The son of a jailed Hamas leader who converted to Christianity has gone public to announce that he spied for Israel.
Speaking before the release of his memoire next week, Mosab Hassan Yousef made the confession in an interview with Israeli daily Haaretz.
Labeling him “Israel’s most valuable informant for more than a decade," Haaretz reported that Yousef, 32, who moved to California in 2007, supplied the Shin Bet–Israel’s internal security agency–with information that led to the capture of leading Palestinian militants and prevented suicide bombings.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) quoted a former deputy head of the Shin Bet as saying that Mosab had been one of its agents.
Mosab’s father, however, dismissed the report, asserting that his son had never been an active member of the Islamist group.
Yousef is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a senior Hamas leader in the West Bank, who is currently serving a six-year prison sentence in an Israeli prison.
The recent allegations, if proven true, would suggest that Israel’s penetration into Hamas’ upper echelons has been more serious than previously thought. The Islamist movement was already trying to recover from the assassination of one of its leaders in Dubai last month, where speculation about possible Israeli infiltration of the group has been anticipated.
According to Haaretz, Mosab secretly converted to Christianity one decade ago, before leaving to the US where he was baptized with the name Joseph.
The Israeli daily also said that Mosab’s information had led to the arrest of two senior Hamas figures, Ibrahim Hamid and Abdullah Barghouti, as well as influential Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti. His career as an informant began in 1997, according to Haaretz, after he spent one year in an Israeli jail.
Meanwhile, Gideon Ezra, former deputy leader of Shin Bet and current member of the Israeli Knesset for the Kadima party, told the BBC that Mosab “provided very important information like hundreds of others fighting against terror."
Sheikh Hassan Yousef, however, dismissed the Haaretz report, stating that his son had never been an active member of the organization.
“Whether or not what was attributed to Mosab by the Jewish Haaretz newspaper proves to be true, I assert that he was never an active member in Hamas’ political, military or religious wings,” Yousef said in an email to Al-Masry Al-Youm from prison.
He added that his son “had been the subject of extortion and pressure by the Israeli intelligence service since 1996, when he was 17-year-old.” Since then, according to Yousef, “Mosab had been closely monitored by the organization.”
Yousef also vehemently denied that his son could have exploited his familial connections to get inside information about the group and its activities. “Everybody knows that I’m only involved in the political and media activities of Hamas,” Yousef said in the statement.
Yousef, who has led Hamas in the West Bank since August 2001, was arrested by the Israeli army in April 2005. Two years later, Yousef, who is widely seen as a moderate, was sentenced to six years in prison.
Hamas has always maintained that its military wing, Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades, functions separately from the group’s political leadership.
According to Western intelligence assessments, Yousef and exiled head of Hamas’ political bureau Khaled Meshaal had differed in the past regarding the best means of confronting Israel, with Yousef supporting negotiations over armed resistance.
