Estranged Son of Hamas Leader, Now an American Citizen, Warns of Wider War in Middle East

‘What you saw in Gaza, the attack on October 7, this is nothing compared to what Hezbollah is capable of doing,’ Mr. Yousef says.

AP/Sebastian Scheiner
Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of Hamas founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, at the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in 2012. AP/Sebastian Scheiner

The estranged son of one of Hamas’ founders, Mosab Hasan Yousef, is taking to social media and the U.S. airwaves warning of the perils of allowing Iran to continue its terrorist campaigns in the Middle East and the potential risks of a multi-front war to the state of Israel.

In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Monday, Mr. Yousef says Israeli leaders need to be wary of becoming too bogged down in Gaza because Iran is training and equipping armies throughout the Middle East that will likely strike from the north if Israel’s military is distracted.

“What you saw in Gaza, the attack on October 7, this is nothing compared to what Hezbollah is capable of doing,” Mr. Yousef says, referring to the Iranian-backed terrorists in Lebanon and Syria. “They have a lot more experience. They have a lot more missiles and they could use weapons that we are not expecting, including biological and chemical weapons. Because they have no limit and they have no morality. They have no responsibility. They are driven by hatred, and they think that they are authorized by the divine.”

As strong as it is, he says, Israel cannot fight on multiple fronts alone. “The time has come for the United States to weigh in,” he says, adding that the voices in the West advocating for appeasement of Hamas are “escaping reality.” As the most powerful nation on the planet, he says, America “has a responsibility to the rest of the world.”

The root cause of the current turmoil that has engulfed Israel and the wider Middle East is Iran, he says, “the head of the snake,” as he puts it. “A nuclear-armed Iran will threaten not only the Middle East,” he says. “They will threaten Europe as well.”

Mr. Yousef is the son of Hassan Yousef, the leader of a Hamas faction at the West Bank and widely considered one of the group’s most extreme leaders. He broke off relations with his father in the mid-1990s and for years worked as an informant for the Israeli security service, the Shin Bet. He converted to Christianity in 2005 and moved to the United States, where he is now a citizen, two years later.

Mr. Yousef appears to have joined Twitter since the October 7 attacks in Israel and is regularly posting diatribes against Hamas and its leadership, who he says are engaged in a religious war to annihilate Jews in Israel and elsewhere. “If we give Hamas what they want, they will become deadlier,” he said in another post Monday. “Hamas is not a threat against Israel only, Hamas today is a global threat. Look at the death, confusion and moral conflict they have created so far. They started the war and united we will end it.”


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