The Brutal Reality of the Middle East | Mosab Hassan Yousef | EP 443

We cannot be clashing like this, inciting for violence, harassing Jewish people, harassing successful people, bringing the Hamas nightmare into American soil, globalizing the intifada, globalizing the chaos. These are very dangerous terms that we don't know what we're talking about.

From the River to the Sea, they don't understand that back in 1987 when people started chanting from the River to the Sea, violence followed just shortly after that. This is my childhood trauma, and when I saw the people chanting from the River to the Sea, I knew we were in trouble.

Hello everybody. I had the opportunity today to talk to Mr. Mosab Hassan Yousef, who's a very complicated person. He spent a lot of his life north of Jerusalem. His father is Shik Hasan Yousef, who's a co-founder of Hamas. He told me that he loved his father but came to believe that his orientation in the world was deeply misguided. He said the same thing about his culture in general.

He had a very brutal childhood; he grew up during a sequence of intifadas and became conversant with bloodshed and the death of children at a very early age in his life, and that isn't the worst of it by a large margin. He started to work for the Israeli intelligence in 1997; he was born in 1978 and was a very reliable source for them in relation to the doings of Hamas. He involved himself in the prevention of suicide bombings, most particularly.

We talked quite broadly about the situation in the Middle East, about the culture that he was raised in, about the transformation of his attitude towards Israel as a state, the Israelis as people, his understanding of what constituted Palestine, and the general situation in the Middle East. It's a very intense interview, to say the least.

I suppose part of what I walked away from it concluding was that, you know, "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." Everybody has an opinion about Israel and Gaza, and most of us don't have the wisdom or the experience to do anything but remain silent in the face of what's happening there. You can watch, listen to OAB Yousef, and draw your own conclusions about the catastrophe unfolding in the Middle East. His conclusion was that an alliance with the Israelis is the best pathway forward, not only for the West but for the Arab world. There's many people in the Arab world who believe that as well.

It's why the Abraham Accords are holding, even in the face of Iran's attempts to tear that Accord to shreds. So buckle up, it's a wild ride.

So obviously there's a terrible mess in the Middle East, and everybody has an opinion about it, but everyone's also woefully under-informed. What I’d like to ask you is: what is Hamas exactly? How would you characterize it?

Before actually we say what Hamas is, we need to ask ourselves what is Palestine, okay? Because Palestine is non-existent. It was never a country; it's not an ethnic group, it's not a religion, it's not a faith—it's a colonial entity created by the British that lived for about 25 years. Jews, Arabs, Druze, Christians, Zionists, were called Palestinians before the termination of the British mandate. It was called the British Mandate of Palestine. The Mandate itself had the name Palestine.

Now, right, and this is all taking place after World War I when, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, questions arose about how the political boundary should be drawn. The British established this state known as Palestine.

What should people think about that? What do you think people should think about the fact that the British were involved? I mean, they won World War I, and the Ottoman Empire collapsed, so there was some mopping up to do, and often those things are done in a hurry and with less than optimal information, let's say.

Well, the Ottoman Empire continued for about 400 years. During that time, they ethnically cleansed the Jewish people from their land, which explains why the Jewish people were all over the place after World War I. After all the atrocities and the persecution of Jewish people, they felt the need to seek a refuge, and the homeland was the best option for the Jewish people.

Now, this led to clashes between the colonizer, which was the British Empire, and the Jewish people. The Jewish people fought for their independence, and they shed blood in the process. Also, the Arabs did the same in 1948 when the United Nations divided the land, giving the opportunity to the Jews and the Arabs to build and establish their own states. The Jews declared their independence, but the Arabs declared war against the Jews.

I think this is a very important point to understand: there was no such thing as Palestine. When we talk about the British Mandate of Palestine, it was never a state; it was just a transitional period from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the termination of the British mandate, and that was less than 28 years. The termination was in 1948.

So why, in your estimation, weren't two states established at that time—a state for the Palestinian Arabs and a state for the Jews?

From a Muslim point of view, and this is where it gets tricky, this is where nobody wants to talk about the ideological religious dimension of this war. From an Islamic point of view, the Al-Aqsa and the surrounding areas do not define boundaries. The surrounding areas could be 100 miles, 500 miles; it’s an Islamic trust that no Muslim leader has the authority to give away to the non-Muslims.

So when the Jewish people returned to their homeland, the Muslims were outraged, and that's the fundamental reason and motive for the Arabs and Muslims to fight against Israel because they consider that territory as Islamic land.

That’s the mosque that's built on what was the Temple Mount. Exactly. The history of the mosque is about approximately 1,300 years, but the Jewish temple beneath is a lot older than that, and the Jewish ruins in Judea and Samaria are still erected, actually. The Jewish people have overwhelming evidence of artifacts and archaeology that support their existence over centuries, millennia. But the Muslims don't. There is no currency; there is no book; there is no Bible. There is only a building that is 1,300 years old.

This is why the Jewish people don’t have a problem in principle to coexist with other ethnic groups, like even the Zionist movement did not have a problem to have a two-state solution back in the day. While the Muslims refuse completely to have Jewish existence on that land, the same way in Mecca non-Muslims are not allowed to enter Mecca, even to drive through Mecca. The same thing they want the situation to be in Jerusalem.

How did you come to these conclusions? I mean, I don't imagine this is how you looked at the world when you were young.

True. So how did you come to these conclusions? I understand that your father, Shik Hassan Yousef, is a co-founder of Hamas, so obviously that's complicated to say the least.

Since I was very young, I had critical thinking. How old are you now?

I'm 45 years old. 45? Okay, okay, so you were born in about 1978?

1978, yeah. I had critical thinking from the early beginning of my life. When the Mullah told the funeral crowd that the angels of heaven are going to come back and engage this deceased in the grave, they're going to bring his soul back, they're going to torture him, and if he does not answer the right question, it's going to be an open hell.

I went back to the graveyard and I investigated—I was only 10 years old. Since that point in my life, I did not find death intimidating, as much as it actually became my drive to seek a higher truth.

Tell me about that again. I don't understand that story exactly. What event was that?

So basically, in the Islamic belief, there is something called the grave torture. This is a device religious authorities used to control the Muslim population. When the person dies in the grave, supposedly, there is torture and there is interrogation. If the person doesn't know who his God is, who his Prophet is, if he fails to answer the questions regarding the religion, they're going to be tortured painfully. It’s like a last judgment sort of—it happens in the transitional period.

Because people die, you know, and they've been dying for thousands of years. Many people die, and is there a torture? So they come up with the story that there is grave torture, whether Muhammad said this or not, but it's widely believed in the Islamic faith.

Many people were afraid when I was very young, I asked all my friends to go back with me to the cemetery, and none of them agreed. When I went back, I was terrified. Eventually, I did not hear any screaming or any torture, and I put my ear to the ground trying to listen.

Did you do this alone?

I did this alone because none of my friends would come back with me to the graveyard. Is this during the day?

It was during the day. But eventually, I found my peace, even at nighttime. This might sound a bit psychic, but I reached the point; that was my challenge to myself, where was I able to lay down in an open grave and look at the stars at midnight.

How old were you when you did that?

I was maybe 12 or 13 years old.

What do you think drove you to do that?

It’s my fear of death.

Yeah, because the entire culture usually avoids it, though, rather than confronting it.

It sounds strange, but this is when I made peace with death, and this is actually what empowered me.

That’s very young when you did that. Yes. How many times did you go visit a grave?

Basically, we were just next to the graveyard, and this is not actually the most important thing of observing death and having an early age encounter with death; the first person in started when I was living in that neighborhood.

So you were living where exactly?

Right next to the cemetery.

Okay, so here’s the cemetery, war, and here’s my bed.

Okay, and where are you geographically located?

That's Ramallah and Alir, to the north of Jerusalem.

Okay, the capital of what’s the Palestinian?

Okay, basically, you're north of Jerusalem. Yes.

Right, but we were at the heart of the conflict, and all the bloodshed—all the youngsters who got shot during the first Palestinian intifada—we buried next door, so I guarantee you that there is no one in that conflict that witnessed firsthand bloodshed as much as I did as a child.

Hundreds of people were buried next door, whether they died naturally or they died because of the conflict or the internal conflict between Hamas and Fatah, where they shot each other or stabbed each other. The entire conflict was displayed in front of my eyes as a child, and I couldn't find a stronger motive.

Why are we suffering? Why are we dying? And who's doing this to us? Of course, the narrative on the Palestinian street was that this is Israel, this is the Jewish people killing us, and as a child, I did not have the power to discern, to see a higher truth. How could I?

The same thing with the children now in Gaza. They suffer the consequences of war, but they don't realize or understand how the war originated.

So in that situation, I had the trauma of the first Palestinian intifada, and all the memories stay with me. This is what empowers me to carry on, and that was when?

About 1987.

1987 to…?

1992.

1990.

What’s the definition of intifada?

Chaos. People call it an uprising, but the very definition—not only of intifada, of Palestine—bears very similar definitions. It's chaos, it's disorder, it's anti-establishment.

How does it arise? Simply, this is supposed to be the father of the Palestinian revolution. The same Yasir Arafat who died with like $4 billion, a lot more. Yasir Arafat was an Egyptian K artist; he was born in Egypt with an Egyptian accent. It was so obvious to know that he's Egyptian, but everybody was in denial, that he’s Palestinian, and he’s the father of the Palestinian revolution.

After they were kicked out of Jordan, Lebanon, and the end of Indonesia some 2,000 miles away, they came up with the idea to engineer the intifada. They wanted trouble, but from within they knew that this could be a lot more effective than trying to destroy Israel from outside, and they sent children to die.

This has been their mechanism, their strategy.

And who's they?

When I say they, all those who are complicit in this continuous crime, all those who sacrifice children for power and for money. It's a fundamental part of that culture. We have to understand this first; it was the ideological dimension that I told you about.

Then sacrificing children is not something that makes them feel guilty; it's acceptable in that culture.

So now, as students, men used to come, and we were just in fifth and sixth grade—we were very young—and they would force all students to evacuate the school. They paralyzed the educational system; they paralyzed economy, transportation, and they wanted complete chaos.

Until today I ask myself, if you’re fighting against Israel, why would you stop the education and the economy and all other aspects of the Arab life in the West Bank? This is what intifada means.

So instead of going to school, we stayed at home for the first two or three years of the first Palestinian intifada. We did not go to school.

Now instead, many of the children got engaged in stone-throwing, and this became our game. I was part of that game, and many of my friends got shot in the process, throwing stones at the IDF, or what we used to call them, settlers—just clashing.

Of course, many civilians got hurt in the process. They did not want us to go to schools, and I did not understand why. What about the economy? What about the people who were forced to shut down their stores? If they did not obey, they became traitors, and in the morning they came back to their stores and they were burnt down to ashes.

By means of intimidation. Yasir Arafat was sitting in luxury, like today, sitting in luxury in Qatar. What’s in common between all these K artists? That they were outsiders living outside while they wanted the children to die on their behalf because what really globalized the intifada or the Palestinian cause is the children.

During the first Palestinian intifada, when the world saw a child in the face of a modern army, that was outrageous. Everybody sympathized with the children.

So how did the leaders of the intifada benefit personally from putting children on the front line? How? What's the money pipeline precisely?

I mean Arafat ended up with an absolute bloody fortune—like an insane fortune—and I know the same thing is happening, but how exactly is that monetized?

It’s the suffering of children that produces an influx of foreign aid that's then pocketed, essentially.

Yes, because on one hand they delegitimize Israel; Israel becomes a child killer.

Right, right.

Then there is no one in the world that does not sympathize with children dying.

Right.

So there's no more destructive or powerful weapon in the hands of corrupt regimes than a revolution that don’t want to fight. They didn’t have the courage to actually fight in combat, but they prefer that their children would die on their behalf.

In the meantime, delegitimize Israel and globalize their cause. The international community doesn’t know the reality 100% on the ground; they don’t understand this game.

Even up to now, they see Hamas using children as human shields, which is very obvious. This is what Hamas wanted from this war. The international community is still in denial.

So when children are dying, this will lead to more chaos; it would lead to war—it would lead to today a global chaos.

But how do you deflate the tension? You deflate the tension by going to the middleman, paying him off, and he's going to stop the madness.

This is how they paid off. Yas paid off Hamas. This is the Gaza war today. This is not the first one; this is the fifth one. Every time Hamas started the war, they used human shields; children died.

Hamas exaggerated the numbers; the statistics weren’t accurate. The international community bent over and submitted to a ceasefire, which basically guaranteed Hamas staying in power.

But now, how do you silence Hamas for a while? By giving them lots of money. But this time, Hamas thought they could double down on human shields by putting booby traps all over the place—schools, hospitals, mosques. They did not leave any secret location in Gaza without using it as a shooting pad, digging hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath one of the most populated areas on Earth.

How come that wasn't widely known in the West?

Well, this is obvious, but the world is in denial because it's much easier to condemn Israel. You know, when we have close to two billion Muslims repeating a certain narrative—a false narrative that is baseless—that say Palestine…

We say the very foundation of this narrative, there's no such thing as Palestine; it never existed.

But everybody suddenly became pro-Palestine.

All the well, it fits into the oppressor-victims narrative.

Right, it’s the victim mentality. So now, even in the United States, the anti-bankers, those who are in debt, or anti-establishment communists, feminists, socialists, Islamists are coming in the same room protesting, opposing as pro-Palestine.

