Mosab Hassan Yousef – Son of Hamas

Mosab Hassan Yousef – Son of Hamas

By: Deji Yesufu

On August 1, 2025, Mosab Hassan Yousef informed the public through several of his social media accounts that he had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Going by his records, his utterances, and what he stands for, it will almost seem impossible that the Nobel Prize committee will recognize an individual like him for such an exalted award. However, perhaps there is something that they are seeing about Mosab that the world has overlooked. If it is possible to understand the rationale behind this nomination (he has not won the prize yet), perhaps our world might be able to take the required step to see sustained peace come to the Middle East. Who is Mosab Hassan Yousef? Who is this Green Prince?

Mosab, as most people call him, was born on the 5th of May, 1978, in what is today known as Palestine. His father is Sheikh Hassan Yousef. Sheikh Yousef is one of the few individuals who founded the religious/political group that is known today as Hamas. Mosab grew up to regard Israel as the foremost enemy of the Palestinian people. His own family lived in the West Bank, not Gaza. Mosab explains that in his youth, two diametrically opposing worldviews were playing out before him. The first was the typical indoctrination that he was taught both at home and at school, which was that Israel had taken the land that belonged to his forefathers, and that it was his duty to destroy all Jews. Even as young as ten years old, Mosab joined up with other young Palestinian boys to stone Israeli soldiers who may be patrolling their neighborhood. He paid very little attention to his studies; his goal in life was to kill an Israeli soldier, and he worked very hard towards this goal. On the flip side, other things were happening within his life that would eventually come to have meaning when he was an adult.

Mosab tells the story of his first whipping. He did not explain what led to it, but he remembers that he was a little older than ten years old. He also says that his dear mother was also made to endure watching the scenario. An uncle had concluded that he had done something wrong and that he was going to be punished. He was tied up and beaten with a whip until he fell unconscious, blood pouring out all over his back. He has never been able to reconcile what he could have done as a ten-year-old that would warrant such brutality. In the same community that pays such a high premium to discipline and the eradication of lawlessness and sin, he was raped by a male relative. He did not mention who this person was, but Mosab explained that the psychological injury of being raped by a man was even worse than the one that led to his being caned as a child. All these, combined with watching how women were treated in his community, particularly the issue of honor killing, where a father would gladly kill a daughter all because she had chosen to take a position in the family that is against the father’s wish. This is besides the fact that women are treated like garbage, and the hypocrisy that follows the covering up of sin just because of the wealth of the individual is quite rampant, where he grew up. Mosab did not pay much attention to these problems in his community in the West Bank. His rage against Israel blinded him to these realities until…

At age eighteen, Mossab decided to take the law into his hands. He was finally going to kill an Israelite. He jumped over the barricade that separated his community from the Israelites and had his weapon hidden. He was just about preparing to take the shot when an eagle-eyed Israeli soldier spotted him and demanded his surrender. Young Mossab was arrested and slammed in an Israeli prison – along with thousands of other Palestinian youths. It was in prison that things began to be clearer for him. Mosab observed that even the Palestinians who were in prison with him did not trust him. There was a strong culture of mistrust among all of them, despite the fact that they all came from the same community. Besides this, there was the brutal practice of torturing fellow Palestinians by Palestinians themselves. Mosab explains that he can still hear the cry of horror coming from the lips of some of those young men as they are being tortured by their own countrymen. Usually, something would have happened in the West Bank, and the conclusion would be that a Palestinian had betrayed their cause and revealed secrets to the Israelites. They will then find an innocent person, torture him, and sometimes even kill him in the process. Mosab explained that the only way he was not tortured was because everyone knew he was the son of one of the founders of Hamas.

