Underground church.

I had not realized there were enough believers in Gaza to call it a church.

But Yousef explained that there were several dozen secret believers, maybe more.

They met in small groups.

They were very careful.

They had to be.

He said, “We will arrange your baptism, but first you need to understand the danger.

You have left Islam.

That makes you an apostate.

If your identity as a believer is discovered, you will be killed.

Not maybe you will be killed.

Your family might be killed too or at minimum they will be shamed and persecuted.

Do you understand this? I said I understand.

I am already in danger because I refuse to return to bomb making.

They are getting suspicious.

How long before they force the issue? Ysef nodded grimly.

He said, “You will need to disappear eventually.

We can help with that.

We have ways of relocating believers who are in danger.

But first, let us make sure you are grounded in your faith.

Let us teach you.

Let us baptize you.

Then we will plan your next steps.

” Over the next two weeks, I met with Yousef and other believers several times, always carefully, always in secret locations, never the same place twice.

They taught me about the Bible, about the differences between Islam and Christianity, about grace and law and faith.

They answered my questions.

They prayed with me.

They became my family.

There were more believers than I had imagined.

I met a doctor, a teacher, a shop owner, a university student, even a former imam who had converted years before.

All of them living double lives.

All of them risking everything.

They told me about other converts throughout the Muslim world, about underground churches in Saudi Arabia and Iran and Afghanistan, about satellite TV channels and secret websites and encrypted apps that were spreading the gospel in places where it had been banned for centuries.

They said that more Muslims had come to Christ in the last 20 years than in the previous thousand years combined.

That Jesus was moving powerfully in the Islamic world despite the persecution.

That the blood of martyrs was producing a harvest.

I met other converts who had similar experiences to mine.

One man had seen Jesus in a dream.

A woman had been healed supernaturally after praying in Jesus’s name.

A young man had been saved from a violent death by an intervention he could only explain as angelic.

Each story strengthened my faith.

I was not alone.

This was real.

This was happening everywhere.

My baptism was held in the middle of the night in a hidden basement room.

About 15 believers were there.

They sang hymns quietly in Arabic.

They read from the Bible.

Then Ysef baptized me in a large container of water.

He said, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Buried with Christ in death, raised with him in new life.

He lowered me under the water.

For a second, I was back in that moment of dying, back in the darkness.

But then I came up out of the water and there was only light and joy and the faces of my brothers and sisters in Christ smiling at me.

They hugged me.

They welcomed me.

They called me brother.

I cried.

I had not felt belonging like this since before the explosion.

Maybe I had never felt belonging like this at all.

One older woman, maybe 60 years old, said to me, “You have been given a great gift.

Jesus revealed himself to you in a powerful way.

That gift comes with responsibility.

You must share what you have seen.

You must warn others.

This is your calling now.

I knew she was right.

” I thought about the souls in hell begging me to tell people.

I thought about Jesus commanding me to share the message.

I thought about my family still on the wrong path.

I said, “How? How do I share safely? How do I reach people without being killed immediately?” Yousef said, “The internet, social media, blogs, videos, all anonymous.

You can reach millions without revealing your identity.

Others have done it.

You can too.

” The idea terrified me, but it also excited me.

I could fulfill Jesus’s command.

I could warn people.

I could tell the truth about hell and about Jesus and about salvation.

I said, “I will do it.

Teach me how.

” They taught me about VPNs and encryption, about anonymous accounts and secure communication, about how to speak the truth while protecting my identity.

It took time, but I learned.

Meanwhile, the pressure from Hamas was increasing.

They were no longer patient.

They were demanding that I return to work.

They were sending people to check on me.

They were watching my family.

Yousef said, “You need to leave Gaza soon.

We are working on arrangements.

It will take a few weeks.

Can you hold on that long? I said, I have to.

I have no choice.

But it was getting harder.

Aliyah knew something was very wrong.

She asked me constantly what was going on, why I was acting so strange, why I refused to work, why I spent so much time on my phone.

One night, she found me reading something on my phone.

Before I could hide it, she saw it was a website about Jesus, about Christianity, about conversion from Islam.

Her face went white.

She looked at me with horror and disbelief.

She said, “What is that? Why are you reading that?” I said, “Aaliyah, please let me explain.

” She said, “Explain what? Explain why you are reading about Christianity.

explain why you have turned your back on Islam.

She was crying now, loud enough that she might wake the children or alert the neighbors.

I said, “Please keep your voice down.

Let me tell you what happened to me.

” But she would not listen.

She was hysterical.

She said I had gone crazy, that the explosion had damaged my brain, that I needed help, that I was putting us all in danger.

I tried to tell her about my experience, about hell, about Jesus.

But she put her hands over her ears like a child refusing to hear something.

Finally, she said, “I cannot live with an apostate.

Do you understand what you are doing? They will kill you.

They will kill all of us.

How can you do this to your family? I said, I am trying to save you.

You are on the wrong path.

You are heading to hell.

All of you, I have seen it.

I have been there.

Jesus is the only way.

She slapped me hard across the face.

Then she ran into the bedroom and locked the door.

I stood there in the darkness, my cheeks stinging, my heart breaking.

