Israel's internal intelligence agency received top secret information from one of the most unlikely places - the son of one of the co-founders of the Palestinian organization Hamas, according to the new documentary "The Green Prince," which highlights Mosab Hassan Yousef's 10-year journey from deep within the ranks of Hamas to working with Israel.
Code-named "The Green Prince," for the emerald flag of Hamas and his royal pedigree as the son of the group's co-founder, Yousef worked with agents from Israel's intelligence agency Shin Bet from 1997 to 2007.
Born to Hamas leader Sheikh Hassan Yousef, he blamed Israel for the poverty and violence around him as a child, just like thousands of other Palestinians, Yousef told Josh Zepps when he joined him on HuffPost Live on Friday.
It wasn't until Yousef spent over a year in an Israeli prison and got exposed to Hamas brutality that he began questioning his upbringing.
"Hamas people were torturing other Hamas members for suspicion of collaborating with Israel," Yousef said. "When I saw Hamas' brutality, I decided basically to question the nature of the movement and this was the beginning of a new journey ... working with Israel to save human lives."
Israel had long been searching for someone within Hamas to collaborate with when an unlikely friendship developed between Yousef and his Israeli spy handler, Gonen Ben Itzhak.
In "The Green Prince" Itzhak explains the difficulty of recruiting informants, of convincing someone to betray his own people.
"We had a goal, and the goal was to stop killing .. We didn't understand Hamas at the time, we didn't know how it works, we didn't know Hamas' secrets," Itzhak, who was eventually fired for breaking protocol, told Zepps on Friday.
As Yousef fed Israel information, he said his main objective was "to save human lives," according to Huffington Post.
"Whenever I had information about a suicide bomber, trust me, I did not hesitate a second to work very hard to stop a suicide bomber before they reached their target," he said. "Suicide bombers did not kill only Israelis and themselves, they killed all types of people. They were against humanity."
Yousef is now a 36-year-old Christian yoga teacher living in Los Angeles, unable to ever return to his family and home in the West Bank city of Ramallah. His book about his life and time as an informant came out in 2010.