What is Palestine? You are extreme opposites that you should not be in the same avenue at all. Without Israel, you would be conspiring to destroy each other, Islamists and communists clearly, but suddenly now you're appearing.

This phenomenon of Palestine, it shows you falsehood versus truth.

Well, there’s something really fundamental to that victim-victimizer narrative, right? That’s underlying all of this, and if you can tap into that, then you get all the – well, you certainly get all the left-wing radicals on your side instantly because they’re of course 100% bought into the victim-victimizer narrative.

It enables them to explain the world and also to be moral because all you have to do is identify with the hypothetical victim. The thing I see happening in Palestine, you can clear up any misconceptions on my part, is like I've thought for decades that the Palestinians are sacrificial victims for any outside powers that want to delegitimize Israel, and then it doesn't matter how many Palestinians die because they’re essentially expendable.

That seems to me particularly true in relationship to Iran. So it’s completely in Iran’s fundamental interest to ferment this chaos that you described. It’s not in the best interest of the Palestinians in the medium to long run but it doesn't matter as long as the trouble keeps brewing.

It’s hard on Israel; it’s hard on the United States; it helps Iran maintain its iron grip. It obviously seems to me obvious that many people in the Arab world are waking up to that, and have woken up to that.

I think that's why the Abraham Accords have more or less held through this because there are powerful forces allied against Iran, most fundamentally.

But it's in their best interest to keep the misery of Palestine going as long as it possibly can, and my suspicions are that what happened on October 7 was commanded directly.

Please, you know, feel free to disagree with me, but this is how it looks to me: the Iranians decided it was time to stir the pot, they produced this massacre, and they hoped they’d provoke Israel into exactly the sort of reaction that Israel is having— that Israel would take the threat extraordinarily seriously and move in.

As their military victory mounted, public opinion would turn against them, and it would fragment the Abraham Accords. I suspect that was their plan. What do you think about that? Is that in accordance with your understanding of the situation?

Absolutely. You know, this is Iran’s attempt to actually rearrange the region. But I don't want to go too far; also, China and Russia have ambitions of reshaping the world and changing the world order, but we don't want to go too far.

No, because God only knows how that's going to turn out, but it’s basically Iran, Russia, and China made it very clear that they don’t want the U.S. monopoly over power; they want to change the world order.

Putin understands completely what it really meant for Hamas to go and ethnically cleanse 20 Jewish communities, and it was not coincidental. Right after the Ukraine-Russian war, where all the attention was at Europe, we saw after what happened in Gaza, nobody is talking about Ukraine.

When you bring the three major religions and make them clash somehow, Hamas was the trigger. I doubt that Hamas understands the KGB and Putin’s play, but they are part of it, and Putin is complicit in this situation.

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So Iran does not act on its own. When they launched, for example, hundreds of ballistic missiles in the 21st century, this is a major attack. I haven’t witnessed this in our lifetime.

Maybe during the Iraqi War, but it was not on this scale.

So anyway, yes, these people don’t care for global security. They are irresponsible. Worse than this, we have experience with the communists or lets say communist-Islamic ideologies that reached a dead end. They failed. The communist-Islamic model did not bear fruit; it did not emancipate humanity or solve the human problem, and they still insist on replacing capitalism.

I don't think capitalism is the perfect solution, but it's the better option for sure. They insist on keeping this going. When we have a weak leadership, with due respect, the Biden administration is not showing leadership.

In the Muslim culture, in the Arab culture, they don't understand tolerance. There is no such thing, not in the Muslim consciousness. Maybe forgiveness, but not tolerance. Tolerance is mostly perceived as weakness.

I speak as someone who grew up in that culture. Every time, you know, when Trump was there, for example, everybody was terrified of him. Unpredictable, and you don’t know what he’s going to do next.

He moved the American Embassy to Jerusalem. Nobody dared even to challenge. Right?

Yes. Not even riots or any of that.

But now, the Obama Administration—then now the Biden Administration—the Americans and the American power is not respected. They have enabled Iran.

One of the things that appalled me when Biden took office is that I've been following the Abraham Accords quite closely because I thought they were really quite the miracle, and I knew from talking to people who were involved firsthand that the Saudis were very interested in having that process continue and were very inclined to sign on.

My sense with the Biden Administration was that that got scuttled because the Democrats were completely unwilling to give Trump any credit for anything he did during his administration. I thought that was absolutely unforgivable because it would have been—and the Democrats could have pulled this off; they could have brought Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords, and they squandered the opportunity.

That's a complete catastrophe as far as I’m concerned, an unforgivable catastrophe. It’s here we are now, as a consequence of it, at least in part.

Let’s go back to when you were 13. I want to pick up the thread of that story.

Okay, so you're seeing all this catastrophe, this chaos that you describe that redounds to the benefit of the conmen who are running the show, for example, and that is there to delegitimize Israel and the United States. To redound to the credit, let’s say, of the Iranians operating in the background.

You're seeing all the consequences of this firsthand. You decide that for a variety of complicated reasons, you’re going to face your fear of death. You have this graveyard next door; you’re going there to investigate and experiment.

What was the consequence of doing that for you, and then how does that tie in with your transformation of worldview over time?

When I was very young—and this is stuff I don’t like to talk about because I choose not to be a victim, and also I don’t like to become vulnerable because people think that you are weak.

There’s stuff that I don’t have to talk about, but I think there’s no way around it, because many people ask, you know, what motivates you? Where are you coming from?

When I was very, very young, I was raped in a culture that would kill the rapist, but also they would kill the rape victim.

So I never told anybody about that story; I never got any support. How old were you?

I was five or six years old when that happened.

Now, I had to heal on my own, and it was a hell of a journey in a society that did not have mercy—they preferred that I would disappear so I don’t bring shame on them.

I witnessed so many women being killed after being raped that the father would prefer to kill his daughter to bury the shame with her, not to have to face the society that his daughter was raped.

What type of mentality is this? What type of religion is this? This is not just a culture; okay, does it reflect on his inability to protect her? Is that the source of the shame?

It’s his status—his status. It’s the father; his status—he could not protect his daughter.

Now, maybe the daughter is pregnant. This was before abortion, etc. The daughter is pregnant. What is he going to do with the child?

No, he prefers to kill the daughter; he does not want to go even to the degree that his grandchild is a result of a rape incident.

From the 7th century in Islam, in Arabia, they killed the infants.

When I say sacrificing children, this is not coincidental—it’s rooted in that culture.

So for me, it was unjust that I had to actually carry the burden instead of getting the support from the family, from the society, to come and say, “Who did it?”

Today, I’m 45 years old; I’m a very strong man; I can confront the whole universe if necessary, and up to now none of them asked the question, “Who did it?”

By the way, I had the power to kill the predator down the road. He’s probably living in a nightmare.

Why didn’t I actually harm him? Because later on I got lots of power, even when I was back in the territories.

