Mosab Hassan Yousef was born into Hamas. His father, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, was one of the group's co-founders. For years, Yousef lived inside the movement's inner circle—until he broke away, rejecting its ideology and even serving undercover for Israel's Shin Bet intelligence agency.
Yet even as an insider, Yousef told ILTV News, he never imagined Hamas could carry out an atrocity on the scale of October 7.
"I thought to myself, Hamas now is just busy governing us. They are enjoying the money," Yousef said in an exclusive interview arranged for ILTV by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA). "I thought they probably like having all this military … to bully the world… I never thought, you know, they would just invade and commit a genocide against the Jewish people."
Yousef explained that it wasn't because he believed Hamas was incapable of such barbarism—he knew it was. Instead, he assumed the group understood that by attempting a "modern-day Holocaust" against Israel, "Hamas signed their death sentence."
"The barbarism in the worst possible way – and everything was caught on camera. And Israel is not a weak country. This is a very powerful army," Yousef said of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Before October 7, he continued, Israel believed it should contain Hamas in Gaza for diplomatic reasons.
"But Hamas came on October 7 and pulled the trigger," he said. "Now no one knows how this is going to end."
The world may want to move on, he added, but Israel cannot.
"This time, this war, it was not possible to repeat the same mistakes of the past, to just let Hamas get away with their crime," according to Yousef.
Yousef was in Israel as a visiting fellow at the JCFA. The organization invited him to meet with policymakers, government leaders, and the media in an effort to "try to break this poisonous propaganda, particularly now, a few weeks before this diplomatic Jihad that is expected to take place in the United Nations General Assembly, supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state," explained JCFA President Dan Diker.
In his interview with ILTV, Yousef recalled that at the beginning of the war, Muslims around the world—from Australia to London—were celebrating Hamas's so-called victory. But as soon as Israel launched its ground invasion on October 27, Hamas began "screaming genocide." This, he stressed, is nothing more than propaganda. He argued that many of the pictures and videos emerging from Gaza are inaccurate, and that any genuine suffering there should be blamed squarely on Hamas.
According to Yousef, Hamas is "weaponizing civilians" by using them as human shields. The group is also holding around 50 hostages. He said Hamas never expected Israel to persist in fighting and to resist bowing to its demands in the face of global pressure. Hamas, he emphasized, relies on triggering an emotional response from the world.
"A civilized world in the 21st century cannot see children dying like this," Yousef said. "You need to direct this message to Hamas and apply the pressure on Hamas, not on Israel."
Yousef also challenged the notion that Hamas is simply a product of the Israeli occupation.
"Much of the world believes that Hamas is the outcome of the occupation; they think that the occupation created Hamas. I don't think so," he said.
If that were true, he asked, how could the Syrian and Lebanese civil wars—or even the September 11 attacks—be explained?
"What about honor killings? They've been butchering women regularly, and they have been canceling women regularly," Yousef added. "They are racists towards the Jews. They are racist towards Black people. They are racists towards all non-Muslims."
He further noted that Hamas has raised billions of dollars over several decades, but that money was never invested in building society. Instead, it was used to "bully the people, oppress the people… The people who don't live there cannot make the connections, and the people who live there are afraid to speak."
Yousef said that he grew up in a culture of death.
"The Islamic culture is not concerned with this life. It's concerned with the afterlife," Yousef told ILTV. "This type of mentality does not create a productive society… The outcome of such a way of thinking is violence, recklessness, abuse, and it's a very dangerous indoctrination. But of course, when living in it, you don't realize it. You think this is the way of life."
The First Intifada began in 1987, when Yousef was 10 years old, and the Second Intifada erupted in 2000. Those waves of terror marked the beginning of his decision to stand up against his culture, his upbringing, and the violence around him.
"The first intifada was very difficult, but the Second Intifada was a lot worse, and I needed to do something about it, to stand for myself, to do what I believe is right," he said.
Yousef explained that while his community "blamed Israel for everything," he began to recognize the real enemy from within.