I had lost her.

I had lost my wife and probably my children, too.

This was the cost.

This was what Jesus had warned me about.

I would lose everything.

But it was worth it if even some would be saved.

I contacted Yousef that night.

I said, “I need to leave now.

Today, it’s not safe anymore.

” He said, “Give us 2 days.

We are almost ready.

two days and we can get you out.

Those were the longest two days of my life.

Aliyah would not speak to me.

She kept the children away from me.

She was talking to her family, to my family, to people at the mosque.

She was telling them something was wrong with me.

I knew it was only a matter of time before Hamas came.

On the second night, Yousef sent a message.

Tonight, midnight, be ready.

Bring nothing.

Come to the location I send you.

Do not be followed.

I looked at my sleeping children one last time.

TK with his mouth open, breathing softly.

Ila curled up with her favorite doll.

Omar with his thumb in his mouth even though he was getting too old for that.

I wanted to wake them, to hold them, to tell them I loved them, but I could not risk it.

They might cry out.

They might alert Aliyah.

So I just kissed their foreheads while they slept.

I whispered that I loved them, that I was doing this for them, that someday they would understand.

Then I left.

I walked out of my home and my old life forever.

At midnight, I met believers who had arranged my escape.

They smuggled me out of Gaza through tunnels and safe houses and bribes and risks I did not fully understand.

They passed me from one contact to another like a relay race.

After 3 days of traveling, I arrived in a small town far from Gaza.

A place where no one knew me, where I could start over.

They set me up in a safe house, a single room with a bed and a table and a computer.

Everything I needed to begin my mission.

I created accounts, multiple platforms, all anonymous, all secure.

I began to write my story to share my testimony to warn people about hell and tell them about Jesus.

The first blog post was the hardest.

I wrote it and deleted it a dozen times.

I was terrified.

But finally I hit publish.

The title was simple.

I was a Hamas bomb maker.

Jesus saved me from hell.

Within hours the responses started coming in.

Hundreds then thousands.

Some were death threats.

Some called me a liar and a traitor and a tool of the West.

But some were different.

Some said, “Is this true? Tell me more.

I need to know.

” And I knew then that Jesus was working, that my story was reaching people, that some would believe, and that made everything worth it.

The first few months in hiding were the hardest time of my life.

Not because of physical danger, though that was always present.

Not because of the conditions of the safe house, though they were basic and lonely.

The hardest part was the separation from my family.

Every night I would lie awake thinking about my children, wondering what they were doing, if they missed me, if they understood why I had left.

If Aliyah had told them I was dead or just gone, if they hated me now.

I had photos of them on my phone.

Hundreds of photos.

I would look at them in the dark and cry silently.

Tariq at his seventh birthday party, smiling with cake on his face.

Leila dancing in the living room to music from my phone.

Omar taking his first steps while we all cheered.

I had left them to save them, but the cost of that choice was almost more than I could bear.

The safe house was in a town I cannot name.

The room was on the third floor of a building that housed several refugee families.

My cover story was that I was a refugee from Aleppo, displaced by the Syrian civil war.

No one questioned it.

There were thousands of Syrian refugees scattered throughout the region.

One more made no difference.

The room was small, maybe three meters by four meters.

a single bed, a small table with a chair, a hot plate for cooking, a bathroom down the hall that I shared with three other families.

The walls were thin.

I could hear conversations and arguments and children crying through them at all hours.

But I had a computer, an old laptop that the believers had provided and I had internet access through a secure connection.

That was all I needed.

I spent hours every day writing blog posts, articles, testimonies.

I wrote about my experience in hell with as much detail as I could remember.

I wrote about seeing Jesus.

I wrote about the message he gave me.

I wrote about salvation and grace and the urgency of choosing Christ before death comes.

I wrote in Arabic.

My people needed to hear this message in their own language.

But I also had friends translate my posts into English and other languages.

The message needed to go everywhere.

The response was overwhelming.

Within weeks, my blog had thousands of followers, then tens of thousands.

My story was being shared across social media platforms.

People were discussing it, debating it.

Some believed it, many did not.

The death threats came immediately.

Detailed messages describing exactly how they would kill me if they found me.

graphic descriptions of torture, promises to hurt my family.

I learned to expect them.

I learned to not let them frighten me into silence.

But mixed in with the threats were other messages.

Messages that made everything worthwhile.

A young man in Saudi Arabia wrote, “I have been having dreams about Jesus for months.

Your story confirms what I have been feeling.

I prayed the prayer of salvation today.

Thank you.

A woman in Iran wrote, “I am a secret believer.

I thought I was alone.

Your testimony gives me courage.

There are more of us than we know.

” A former ISIS fighter wrote, “I have done terrible things.

I thought I was serving Allah.

Your story about hell terrified me.

But your message about Jesus’s mercy gives me hope.

Can someone like me be forgiven? I responded to as many messages as I could.

I prayed for people I would never meet.

I pointed them to resources.

I connected them with other believers in their regions when I could do so safely.

I realized I was part of something much bigger than myself.

Jesus was moving throughout the Muslim world in ways that had never happened before through dreams and visions and testimonies like mine.

