Hamas exploits pedophilia to recruit boys to its ranks

Children in the Gaza Strip are being raped and sexually abused as a tactic for recruitment to the Hamas movement, the Daily Mail reported on Sunday.

The children, while attending mosques, are attacked by imams or clerics and consequently coerced into submission by the terrorist organization lest their sexual abuse be made known in public, the daily cited a former Palestinian Authority security officer as saying on conditions of anonymity.

The British publication obtained filmed testimony of two boys, aged 9 and 10, from Jusoor News in Gaza, in which they describe the horrors they had experienced.

Jusoor News is a pan-Arab news outlet with a staff of more than 70 full-time journalists and editors in the Middle East and North Africa, according to the Daily Mail.

“I went to pray at the mosque that day ..., I was studying the Quran,” the 9-year-old is reported to say in the footage. “We were studying the Quran together. [The sheikh] said to me, ‘Come with me, I want to give you something nice. He took me to the restrooms and undressed me, took off my pants and had his way with me. I started to scream and then I cried,” the boy recounts, adding that the assailant warned him not to tell his father.

The 10-year-old boy relates a similar experience that took place in a mosque. He says that he stopped going to the mosque after he was sexually abused, but that he has heard that the cleric does “filthy things with lots of kids.”

According to the Daily Mail, one father confronted an imam who allegedly raped his son, a third victim. The imam in response said, “I’ll send al-Qassam Brigades [Hamas’s ‘military’ wing] to you and they’ll shoot you. A shooting like you’ve never seen in your life. We’ll just say you were an Israeli collaborator.”

The former security official described the sexual attacks as “a method used to bind them … so you can’t leave them. It’s not just sexual abuse, it’s rape. ... If you open your mouth, they will destroy you and your entire household.”

The Daily Mail cited a spokesman from Jusoor as saying that Hamas uses this tactic to instill fear in young boys and pressure them into joining its ranks as they grow older.

“In our reporting from Gaza, we found that orphaned children and unmarried women are being subjected to harassment and exploitation by Hamas. Unfortunately, we have heard far too many of these stories. For people in Gaza, these stories are not new. They are widely known to locals. But conservative social norms and the stigmas of a shame culture have made their mention in the media taboo,” the spokesman added.

A Palestinian author who has fled Gaza, named in the report as Hamza Abu Howidy, said this type of abuse is so prevalent in Hamas-run institutions that an Arabic term was coined to describe the phenomenon, translating roughly to “tennis players” or “mosque tennis players.”

“We use it to refer to such people who mislead children into thinking they’re going to learn religious texts. The child gets sexually abused but stays close to the imam or mosque in the hope no one ever finds out what’s happened, but step by step he finds himself dragged into the Hamas movement,” Abu Howidy was cited as saying.