If you’ve ever tried to untangle the Israel–Palestine conflict and felt lost in headlines, Son of Hamas solves a quieter, harder problem: it shows you the conflict from the inside, through the eyes of a son, a spy, and a believer.
A Hamas founder’s son becomes a top Shin Bet source and, through a decade of double life, learns that saving lives is a more radical act than vengeance.
The memoir gives first-person detail on the First Intifada (1987), the 1992 deportations, Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 Hebron massacre (29 killed; 125+ injured), and the operational dance between Hamas and Israel’s Shin Bet; later reporting and a Sundance-winning documentary (The Green Prince, 2014) corroborate core claims and timelines.
Son of Hamas is best for readers of political memoir, counter-terrorism studies, Middle East history, and faith journeys that cut against the grain. Not for readers seeking a simple hero–villain arc or a one-sided polemic.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
I start with the basics.
Three facts anchor this book: title, authorship, publication. Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices was written by Mosab Hassan Yousef with journalist Ron Brackin and published by Tyndale’s SaltRiver imprint in 2010 (hardcover; trade paper edition also 2010).
The context matters.
The book is a political-spiritual memoir: part family chronicle (Ramallah, Al-Bireh, refugee camps), part inside history (Muslim Brotherhood, birth of Hamas, the Oslo years), part intelligence case study (Shin Bet recruitment, handling, prevention of suicide attacks), and part conversion narrative.
In the preface, Mosab frames the West’s perennial question—“Why can’t people just get along in the Middle East?”—then answers with a lived mosaic rather than a slogan. He describes himself starkly as “a child of Islam and the son of an accused terrorist… also a follower of Jesus.”
The purpose is blunt.
Mosab’s core thesis: ideologies and identities (“ladder of Islam,” factional nationalism, revenge) pull people up rungs toward absolutism; only breaking the cycle—often by betraying your own side’s expectations—saves lives. In his words, the goal is “to set the record straight on some key events” and offer “hope that the impossible can be accomplished.”
I keep that front of mind.
Because clarity is the only fair way to read this book.
And because the stakes—human lives—leave no room for lazy summaries.
The memoir’s publication in March 2010 made headlines as the author revealed he had spied for Shin Bet for nearly a decade—the same revelation that underpins the 2014 documentary The Green Prince (Audience Award, Sundance).
2. Background
One generation feeds the next.
Mosab sketches his family’s path from his imam grandfather to Sheikh Hassan Yousef, Mosab’s father and a founding figure in Hamas, whose charisma and piety drew crowds in the camps. The “ladder” metaphor is memorable: at the top rung sits jihad, which moderate believers rarely look up to see—until escalation makes it feel inevitable.
Two historical hinges recur.
First, the Muslim Brotherhood’s social roots and moral ambition (schools, charity) coexisting with a program that ultimately sanctifies struggle; second, the First Intifada (1987), where boys threw rocks at armored vehicles and images ricocheted worldwide. In those pages Mosab recounts childhood stone-throwing, masked men, curfews, and the way chaos enabled infiltrations and vendettas.
Then comes the whiplash.
In December 1992, following the abduction/murder of an Israeli policeman, Israel deported hundreds of suspected Hamas/Islamic Jihad figures into a winter no-man’s land near Lebanon—press tallies vary, with contemporaneous and later accounts citing 415–418 deportees. Mosab’s father was among them, and the exile inadvertently deepened Hamas–Hezbollah ties—an outcome widely noted by analysts.
3. Son of Hamas Summary
I read this as a chronicle of three conversions.
First, from son to fighter: the boy watching burials by the Ali Mosque grows into a teenager intoxicated by defiance. He describes a stone striking metal as “sounding like a bomb exploding,” and the fear of a settler’s M16 aimed across the cemetery wall. He is cuffed, blindfolded, dumped from jeeps; he is told, “Walk, or I will shoot you.” (All details recounted in early chapters.)
Second, from fighter to informant: after a 1996 arrest linked to guns he’d purchased, he’s dragged to Maskobiyeh—the Jerusalem detention center nicknamed “Dark Night” or “the Slaughterhouse.” Sitting for hours on slanted chairs, hood rank with “the unbrushed teeth and foul breath of a hundred prisoners,” he hears Leonard Cohen’s refrain—“First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin”—looping while prisoners beg just to use the toilet. An interrogator named Loai (Shin Bet) offers him a way out—“Tell me about Hamas… weapons… organization”—and Mosab realizes the most urgent enemy might be the logic of the machine itself.
