The senior Mossad officer who, in September 1997, helped bring Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal back from the clutches of death, now calls on Mashaal to adopt a less-extreme stance in the current conflict with Israel, telling the Telegraph that Hamas’s position is leading Israelis and Palestinians into ever more dire straits.
“I thought that it is time to address the rational side of Khaled Mashaal,” retired spy Mishka Ben-David tells Inna Lazareva. “And I thought that I am the person to do so, because I’m the person who had a hand in reviving him.”
Ben-David, a novelist and former school principal, was the chief intelligence officer of the Mossad’s operational unit, Caesarea, when, in 1997, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to covertly assassinate Mashaal in Amman. But the plan backfired and Ben-David was ordered to deliver the antidote to Jordanian officials.
Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal answers AFP journalists’ questions during an interview in the Qatari capital of Doha, on August 10, 2014. (photo credit: AFP/al-Watan Doha/Karim Jaafar)
— Mitch Ginsburg
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