But I chose not to. Instead of going after the rapist, I went after the belief system.

This is where I need to create the change.

I see.

What's at fault is Islam. I know this is a very sensitive topic. If the belief system, if Allah thinks that the rapist and the raped are equal and they deserve the same punishment, then this God does not have authority over man's life.

This is where I start questioning the entire belief system.

How come you're still alive?

Well, they tried to kill me, and they're still trying to kill me.

Not bad; they have been trying to assassinate me politically, at least. All these progressives and Muslim Brotherhood wearing all types of masks in the United States have been trying to discredit me so I cannot even speak for myself, to defend myself, because I'm speaking on behalf of all the wounded children in the region.

I know their game, and I know they don't care for the children. Instead, my father sacrificed me; he said, “This is not my son, and I don’t know him; if you want to kill him, his blood is allowed.”

So when you have to choose between a hypothetical God that does not even exist and the future of children or your own child, we have a fundamental problem here.

Then you come pausing to tell the rest of the universe that Islam is a religion of peace?

Well, no, we have a big problem here. We have to talk about it. I start talking about this; I got canceled.

Yeah, I bet you got canceled.

So I’m labeled an Islamophobe. What Islamophobe? I’m confronting this thing, and I’m willing to die in its pursuit because there's no other way.

Only the truth can set people free.

The same thing with Palestine. It totally depends on the destruction of Israel in order for us to see what Palestine is.

The manifestation of Palestine requires the destruction of Israel. The same thing with the Islamic State; it requires the destruction of civilization—all civilizations combined in order to achieve this global state called a caliphate.

We don't know how it is going to look like then, so we have first to die for them to live; then they can prove themselves.

If there is anything that defines madness, this is madness.

So you were hurt very badly when you were very young, and then you lived through the intifada, and you were right beside the graveyard. You decided that you're going to confront death relatively directly and overcome your fear of it.

You were doing some religious experimentation really at the same time. Then you said that you were testing out this hypothesis that there was torture in the grave. You did that alone because your friends wouldn't come along with you, which is hardly surprising.

So, you also decided with regard to being raped that the proper response to that wasn’t to go after the person specifically who was responsible but to go after something deeper than that which was the belief system that that gave rise to this problem.

Alright, so now you’re 13. Are these ideas already in your imagination? When do you start sorting? When was it that you started sorting this out?

Some of them were in the form of feelings, just a gut feeling; I did not have the means to express them, but I knew them.

It was not coincidental that I could not tell my own father about this situation, but later on, I knew that my punishment is death.

So today I have the power to express myself. I didn't know everything at that time, but believe it or not, I felt that this society cannot be trusted.

This is why today, when I stand and I tell the world, anyone who identifies as a Muslim, I consider them as a threat; I don’t trust them.

And people say, “Oh, you cannot generalize; this is like insane what you say.”

No, it’s not insane because if their belief system has sentenced me to death many times for crimes that I haven't committed, then you pause as a Muslim; you carry that identity.

How am I supposed to feel towards you? It’s like coming to a Jewish refugee during the Nazi era and saying, “I am a Nazi; come with me; I’m not going to hurt you.”

No, you're taking the identity of a Nazi regime, and whether you are the bad cop or the good cop, it doesn’t matter; you are serving the same establishment.

I’m tired of this moderate versus extremist; every individual has the responsibility to know what they are identifying with.

My individuality is above all religions and above all gods. I don't accept just taking a label for myself, not knowing what I'm getting myself involved into. Because only my parents pushed that religious identity on me.

If I am at that level of consciousness, then how can I trust you with anything? I cannot trust you with my woman; I cannot trust you with my property; I cannot trust you with my money; I cannot trust you, even being close to me.

Because you don't qualify. You don't know your individuality; you are unpredictable; you can be friendly now, but five minutes later, you can be a part of a crowd and show me your mask; you might bite me.

So then I have a problem.

Okay, what do you make of moves on the part of countries like the UAE and the other countries that are involved in the Abraham Accords, let's say?

Because it looks to me like that’s a pathway forward much different than the pathway laid out in Iran that holds out the possibility of something like a repro between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Do you see any hope on that side of things?

Yes, with a statement that I made; this is my fundamental stand, and I don’t compromise this truth, and I don’t respect anyone who identifies themselves as a Muslim in principle—because.

Okay, but this is my fundamental stand because I aim to reform a generation, and I need people to get out of their cave of delusion and think for themselves.

For example, I don’t have a problem with the Sufis, and I don’t have a problem actually with Muslims who don’t pose as Muslims.

They don’t have to bring their religious identity as they are entitled to something—they want to intimidate me or maybe tempt me with something sincere. Devotional people don’t need a religious identity at all.

And those exist in the Arab and the Muslim world, but also hypocrisy is the other side of the coin.

I just did a seminar on the Gospels with some scholars—the same group that I walked through the story of Exodus with. Now we spent 20 hours going through the Gospel accounts, and the biggest enemies of Christ are the religious hypocrites; they're people who proclaim allegiance to God while acting in their own service.

Right, the deepest of all possible sins right there.

To invert the moral order so that you serve yourself while claiming to serve what’s properly put in the highest place.

There’s no shortage of religious hypocrisy, and I think it is the worst of all possible sins because it inverts the cosmic order.

It makes everything good subservient to what it is that you want, and that can obviously be a problem faced by any religious system because any religious system can become overrun with hypocrites.

But that’s really what you’re pointing to—the distinction between hypocrisy and…

It says in the Gospels that you shouldn’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, and what that really means is that it’s something like practice your devotion in utter secrecy, and don’t trumpet it; don’t make a show of it.

The activists in the West are exactly the same sort of people. They’re wearing their morality on a stick: “Look how good I am because I’m on the right side.”

It has nothing to do with them organizing their lives in any sense of the word. All they have to do is proclaim allegiance to the victim, and they’re on top of the moral order—regardless of who they have to crawl in bed with to manage that particular stunt, which is what we’re seeing everywhere in the West at the moment after October 7th, obviously and all this moral decay—of course, there’s in common—it’s a human condition, you know.

That’s why we’re saying if we want to see the new man, if we want to integrate to a higher state of consciousness, then we need to drop this political correctness.

What’s the difference? It’s the same thing; it’s the same game.

I was born in that—that’s why they end up on the same side. I was born in that belief. At least when it comes to me, I don’t have the right to criticize my own belief system, and if I do, I become—it becomes a hateful speech.

Who says this? This is my birthright to rebel and to criticize this; what makes us superior to animals—especially that there’s no such a thing as Islam.

We have so many denominations, so basically, at least we can do now is push them back. They have to back off, and we probably can apply political pressure where they will have to hold extremists accountable.

Okay, but after October 7, what I saw—and this is why I went outrageous—I really told the Arab world, “Listen, if it comes down to choose between the entire Muslim population and a cow, I choose a cow.”