Third, from informant to witness: he becomes the Shin Bet source later dubbed “the Green Prince,” tasked with preventing bombings and assassinations, often on the condition that targets be arrested rather than killed. External reporting and the documentary confirm that handler Gonen Ben Itzhak publicly testified in the U.S. to secure Mosab’s asylum, and that the role prevented multiple attacks.
Son of Hamas
I began with a question that kept circling my mind: how does a boy raised in reverence become a man who picks up an alias and a wire, and why does he decide—quietly, dangerously—that saving strangers matters more than belonging?
Very early, Mosab Hassan Yousef answers with a tapestry image: life in the Middle East isn’t a neat timeline; it’s “a Persian carpet—thousands of richly colored threads” where events run “consecutively and concurrently,” and any attempt to lay them end to end “would lose the design.”
From the start, the place and the family feel like the anchor of a small universe. Mosab was born in the West Bank city of Ramallah, the eldest son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef—one of the seven men who would help found Hamas—and the grandson of an imam whose voice carried the adhan like a lullaby over the hills near Al-Janiya.
Mosab introduces himself plainly: “My name is Mosab Hassan Yousef. I am the oldest son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, one of the seven founders of the Hamas organization.” His description of village life is tender—olive trees, a single car in town, a grandfather who “whispered the adhan” into each newborn’s ear and “married them, and…buried them.”
But the carpet he promised is woven with harder strands: occupation and resistance, sermons and funerals, curfews and holy days.
The book’s preface sketches the scale of Mosab’s vantage: “I am a child of Islam and the son of an accused terrorist. I am also a follower of Jesus… I was trusted at the highest levels of Hamas… I was held captive in the bowels of Israel’s most feared prison facility.” That triple identity—son of a movement, asset of its enemy, seeker of a bruising kind of faith—drives the entire narrative.
The boyhood chapters make a simple but important point: the Muslim Brotherhood his father first encountered in the 1970s looked like a civic revival, not a militia.
In Jordan the Brotherhood “was well established and beloved by the people,” its members “encouraging renewed faith,” “healing those who were hurt,” and “supporting charities.” What Mosab’s father didn’t yet see, his son writes, was “the other side of Islam,” and here the book introduces the metaphor he never lets go: “Islamic life is like a ladder,” with charity and schools on middle rungs and “the highest rung…jihad.”
Most people, the young narrator observes, don’t look up to see the top; “progress is usually gradual,” like a cat edging closer to a swallow until, in an instant, “the cat’s claws are stained with the swallow’s blood.”
Without warning, politics accelerates the climb. The secret meeting in Hebron (1986) brings seven men—including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Jamal Mansour, and Mosab’s father—together to shift from pastoral influence to organized confrontation.
They agree to start with “simple civil disobedience—throwing stones and burning tires” to “awaken, unify, and mobilize” people “under the banner of Allah and Islam.” The last line in the scene lands like a gavel: “Hamas was born.”
Within a year, the fuse is lit. In December 1987, a stabbing in Gaza and a fatal traffic accident spiraling through rumor spark riots in Jabalia; a seventeen-year-old throws a Molotov cocktail, is shot by a soldier, and the streets ignite. “Children threw stones at Israeli tanks,” their photos raced across the world; “The First Intifada had begun.” The violence runs so thick through the Ramallah cemetery that the boy narrator says he sometimes grew bored in rare quiet spells and joined friends throwing stones “to be respected as fighters.”
He describes settlers with automatic weapons as “aliens from another planet,” and the water tanks on his roof “shredded by Israeli bullets.”
Then history imposes its calendar: detentions, deportations, accords. The 1992 mass deportations of Islamist figures to south Lebanon backfire badly for Israel, Mosab writes; the men became media symbols and—more consequentially—used exile to “forge an unprecedented relationship between Hamas and Hezbollah,” a connection with “major historical and geopolitical ramifications.”
Within a year, Oslo (Sept. 13, 1993) introduces a shimmering possibility: Arafat and Rabin shake hands at the White House; a poll shows “the vast majority of Palestinians” in Gaza and the West Bank supporting the Declaration of Principles; the Palestinian Authority is created; and autonomy is pledged to Gaza and Jericho.
