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Israel praised by Hamas co-founder’s son

Israel is getting accolades for its war against Hamas from a very unlikely quarter — the son of the terror group’s co-founder.

“Israel in the Middle East is fighting on behalf of the free world,” declared Mosab Hassan Yousef, the outspoken son of Hamas leader Hassan Yousef.

Mosab Hassan Yousef in 2010AP

The younger Yousef long ago abandoned his father’s twisted ideology — and even worked for a decade as a spy for the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet.

Echoing the warnings of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Yousef said Hamas can’t be trusted and doesn’t care about how many lives are lost in pursuit of its goal to build a radical Islamic state.

“Hamas does not care about the lives of Palestinians, or the lives of Israelis, or Americans; they don’t care about their own lives,” Yousef told CNN in a recent interview. “They consider dying for their ideology a way of worship.”

He rejected Hamas and converted to Christianity despite being raised to become a violent militant. He wrote a book, “Son of Hamas,” about his unusual experience.

“Their goal is to conquer the globe and build an Islamic state on every inch of the globe,” he told the website The Right Scoop. “[Hamas] is willing to sacrifice as many Palestinian lives as it takes.”

In the CNN interview, he blasted the militants battling Israel in Gaza for their stated goal of establishing an Islamic caliphate — a goal shared by the Sunni extremists fighting in Syria and Iraq.

“Hamas is not seeking co-existence and compromise. Hamas is seeking conquest and taking over. And by the way, the destruction of the State of Israel is not Hamas’s final destination,” he said. “Hamas’s final destination is building the Islamic caliphate, which means an Islamic state under rubble of every other civilization.”

Yousef, who won asylum to live in the US in 2010, said he had been brainwashed as a child to give up everything for the terrorists’ cause.

Smoke rises in the sky following Israeli strikes on eastern Gaza City on Wednesday.AP

“In the mosques, Hamas taught us that without shedding innocent blood for the sake of the ideology, we wouldn’t be able to build an Islamic state. They were preparing us from the age as young as 5 years old. This is the ideology that Hamas was feeding us. And honestly, it’s impossible almost for anybody to break through and see the truth and real face of Hamas and be able to leave at some point,” he said.

“As you see in my case, I had to lose everything just to say no to Hamas. And today when I look at the children of Gaza and I know what they’re fed, I know that they have no choice.”