At least the cow is very peaceful; it gives us milk; it gives us leather; it gives us meat—it’s very peaceful—it’s harmless.

But you—what’s your contribution? Now we have this global crisis where a religious minority is being persecuted, suffering ethnic cleansing on October 7, and instead of siding with truth to say, “This does not represent us as a Muslim world,” instead, they have been weaponizing their religious identity against this religious minority that is most creative, with the greatest contribution to life.

I don’t see this as the blueprint of our society.

I mean, I cannot imagine Western civilization or our civilization—how do you account for the fact that the Abraham Accords haven't collapsed?

I mean, they haven’t, right? They’ve held, and that again seems to me to be a very positive thing.

I mean, I think you could make a case that perhaps the people who are on the Abraham Accord side of the world could have been more forthright in their defense of Israel after October 7th, but at least the whole bloody process hasn’t collapsed.

I mean, that’s what Iran was hoping for.

It’s not collapsed. It’s not collapsed, and I think it’s going to be rejuvenated after this war because it’s in the interest of everybody.

Now the thing is Israel is showing everyone that violence is a dead end. So what I am hoping for, that I don’t know if we have to go to the point where we have to deal with Iran and Hezbollah, and this war could be a lot longer than people expect.

But eventually, the Middle East is going to reach the point, especially Muslims and Arabs, that violence is a dead end.

We’re not going to tolerate violence. If you want to worship the stone, worship it as much as you want, but don’t throw it at me. Don’t dare to throw it at me because I will retaliate, and this was the final result—the use of force after exhausting every possibility with Islamists, especially with the Muslim Brotherhood, especially with Hamas; there is no difference.

Now that they learned the lesson they can stay in their delusion, it’s not my responsibility to go and try to pull them out of their cave. But if they choose to act on it and manifest their delusion in the form of violence, in the form of terrorism, then we have very tough warriors, and we are going to fight.

I personally am fighting for my very existence; I’m not an expert on the topic; they want me to cease to exist; hence my relationship and my understanding of Israel because Israel didn’t do anything wrong to the Arabs and to the Jews, except, you know, just being who they are, and they want them to cease to exist. This is how I feel; why I feel with Israel, there’s no difference.

We are in the same situation; I didn't commit a crime against my people; I didn’t commit a crime against anyone. Even later on when I collaborated with Israel in the intelligence service, my main goal was to just stop the madness—stop suicide bombers from targeting civilians indiscriminately.

This was my goal, my moral compass. I didn’t do it because of national motivation.

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But I still became a traitor. I say, “Why? Why do you label me as a traitor? Why do you condemn me to death?”

All I say is I did not only save Jewish life; I saved Palestinian lives; I saved my father's life and other Hamas leaders' lives, believe it or not. For 10 years, I didn’t have blood on my hands.

I did not take part in killing any human being throughout 10 years of war and chaos and bloodshed, working around the clock to save people from their madness, trying to just juggle with the whole situation.

I was very young, and I almost got killed so many times in the process. Sitting in a room full of explosives with potential suicide bombers at 19 years old, discussing who’s going to die first—that kind of situation.

I am trying; how can I stop this kid from killing so many other people? This is not about treason; it’s about pro-life. This is what we were doing.

Yet a society that prays suicide bomb and attacks, praise death because they are blinded with hatred towards the Jewish people. That by the way, they don’t know nothing about the Jewish history; they don’t know nothing about the Jewish suffering; they are not willing to study about the Holocaust.

Instead, they’re teaching people the wrong and false narrative, and this is how they guarantee to stay in this victimhood for eternity.

So basically, it’s so complicated, you know, in my matrix, that I learned a lot about myself, and I fought the good fight. But right now, I reached the point that I don’t need to explain to anybody anything.

There's a volcano inside me that is about to erupt, and I don’t care what people are going to say—whether they’re going to say "mad," "crazy," "out of control," they can say whatever they want.

We have to eradicate Hamas; we have to finish Islamists. There is no room for savages in our civilization, and anyone who poses a threat against innocent civilians doesn’t have equal rights.

It’s as simple as that. All the voices coming from the United States say, “Hey, Palestinians, give the Palestinians equal rights.” I say no. First, I want to see equal responsibility.

Show me equal responsibility; then we can discuss equal rights, but you don’t compare savages to decent civilians or to decent civilized people who know their responsibilities towards themselves and towards their neighbor.

And compare and say, “Hey, Israel is a democracy; why do you treat the Palestinians in such a manner?”

Well, there is no such thing as Palestine to begin with, and the entire social structure needs to be studied before we decide what Palestine is because it's not a nation—just political gangs fighting against each other, finding Israel as a common enemy.

When Israel is not there, they will kill each other; I promise you that.

So what happens to you at 13? Walk me through your life from 13 onward to the point where you start working with the Israelis. Walk me through that whole biography.

That was the first part of the intifada. I developed so many disorders because of the traumas of childhood. Instead, a society that can understand a child and what’s going on, what they did, they beat me up.

Everybody—from the Hamas leaders to my parents, to the teachers at school, to the principal, to the other kids in the streets—everywhere I went—at some point I got beaten up by a mob.

In fact, in my life, I got beaten up by a mob multiple times to the point where I went unconscious.

Why were you a target of that sort of…?

I was just a troublemaker, and I am still a troublemaker; this is one of my best qualities.

Basically, they wanted me to behave accordingly to the religious laws and the cultural laws, but I didn't know why I was behaving that way. I just wanted to rebel; there was a lot of anger inside me, and there is still a lot of anger.

So what were you doing that was causing trouble?

I broke the rules at the mosque; I played—I just was a very playful kid—and they wanted me to just not do anything. If I ran in the mosque once, the imam at the mosque lifted me up above his head and threw me flat on my back, where I lost my breath.

In another occasion, I was whipped by a Hamas leader with an electric cable to the point I lost consciousness.

How old were you?

Between 10 and 18 years old. This is where the brutality of the society took place.

If I was only a rape victim when I was very young, I would say, "Okay, you know, that was one event," but come on, everybody was conspiring against me, and I still wonder why so many forces wanted me dead, and they still don’t have compassion to just look and say, “Wow, this guy went through a lot.”

Maybe, you know, whatever he’s saying, he has the right at least to express it. But they want to strip me even of the right to talk about it.

So it’s a brutal culture, you know, when some say what happened in October 7 was barbaric. It’s not only Hamas; there is a majority in the Gazan society that is complicit in this crime.

In fact, for those who watch the footage of the October 7 crimes, it was not only Hamas that committed the crime. Most of the crimes, especially raping and kidnapping, were committed by G.I. civilians.

I know now, this is considered—or somebody can discredit me because I’m generalizing—but I say the vast majority of that society don’t have mercy when it comes to children.