Sheikh Hassan Yousef distrusts it, fearing that a real peace would mean the end of Hamas, and in the months that follow, killings and reprisals continue.
On February 25, 1994, the story veers into nightmare. During Ramadan and Purim in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque, Baruch Goldstein opens fire, killing 29 Palestinians and wounding “well over one hundred” before he’s beaten to death. Mosab describes the TV images—“one bloody corpse after another”—and the city’s emotional whiplash that left everyone “exhausted.”
In April, a car bomb destroys a bus in Afula, killing 8 and injuring 44, an attack claimed as reprisal.
A few months later, July 1, 1994, Arafat crosses the Rafah border and returns to Gaza, where he proclaims “National unity,” he told the crowds celebrating his return from exile, “is . . . our shield, the shield of our people. Unity. Unity. Unity.” But the Palestinian territories were far from unified,” Ramallah greets him with respect—Arafat even kisses Sheikh Hassan Yousef’s hand—yet Hamas and the PA1 remain ideologically miles apart.
While the political sky flickers, the book pulls us underground—literally—into the chapter that changes everything. After a weapons purchase goes wrong, Mosab is arrested in 1996 and thrown into the Maskobiyeh Detention Center in West Jerusalem, a former Russian Orthodox compound reworked into police HQ and a Shin Bet interrogation site, with a prison buried “deep underground… black and stained and dark.”
He’s forced onto a low plastic chair, slanted forward, shackled; the room is “freezing cold.”
He breathes through a “foul bag,” shaking, unable to shift. A civilian interrogator arrives, sits on the desk, and says, “Some call it Dark Night. Others call it the Slaughterhouse. You are in big trouble, Mosab.”
The sounds become a torture device with their own grotesque rhythm: “Leonard Cohen’s voice… the merciless beat of ‘First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin!’” He tastes the hood, hears men crying, learns that someone has been in that chair “for three weeks” and allowed to sleep “four hours every week.”
When he’s chained again, he keeps his father’s stoicism in mind—“He was strong. He didn’t give in”—and the scene crescendos with a guard’s refusal: “No toilet now. It is not the time for the toilet.”
And then, in an unannounced pivot, the interrogator offers a door out that isn’t labeled “freedom.” It’s labeled information. What do you know about Hamas? About the Islamic student movement? “I want to know everything,” the man says. In hindsight, this is where the double life begins—not as a cinematic moment of recruitment but as a survival calculation that hardens into a moral program: if a phone call, a tip, or a delay can stop one bus from exploding, you take the risk and pay the price.
Mosab doesn’t turn into a cheerleader for the men who hurt him; he becomes a source who insists on one crucial condition whenever he can: arrest, don’t kill.
From there, the book reveals its most paradoxical strand: the son of a founding leader becomes one of the Israeli security service’s most valuable sources against the organization his father helped build.
Meanwhile, the movement he was raised in accelerates toward clandestine violence—bomb-makers honing peroxide charges; cells forming; clandestine sermons offering scriptural backing for reprisal.
The PA tries to reconcile with Hamas; the meetings, Mosab notes, collapse when Hamas refuses to join a peace process it interprets as surrender. “The transition of Hamas into a full-blown terrorist organization was complete,” he writes, as many “climbed the ladder of Islam and reached the top.”
At this point, the book alternates between operations and conscience. The “ladder” returns as a warning: moderates can be “more dangerous” because they normalize the climb, and “most suicide bombers began as moderates.”
That line is intentionally provocative, and Mosab frames it as the bitter fruit of experience: his father’s mercy couldn’t hold the center against militants who claimed “the full force of the Qur’an to back them up.” He isn’t asking the reader to adopt a theology; he’s testifying to an ecology of belief that, in his telling, nudged men from charity to carnage in the friction of the 1990s.
The public facts continue to mark the pages like calendar pins: 1993 handshake; 1994 Hebron massacre with 29 killed and 100+ wounded; 1994–1996 bombings and shootings; and by 1994 Arafat’s return via Rafah, repeated attempts at unity with Hamas, and failure. Each time the headlines tilt toward breakthrough, the street yanks them back.
Underneath those headlines, the personal cost tallies up in subtler figures: the number of hours chained to a slanted chair; the number of times a mother cooks without her eldest at the table; the number of tips that don’t make the news because a bus never explodes. Speaking directly to his father, Mosab writes about “every drop of innocent blood that has been saved,” and that line—plain, almost shy—reads like the quiet ledger that kept him going.
