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Adventures of the Green Prince

(Ha'aretz) Avi Issacharoff - "I wish I were in Gaza now," says Mosab Hassan Yousef by phone from California. "I would put on an army uniform and join Israel's special forces in order to liberate Gilad Shalit. If I were there, I could help. We wasted so many years with investigations and arrests to capture the very terrorists that they now want to release in return for Shalit. That must not be done." For more than a decade, Yousef, son of a Hamas leader in the West Bank, was an agent of the Israel Security Agency (ISA) and was known as the "Green Prince." His book, Son of Hamas, will be published next Tuesday. Yousef was a member of the Hamas students' organization at Birzeit University in the West Bank and was sent to prison after buying a gun in 1996. "I was in jail with Hamas people, with senior figures in the organization who ran an apparatus called Majad, a kind of internal security body of Hamas aimed at uncovering Israeli agents. They tortured prisoners, most of them from Hamas, whom they suspected of collaboration." "My job was to write down the confessions and testimonies. As the sheikh's son, I was trusted. It was there that I lost my faith in Hamas. They killed people for no reason. While everyone was warning me about the ISA, for the first time in my life I saw Hamas people torturing their comrades, members of their nation, with exceptional cruelty." "My handlers [in the ISA], for their part, respected me and treated me very well and even helped me with my studies. I was stunned by their behavior. They did not want to take action against the Palestinians as such, only against the extremists. I looked at these people, whom in the past I had so much wanted to kill, and discovered that everything I knew about them was incorrect."
2010-02-26 08:23:04
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