Son of Hamas

Suspicious, I asked, “How can I help you?”

“We’re looking for Sheikh Hassan Yousef. It’s important.”

“Tell me why it’s important.”

They explained that they were two of the five suicide bombers who had just arrived from Jordan. Their contact had been arrested, and they needed a safe place to stay.

“Okay,” I said. “You came to the right place.”

I asked what they needed.

“We have a car full of explosives and bombs, and we need someplace safe to leave it.”

Great, I thought, what am I going to do with a car stuffed with explosives? I had to think quickly. I decided to keep their car in the garage beside our house. It was obviously not one of my brighter ideas, but I was forced to think on my feet.

“Okay, here’s some money,” I said, emptying my wallet. “Go find a place to stay, get back to me here tonight, and we’ll figure out what to do.”

After they left, I called Loai, and to my relief, the Shin Bet came and took the car away.

All five suicide bombers returned a short time later. “Okay,” I told them, “from now on, I am your connection to Hamas. I will provide your targets, locations, transportation, everything you need. Do not talk to anyone else, or you might be dead before you have a chance to kill any Israelis.”

This situation constituted an extraordinary windfall in terms of intelligence. Up to now, no one ever knew about suicide bombers before they detonated their explosives. Suddenly, five of them had shown up at my door with a carload of bombs. Thirty minutes after I told the Shin Bet their location, Prime Minister Sharon authorized their assassinations.

“You can’t do that,” I told Loai.

“What!”

“I know they are terrorists, and they are about to blow themselves up. But those five men are ignorant. They don’t know what they’re doing. You can’t kill them. If you kill them, this is my last operation.”

“Are you threatening us?”

“No, but you know how I work. I made an exception once with Halawa, and you remember how that ended. I will not be part of killing people.”

“What option is there?”

“Arrest them,” I said, though even as I spoke the words, I knew it was a crazy idea. We had the car and the bombs, but these guys still had their belts. If a soldier got within a hundred yards of their one-room flat, they would detonate the belts and take everybody with them.

Even if we managed to get them out alive without anybody else getting killed, they would be sure to mention my name to their interrogators, and I would be burned for sure. Self-preservation told me the safest thing for all concerned was just to let a helicopter fire a couple of missiles into their apartment and be done with it.

But my conscience was being rewired. Though not yet a Christian, I was really trying to follow the ethical teachings of Jesus. Allah had no problem with murder; in fact, he insisted on it. But Jesus held me to a much higher standard. Now I found I couldn’t kill even a terrorist.

At the same time, I had become far too valuable to the Shin Bet for them to risk losing me. They weren’t happy about it, but they finally agreed to call off the assassination.

“We have to know what is going on inside that room,” they told me. I headed over to the apartment under the pretext of taking the bombers a few pieces of simple furniture. What they didn’t know was that we had placed bugs inside the furniture that allowed us to hear every word they said. Together, we listened in as they discussed who would go first, second, third, etc. Everyone wanted to be first, so they didn’t have to watch their friends die. It was eerie. We were listening to dead men talking.

On March 16, security forces troops moved into position. The bombers were in the center of Ramallah, so the IDF couldn’t bring in tanks. Because the troops had to go in on foot, the operation was very dangerous. I followed the events from my place, as Loai talked to me on the phone and kept me informed of everything that was going on.

“They are going to sleep.”

We all waited until sounds of snoring came across the monitors.

The greatest risk was waking them too soon. The troops had to get through the door and reach the beds before any bomber could move a muscle.

A soldier fixed an explosive charge to the door as we listened to the monitors for the slightest noise, the slightest interruption in the snoring. Then they gave the signal.

The door exploded. Special forces troops rushed into the small apartment, catching all but one of the men. He grabbed a gun and jumped through the window—he was dead before he hit the ground.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Everyone except me. As soon as they got the guys into the jeep, one of them mentioned my name, exposing me as a collaborator.

My worst fears had been realized. I was burned. Now what?

Loai had the solution. The Shin Bet simply deported the guy back to Jordan, sending his friends to prison. So while he was home free, having fun with his family, the other three would assume that he had been the traitor, not me. It was brilliant.

I had gotten away with it one more time, though just barely. But it was clear I was pushing my luck a little too hard.

* * *

One day, I received a message from Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter, thanking me for the work I was doing for them. He said he had opened all the files in Israel’s war on terrorism and found the Green Prince in every one. While this was flattering, it was also a warning. I recognized it, and Loai recognized it. If I continued the way I was going, I would end up dead. The trail out there was too long. Somebody was sure to stumble across it. Somehow I needed to be sanitized.

My stubborn refusal to allow the five suicide bombers to be killed had compromised my situation in a big way. Even though everybody believed that the bomber who had been sent back to Jordan was responsible for the arrests, they also knew that Israel doesn’t hesitate to pick up anyone suspected of providing suicide bombers with help. And I had helped them a lot. So why hadn’t I been arrested?

A week after the bomber arrests, the Israeli security team came up with two ideas that could save me from being burned. First, they could arrest me and put me back into prison. But I was afraid that would be the same thing as a death sentence for my father, who would no longer have me to protect him from Israeli assassination attempts.

“The other option is for us to play the game.”

“Game? What game?”

Loai explained that we needed to trigger a high-profile event, something big enough to convince all of Palestine that Israel wanted me arrested or dead. In order to be persuasive, it couldn’t be staged. It had to be real. The Israeli Defense Forces had to really attempt to capture me. And this meant the Shin Bet had to manipulate and deceive the IDF—their own people.

The Shin Bet gave the IDF only a few hours to prepare for this major operation. As the son of Hassan Yousef, I was a very dangerous young man, they warned, because I had a tight relationship to suicide bombers and might be armed with explosives. They said they had good intelligence that I would come to my father’s house that night to visit my mother. I would stay only a short time, and I would be armed with an M16.

What a buildup they gave me. It was indeed an elaborate game.

The IDF was made to believe that I was a very high-profile terrorist who might disappear for good if they screwed up. So they did everything they could to make sure that didn’t happen. Undercover special forces dressed as Arabs, along with highly trained snipers, entered the area in Palestinian vehicles, stopped two minutes from the house, and waited for a signal. Heavy tanks were stationed fifteen minutes away on the territorial border. Helicopter gunships were ready to provide air cover, in case there was trouble with Palestinian street fighters.

Outside my father’s house, I sat in my car waiting for a call from the Shin Bet. When it came, I would have exactly sixty seconds to get away before the special forces surrounded the house. There was no margin for error on my end either.

I felt a stab of regret when I imagined how terrified my mother and little brothers and sisters would be within