Hamas Co-Founder Hassan Yousef, Freed After 2.5 Years in Israeli Prison
One of the founding architects of Hamas in Judea and Samaria walks free, as Israel offers no explanation for his release.
Hassan Yousef, one of the founding architects of Hamas in Judea and Samaria, was released Thursday from Israeli custody after two and a half years of administrative detention, Palestinian media reported, in a move that drew immediate attention given his deep roots in the terror organization and his role as the father of Israel's most celebrated informant.
Yousef, 71, was arrested on October 19, 2023, at his home near Ramallah, as part of a wave of arrests of Hamas operatives in Judea and Samaria following the October 7 Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel that sparked the war in Gaza. His son Owais said he was freed near the city of Hebron and transferred to a hospital in Ramallah, where he resides. AFP footage showed Yousef lying in a hospital bed, one arm in a sling. "I can't sleep because of the pain," he told a well-wisher over the phone.
Who Is Hassan Yousef, and Why Does His Release Matter
Yousef is a senior leader of Hamas in Judea and Samaria, having co-founded the terror group in the 1980s along with Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and other Palestinian members of the Muslim Brotherhood. He is not a peripheral figure or a symbolic holdover from an earlier era. He is, in the assessment of Israeli security analysts, one of the movement's most consequential and enduring operatives.
He is considered a member of Hamas's extremist faction and refrains from any talk of rapprochement between Israelis and Palestinians. He is also considered one of the organization's spiritual leaders.
As a senior leader and spokesperson of the organization, he has survived assassination attempts, imprisonment, exile, and infighting. He is well-known in Judea and Samaria, even in the countryside, because he used to travel from village to village to preach in the mosques, and people remember him from those early days. That grassroots network, built over decades, is precisely what makes him dangerous. He is not merely an ideological figurehead. He is a mobilizer.
Yousef's views on resistance emphasize armed jihad as an obligatory religious and national duty to liberate Palestine from Israeli control, rejecting negotiations or recognition of Israel as legitimate paths to statehood. In line with Hamas doctrine, he regards the land of Palestine as an Islamic waqf inalienable from Muslim stewardship, necessitating perpetual struggle until full liberation.
A Long History of Incitement, and a Revolving Door
Yousef has been arrested by Israeli authorities several times, starting from 1993. He became a visible leader of the Second Intifada. According to the Palestinian Information Center, he has spent over 23 years in Israeli prisons.
In a 2019 interview on Al-Aqsa TV, Yousef himself said that Hamas in Judea and Samaria had been in constant communication with Sheikh Ahmad Yassin's office during the Second Intifada, playing a key role in planning operations.
His most recent pre-October 7 arrest came in late 2021, when he was charged in an Israeli military court with incitement to terror and supporting a terror organization after he arrived at the mourning tent of a Hamas gunman who killed an Israeli civilian near Jerusalem's Old City and gave a speech praising the attack and conveying the condolences of the Hamas movement to the terrorist's family.
Israel has arrested Yousef several times over the years. He was last released in July 2020 from 16 months of administrative detention. His release Thursday follows the same cycle, but the timing, with Hamas infrastructure in Judea and Samaria under strain and Israeli security forces engaged on multiple fronts, makes it more fraught than previous releases.
The Green Prince's Father
The family story adds a remarkable dimension to his release. From 1997 to 2007, his son Mosab Hassan Yousef worked for Israel's internal security agency Shin Bet. His efforts culminated in the incarceration of his father, who had served as a leading figure for Hamas operations from Judea and Samaria.
Mosab, known as "The Green Prince," is now a vocal critic of Hamas living in the United States under a new identity. The two are estranged. The elder Yousef's release is unlikely to change that.
What it may change is the security calculus in Samaria, where Israel has increased its use of administrative detention against Palestinians amid the Gaza war, a system that allows authorities to detain individuals for renewable six-month periods without charge. The decision to release Yousef without charge, after two and a half years, has given no official explanation, and Israeli police did not immediately respond to press inquiries.