February 25, 2010 | 6:35 pm

Hamas scion spied for Israel

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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It feels a lot like deja vu. Eighteen months ago I blogged about how excited I was for an exclusive appearing Friday in the Haaretz Weekend Magazine. The subject was a Hamas scion who had converted to Christianity.

Today I’m looking forward to another story about Yousef that will appear in another edition of the Haaretz Weekend Magazine. This time it’s about Yousef’s decade of providing intelligence to Israel’s Shin Bet. An excerpt of the preview already online:

Yousef was considered the Shin Bet’s most reliable source in the Hamas leadership, earning himself the nickname “the Green Prince” - using the color of the Islamist group’s flag, and “prince” because of his pedigree as the son of one of the movement’s founders.

During the second intifada, intelligence Yousef supplied led to the arrests of a number of high-ranking Palestinian figures responsible for planning deadly suicide bombings. These included Ibrahim Hamid (a Hamas military commander in the West Bank, Marwan Barghouti (founder of the Fatah-linked Tanzim militia) and Abdullah Barghouti (a Hamas bomb-maker with no close relation to the Fatah figure). Yousef was also responsible for thwarting Israel’s plan to assassinate his father.

“I wish I were in Gaza now,” Yousef said by phone from California, “I would put on an army uniform and join Israel’s special forces in order to liberate Gilad Shalit. If I were there, I could help. We wasted so many years with investigations and arrests to capture the very terrorists that they now want to release in return for Shalit. That must not be done.”

Awesome. Read the rest here and check back tomorrow for more on the full story. You can also hear an NPR interview with the reporter after the jump: