That is not a headline you see every day, and this interview is nothing short of amazing, regardless of how you feel about Yousef’s views. Video is here.

Mosab Hassan Yousef — son of popular Hamas leader Sheikh Hassan Yousef (who is currently in an Israeli prison) — fled Ramallah, renounced his Islamic faith, embraced Christianity, and is now living in California.

It is important to understand just how stunning this transformation is. This is not just any Palestinian Muslim, or even just any former Hamas terrorist — this is the son of one of the most prominent leaders of the Hamas movement; an individual who grew up surrounded and indoctrinated by the extreme hard-line Islamist ideology of Hamas.

Mosab Hassan Yousef says he still loves his family — including his father, who he describes as “honest,” “humble,” and a “good Muslim,” — but says that he began undergoing a transformation after spending time in an Israeli jail and seeing the brutality and depravity of the Hamas leaders who were fellow inmates there:

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: When I was 18 years old, and I was arrested by the Israelis and was in an Israeli jail under the Israeli administration, Hamas had control of its members inside the jail and I saw their torture; (they were) torturing people in a very, very bad way.

JONATHAN HUNT: Hamas members torturing other Hamas members?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: Hamas leaders! Hamas leaders that we see on TV now, and big leaders, responsible for torturing their own members. They didn’t torture me, but that was a shock for me, to see them torturing people: putting needles under their nails, burning their bodies. And they killed lots of them.

JONATHAN HUNT: Why were they torturing people?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: Because they suspected that they had relations with the Israelis and (were) co-operating with the Israeli occupation against Hamas … So hundreds of people were victims for this, and I was a witness for about a year for this torture. So that was a huge change in my life. I started to open my (eyes), but, the point (is) that I got that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims. Good Muslims, such as my father, and bad Muslims, like those Hamas members in the jail torturing people.

So that was the beginning of opening my eyes wide.

Yousef also goes on to discuss how that realization about Hamas led him to convert to Christianity.

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: Now, here’s the reality: after I studied Christianity — which I had a big misunderstanding about, because I studied about Christianity from Islam, which is, there is nothing true about Christianity when you study it from Islam, and that was the only source.

When I studied the Bible carefully verse by verse, I made sure that that was the book of God, the word of God for sure, so I started to see things in a different way, which was difficult for me, to say Islam is wrong…

Needless to say, this transformation caused dramatic changes in Yousef’s life:

JONATHAN HUNT: How difficult a process has this been for you to effectively walk away from your family, leave your home behind? How difficult is that?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: Taking your skin off your bones, that’s what happened. I love my family, they love me. And my little brothers, they’re like my sons. I raised them. Basically, it was the biggest decision in my life.

When asked about his current views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Yousef had this to say:

…it’s not about nations, it’s about just wrong ideas on both sides and the only way for two nations really to get out of the endless circle is to know the principles that Jesus brought to this earth: grace, love, forgiveness. Without this, they will never be able to move on, or break this endless circle.

Sheikh Hassan Yousef is regularly described as representing the “pragmatic” wing of Hamas, advocating negotiations with Israeli officials and possible truce agreements. Nevertheless, to read the above words coming from the son of a prominent leader of a terrorist organization that was founded with the expressed goal of the destruction of Israel is incredible.

From the 1988 charter of the Hamas movement:

[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its faith, the movement educates its members to adhere to its principles and to raise the banner of Allah over their homeland as they fight their Jihad: “Allah is the all-powerful, but most people are not aware.”

Still, there are a significant number of people (including many Israelis) that believe that Israel can in fact come to a negotiated peace agreement with Hamas — exemplified by Jimmy Carter’s trip earlier this year to meet with Hamas leaders. Carter announced after the visit that he believed Hamas was “ready to live in peace with Israel.”

Mosab Yousef, however, believes otherwise:

JONATHAN HUNT: Do you believe that Israel can ever strike a peace deal with Hamas?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: There is no chance. Is there any chance for fire to co-exist with the water? There is no chance. Hamas can play politics for 10 years, 15 years; but ask any one of Hamas’ leaders, ‘Okay, what’s going to happen after that? Are you just going to live and co-exist with Israel forever?’ The answer is going to be no…

There’s more on that subject from Yousef’s interview with Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.

Towards the end of the interview, Yousef is asked if he fears for his life — renouncing Islam (and/or conversion to another religion) is forbidden by Islamic law and, according to the radical interpretation accepted by Hamas and other Islamist groups, it carries an automatic penalty of death.

His answer:

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: They got to kill my ideas first, (and) that’s it, they’re already out. So how are they going to kill my idea? How are they going to kill the opinions that I have? … They can kill my body, but they can’t kill my soul.

Ideas, after all, are bulletproof.