Worthy Christian News > Christian > Former PLO Terrorist Who Converted to Christianity Hopes Israel-Hamas war Will Cause Gaza Palestinians to Accept Christ

Former PLO Terrorist Who Converted to Christianity Hopes Israel-Hamas war Will Cause Gaza Palestinians to Accept Christ

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Amid reports that Muslims around the world are accepting Jesus at extraordinary levels through dreams, a Palestinian who fought Israel with the Palestinian Liberation Organization before he became a Christian in the 1990s has stated he hopes the Israel-Hamas war will lead Gaza Palestinians to accept the Gospel, the Christian Post (CP) reports.

The author of ‘Once an Arafat Man’ and founder of the Hope for Ishmael evangelical ministry, 73-year-old former PLO terrorist Taysir Abu Saada said in an interview for Trinity Broadcasting Network that he believes many Palestinians are becoming disillusioned with Hamas and radical Islam, CP reports.

“Hamas is an ideology that is spread among many people, not only in the Gaza Strip but all over the world,” Saada told Israeli-American journalist Joel C. Rosenberg during the TBN interview which aired at the weekend. “However, God has a plan. And I believe the Arabs’ and the Jews’ plan is also part of that, and that is where my hope is,” Saad said.

During the interview Saada recounted how he, like many Arabs, had learned to hate Jews, CP reports. “After the [1967] Six Day War, I felt as if I was having a nervous breakdown, and my hatred just grew and grew,” Saada said. “I did not understand how we could lose so many wars against Israel. We were bigger than Israel in numbers and size, we had more equipment — everything we had was more than they had, but still, we lost the wars against them…For me, as for most Arabs, a good Jew was a dead Jew.”

Following an extraordinary encounter with Jesus Christ in the United States, where he had eventually gone to live to escape arrest for violence acts he committed against Israelis, Saad returned to the Holy Land last year as he felt that, in the first instance, Jesus wanted him to give himself up to the Israeli authorities, CP reports. Arriving in Israel he was interrogated for 14 hours and then released. Now, Saada told Rosenburg, he hopes to help in the rebuilding of Gaza and to be part of what God is going to do there.

“That is why I am back in the Holy Land, to move to the Gaza Strip and take part in rebuilding,” Saada said. “I believe with all the destruction, with all that happened, with the hardship the Palestinians have gone through, they cannot sit back but will ask, ‘Why?’ God is going to do a lot of work, and I want to be a part of that,” he added.