Mohammad Massad, an ex-PLO operative turned anti-corruption activist, tells Arutz Sheva that Gaza insiders gave him precise hostage locations — but Shin Bet rejected his leads. Massad accuses a corrupt system of protecting interests over saving lives and vows to expose the truth even at the risk of his own life.
Mohammad Massad, a former PLO militant who now styles himself an anti-corruption campaigner, claims he has been receiving actionable messages from Gaza residents identifying where Israeli hostages are being held — and that when he took the information to Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, his warnings were ignored.
Massad told Arutz Sheva that his Gaza sources are people who “were severely harmed by the Hamas regime and want revenge.” He says his material included names, photos, and precise locations of hostages and senior Hamas operatives. According to Massad, he even offered a bold timetable: “I said I can get the hostages back within 60 days.”
But he alleges institutional reluctance — and worse: vested interests that would rather the hostage crisis continue because it fuels protests and political leverage. “There are those who don’t want the state to succeed, because they prefer that the hostages’ parents remain at the protests on Kaplan Street… If the hostages are freed, no one will remain on Kaplan,” Massad said.
Massad accuses a broader network of corruption linking senior security officials and Palestinian economic actors who profit from permits, goods transfers, and development projects — a system he says has failed repeatedly since the mid-2000s and culminated in October 7. He calls for a clean, corruption-free security body willing to act on the intelligence he brings.
Aware of the personal danger his disclosures invite, Massad said frankly: “I am scared and I’m waiting for death at every moment, therefore I began to put everything out, so if I take a bullet, the world would know why I took a bullet.”
Key takeaways
- Massad claims to possess actionable, up-to-date intelligence from Gaza on hostages and Hamas leaders.
- He says the Shin Bet ignored his information and that entrenched corruption benefits from prolonging the crisis.
- He calls for an independent, corruption-free security mechanism to act on such leads.
- Massad is willing to risk his life to force the truth into the open.