Mosab was in the middle of this dilemma when he approached Israeli operatives and told them that he wished to “rat” on his own country people. The Israelites did not believe him, but since they were short on sources, they were willing to give him a try. They, however, ensured that he had lots of cover and that his identity would not be revealed to his Palestinian people. The code name that was given to him for those operations was “The Green Prince”. Mosab took the time to weigh the two cultures he had lived in all his life and reached the conclusion that a culture of death reigned among the Palestinians, while a culture of life was prevalent among the Israelites. Mosab chose life over death. He was released from prison and was sent to the University to read History by the Israelites. While he was doing this, he used his network of connections within Hamas to learn about potential terrorist attacks on Israel. Then he would inform his Israeli friends about these, and they would go to those places and stop the suicide bombs before they went off. This way, both the lives of the Palestinians and the Israelites were saved. Mosab did this for close to a decade, before the Israelites decided to retire him. They whisked him out of Palestine and sent him to live in the United States of America. It was while in the USA that he wrote his bestseller “Son of Hamas”. The book shot him to the limelight, but at the same time brought his life into peril. Mosab has since left the USA and returned to Israel. He says his life in the USA is not safe, with many thousands of leftists and liberals who are championing the cause of Palestine in American universities, and many of them are threatening his life. Mosab was largely in abeyance until October 7th, 2023, when it happened. It was that incident that launched him out again. He had long argued with his Israeli friends that suicide attacks on Israel would not end. This is why it was never his wish to leave his earlier job of unveiling terrorist activities against Israel. But the Israeli authorities understood that his life was in danger if he continued to live in the West Bank.

Mosab’s theory about happenings in the Middle East was fundamentally altered when he met a Christian missionary in Israel and became a Christian. He was able to examine the fundamental root of his people’s hatred of the Jews, and he was able to trace it to the Quran. He saw that the writers of the Quran had made it clear that all Jews are the enemies of Muslims, and that there will be no end to our world except that the Jews are destroyed. Now, that section of the Muslim writ remained largely unnecessary for centuries until 1948, when the United Nations decided to allow the Jews to return to Palestine to live. The area that is today regarded as Israel, and also called Palestine for some people, was the geographical location of the people of Israel as recorded in the Bible. In AD 70, however, Jerusalem was destroyed and a large population of Jews was killed. Those who survived moved into other parts of the Middle East, but the religion and culture of the Jews were largely preserved because it is a religion that is founded on the Old Testament. So, for close to two thousand years, the geographical location called Palestine was largely uninhabited. That area was called Palestine by the Romans. Mosab’s argument is that there is no such thing as “Palestine”. Instead, his own people are Arabs, who live in the Middle East. Many of them have come to become Muslims, but long before the coming of Prophet Mohammed in the seventh century, the people living in that region of the world were polytheists, like most other places in the world. Mosab argues that the people we call Palestinians today are persons who migrated from neighboring countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon and came to live in the land of Israel. These people are Arabs, and the only link they have to that land is that they have also lived there, especially when the Jews were not around. Mosab then argues that what will make for peace is for the Arabs, or Palestinians if you like, to regard the Jews as friends, not enemies. He says that there are thousands of Arabs who live in Israel today and have come to adopt Israel as their nation of birth, while retaining their religion as Muslims. Mosab argues that Israel has brought light, life, education, and civilization to the Middle East. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. And that this has made the country strong and prosperous. Rather than its Muslim neighbors fighting Israel, they will do well to work with Israel. Mosab believes that many Arabs living around Israel will not live in peace with Israel as long as they retain that ideological position that the Jews are their enemy. So, when Israel wages war against Hamas in Gaza, Mosab sees this as a necessary counter-offensive on an ideology that is evil at its root.

It is this thinking that the Nobel Prize committee has recognized and has thus accepted the nomination for Mosab to get the Nobel Prize for peace this year, 2025. They are giving him this award for the efforts he made to ensure that suicide attacks failed on the soil of Israel for close to a decade. It was something that went unnoticed for a long time, but after October 7th, 2023, many people in Israel have come to realize how much Mosab has done to save Israeli lives. Mosab’s greatest pain in life was being disowned by his own father. After his book, Son of Hamas, was published in 2010, his father spoke to him on the phone and told him that he would always love him, but Mosab knew what that meant. The following day, Sheikh Yousef disowned Mosab publicly. It was something he needed to do to preserve his family’s honor back in the West Bank. Mosab, however, grieves over the fact that his father chose an ideological position over his own son. It is this grief, and the fact that Israel represents light and life to the Middle East that drives him to do all that he does. If he wins the Nobel Prize for peace in 2025, Mosab’s lifelong work would have become globally recognized and could help bring permanent peace to the Middle East.

Deji Yesufu is the pastor of Providence Reformed Baptist Church Ibadan. He is the author of HUMANITY. He can be reached at [email protected]