Eventually, the book’s other declared identity arrives on stage: the spiritual pivot.
He has read the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus Christ; he has wrestled with the outrageous command to love enemies; and he names himself, to the reader, as a follower of Jesus, a label that in his world means exile from one tent without promise of shelter in the next. “I made choices that have made me a traitor in the eyes of people I love,” he says, and the sentence never sounds triumphant; it sounds like a bruise that hasn’t faded.
The later chapters—pruned of operational detail for obvious reasons—still convey the shape of the double life: handlers who know everything; informants who can’t sleep; arrests that avert assassinations; disagreements over tactics; and the numbing loneliness of success that must remain secret.
The security services, once a faceless tormentor, become a network of individuals—some cruel, some banal, a few unexpectedly humane—who inhabit the same moral fog as everyone else. The Maskobiyeh scenes don’t disappear; they hang there as the price of the knowledge only a turncoat can offer.
When I closed the book, what lingered wasn’t just the set-piece events—the 1986 meeting, the 1987 uprising, 1992 deportations, 1993 Oslo, 1994 Hebron—but Mosab’s relentless attention to the gray in which people live.
He refuses to flatten his father, who “had a great love and compassion for the Muslim people” and filled a mosque so full that worshipers “overflowed into the streets,” even as that same father could not publicly condemn suicide bombings carried out by others. He refuses to saint himself; he shows us the hood and the trembling; he remembers the taste of water that “didn’t smell right at all” and the boiled egg rolling on a blue tray across a sheen of sewage.
What did I learn, beyond the shock of an insider turning? First, that organizations are not machines with switches; they’re “ghosts,” ideas that regenerate like flatworms when you cut off a head—so the war of attrition against militants becomes a war against a story, which is far harder to win than a raid.
Second, that policy gambits can boomerang: the 1992 deportations grew Hamas’s prestige and network by accident, a case study in the unintended consequences of collective punishment. Third, that the arithmetic of “lives saved” is real even when invisible; a postponed bus route never gets a headline, but it is the whole point of an informant’s peril.
Fourth—and this is the hardest to stomach—that many of us want the comfort of a villain who never prays and a hero who never cuffs, while the reality is fathers who cry at births and leaders who condone violence by silence, interrogators who blast Leonard Cohen and handlers who quietly argue to arrest instead of kill. The contradictions don’t cancel; they coexist. In that coexistence, Mosab makes his choice.
The final notes are addressed like letters, a son talking to a father and to a reader who might be a stranger but is asked to carry a small piece of the weight. He admits the bills of war “continue to come,” but he grounds his stubbornness in a simple metric: “Every drop of innocent blood that has been saved gives me hope.”
It is not a policy paper, not a manifesto. It is a witness statement told by someone who has stood in too many rooms with too little light.
The interior verdict
Some of Mosab’s most arresting passages are not about geopolitics but about moral math. Here is his candid summation of Hamas’s doctrinal trap:
“Hamas… Islamized the Palestinian problem, making it a religious problem… it could never be resolved because we believed that the land belonged to Allah. Period. End of discussion.”
And here is the needle he threads with his father:
“I loved my father so deeply… But for a man who could not bring himself to harm an insect, he had obviously found a way to rationalize the idea that it was fine for somebody else to explode people into scraps of meat.”
Those are not the words of a dispassionate analyst. They are a son’s verdict, handed down after years of trying to square irreconcilables.
A compact, chapter-spanning recap with dates and numbers
- 1978–1986 (roots): Born 1978 near Ramallah, Mosab grows up in a devout household that becomes central to the rise of Hamas (founded 1986 in Hebron, per the book’s timeline). He inherits a communal ethic and a reputation to uphold.
- 1987–1991 (first uprising): The First Intifada politicizes daily life; masked men dictate strikes; “collaborator” accusations can mean a hanging; schooling suffers almost an entire year. Beatings by both occupiers and local enforcers become commonplace.
- 1992 (deportations): Israel’s mass deportation unintentionally amplifies Hamas leaders’ fame and links them with Hezbollah; families wait months—101 return, then others later; Sheikh Hassan is re-imprisoned.
- 1993–1994 (Oslo and Hebron): Arafat–Rabin letters (Sept 9) and the Sept 13 handshake; polls show broad Palestinian support for the DOP; Sheikh Hassan opposes it as a threat to Hamas’s existence. Then Hebron (Feb 25, 1994): 29 killed, 100+ wounded, followed by reprisal attacks including Afula (Apr 6): 8 dead, 44 injured.
