A former terrorist is predicting that thousands of Gazans will turn to Christ as the war between Israel and Hamas continues.
Taysir “Tass” Abu Saada, a former member of the Fatah terrorist group who became a Christian in the 1990s, told Joel Rosenberg, an American-Israeli communications strategist, that he believes Gazans will convert from Islam to Christianity due to the war and being lied to by Hamas.
“Hamas is an ideology that is spread among many people, not only in the Gaza Strip but all over the world,” Saada explained on the “Rosenberg Report” from TBN. “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.”
“That is why I am back in the Holy Land, to move to the Gaza Strip and take part in rebuilding,” he added. “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 [in Gaza], and I want to be a part of that.”
Saada, who was born in Gaza, shared that he became resentful toward Jewish Israelis in the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967. His family moved to Saudi Arabia and Qatar when he was young. He eventually ran away to join Fatah and fight to support Yasser Arafat, the former chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
“After the Six Day War, I felt as if I was having a nervous breakdown, and my hatred just grew and grew,” Saada said in his testimony, published on jewishroots.net. “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.”
“I was thinking that, once again, our leaders sold us to the Jews,” he added. “That was when I decided to go and fight for our land, which I believed was ours.”
Per Faithwire, Saada was later sent to the U.S. after he got into legal trouble amid a series of events. In the U.S., he married an American woman and met a Christian man who led him to Christ.
The Christian man told Saada, “If you want to experience the peace of mind that I have, you have to love the Jews.”
“I completely froze and asked him how he could even think of such a — to love the Jews? He knew I hated them. For me, as for most Arabs, a good Jew was a dead Jew,” he recalled.
After a time in which Saada and his spiritual mentor read Scripture together, the former terrorist shared he felt the urge to pray for the Jews the following day.
“The first people that came to my heart to pray for were the Jewish people,” said Saada. “I was praying, ‘Oh, God, bless your people, Israel. God, gather them to the Promised Land.’”
Saada told Rosenberg he believes the world is now facing the end times.
“What we are seeing today happening is really one of the signs of the end of times because it is not normal — the destruction that is taking place,” he told the host. “The evil hand of Hamas is attacking Israelis in a radical, very evil way. Naturally, Israel had to respond and defend itself.”
Despite the destruction and chaos, Saada contended that, ultimately, many Gazans will turn to Christ as their only hope.
“The harvest is going to be huge,” he asserted.
Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer and content creator. He is a contributing writer for Christian Headlines and the host of the For Your Soul Podcast, a podcast devoted to sound doctrine and biblical truth. He holds a Masters of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary.
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