the cruelty and barbarity of his allies.

In 1996, while in the custody of Shen Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, Mr. Yousef accepted overtures from agents and became an Israeli mole within Hamas. He claims that his cooperation hinged upon Israel refraining from killing members of Hamas, including his own father, and that his role was to merely prevent Hamas attacks, and if they took place to then help Israel identify the participants in order to arrest them. Mosab Youself became interested in Christianity in 1999, and in 2005 was secretly baptized in Tel Aviv.

Just two years later, Mr. Yousef left Hamas and Shen Bet to emigrate to America. After an immigration battle which landed in front of a California judge, he was granted residency in 2010, the same year in which he essentially outed himself by publishing his autobiography. Mosab Yousef’s younger brother Suheib Yousef has also subsequently renounced his father and Hamas, though unlike his older brother he denies ever having served as an informant for Israel.

The interesting development is that after years of allegedly protecting his father and other Hamas radicals from assassination by Israel, Mosab Yousef now believes that Israel needs to get their hands dirty and eradicate Hamas from Palestine. In a ten-minute video posted on Twitter, he berates Hamas for demanding “the release of mass murders” in exchange for the release of hostages, and warns that to acquiesce to their demands would put lives in Israel and Palestine at danger. He now advises Israel to shift its focus from hostage rescue to hunting down and capturing or killing Hamas militants, for the greater good of both nations.

Hopefully there are thousands of young Palestinians who have also rejected the works and empty promises of Hamas and a life of terrorism, even if conditions are not favorable for them to take a public stand at this time. That two sons of a Hamas co-founder have rejected the ideology is encouraging, and hopefully in the coming year Hamas will go the way of al Qaeda, ISIL, and other repressively brutal paramilitary organizations who for ugly and tragic reasons are often mistaken for freedom fighters. And then you’re next in the crosshairs, Hezbollah.

– JVW