A former terrorist who was associated with the Fatah political party and the Palestine Liberation Organization before converting to Christianity in the 1990s believes the war between Israel and Hamas is preparing many Gaza Muslims to become Christians.
Taysir “Tass” Abu Saada, 73, told Israeli-American journalist Joel C. Rosenberg during a interview broadcast on the Trinity Broadcasting Network this weekend, it calls the scale of violence and destruction sweeping the Middle East “not normal” and indicates that the “end times” are fast approaching. not.
But Saada also hopes the conflict will cause many Muslims in the region to become disillusioned with Hamas and radical Islam, leading them to be more open to the gospel of Jesus Christ. As a former Palestinian Muslim born in Gaza, Saada is preparing to return to Gaza after the end of the war to be part of the “harvest.”
“Hamas is a widespread ideology among many people, not only in the Gaza Strip but all over the world,” Saada said. “However, God has a plan. And I believe that the plan of the Arabs and the Jews is also part of it, and therein lies my hope.”
Saada, author of the autobiography Formerly Arafat’s mantold in testimony for JewishRoots.net, how he was consumed by rage toward Israeli Jews and others after the 1967 Six-Day War. After his family moved to Saudi Arabia and Qatar while he was still young, he eventually fled to join Fatah and fight under Yasser Arafat, the former president of the Palestine Liberation Organization. He would become a sniper, assassin and Arafat’s personal driver.
“After the Six-Day War, I felt like I was having a nervous breakdown and my hatred only grew,” Saada recalled in his testimony. “I didn’t understand how we could lose so many wars against Israel. We were bigger than Israel in numbers and size, we had more equipment – all we had was more than them, but we when even lost the wars against them.”
“I thought that once again our leaders sold us out to the Jews,” he added. “That’s when I decided to go fight for our land, which I believed to be ours.”
After his family found him and forced him to return to Qatar, repeated violence and legal problems led his father to push him to continue his studies in the West. Saada traveled to the United States in 1974, where he married an American woman and met a Christian man named Charlie, who would eventually share the gospel with him after befriending him for over 19 years .
Saada recalled that in 1993 he was suffering spiritually when Charlie finally told him about his Christian faith. In his testimony, he said Charlie told him that if he wanted peace of mind, he had to “love Jews.”
“I completely froze and asked him how he could think of such a thing: loving Jews?” Saada wrote. “He knew I hated them. For me, as for most Arabs, a good Jew was a dead Jew.”
Saada said he was scared and reluctant when Charlie opened the New Testament to read it. John 1:1 » but he remembered that as soon as Charlie read the verse about the divinity of Jesus Christ, he began to shake violently before passing out.
When he regained consciousness after having a supernatural experience in which Jesus appeared to him in a bright light, he immediately surrendered his life to Him, he said. Saada’s wife and son also became Christians.
Saada tell to Rosenberg how he returned to Israel in 2003, knowing he would be arrested because he felt Jesus calling him to confess his violent sins to the Israelis, as well as his change of heart. After 14 hours of interrogation, an Israeli colonel allowed him to leave.
Saada became emotional as he recounted how he told a heavily armed Israeli soldier that he had once fought for Arafat but had since become a Christian and wanted to pray for him. The soldier started crying and asked to hug him, he said.
Since becoming a Christian, Saada and his family have founded Hope for Ishmael, an evangelical organization for Muslims and Muslims. Seeds of hopea non-profit humanitarian organization that provides basic necessities to poor people in the Middle East.
Saada told Rosenberg that many non-Christians in the region encounter Jesus in dreams and that his sources on the ground, who currently minister to Palestinians in Gaza, predict that the spiritual harvest “is going to be enormous” as a result of the conflict.
“This is why I am back in the Holy Land, to settle in the Gaza Strip and participate in the reconstruction,” Saada said. “I believe that with all the destruction, with everything that has happened, with the difficulties that the Palestinians have gone through, they cannot sit idly by and ask themselves: ‘Why?’”
“God is going to do a lot of work and I want to be a part of it,” he added.
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