Son of Hamas Leader was Top Spy

Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of jailed Hamas terrorist leader Sheikh Hassan Yousef, operated undercover in the service of Israel's intelligence agency for a decade. Yousef reveals this information in an upcoming book, and in an interview with Israeli newspaper Haaretz to be published this weekend.

According to the newspaper, the intelligence Yousef supplied led to the arrests of several high-ranking terrorists including Ibrahim Hamid, a Hamas terror commander in Judea and Samaria, as well as Fatah strongman Marwan Barghouti and Hamas bomb-maker Abdullah Barghouti.

Mosab Hassan Yousef converted to Christianity and moved to the U.S. in 2007, where the book he co-wrote, Son of Hamas, is due to be published shortly. He said that after he converted to Christianity, he decided he had to escape and "live my life away from violence, because I couldn't coexist with that situation as a Christian."

"He provided very important information [as did] hundreds of others fighting against terror," MK Gideon Ezra (Kadima), formerly deputy chief of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), told BBC World Service.

Haaretz said that Yousef “was considered Shin Bet's most reliable source in the Hamas leadership.”

"The amazing thing is that none of his actions were done for money," said his ISA handler, who is named in the book as "Captain Loai.”

Yousef's father, who has great influence within Hamas, was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council in January 2006 from his prison cell.

Appalled by Torture

Yousef has said that from an early age he was appalled by the brutality of the Hamas movement. "Hamas, they are using civilians' lives, they are using children, they are using the suffering of people every day to achieve their goals. And this is what I hate," he said.

In an interview with Fox News in 2008, Yousef said that when he was 18 years old, he was arrested and placed in an Israeli jail. “Hamas had control of its members inside the jail and I saw their torture; [they were] torturing people in a very, very bad way... Hamas leaders that we see on TV now, and big leaders, [were] responsible for torturing their own members. They didn't torture me, but that was a shock for me, to see them torturing people: putting needles under their nails, burning their bodies. And they killed lots of them... I was a witness for about a year for this torture. So that was a huge change in my life.”

"Islam is the Problem"

“The problem is not Hamas, the problem is not people. The root of the problem is Islam itself as an idea,” he added. He said he saw no chance for Israel and the PA to make peace.