{"id":488685,"date":"2026-06-12T04:36:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T04:36:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/488685\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T04:36:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T04:36:16","slug":"israel-releases-hamas-co-founder-after-two-years-of-detention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/488685\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel releases Hamas co-founder after two years of detention"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n      Hassan Youssef was seen in a sling and described being in a pain following his release [Getty\/file photo]<\/p>\n<p>The son of a Hamas co-founder said that Israeli authorities released his father in the occupied West Bank on Thursday after <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newarab.com\/news\/israel-extends-detention-without-trial-khalida-jarrar\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">holding him without trial<\/a> for more than two years.<\/p>\n<p>Hassan Yousef, 71, was &#8220;freed near the southern West Bank city of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newarab.com\/news\/israeli-forces-arrest-hebron-academic-west-bank-raids\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Hebron<\/a>&#8221; and taken to a hospital in Ramallah where he resides, his son Owais Yousef said.<\/p>\n<p>Yousef is a senior leader of Hamas in the West Bank, having co-founded the group in the 1980s along with Sheikh Ahmad Yassine and other Palestinian members of the Muslim Brotherhood.<\/p>\n<p>Israeli police did not immediately respond to an AFP request for confirmation.<\/p>\n<p>AFP footage showed Yousef lying in a hospital bed, one arm in a sling, as relatives came to greet him.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I can&#8217;t sleep because of the pain,&#8221; he told a well-wisher over the phone. He was later wheeled away for medical checks.<\/p>\n<p>Yousef had been held in Israeli administrative detention since October 2023, shortly after the Hamas attack on Israel that triggered Israel&#8217;s war in the Gaza Strip, which has killed well over 72,000 Palestinians in acts labelled as genocidal.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Israel has increased its use of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newarab.com\/news\/israel-extends-administrative-detention-palestinian-woman\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">administrative detention against Palestinians<\/a> since the war. The system allows it to detain individuals for renewable six-month periods without charge.<\/p>\n<p>Israel justifies this procedure by claiming it allows authorities to hold suspects and prevent attacks while continuing to gather evidence, but critics and rights groups have long-condemned the system, saying it allows for the abuse of Palestinian detainees.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Israel has arrested Yousef several times over the years. He was last released in July 2020 from 16 months of administrative detention.<\/p>\n<p>A member of the now-defunct Palestinian parliament, Yousef is estranged from his eldest son Mosab Hassan Yousef, who for 10 years spied against his father&#8217;s movement.<\/p>\n<p>From 1997 to 2007, Mosab Hassan Yousef worked for Israel&#8217;s internal security agency Shin Bet, before relocating to the United States, where he lives under a new identity and wrote the book &#8220;Son of Hamas&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hassan Youssef was seen in a sling and described being in a pain following his release [Getty\/file photo]&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":488686,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[225835,60,51,85,46,43],"class_list":["post-488685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-administration-detention","tag-gaza-war","tag-hamas","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488685\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/488686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}