Imprisoned for 16 Months: Reality Over Fiction | Mosab Hassan Yousef

So, I end up going to prison for 16 months. This was my first imprisonment. In prison, I told Hamas about this encounter with the Israeli intelligence. I told them the truth and this is my plan, but they said, "Is this everything?" I said, "This is everything." I 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. But 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 and they were brutal.

Didn't this some of this was taking place in the prison you were in? In prison, all of it. I see. So, I'm talking about the 16 months of a nightmare beyond anyone's imagination, where I am suspect, but they are not touching me while everyone else, everyone around me is being tortured and killed. For 16 months, I was wondering, "Is my turn going to come?" Because of my father's status and their hypocrisy and, of course, their shame. They did not do anything, anything to me.

But the thing is, up to that point, I did not betray. I did. I just told them the truth, not under pressure. I thought, you know, 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 prison. My father was still in prison, but a different Israeli prison at that time, so he wasn't there to protect me.

And I was outraged. Or was he in prison with you? No, no, no. My father was in a high-security prison. I was in a more of a jail. Okay, okay, so he was inside prison to protect me. And 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, saying, "Just keep us posted on what's going on."

And now, they're, I don't want to say blackmailing me, but in human nature, the handler of Hamas found opportunity actually to take total advantage. He wanted me to become somehow like his… and I was in a situation. I preferred to die. You know, I did not betray my people. I don't have any intention to betray anybody. I thought, "Okay, you know, we're fighting against occupation and this is the way to just become a Shahid and exit all this tragedy for good."

So, I was going suicidal. I did not mean, you know, 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 on defense and you are in a society like this where everything is ruled based on shame and honor, it's the most shameful thing. 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, and 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 haunt 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.

And why would I die? So in the first encounter with the Israeli intelligence, I told them the whole truth. How did you make contact with them? They made a contact after I was released from prison. This was the original plan, wasn't it? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. 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 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' 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 is still alive in the United States." And he gave me the name of that person. He said, "This is the only true story. The hundreds of others who have been killed had no relation. They are all innocent people."

Well, if he was telling me the truth, this is even more disastrous. I decided to go back to the second meeting and the third meeting. In every meeting, they were just building me up. I was so broken. Building you up in what way? Building me up in education, conversation, open conversation about who they are, what they do.

And so, this is when your political attitude started to switch? Your attitude towards history? 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. And 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 cannot prove where you got this money from, they will kill you." So I said, "You only go to school."

"Oh, what's my mission?" "There is no mission. There was no gun. There is no Goh SP." What school did you go? So, did you go back to high school? 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 and my education only. There was no other deal than that.

There was no other deal. Why did they do that? Because this is how they work, and this is how the Israeli intelligence works. They said from the beginning, "Listen, we don't work with losers. It doesn't matter, like the fact that you are 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."

And they did a long process of fooling Hamas that we don't have a relationship that included, you know, some attack on our house, some arrests in the future, all types of illusions orchestrated by the Israeli intelligence to just convince the society that I was a wanted person at some point and 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.

And I had top secrets of the movement, but the Israelis did not act upon my intelligence or my information to just keep Hamas feeling safe for as long as possible. So 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 avoided 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 was that the Israelis would 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. They will, all types of crazy stories that they had. It had nothing in reality.