Washington, March 08: The son of a founder of the Palestinian democratically elected movement Hamas, who converted to Christianity, admitted his years spying for Israel’s domestic security agency Shin Bet in an interview broadcast Sunday.
Mosab Yussef told CNN he fed Shin Bet information about Hamas for 10 years.
He claimed the resistance group was practicing “exceptional cruelty” against its members and “killed people for no reason.”
“They offered me to work for them. My goal was to be a double agent and attack them from the inside,” Yussef, 32, said of his initial contacts with Shin Bet.
But the views of the man who came to become a top informer codenamed “The Green Prince,” changed after a stay in prison.
“After I was tortured by Shin Bet, I was transferred to prison (where) Hamas tortured Hamas members and I became confused who was really my enemy… I accepted to meet Shin Bet.”
Yussef’s father Sheikh Hassan Yussef disowned him on Monday after Mosab made his revelations.
“My people did not understand this. Shin Bet is committed to a constitution but Hamas targets civilians. There’s a difference between targeting a terrorist and civilians,” he said.
“I saw that my enemy… they had morality, they had their responsibilities more than my own people,” said Yussef, who converted to Christianity 10 years ago and now lives in California.
He reportedly worked for the Shin Bet at the height of the 2000 Palestinian intifada, or uprising.
Yussef insisted he was not responsible for any deaths of Palestinian resistance memmbers.
“As a Shin Bet agent, when I had information I helped arrest people, otherwise they hit randomly. When I specified a particular person I had a condition — not to kill that person,” he said.
“In 10 years working for Shin Bet I am not responsible for killing one terrorist. I care about my people, my problem was their (Hamas’s) ideology.”
Israel, which wants to crush any Palestinian liberation movement, responded to Hamas’s win in the elections with sanctions, and almost completely blockaded the impoverished coastal strip after Hamas seized power in 2007, although a ‘lighter’ siege had already existed before.
Human rights groups, both international and Israeli, slammed Israel’s siege of Gaza, branding it “collective punishment.”
A group of international lawyers and human rights activists had also accused Israel of committing “genocide” through its crippling blockade of the Strip.
Gaza is still considered under Israeli occupation as Israel controls air, sea and land access to the Strip.
The Rafah crossing with Egypt, Gaza’s sole border crossing that bypasses Israel, rarely opens as Egypt is under immense US and Israeli pressure to keep the crossing shut.
Fatah has little administrative say in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and has no power in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, both of which are Palestinian territories illegally occupied by Israel in 1967.
Israel’s war on Gaza killed nearly 1,400 Palestinians, mainly civilians, and wounded 5,450 others.
Among the dead were 437 children, 110 women, 123 elderly men, 14 medics and four journalists.
The wounded include 1,890 children. The war also left tens of thousands of houses destroyed, while their residents remained homeless.
—Agencies