From Hamas’s Hell to the Embrace of Judaism: The Unbelievable Journey of a Gaza Native Who Left Everything and Converted
Dor Shachar, born in Gaza as Ayman Abu Subouh, has come forward with a gripping personal account that spans life under terror rule, brutal imprisonment, and a long, arduous path to conversion to Judaism. His story offers a rare, firsthand look at daily life in Gaza, the methods Hamas uses against suspected collaborators, and the ideology that shaped the enclave long before the group formally seized power.
Shachar was born in Khan Younis and grew up in its alleyways and marketplaces, where Hamas and other terror factions already functioned as dominant local forces years before the January 2006 elections that brought the Islamist organization to power. As a teenager, he fled to Israel and found work as a guard at a construction site. Years later, at the age of 25, he completed a formal conversion to Judaism and changed his name.
Now 49, Shachar says his earliest lessons about Jews came from his grandfather, whose contradictory behavior left him deeply unsettled. The elderly man would invite Jewish guests for coffee and bread, yet in the same breath urge his grandson to one day “liberate the land” by killing Jews. “I said to myself, ‘How can this be? On the one hand he invites them for food and drink, and on the other hand he says to kill them.’ From a young age I understood that something was very wrong,” he said in an interview with the National Post.
Growing up in Gaza, Shachar says he personally knew figures who later became synonymous with terrorism, including Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Yahya Ayyash. He recalled that they were regarded as prominent community figures, alongside operatives from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, and the PLO. He added that even people close to him, including a brother, carried out attacks that killed Israelis.
He described scenes of extreme violence that unfolded openly in public. In one instance, he said he witnessed Sinwar beheading a Palestinian accused of collaborating with Israel as crowds in the marketplace cheered. On another occasion, he and his mother found a severed head lying in the market street. “They said he was suspected of collaborating with Israel,” he recalled. “The passersby and onlookers were indifferent.”
According to Shachar, incitement began early and was deeply embedded in Gaza’s education system. In schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, he said children were taught to hate Jews from a young age. “Jews were portrayed as pigs, dogs, and infidels who did not deserve to live, and children were told that Israelis had one eye in the middle of their forehead or three legs.”
Violence, he said, was not incidental but institutionalized. “Every child learned how to throw stones at Jews because that is what they taught us. The teacher would tell us to go out and throw stones, then come back and open books as if we were studying. When soldiers arrived, they saw small children learning. After the soldiers left, the teachers laughed and said, ‘Those pigs, those dogs, those traitors, those Jews — we will slaughter them the way Hitler did.’”
Disillusioned by the extremism surrounding him, Shachar escaped to Israel in his teens. For a period, he served as an informant for the Shin Bet, reporting on terror activity, and later supported himself working as a renovation laborer. An Israeli Jew took him under his protection, even as others repeatedly questioned his loyalty. Shachar says he endured suspicions, arrests, and an eight-year bureaucratic struggle to fulfill his lifelong dream of converting to Judaism.
“Yes, it would have been easier not to be Jewish,” he said, explaining that his motivation stemmed from what he described as a search for a “spark of the soul.” “I feel connected to the Jewish people,” he said. “I wanted to be Jewish because I chose life. I chose love and not hatred. I chose love, not darkness.”
For a time, Shachar lived in Israel without legal status. Immigration authorities eventually located him, brought him before a judge, and deported him back to Gaza. There, he spent seven months in prison, his legs shackled, enduring beatings, electric shocks, psychological abuse, cuts to his arms, and severe starvation. He said his captors knew about his interest in Judaism and his affinity for Israel and tortured him accordingly.
After his release, Shachar managed to escape Gaza via Egypt and Turkey, eventually reentering Israel clandestinely using a Palestinian Authority passport. Reflecting on Gaza today, he said the ideology promoted by Hamas is widely shared. “Between Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and every other terror group, and the majority of Palestinians in Gaza, they all share the same ideas about Jews,” he said. “And they say that Hamas will lift their heads and rebuild Gaza.”
The events of October 7, 2023, he said, only strengthened his conviction that a poisonous ideology has overtaken Gaza. He described watching civilians join the violence and celebrate in the streets, saying that no Gazan helped any Jew and that hospitals were used as military positions.
Today, Dor Shachar lives with the quiet clarity of someone who has seen the darkest corners of human cruelty and consciously chosen a different path. Having escaped a world built on fear, hatred, and coercion, he rebuilt his life around faith, moral responsibility, and the sanctity of life itself. His journey from Gaza’s streets to the embrace of the Jewish people stands as a stark counterpoint to the ideology he left behind, a testament to free will, personal courage, and the power of choosing light over darkness, even when the cost is unimaginably high.
{Matzav.com}
