Jonathan Sacerdoti

Instead, a lot of that was trashed very quickly.

And

More or less all the resources, especially once Hamas seized control and then killed its opposition in the Strip, the Fatah opposition, all of those resources were funneled towards the true goal, which was launching terrorist attacks on Israel.

Rockets were coming out of the Gaza Strip for that 20-year period constantly.

Those rockets would threaten the homes of civilians living in what's called the Gaza envelope around the Gaza Strip inside Israel in non-disputed territory.

To the extent that in places like Sderot, where I've been, which is very near the Gaza Strip, people had something like seconds, less than a minute, to get into their bomb shelters that they have in their own homes every time they would hear a siren.

further north in Israel, which is a tiny country, you know, in places like Tel Aviv, if rockets were coming, you had a little bit more warning from the apps and they all got apps on their phones and there are sirens in all the streets because it's a country that's had to deal with this kind of threat for so long that it's almost become normal.

You know, we have weather forecasts, they have rocket forecasts, literally, when I've been there.

So back to the cause itself, I think that's indicative what happened in Gaza of the cause more broadly.

I think that the Palestinian cause for a number of people who support it today is quite misunderstood in my opinion.

I think they overlook some of the worst aspects of it.

They assume that it is a persecuted and downtrodden people and that Israel is solely responsible for the bad quality of life that Palestinian people have, whether it's in Judea and Samaria or the West Bank, as some will call it, or whether it's in the Gaza Strip.

And they think it's Israeli persecution, Israeli occupation, Israeli siege, which has caused these people to have bad quality of life.

In certain circumstances, some of those things have played a part.

But Israeli checks on what goes in and out of Gaza, for example, has been done in order to stop them being able to build rockets or to build further terrorist infrastructure.

We found out during this war that they have...

hundreds, if not more, miles of underground tunnels from which they conducted this war, where they kept the hostages that they kidnapped on October the 7th, where they hid.

The Hamas operatives hid during the war, leaving all of the Gazan civilians above ground, completely unprotected.

So if Israel has, in Israeli homes and in neighbourhoods which don't have them in individual homes, public shelters...

In Gaza, they had nothing of the sort, not because they couldn't, but because they chose to build underground for the purposes of carrying out the war, for the purposes of protecting terrorism and terrorists, and they funneled resources into building weapons.