Former Hamas Member Tells UNHRC: “If Israel Did Not Exist, You Would Have No One To Blame”

Jerusalem, 26 September, 2017 (TPS) -- The Palestinian Authority is the “greatest enemy of the Palestinian people,” a former Hamas member Mosab Hassan Yousef told the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday.

“If Israel did not exist, you would have no one to blame; take responsibility for the outcome of your own actions,” said Yousef, 39,  the son of one of Hamas’s founding members Sheik Hassan Yousef.

Yousef’s statement at the UNHRC came during a debate on Agenda Item Seven: “Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories,” which singles out Israel for permanent censure. Yousef spoke on behalf of UN Watch, a Geneva-based pro-Israel organization.

In his one minute and a half  speech Yousef  challenged the PA’s legitimacy: “The Palestinian people did not elect you, and they did not appoint you to represent them. You are self-appointed,” he said referring to the fact PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s four-year mandate expired in January 2009, although his tenure was extended by decree for a year beyond that. Presidential elections scheduled for January 2010 were then postponed indefinitely.

Yousef abandoned his Muslim faith and became an Israeli agent after becoming appalled by the brutality of the Hamas movement and its use of suicide bombers. He emerged as one of Israel’s prized informants, who disrupted lethal attacks and uncovered terror cells. Known as the Green Prince, a reference to the color of the Hamas flag, Yousef was an Israeli intelligence asset for a decade beginning in 1996, feeding the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) information that prevented many suicide-bombings and led to the arrests of his father and of Marwan  Barghouti, who was a founder of Fatah’s Tanzim militia and has been in an Israeli jail since  his arrest in 2002 and subsequent conviction on five counts of murder.

In 2007, Yousef  moved to the United States where he received political asylum.