The story of Suheib Yousef , the second son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef to defect from the Islamic terror organization, broke over the Fourth of July holiday weekend — which may be why some of what he told an Israeli TV journalist has been overlooked.

Suheib Yousef is the brother of Mosab Yousef, who became known as the “Green Prince” after working undercover for ten years with the Israeli intelligence service, Shin Bet, to help thwart terror attacks from 1997-2007.

Suheib Yousef had been posted to Turkey before his recent defection.

There, he worked for a Hamas ‘political branch,’ which Yousef explained is actually a spy unit that is targeted against Palestinian Authority (PA) officials in Ramallah as well as Israel and a number of unidentified Arab countries. He said that high tech equipment is used there to listen in on PA and other targeted conversations. But the information gathered by that Hamas listening unit “isn’t for the Palestinian cause,” Yousef added. Instead, it’s sold “to Iran in return for financial assistance,” which Yousef says is channeled through Turkish banks.

The accusations and revelations Suheib Yousef has provided about the incredible corruption at the top levels of Hamas are shocking enough: the extravagant lifestyles of senior Hamas operatives who live in Turkey, the country clubs they belong to, the luxurious hotels and expensive restaurants they enjoy, the private schools their children attend there. But the fact that the pro-Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan permits Hamas operatives to run military and security operations on Turkish soil in collaboration with the jihad regime in Tehran should focus renewed and very serious attention on this one-time supposed NATO ally.

Hamas is an Islamic terror organization whose very Covenant asserts that its raison d’etre is the annihilation of the Jewish State of Israel: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and has been listed on the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) list since 1997. Hamas also has been designated a terrorist organization by Australia, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, the European Union, and the United Kingdom — and with good reason, being responsible for literally thousands of suicide bombings, rocket and mortar attacks, shootings, and kidnappings, many of them targeted against Israel.

Turkey was once a key NATO ally, but as the Center for Security Policy (CSP)’s 2018 monograph “Ally No More: Erdogan's New Turkish Caliphate and the Rising Jihadist Threat to the West” described, its behavior under the rule of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been anything but friendly to the U.S. or Israel, our most important partner in the Middle East. Open reference to waging ‘jihad’ by senior Turkish officials, frequent and menacing reference by Erdogan himself to reviving the Ottoman Empire, and the close collaboration of Turkish officials with the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood on U.S. soil all have given good reason for alarm about where Erdogan and the AKP are taking Turkey.

These most recent revelations about Hamas espionage operations being run out of Turkey must only raise the level of concern even higher.

Clare M. Lopez is VP for Research and Analysis at the Center for Security Policy. Previously a Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and a member of Board of Advisors for Canadian Mackenzie Institute, she was named to Senator Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign national security advisory team in 2016. Lopez served with Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi and now its successor, Citizens’ Commission on National Security. Formerly VP of Intelligence Summit, she was a career operations officer with Central Intelligence Agency, professor at Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies and Executive Director of the Iran Policy Committee from 2005-2006. Lopez received a B.A. in Communications and French from Notre Dame College of Ohio and an M.A. in International Relations from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She completed Marine Corps Officer Candidate School (OCS) in Quantico, VA, before declining a military commission to join the CIA. To read more of her reports — Click Here Now.