Amid the conflict between Hamas and Israel, Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, has openly batted in favour of Israel in a television debate and called the Israeli action justified.
In a TV debate, Yousef said that Israel is “the most legitimate ethnic group in this region”, which has strong evidence of its ties with that land.
“Muslims have been trying to wipe out the Jewish people from that land for the last 1,400 years,” he said in the television debate. He further said that Israel has every right to defend itself and that the war was started by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
“I do not want to comment more on the current developments. I have given a lot to this struggle. I have been a witness to the Palestine struggle. I have lived half my life in the so-called Palestinian society and half my life in the Jewish community. The culture of Palestine is a culture of death, which sacrifices children for political and financial gain. Why did no one oppose Hezbollah’s action when blood was flowing in the south of Israel? Why did no one stop Hassan Nasrallah when 12 children died at the playground? Nasrallah was completely wrong and he got punished for his actions,” he explained.
As per media reports, Yousef decided to go to Israel in 1997. Following this, he served as a spy for the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet until he went to United States in 2007. His father Sheikh Hassan Yusuf was one of the founders of Hamas.
According to a 2012 Reuters profile of him, Yousef secretly converted to Christianity and helped the Shin Bet security service in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Hamas waged suicide bomb campaigns against Israel. He was codenamed “Green Prince” after the Islamist colour and the fact that his father, Hassan Yousef, led Hamas in the West Bank.
Yousef unmasked himself in a 2010 book, “Son of Hamas”, and has been living in refuge in the United States. In his book, he asserted that he foiled Palestinian attacks and also arranged for the elder Yousef to be repeatedly arrested in order to spare him assassination by Israel.
Last year, Yousef had appealed to Israel to eliminate all Hamas leaders. He had said that if all Israeli hostages are not released, then Israel should eliminate all Hamas leaders, including his father.
Israel on Tuesday said intense fighting erupted with Hezbollah in south Lebanon after its paratroops and commandos launched raids there, ahead of a widely expected ground incursion and after devastating airstrikes against Hezbollah’s leadership.
Israel has dealt heavy blows to Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful Middle East proxy, assassinating its leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut last week, eliminating a towering figure who turned it into Lebanon’s top military and political force.
The operation into Lebanon represents an escalation of the conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Iran-backed militants that now threatens to suck in the US and Iran.
Israel has been carrying out strikes against Iran-linked targets in Syria for years but has ramped up raids since the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel’s southern territory on October 7, 2023.
Hamas killed 1,200 people and took about 250 hostage in its assault on Israel, according to Israeli tallies. Israel in response launched a massive assault on Hamas in Gaza, reducing most of the Palestinian territory to rubble, displacing most of its 2.3 million people and killing more than 41,300 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry.
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