"I see the violence. I see people carrying a butcher knife and following somebody to kill him, literally, his cousin or a brother trying to kill his sister for honor," Yousef recalled. "This is a culture that is based on honor and shame, not right and wrong. This is a very important thing for Westerners to understand."
Despite coming from a prominent family, Yousef said he was regularly beaten by mullahs, imams, his school principal, teachers, and even other children on the street. Violence, he explained, was considered normal.
"The outcome of this was like a rebellion. Something inside me started changing," Yousef noted. "From a very early age, I learned to basically fight back. And in that society, they don't like you when you fight back, especially if you are bringing embarrassment to the tribe or to the family."
As a teenager and young man, Yousef spent time in jail—first as a boy, and again in the 1990s—before he was recruited by the Shin Bet in 1997 to serve as a spy, a role he carried out for nearly a decade. He said that after witnessing Hamas's brutality against its own people during his imprisonment, he understood that his future—and the future of Palestinians—depended on breaking away from Hamas.
"What if Hamas succeeded in destroying Israel and building a state?" Yousef asked himself.
Still, he emphasized that he was never willing to kill or allow Israel to assassinate Hamas leaders. "Instead," he told ILTV, "I wanted them arrested and put into jails." Yousef helped bring down several top Hamas figures. But today, he admits he questions that strategy, after seeing how released prisoners went on to commit more crimes and how Hamas kidnapped innocent people to bargain for further releases.
"If I did not insist on arresting them, Hamas would not have kidnapped innocent civilians to ask for their release," Yousef said. "Some of these people, actually the ones who still lead in Hamas, the most dangerous Hamas people… but today, I don't want to say I regret it."
He added, "I sabotaged the terrorist operation, but my intention was not to harm innocent people who had nothing to do with it. Even today, you know, from the beginning of the war, I've been saying, here we are after many, many years, and the Palestinian violence led to the destruction of Gaza and the suffering of so many people. I'm trying to bring to the world that this is the outcome of violence."
Yousef believes that Gazan society has "fallen from grace," as the vast majority of its citizens now align themselves with Hamas's extremism. "It is not Israel's failure," Yousef stressed. "It's the world's failure. That failed to condemn Hamas from the beginning. Had the world condemned Hamas from the beginning as a barbaric terrorist organization, if Hamas had that kind of feedback from the beginning of the war, they would not have had this stubbornness and insisted on their method because they think that the entire world is behind them."
Granting Palestinians a state under these circumstances, he warned, would only empower Hamas and prove that its violent strategy pays off. But Yousef does not believe such a state can—or will—ever exist.
"Not a sovereign state at the expense of Israel's sovereignty," Yousef said. "There is no way in the world that Israel would allow that. And by the way, Western leaders who have decided on behalf of Israel, compromising the Israeli security and legitimizing terrorists, if they think this is going to lead to a Palestinian state, they are totally mistaken."
According to Yousef, recognition of a Palestinian state "will lead to only one thing—the dismantlement of the Palestinian Authority." He added, "Enough is enough. Israel has been in wars with the surrounding countries, with Muslims, since its establishment 77 years ago."
Yousef said the situation in Gaza is "pretty much irreversible," and he does not believe it can ever return to the way it was on October 6, before the massacre. Nor, he argued, should it. Gaza should not be rebuilt under the same conditions, with militant rulers controlling the territory. The most dangerous Hamas members, he stressed, are those still in prison, and they must never be released. Instead, he said, Gazans should be given the freedom to leave.
"The earth is vast," Yousef said. "They can go wherever. But at least we must give them the freedom to choose. I'm not saying to force them anywhere… But I think the time has come. We must finish Hamas and give the people the freedom to basically go wherever they want to go."
Has Yousef lost his faith in humanity? He said the answer is no. But he warned that the world must not fall for the Palestinian narrative of victimhood.
"What they don't know is that they are inviting violence and dangerous indoctrination to their front doors and to their backyards," Yousef cautioned. "There is no mother that does not feel sorry for the children's suffering, but blame the ones who sacrificed the children, who gambled with their blood for their political agendas."