No woman can walk freely and feel safe at midnight anywhere in the Palestinian territories. This is why a father is willing to kill his daughter if she would leave the house without a companion, because if she leaves the house with that companion, there’s a big chance that she’s going to be raped on the streets.

Why are you taking such a risk? They would beat them up if they leave the house alone.

It’s a troubled society; it’s a death culture. And I don’t mean to label them as savages. I don’t want to say this because it’s so hard—it’s my biological family; this is where I came from—and I love the people. I want the people to integrate, but they want me dead still.

As long as they are not able to make peace with their own child, I don’t know how they can make peace with other nations, with other people.

What was your relationship with your father like?

I loved my father; I loved him; he was my God, even though he beat me up so many times. I loved him, and I loved my mother as well; I loved my people.

I did not hate them; I was just a troublemaker, but it’s not out of hatred. Even the ones who hurt me the most, I was able to let go—even my rapist or that guy I told you who beat me up or the teacher.

I did not go after them, and it was not coincidental that existence gave me so much power. During the second intifada in which I was involved, I had the capacity to pretty much give permission to an army to kill somebody and I refused, especially when they were my opponents.

How did you come to be in that position?

So you’re a young man, 13 to 18—what’s happening in your life, and where do you end up?

At the age of 18, the gap between me and that society was really wide, and I questioned many things about that culture. Who we are, and why are people just so cruel?

I wanted to take revenge, but I thought I’d take revenge on Israel, and somehow I wanted to go just suicidal because it was very hard, you know, to take a gun and go shoot my people.

So I thought, “How about I go against the occupiers, our enemies?” I decided that I'm going to buy a purchase gun and shoot some Israelis and just go as a Shahid; that was my only escape, and that was only at the age of 18.

So I got the guns, and before I did anything, thankfully, I was arrested by the Israeli intelligence. During interrogation, they offered me to work for them, and I thought it was an opportunity to actually say yes and destroy them from within.

On one hand, I would be released from prison, and I would have a lot more information, a lot more power, and I can do something against. Because there was no way for any intelligence service to buy me, let’s say, by money or by intimidation or any of that.

So that was actually my real motive, and it’s described in detail in my books. But instead of releasing me, they said, “You must go to prison. If we release you, people will get suspicious, and you will get killed.”

So I ended up going to prison for 16 months—this was my first imprisonment. In prison, I told Hamas about this encounter with the Israeli intelligence.

In prison, I told them the truth, and this is my plan. They said, “Is this everything?” I said, “This is everything!” They said, “No, you write more!”

So there is nothing else. So who's your handler? What's your mission like? They did not give me any mission; Hamas became suspicious of me. Instead of helping me, I became a suspect, but my father is one of the founders of the movement so they could not torture me.

In the meantime, they were torturing hundreds of other prisoners for suspicion of collaborating with Israel. Dozens were killed during that time, and hundreds were tortured; they destroyed their lives completely.

They were brutal.

Some of this was happening in the prison you were in?

In prison, all of it.

So I'm talking about the 16 months of a nightmare beyond anyone's imagination where I am suspect but they're not touching me while everyone else, everyone around me is being tortured and killed. I was wondering if my turn is going to come, but because of my father's status and their hypocrisy, and of course, their shame, they did not do anything to me.

The thing is, I didn’t up to that point betray. I just told them the truth—not under pressure. I thought, “Okay, they could help me.”

This is my plan, and this is how things went wrong between me and Hamas to the core.

When I was released from prison after 16 months, Hamas followed up outside the prison. My father was still in prison, but in a different Israeli prison at that time, so he wasn’t there to protect me and I was outraged.

Was he in prison with you?

No, no, my father was in a high-security prison; I was in a like more of a jail.

So he was in prison to protect me. When I was released, he was still in Israeli prison. My father spent some 30 years of his life in Israeli prisons.

So, now outside the prison, Hamas is coming after me to say, “Just keep us posted on what’s going on.” Now they’re, I don’t want to say blackmailing me, but in human nature, the handler of Hamas found an opportunity actually to take total advantage. He wanted me to become somehow like his…

I was in a situation where I preferred to die. You know, I did not betray my people; I didn't have any intention to betray anybody.

I was taught that, okay, we're fighting against occupation, and this is the way to just become a Shahid and exit all this tragedy for good.

I was going suicidal; I did not mean to sell my people for money, so the only refuge left on the table is to actually go to the Israeli intelligence and ask them for help from Hamas this time, because Hamas—what were they requiring of you, the Hamas handler?

What was being required of you?

The moment they put you at defense, and you are in a society like this where everything is ruled based on shame and honor, it’s the most shameful thing you they can ask—you to do whatever they want you to do.

And it’s up to the individual; it’s not even to the Hamas movement, so they’re going to hold it against you for eternity.

What kind of life is this? It’s like someone is holding something against you but nothing will clean that shame. No matter what you do, except if you die, even if I became a suicide bomber, the shame will hunt me to my grave.

This was the reality of it, so this is where I think everything just went out of control.

I was like, since childhood, I had no mercy from these people, and right now, trying to actually just escape my misery by dying for Allah, by dying for the nation against the Zionist occupation, they're coming after me.

So this is my psyche, and I was, no matter what I do, even if I die, I will never be able to please them.

Why would I die?

So the first encounter with the Israeli intelligence, I told them the whole truth.

How did you make contact with them?

They made a contact with me after I was released.

This was the original plan, wasn’t it?

Yeah, okay.

So after I was released from prison, they contacted me, and in the first meeting, I asked them, “Why didn’t you come to help the people, the people who were tortured in prison?”

If you now want me really to work for you, you abandoned money; you abandoned me! They said none of these people who were tortured and killed had any relationship with the Israeli intelligence; it’s all in Hamas’s head.

The handler said, “I have been working with the agency for 18 years; one asset in our district was cut in action and this man still alive in the United States, and he gave me the name of that person.

He said this is the only one; this is the only true story. The hundreds of others who have been killed had no relation; they are all innocent people.”

If he was telling me the truth, this is even more disastrous and I decide to go to the second—go back to the second meeting and the third meeting.

Every meeting they were just building me up. I was so broken.

Building you up in what way?

Building me up in education, conversation, and open conversation about who they are, what they do.

This is when your political attitude started to switch.

Not yet. This was just the early beginning; it was the early beginning because simply they said, "Here’s money; you go back to school."

They gave me enough money—the exact amount that pays for my school. When I needed to do anything financial, they said, “Not possible; we cannot give you any amount of money because if we give you money and you do, you cannot prove where you got this money from; they will kill you.”

So I said, “You only go to school.”

I asked, “What’s my mission?”

There was no mission; there was no gun; there was no go-speak.

What school did you go?

So did you go back to high school?

I went back to the high school; I graduated from high school, but also they wanted me to go to college, and I graduated four years of college.

During that entire time, they funded my education—my education only—and there was no other deal than that; there was no other deal.