- 1996 (Maskobiyeh): Arrested and taken to the Maskobiyeh complex; described in exacting detail (hood, slanted chair, “Dark Night,” dungeon-like cells). A Shin Bet handler opens a door that will define the next decade.
- 2000–2003 (Second Intifada and prisons): The timeline logs the Second Intifada (2000); Operation Defensive Shield (2002); arrests of Mosab and his father; targeted killings of Hamas operatives; the book’s narrative traces clandestine work aimed at preventing attacks and reducing civilian deaths.
- 2002 (the staged arrest): To take pressure off and protect his father, Mosab engineers a joint operation; soldiers sweep in; by coincidence, Abdullah Barghouti sits across the street—“everybody was clueless,” he writes.
- 2005–2007 (conversion and departure): Mosab is baptized (2005), steps back from field work, watches Haniyeh’s 2006 rise, and leaves for America (2007), convinced that the only durable answer is truth plus forgiveness, embraced first, before any side does it for you.
What I learned
- Systems are messy; myths are tidy. The notion that Hamas has a single, reachable command center is punctured by a founder’s own admission: “No one is the leader!” The networked, diasporic structure matters for anyone who imagines quick fixes.
- Policies can boomerang. The 1992 deportations didn’t deter; they conferred celebrity and forged cross-border ties—exactly the kind of second-order effect policymakers often underestimate.
- Revenge is efficient—and bankrupt. The Hebron massacre to Afula chain is a grim case study in how one extremist act resets an entire theater of war in weeks. Counting bodies without counting grief misses the point; grief manufactures tomorrow’s volunteer.
- Intelligence work is unglamorous courage. The book’s day-to-day is more hoods and awkward meals than movie chases. A son asking the people holding him to arrest instead of kill is not neutrality; it’s choosing a slower arithmetic of mercy.
- Faith, if it doesn’t change enemies into neighbors, is just a badge. Agree or disagree with Mosab’s theology, he argues that love of enemies isn’t soft; it’s the only lever powerful enough to jam the revenge engine. “Truth and forgiveness are the only solution,” he writes; the challenge is being first to live them.
A closing word to the reader
If you come to Son of Hamas looking for easy heroes, you’ll be disappointed. You’ll meet a father you may admire and critique in the same breath, a son who can sound defiant and exhausted by turns, and a world where a small decision—call a handler, warn about a meeting, ask for an arrest instead of a strike—means lives.
The book’s contribution is not that it tells us who is “good” or “bad,” but that it shows us how people change under pressure, and what it costs to try to stop a bomb that might be minutes away.
Two sentences stay with me. From the dedication: “Instead, I became a traitor in the eyes of my people.” From the last reflections: “As long as we continue to search for enemies anywhere but inside ourselves, there will always be a Middle East problem.” Whatever your politics, it’s hard not to feel the weight—and the invitation—in both lines.
4. Son of Hamas Analysis
I evaluate his evidence on two levels.
On the personal level, the memoir’s best evidence is texture: a rotten water pipe in a cell, a plastic chair bolted at an angle, a plastic tray sliding through sewage, a handler’s whiteboard with “Hamas / weapons / organization” scrawled in marker. These specifics, corroborated by public reporting on the Maskobiyeh facility and Shin Bet methods in the 1990s, are consistent with known interrogation practices and detainee accounts.
On the public level, Mosab’s timeline matches external data: 1987 uprising, 1992 deportations, 1994 Hebron massacre (29 dead; 125 injured), 1995 Rabin assassination, and the 1994–1996 bus bombings that shaped Israeli domestic politics. The documentary The Green Prince and later interviews confirm the identity of handler Gonen Ben Itzhak, the “Loai” of the book, and his U.S. courtroom testimony in 2010 to secure Mosab’s stay.
Does he support his arguments?
Mostly, yes—because the book isn’t arguing an abstract thesis so much as showing how participation in a system (Hamas, PA, Shin Bet) forces moral bets.
He doesn’t airbrush Hamas’s social welfare or his father’s kindness; he also doesn’t euphemize suicide bombings or the religious sanction some ideologues draw from scripture. Where he generalizes—e.g., “moderate Muslims” being “more dangerous” because they normalize the climb—readers should treat that as a provocation anchored in his lived sample, not as sociology.
