Son of Hamas Leader Warns: Hamas Wants to ‘Annihilate the Jewish People’

The son of one of Hamas’ founding members says the terrorist organization is a “religious movement” that aims to kill the Jewish people and everyone who supports them.

“This is an ugly war. Israel did not start it, but Israel will end it,” Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Hamas founding member Sheikh Hassan Yousef, told CNN’s Jake Tapper. The younger Yousef was born in Gaza and was a Hamas member, but later became an informant for Israel after being repulsed by Hamas’ brutality. He converted to Christianity and wrote a book, The Son of Hamas.

Asked what motivates Hamas, he told Tapper, “Well, they are a religious movement, and this is what everybody is afraid to say.”

“If Hamas was a political movement, then we could satisfy their political ambition, but Hamas is a religious movement that does not believe in political borders,” Yousef said. “They want to establish an Islamic state on the rubble of the state of Israel. They want to annihilate the Jewish people and the Jewish state. They want to kill everybody supporting Israel and establish an Islamic state. But this is not the end. They want to establish an Islamic state—a global state eventually. So this is what’s on their mind, and we know we cannot satisfy their ambition. And the more power, you know, we give them, the more aggressive they are going to be. Hence, we cannot give Hamas what they want.”

Yousef said he had seen Hamas torture people by putting needles under their fingernails.

“Their brutality, their nature—it did not surprise me,” he said, referencing stories of beheadings.

The United States, he insisted, must give Israel what it needs to fight the war. 

“Israel is fighting on behalf of America; Israel is fighting on behalf of the Palestinian people; Israel is now fighting on behalf of the free world,” he said. “This is not political propaganda. As an ex-Hamas member, the son of the founder of the Hamas organization, and today, as an American citizen, I ask the president of the United States to give Israel the necessary cover, the necessary supply, whatever it takes to uproot Hamas. Otherwise, the next war is going to be deadlier.”