Why did they do that?

Because this is how they work; this is how the Israeli intelligence works.

They said from the beginning, “We don’t work with losers; it doesn’t matter. Like, the fact that you are the son of a Hamas leader does not qualify you. You must be like us; you need to think like us, and you need to be a part of your society, and you need to be productive.

You cannot be a loser; if you are a loser, you will not gain the respect of your own society.”

They did a long process of fooling Hamas; that we don't have a relationship; it included some attacks on our house, some arrests in the future—all type of illusion orchestrated by the Israeli intelligence to just convince the society that I was a wanted person at some point, that there was no way in the world that I had a relationship with the Israeli intelligence, especially when Hamas started building their trust with me again.

I had top secrets of the movement, but the Israelis did not act upon my intelligence or my information to just keep Hamas in fear and safe for as long as possible.

Part of the building me up, you know, it was we had hundreds of meetings and they showed me many of the values. For example, when we got into operation later on, civilians were involved; we avoid civilians every time.

The civilian involvement was a big concern for the agency, and I was really surprised because I thought that the wisdom on the Palestinian street that the Israelis will give you poison to put in the town’s water; they will give you a gun to shoot your own people; they will make you rape women and take footage of them so you can blackmail them—all types of crazy stories that they had—it had nothing in reality.

I was on my own; they never connect me with anyone else. After my college, this is I think was the period where I was ready to do something good for myself.

What did you take in college?

I studied history.

And what aspect of history?

It was history and social studies, but I studied world history, Middle East history, the history of religion.

Of course, you cannot cover everything in four years, but I did as much as I could, and I was very interested in the topic.

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So what did your education change for you?

Education was just the first step. I had to educate myself. Like for example, while I was in prison, I studied English; I memorized the Oxford dictionary. I was reading 16 hours a day, and I spent lots of time in Israeli prison.

This is how I spent my time.

When I was released, I opened up to Christianity, especially the Bible. The Bible had a huge impact on my life, especially, you know, the New Testament and the teachings of Christ.

To me, you know, it’s not Christianity as much as Christ consciousness; it’s an advanced state of consciousness.

The challenge of love—love thy enemy—that came in a place where I was conflicted.

Who is my enemy? Is it my people? Is it my rapist? Is it my torturer? Is it Israel? Who is it?

The challenge of love thy enemy really made peace with the world somehow, and I decided that I don’t have enemies anymore.

This is what helped me actually heal and progress.

So I made a principle that I did not want to kill any of my opponents, but I have to say that today I regret it.

Today, I regret it. The influence of Christ consciousness of just love everybody unconditionally did not get me to where I needed to be because today I’m under the influence of cause and effect—not right and wrong.

There is no escape for anybody from karma or from their own actions. Nobody's above this universal law; it has nothing to do with cultures.

I tried so hard to save my father’s life. If I wasn’t in the picture, they would have killed him a thousand times.

Saying that he was made—he’s in a political way, he’s not a military wing, but this is the problem of this; this is moderate, and this is extremist.

Then you go into this rabbit hole, and you never find your way out.

I thought to myself, "No, you are complicit in Hamas crimes; then you qualify for the same punishment as any of their attackers on October 7."

This is why I had to take a moral stand and say all Hamas leaders must be executed.

What happened on October 7 was a capital crime—a genocide—that cannot be taken lightly.

This is not just an act of resistance to wipe out 20 plus communities based on their ethnic background, based on their religion.

It is not an act of resistance; it is not justified. Killing babies, killing children, raping women, kidnapping hostages; killing animals, burning trees—nothing gets worse than this, and it requires capital punishment.

And I had the thought, "What about my father, who I loved very much, who disowned me 14 years ago?"

I never give up on him. I was like, always, you know, in my heart this is my father—I love you, whatever you know you did necessary to just shun me and throw me to the mouth of death—it’s no problem as long as you are okay.

But after October 7, I had to make a very difficult choice.

Because this is where—or when we have to draw the line—all of us are connected to a certain interest, that this is a family relationship, this is a love relationship—my relationship to this property—my personal interest to a certain degree.

Thus, we compromise the truth, even though the obvious truth that what happened on October 7 is wrong.

It doesn’t matter if Muslims did it; they are wrong.

I don’t care if they are Buddhists; I don’t care if they are Americans; it doesn’t matter who they are; it was wrong.

I take the moral stand; my father is complicit in this, and especially when I saw him on the top of a demonstration supporting Hamas in our town in Ramallah, this was the moment that I thought he’s not my father anymore.

It cannot be. My father cannot be an exception.

No one can be an exception if they are complicit in a genocide.

This is where, you know, since October 7, it just, as chaotic as it is in the Middle East, and my life also is chaotic, and I don’t have a way around it to see the Muslim population weaponizing their religious identity against the Jewish as a religious minority.

I have known the Jewish people for about 27 years now. Actually, my relationship with the Jewish nation is a lot deeper than my relationship with the Muslim nation—it’s a lot longer, a lot deeper.

Many of the Jewish mothers throughout this journey, they took me in; you know, a country, a nation that really gave me so much support.

I’m not talking about financial support as much as it is like sincere concern for my well-being.

I’ve been to hundreds of Jewish families’ Shabbat dinners.

I have adopted nephews, Jewish nephews, that they’re fighting in Gaza today.

So, in the face of such a situation, how can I abandon the Jewish people? Those are my people right now.

And the Arabs, also the Arab children; I see myself—this is me—and I see how the predators, the pro-Palestine and the Hamas billionaires and the other criminals take advantage of the situation on a global scale.

I find myself just fighting at so many fronts that it just makes out of me an absolute mad person.

So your education was paid for by the Israeli Intelligence Agency, and you started to question your concept of their work. And then you broadened your education formally.

How is it that you worked for the Israeli Intelligence Organization? How did that come about, and what sort of work did you do?

So, because you said to begin with, they were just paying for your education, and you were talking to them, and you were learning that they were different than you thought.

Yes, and I was also very young at that point. Things became serious at the beginning of the second Palestinian intifada and that was…

So the beginning of this journey with the Israeli intelligence started in 1996; the second Palestinian intifada started in 2000; right before 9/11.

So I was already toward the end of my schooling, and I knew enough about Hamas, about the Palestinian Authority.

It happened that I was part of Yasir Arafat meetings and I was part of other Palestinian factions—meetings, Islamic Jihad, Fatah—and my relation based on my father’s public status I was able to go pretty much anywhere I wanted to go.

People knew me from my childhood.

Even though I was a troublemaker, you know, at that time, I was a lot more stable.

What position exactly did your father play or hold?

So basically, my father's position, of course, is changing, but because of internal elections, his status would never be revealed to the public—not even to Hamas members—because the voting for his status would be only limited to the Hamas leadership.

At that time, I think he was from the… or he maintained throughout his career with Hamas top, top leadership in the Hamas Shura Council.