He was calling people out of Islam and into relationship with him.

My contact with other believers was limited but vital.

Yousef checked on me regularly through encrypted messages.

He sent me encouraging words and warnings when there was news of threats.

He connected me with other converts who could provide advice and support.

I learned that there were thousands of us, secret believers scattered throughout the Middle East and North Africa, most living double lives, most unable to be open about their faith, some in real danger every single day.

I heard stories that broke my heart.

A young woman in Afghanistan who had converted after a vision of Jesus.

Her family discovered her Bible.

They killed her for apostasy.

She was 19 years old.

A pastor in Algeria who had been running an underground church for years.

He was arrested.

He refused to recant his faith.

He died in prison under suspicious circumstances.

a family in Iraq who had all come to Christ together.

ISIS fighters found out.

They gave the family a choice.

Deny Jesus or die.

The parents and their teenage son chose death rather than deny their Lord.

The two younger children, both under 10, watched their family die before Isis took them away.

No one knows what happened to those children.

These stories should have discouraged me, should have made me want to hide and stay silent.

But instead, they did the opposite.

They strengthened my resolve.

These brothers and sisters had given everything for Jesus.

How could I do any less? I increased my output.

I began making videos, though I never showed my face, just my voice speaking over images and text.

I talked about hell, about heaven, about Jesus, about the lies of Islam and the truth of the gospel.

The videos reached even more people than the written posts.

Something about hearing a human voice telling this story made it more real, more urgent, more believable.

One video went especially viral.

It was titled What I Saw in Hell: A Warning to All Muslims.

In it, I described in detail the souls I had seen, the fighters and clerics, the suffering, the hopelessness, the desperate warnings they gave me.

That video was viewed over a million times in three months.

It was shared on Facebook and Twitter and WhatsApp and Telegram.

It was translated into multiple languages.

It reached people in countries I had never heard of.

And with its spread came both blessing and danger.

More people were reading and believing and accepting Jesus.

But more people were also hunting for me, trying to identify me, trying to track me down.

I had to be extremely careful.

I never used the same internet connection twice.

I never showed identifying details in videos.

I never mentioned specific locations or names.

I used VPNs and encryption and every security measure the techsavvy believers had taught me.

But I knew that no security was perfect.

Hamas had cyber capabilities.

So did other Islamic groups.

It was only a matter of time before someone got close to finding me.

About 6 months after I left Gaza, I got word through Yousef.

Hamas had been to my family’s apartment.

They had questioned Aliyah.

They wanted to know where I was, what I was doing, why I had disappeared.

Aliyah told them she did not know that I had left without explanation.

that she had not heard from me.

This was true.

I had not contacted her.

It was too dangerous for both of us.

But Hamas did not believe her.

They came back multiple times.

They threatened her.

They said she would be held responsible if I was working against them.

They watched the apartment.

They followed her when she went out.

My family was suffering because of my choices.

My children were being harassed.

My wife was being interrogated.

My parents were being shamed in the community.

People whispered about them in the streets and at the mosque.

The guilt was crushing.

I had saved my own soul.

But at what cost? To the people I loved most.

I wanted to contact them to explain, to apologize, to tell them why I had done what I did, but I could not.

Any contact would put them in more danger, would confirm that they knew where I was or what I was doing.

So, I suffered in silence.

I prayed for them daily.

I begged God to protect them, to provide for them, to eventually open their eyes to the truth.

and I continued my work because their suffering would be meaningless if I gave up now.

The only way to honor their sacrifice was to press forward, to reach more people, to save more souls.

I began to receive invitations to speak.

Christian organizations wanted to interview me.

Churches wanted my testimony.

News outlets wanted my story.

I said no to most of them.

The exposure was too dangerous.

But I did a few carefully arranged phone interviews where my voice was disguised and my identity protected.

I wanted the message to spread, but I needed to stay hidden.

One interview was with the Christian satellite TV channel that broadcast throughout the Middle East.

The interviewer asked me if I was afraid, if I regretted leaving everything behind, if I thought it was worth it.

I told him, “Every day I’m afraid.

Every day I miss my family.

But I have seen hell.

I have seen Jesus.

I know what is true.

How can I stay silent knowing what I know? How can I let others walk into eternal suffering without warning them? My life is not my own anymore.

I gave it to Jesus the moment he sent me back.

Whether I live or die, I will use whatever time I have to tell people the truth.

The interview aired and was viewed by millions, more messages flooded in, more death threats, more people accepting Christ, both in equal measure.

Then came the close calls.

Twice in the first year, I had to relocate suddenly.

Once because someone recognized my voice from a video and reported the general area I was in.

The believers moved me in the middle of the night to a new safe house in a different town.

The second time was worse.

Hamas operatives actually came to the building where I was staying.

They were going door to door, asking questions, looking for suspicious people.

I hid in a closet while they searched the apartment below mine.

The family who lived there told them nothing, but I knew I had been seconds away from discovery.

After that, I moved every few months, whether there was a specific threat or not.

I never stayed in one place long enough to feel comfortable.

Never made friends with neighbors, never established patterns that could be tracked.

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