This is the man who stood up at the JNS International Policy Summit in Jerusalem this week and delivered a message that every one of Israel's enemies should hear slowly and carefully.
"Israel's existence is not negotiable, and it does not depend on superpowers or the public opinion," Yousef told the audience. "If they keep pushing Israel to the corner, they are the ones who are going to suffer the most. Israel has not used everything that it has. And Israel, on purpose, did not expose the advanced weapons that it has for very important reasons: we don't want the enemy to know what we are having. And now at this point we are just playing around."
Playing around. From the son of a Hamas founder who spent a decade inside Israeli intelligence.
He also had pointed words for President Trump, who paused the joint U.S.-Israel operation against Iran and has been publicly congratulating himself for his role in ending the conflict. "We could have finished the job. You stopped. You don't know what the hell you are doing," Yousef said, addressing Trump directly. "Total arrogance. Then when you came to the picture, you dragged us into this rabbit hole. And now you're throwing us under the bus."
He did not spare the diplomatic framework either. "I did not want Trump's involvement in this war," Yousef said, "because he has been a disadvantage."
These are not the words of a politician calculating his next move. They are the words of someone who has been inside the machinery of Islamic extremism, who watched it up close for decades, and who understands what it responds to and what it does not. It does not respond to concessions. It does not respond to international pressure. It responds to strength, and to the credible belief that the price of continuing to fight will be unbearable.
Yousef closed with a theological dimension that was unambiguous: "Behind Israel's existence is the Creator. Israel is not coincidental." He added: "This is the clear message to those who think they can annihilate Israel."
The setting for these remarks carries its own significance. Just two weeks ago, Yousef's father, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, the Hamas co-founder, was released from Israeli administrative detention after two and a half years in custody, freed near Hebron and taken to a hospital in Ramallah. Father and son have been estranged for years, each a living symbol of the same family's irreconcilable choices. One chose Hamas. One chose Israel. One spent two and a half years in an Israeli prison. The other stood before a Jerusalem audience and told the world that Israel is holding back.
The son knows things the father does not want acknowledged. He knows them because he lived them, because he risked his life for a decade to gather them, and because he understands, from the inside out, what it means when Israel says it has not yet shown everything it has.
The enemies of Israel would do well to believe him.
