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January 3, 2024
A one-time terrorist who turned to faith in Jesus in the 1990s is predicting thousands of Gazans will become Christians as the war between Hamas and Israel rages on.
The 73-year-old Taysir Tass Abu Saada, a former member of the Fatah terrorist group, recently told Joel Rosenberg, an American-Israeli communications strategist, he believes the war will lead many in Gaza to feel hopeless, abandoned, and lied to by Hamas, the terror group governing Gaza. As a result, he predicted they will turn from Islam and toward Christianity.
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“Hamas is an ideologythat 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.”
He continued, “That is why I am back in the Holy Land, to move to the Gaza Strip and take part in rebuilding. 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, born in Gaza, was overcome with rage 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 and, ultimately, 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.”
A series of events landed Saada in legal trouble that ultimately sent him to the U.S. After integrating, he married an American woman and met a Christian who led him to faith in Jesus.
The Christian man told Saada, “If you want to experience the peace of mind that I have, you have to love the Jews.” He recalled, “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.”
Saada and his faith mentor read Scripture together and, the following day, the former terrorist felt an urge to pray.
“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.”
The ex-terrorist told Rosenberg he believes the world is now enduring 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.”
But as the destruction and horror continues, he feels a glimmer of eternal hope.
Saada said that, in time, “the harvest is going to be huge,” referring to the number of Gazans he is confident will ultimately turn to the same faith in Jesus he has found.
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