Plus a huge chance that he’s one of the founders of Hamas, but he never revealed that.

I knew this from other Hamas leaders, but he would never reveal that information to me.

Okay, they usually reveal this information after his death.

So we’re talking about he’s not only a leader of the movement; he’s also the spiritual leader of the movement today; he could be the spiritual father of the movement—this is his significance.

So not just logistical—and of course, after my story came out, his status in the movement was shaken.

Somehow they wanted to give him as much support as they could.

So now we're at the second intifada; this is about, you said this is just before 9/11; this is around the year 2000, right?

Okay, so what’s happening? And you have access to all these meetings, right?

But you've already established relationship with the Israeli intelligence.

So basically, trust between me and the Israeli intelligence was already established, and I was highly motivated to capture a suicide bomber before they reached their target.

Israel was really struggling with this issue.

So that became your mission?

It was suicide bomber prevention-oriented.

Yes! The thing is everything was happening in front of my eyes; the only thing I just needed to set my intention: do I want to do this job? Do I want to do this very difficult job or not?

Because even though I established the relationship with the Israeli intelligence, that did not mean that I was forced to do anything.

So I was in the mosque; I was in the meetings; I was in the safe houses. I was pretty much everywhere.

Any strange encounter between two Hamas members, I was able to just detect that this is unusual; we have to look into it.

Now what was more important than the Israeli intelligence had lots of information, but it would take an expert hours and hours to go through thousands of pages to come to a conclusion.

For me, if I hear the story, I would come to the conclusion immediately.

So I was able to piece the puzzle, and many people think that I was an informant, like going and bringing information, but what they didn’t realize is that actually the Israeli intelligence had the information already, and all I was just in a meeting peacing the puzzle.

When I go back to society, I act based on what I know now from the meetings, so the information the intelligence that I received from the Shin Bet helped me navigate a thousand times stronger than if I was only a son of a Hamas leader.

So I ended up knowing about Hamas a lot more than what my father knew about Hamas operations.

Being part of that culture and having whatever information, it made my position very strong that I was able to reach a suicide bomber before they reached their target.

How many times did you do that?

Okay, and I hate to talk about this.

Okay, okay, I hate to talk about it because this is where I start playing the hero, and even in the book, I would talk about it, but I think right now it’s inevitable—because many people are trying to discredit my journey, and it’s a vow; it’s also that I’m supposed not to talk about operations and reveal the secrets of our work to the enemy.

But you can say the least: dozens of suicide bombing attacks—dozens.

On a regular basis, from capturing five suicide bombers at a time to seven suicide bombers at a time to capturing the masterminds— that includes the bomb maker—and that was our biggest concern.

In fact, somebody like Abd al-Bari was very, very dangerous. Hamas asset—the most dangerous Hamas bomb maker—is in Israeli prison today; I was the first to reach his location, his lab, and recognize him, responsible for the death of at least 100 people at that time before he was arrested.

Ibrahim Hamed and the entire Hamas military wing of the West Bank, which they were using a research center as their cover; they never come to the mosque; they never participate in Hamas activities; they're all shaved; they don't have beards; they’re intellectuals, etc.

I had my suspicion, but the agency did not have any information about these guys.

There were five of them; I kept arguing for about three years, arguing with the agency that these people are doing something wrong, doing something, and nobody would listen to me.

Until finally, we realized that these people had been the core group behind 95% of the suicide bombing attacks during the second Palestinian intifada.

They were there, and we could not make the connection.

Then finally the agency was like, “How did you come to this conclusion?”

So many times, it was just like a gut feeling or literally I would just be taking my little sister to school in the morning and all of a sudden I see this most wanted enter in a building, and this was his apartment, his safe house.

Then I called the agency and I say, “I found it.”

How did you find him?

I was driving, and he just entered the building; they could not believe it.

Ibrahim Hamed, the agency did not see him in eight years; they did not see his face in eight years, and I finally locate him.

So at some point, I remember Aharon was the head of the agency at that time; he said, “Get him out!”

They get him out; he’s going to get killed because the amount of operations, whether in Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Public Front for Liberation of Palestine—in fact, after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, I was the source that brought the information of his relation to suicide bombing attacks.

Because I was in that meeting, the information that was given to Aharon, the Israeli prime minister at that time, my identity was never revealed.

The same information was used in the UN Security Council.

Why am I telling you this? Not to brag about it. The amount of intelligence; my life was on the line every day—every single day during the second Palestinian intifada, all the way up to Hamas’s CP in Gaza.

I told the Israeli intelligence that Hamas is up to something.

They said, “But this is too much; it’s too hard to believe; the Palestinian Authority has 35,000 police officers. Hamas has only 5,000. It’s not possible for them to overthrow the Palestinian Authority.”

I told them, “This is Hamas’s plan and this is what’s going to happen.”

And that was three months before Hamas took over Gaza.

Now where it’s going to get tricky, you know this is stuff that I don’t like to talk about; nobody gives a damn.

Three months later, Hamas was in power, and instead of destroying Hamas and not allowing them to grow, the world pressured against Israel— that this is elections and Hamas won the elections and we have to accept them as a legitimate political party.

They just kept playing this game, and Israel agreed to go into their rabbit hole until Hamas became the power it became.

Even from the first war with Hamas, Israel was determined to destroy Hamas completely, but the world came; ceasefire, now a ceasefire.

The first war, the second war, the third war, the fourth war, and every time they use children as human shields, and this time it was…

There’s no way around it; you’ll have to eradicate them; otherwise they will do a lot worse in the next war.

How do you understand the relationship between Hamas and Iran?

It’s a very weird and awkward relationship because Shi’a and Sunni—they hate each other, and so there’s a bloody history between both sects.

But it’s in Iran’s interest to destabilize the region, and they find in Hamas a device— they give Hamas billions of dollars.

But why do you think the Americans, especially the Democrats, why do you think they can’t see this?

Because everybody’s after their interest. Like for example, right now we have Iran’s full attack on Israel—ballistic missiles, okay?

We downed many of those, and the United States helped. The UK, other NATO countries—this is American states, right?

This is great, but are we supposed to be a defense? Is this the best we could do, that we just stand at defense, the superpower?

I would destroy the Iranian nuclear program immediately. This is what I called from day one.

I said the most adequate response to October 7 is the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program. You cannot give a Muslim country a nuclear power.

It was a big mistake to let Pakistan to become a nuclear power. This could lead to a global situation—a very ugly situation; they are not responsible; they are dictatorships; they are not accountable to anybody but Allah.

How can you give them our…?

Of Allah, of course, yeah, and how—how Allah itself?

I don’t want to say even interpretation because Allah, as He is in the Quran, is a very dangerous entity.

So it’s not a matter of misinterpretation that, you know, the guy is a very good guy in the Quran, and the Islamists or