Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices

In late 1992, Israel responded with extreme force after the Al-Qassem Brigades kidnapped and later murdered a border policeman in an attempt to release Hamas’s leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Hassan and other prisoners were taken across the Lebanon border, from where he was eventually able to send the family mail and make brief phone calls. After several months, Israel released most of the deportees, but Hassan was not among them. They learned that he was returned to prison, as his time in Lebanon helped him fortify an alliance with the militant group Hezbollah. Around that same time, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat embarked on a peace deal with Israel, which Hassan opposed. He believed that Israel may be deceptive during peace negotiations; meanwhile, other Hamas leaders feared “that a peace accord might actually stick! Peaceful coexistence would mean the end of Hamas. From their perspective, the organization could not thrive in a peaceful atmosphere” (52). Violence was widespread, and one of the most significant attacks was carried out by US-born Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish settler who massacred a group of Muslims during prayers on the Jewish holiday of Purim. He killed dozens before the crowd beat him to death. Before long, Hamas carried out the first of what would be many suicide bombings. At the time, Yousef “saw the attacks as a huge victory against the Israeli occupation. At fifteen years of age, [he] saw everything in stark black and white. There were good guys and bad guys. And the bad guys deserved everything they got” (54).

PLO Chairman Arafat lost enormous diplomatic credibility by supporting Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, but he gained his status back with the Oslo Accords, which established some degree of Palestinian autonomy and promise of future negotiations in exchange for the PLO’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist. Some celebrated Arafat’s modest accomplishments as the only substantive progress anyone had yet made, while others castigated Arafat for shaking the hands of a hated enemy. After a failed attempt to link Hamas to the PLO, Hassan decided to support the armed struggle. There was no way that Hamas could defeat Israel by itself, but by framing the conflict in religious terms, they made compromise impossible, as “the land belonged to Allah. End of discussion” (58). Hassan never personally killed anyone or ordered their death, but Yousef began to wonder how someone could “rationalize the idea that it was fine for someone else to explode people into scraps of meat, as long as he didn’t personally bloody his hands” (58).

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who cosigned the Oslo Accords, was assassinated in November 1995. Arafat immediately called Hassan to warn Hamas away from celebrating, but the killer was discovered to be an Israeli law student. The Palestinian Authority nonetheless retaliated against Hamas while treating Hassan to a comparatively comfortable internment. While Hassan told Yousef to focus on school, Yousef wanted to join the armed struggle to get revenge, and his cousin helped him gain access to firearms. Shortly thereafter, his brother told him that Israeli forces were looking for him. His father also learned that the authorities were looking for Yousef; while he was angry, “through his anger, however, it was clear to [Yousef] that he was mostly disappointed and worried” (65).

The books returns to Yousef’s arrest, when soldiers locked him in an Israeli prison known as “the slaughterhouse.” Hungry and thirsty, with a broken toilet and filthy water coming from the pipes, he heard the Leonard Cohen song “First We Take Manhattan” when he received a meager meal and verbal abuse from an elderly guard. That guard brought him into another room, where he was faced with a civilian interrogator who told him that he was now in the same complex that his father was in after his first arrest. The interrogator demanded that Yousef tell him all about Hamas, seemingly overestimating Yousef’s actual knowledge. Taken back into the corridors, he briefly talked with other prisoners who described weeks’ worth of torture, especially sleep deprivation. Referring to his time in this terrifying environment, Yousef says, “My world had stopped. Outside, I knew that people were getting up, going to their jobs, and returning home to their families. […] But in that room, everyone sat. No one moved” (73). The elderly guard offered him two minutes to use the bathroom and eat, but Yousef was too tired to do anything, so he was chained to a chair.

Yousef’s days became a succession of opening and closing doors and color-coded meal trays. He thought of how brave his father must have been in prison, and “[he] very much wanted to be like him, but [he] knew [he] still had a long way to go” (77). One day, an officer named Loai from Shin Bet (Israeli intelligence) sat down to talk with Yousef, treating him with relative courtesy and deploring the violence he suffered. He then asked Yousef for information on Hamas, maintaining a polite air while warning that non-cooperation would lead to serious trouble. Yousef admitted to procuring weapons, which his cousin had but which he claimed had nothing to do with any plans to attack Israelis. Two days later, Yousef heard his cousin in the cell next to his, but he was then moved to another cell to spend weeks in isolation. He met again with Loai, who offered him a chance to work for Israeli intelligence. At first, Yousef refused, insisting that “Islam forbid[] [him] to work with [them]” (82). He then thought about the possibility of being a double agent, pretending to help Shin Bet while really working for Hamas. He accepted the offer, and after a few weeks, he was sent to Megiddo prison, where he strongly suspected that the emir, or leader, of the Hamas faction there was also a Shin Bet spy. Yousef was sent again to the slaughterhouse for 25 days and then returned to Megiddo.

Yousef was welcomed among the Hamas faction who, this time, were not informants, but he was confused about what Shin Bet expected of him. Conditions in the prison were grim, with poor sanitation and ventilation, but their days were organized by prayer, meetings, and even watching television, with someone appointed to hold a rope-bound board and lower it over the screen in the case of any indecent images. Yousef was joined by family members, including his vindictive uncle Ibrahim, who had mistreated the family while his father was in prison. Ibrahim was a popular figure within the prison, and although he seemed to suspect that Yousef might be working with Shin Bet, “he wouldn’t have dared to say so directly to the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef” (91). After several weeks, Yousef was brought to a desert encampment surrounded by chain-link fence, again residing with the Hamas faction, as prisons were strictly divided according to faction. He learned that the different factions communicated by tossing balls of dough to one another at the announcement of a unique code word, with messages stuffed inside.

During daily head counts, Yousef noticed a sickly prisoner who was routinely swapped out with someone else to go unnoticed by the Hamas guards who ran much of the day-to-day operations. The routine in the outdoor prison was similar to Megiddo, although the population was much larger. One day, Hamas security guards ordered Yousef out of a tent and brought someone in to torture him, allegedly for giving information to the Israelis. Yousef then suspected that the ailing man had been subject to a similar treatment. He would later learn that “between 1993 and 1996 more than 150 suspected collaborators were investigated by Hamas inside Israeli prisons. About sixteen were murdered” (98). Hamas security, known as maj’d, gave him dossiers on the prisoners, which seemed sensational. Yousef suspected that many made false confessions under torture, possibly serving “no purpose other than to feed the sexual fantasies of the imprisoned maj’d” (98). A friend of Yousef then fell victim to the maj’d; he was a socially awkward man with nobody to take revenge for him. They confiscated food brought from his sister, which Ibrahim delightfully ate, and then accused him of grotesque sexual crimes that made him an outcast among his family and neighborhood. Despite Yousef’s general dislike for the maj’d, he came to respect one of their leaders, Anas Rasras, and Yousef told him of his plan to be a double agent. Ibrahim immediately found out and questioned Yousef harshly. Everyone became even more suspicious of one another, and Yousef wonders, “Was this Hamas? Was this Islam?” (102).