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

Yousef offers a new Preface for the edition published after Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023, which killed over a thousand Israelis and took hundreds more hostage, as well as prompting a fierce and sustained counterattack from Israel into the Gaza Strip. When asked for his opinion, he insists that “Hamas is bad news” (xiii), which he knows as the son of a Hamas cofounder and a trusted member of its inner circle. As someone who worked for Israeli intelligence and studied Hamas as an enemy, he considers the leaders of Hamas to be vicious frauds who kill only for their personal benefit, not for the sake of the Palestinian people. There are no easy answers to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he claims that violence alone certainly cannot solve it but that “telling the truth” is a vital first step (xiii). Yousef now lives in the United States, and given that some Americans may be uneducated about the conflict, he explains how the British government encouraged mass Jewish emigration to the land of Palestine after World War I, practically ensuring conflict with the Arab majority living there. Once Israel became a state in 1948, the Palestinians never received a centralized authority that could prevent various factions from each pursuing their own interests.