From the same article:
In the West Bank, Mr Yousef witnessed Yasser Arafat, the Egyptian-born founder of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) encourage his father to do “whatever it takes” to fuel the second intifada, the 2000-2005 uprising in which more than 4,000 people (1,010 Israelis and 3,179 Palestinians) were killed.
And in prison, where he spent more than 25 months across various stints (several in the Hamas security wing among would-be suicide bombers he thwarted), he would handle classified documents handed down by Yahya Sinwar, the brutal Hamas enforcer who would later become the mastermind of the Oct 7 massacre.
Mr Yousef’s work for the Shin Bet is well documented. He is credited with helping stop dozens of suicide attacks and assassinations, saving many lives on both sides of the conflict.
But less well known are his motivations and thinking. He sees, for example, the Oct 7 attack – and in particular the pogrom that followed it – not as an act of resistance but the inevitable consequence of a political cult long since infected with violence.
The rot, he says, starts with firebrands like his father, a “man with good in him” but who “always wanted to please others” and is as much a part of the herd as a leader within it.
Once such men accept the principle of violence, it accelerates, first with army targets, then civilians, then stabbings, then suicide bombings, says Mr Yousef. His father was seen celebrating Oct 7, an image which friends say has deeply affected Mr Yousef.
“They agreed [to violence] only because they thought it would be treason to say: ‘No.’ Not: ‘We morally oppose that. It’s not good. It’s not good for our cause.’ We did not have that. Nobody talks about it.
“Show me one article of a prominent Palestinian leader who said, ‘F--- this! This is not us!’. You know, even today on social media, you don’t find people who speak out. They can’t even make a fake account to talk about it. No one. It seems like everybody’s complicit.”
Mr Yousef does not doubt the “brutal suffering” of the two million people in Gaza, or even that “war crimes” are being committed. But Oct 7, he says, is “what happens after 36 years of indoctrination, glorifying suicide bombings, glorifying martyrdom, a culture of murder [and] the indiscriminate targeting of civilians as resistance”.
“What do you think? Do you think all this collective consciousness pushing violence in is going into the void? Of course not. It’s going to lead to the destruction of something. And it did not start with the Oct 7 attack. It’s an evolution since Hamas came to power and before that, with Palestinianism and the victim narrative.
“There was the first intifada, then the second, but still it was not enough. How about now we self-inflict a total destruction over our people, where we sacrifice and weaponise as many civilians as we can. If this is what it is to promote our cause, then so be it. Let’s burn it all down to ashes. This is Sinwar’s strategy. And what we are witnessing is the outcome of his work”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/09/21/palestine-state-will-never-exist-says-son-of-hamas-founder/