Does it contribute meaningfully?
Absolutely. Few first-person accounts offer a triple vantage—Hamas household, Shin Bet agent, Christian convert—across the same timeline. Whether you agree with his theology or politics, the operational detail alone makes this a primary source for courses on insurgency, intelligence ethics, and conflict transformation.
5. Strengths and Weaknesses
This is where I’m candid.
Strengths (pleasant/positive):
- Inside access without gloating. The small choices—asking that targets be arrested, not killed—matter, and Mosab records them without self-mythologizing.
- Human portraits. His father emerges paradoxical, admirable, and frustrating—an imam who “could not kill an insect,” yet couldn’t publicly condemn the killing of civilians by others.
- Chronology that breathes. The memoir’s interleaving of personal and public events—curfews, funerals, school exams—builds credibility and stakes.
Weaknesses (unpleasant/negative):
- Over-generalized claims. Broad statements about Islam or “moderates” reflect Mosab’s trajectory but can read as sweeping indictments; cross-checking with broader Muslim scholarship is healthy.
- Limited Israeli introspection. The book shows Israeli brutality (beatings, hoods), yet its arc centers on saving Israeli (and Palestinian) lives via Shin Bet; readers wanting a fuller legal/rights analysis will need supplemental sources.
- One-person sample problem. As with any memoir, unique vantage is both asset and limit; it’s not a substitute for social science.
6. Reception, criticism, influence
I track three lines of reception.
Public fascination: The revelation of a founding leader’s son working as a top Shin Bet source made global headlines and helped the book hit the NYT list (March 2010); the story then crossed into film with The Green Prince, which won Sundance’s Audience Award (2014) and collected festival nominations thereafter.
Skepticism and pushback: Some Palestinian voices called Mosab a traitor; certain Muslim organizations later labeled his public statements Islamophobic. Even among Western readers, critics noted that a conversion narrative published by a Christian house might tilt the theological framing.
Policy and ethics debates: Timelines and claims in the book are frequently cited in discussions of counter-insurgency, informant handling, and the politics of deportation/asylum—including Gonen Ben Itzhak’s unusual decision to out himself to support Mosab’s U.S. immigration case in 2010.
7. Comparison with similar works
I place it on a shelf.
Compared to Fatah-centered or PLO-centric memoirs, Son of Hamas narrows the focus to Hamas’s formation and the Islamist rationale that competes (and sometimes colludes) with secular nationalism.
For cinematic counterparts, pair it with The Green Prince (documentary of the same story) and narrative dramas like Bethlehem or Omar, which explore informant–handler bonds and moral gray zones; a decade of criticism has noted how such films navigate between authenticity and genre.
If you’re building a reading cluster:
Combine this with reportage on the Hebron massacre, primary sources on the 1992 deportations, and balanced primers on the Oslo era to triangulate the memoir’s claims and emotions.
8. Conclusion
I recommend it widely, with caveats.
If you want to understand Hamas beyond slogans, to see how intelligence actually prevents bombs, or to grapple with a faith that makes you betray your own side for the sake of strangers, read this.
It’s suitable for general audiences who can handle hard scenes and for specialists in security studies, Middle East history, religion and politics, and human rights who need texture, not just theory. It will frustrate partisans on every side—that’s precisely why it’s valuable.
Notes
- In Son of Hamas, “PA” stands for the Palestinian Authority (sometimes called the Palestinian National Authority).
According to the book, the PA was established as a result of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which required Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to form a semi-autonomous government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Mosab Yousef writes that “The Oslo Accords required Arafat to establish the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. So on July 1, 1994, he approached Egypt’s Rafah border, crossed into Gaza, and settled in.” He also notes that some Palestinians accepted the PA as progress because it gave limited control over Gaza and Jericho, while Hamas viewed it as a betrayal because it meant giving up the larger goal of recovering all pre-1948 Palestinian territories.
Later, Mosab describes the PA’s role as an internal governing and policing force, particularly under Arafat’s Fatah faction. After Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995, he writes that “PA police came to our house, asked my father to prepare himself, and locked him away in Arafat’s compound—all the while treating him with the utmost respect and kindness… For the first time, Palestinians were imprisoning other Palestinians.” This moment marks his growing disillusionment with both Israel and the PA, seeing it as corrupt and oppressive toward its own people. ↩︎