Posted on 12/10/23
| News Source: Times of Israel
Former Hamas communications minister Yousef al-Mansi heavily criticized the current leadership of the terror group in Gaza as a group of “crazy people” led by Yahya Sinwar, in footage of his interrogation published by the Shin Bet security agency Sunday.
“They destroyed the Gaza Strip. Set it back 200 years,” al-Mansi, who served under the Strip’s former ruler Ismail Haniyeh — currently the head of its political bureau — and in several other roles, said in translated excerpts provided by the Shin Bet. “There is no opportunity to live.”
Israel has labeled Sinwar — who rules the enclave and has been marked as the mastermind of Hamas’s devastating October 7 onslaught — a “walking dead man,” along with the rest of the terror group’s senior leadership.
In the 14-minute video published by the agency, al-Mansi said, “People in the Gaza Strip say that Sinwar and his group destroyed us, we must get rid of them.”
He said in the video he arrived for his questioning on December 7 and had been at the facility for three days, indicating the session occurred on Sunday. The Shin Bet did not provide further information about when al-Mansi was arrested.
“I have not seen anyone in the Gaza Strip who supports Sinwar, nobody likes Sinwar. There are people who, day and night, pray that God will free us from him,” he said, adding that if he were in Gaza, he would go and demonstrate against Sinwar.
Al-Mansi said that Gaza’s ruler has “delusions of grandeur,” and that he “feels like he is above everyone else. Acts only as he thinks. He makes decisions without consulting anyone.”
The former Hamas minister said the October 7 massacre — when thousands of Hamas fighters invaded Israel’s south and killed some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took another estimated 240 people hostage — was “the opposite of Islam.”
“This is heresy, madness. What they did is unacceptable according to logic, religion, or intellect. Those who are responsible for this are Sinwar and his group,” he said, according to the excerpts, adding that the entire Gaza Strip was paying the price for the onslaught.
“The achievement of Hamas is killing and the destruction of more than 60 percent of buildings, infrastructure, streets, and public facilities [in the Gaza Strip],” he added.
Al-Mansi said in the video that as a result of the war, “over 90%, 95%” of Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, had been decimated, adding, “Al-Qassam is finished.”
“This is my assessment, without any details, but whoever sees the destruction in the Gaza Strip will say that it’s more… if there’s something left they would be scattered.”
The IDF says it has killed 7,000 Hamas members or allied terrorists as it seeks to destroy the terror group, free the hostages, and ensure such a massacre can never occur again. More than 22,000 targets in the Gaza Strip have been struck since the beginning of the war, 3,500 of them since the end of the ceasefire on December 1.