from Gaza striking across Israel.”

In the early hours of Saturday, October 7th...

Israelis in the south of the country...

huddled in basements and bomb shelters.

They listened as Hamas militants

went house to house in their neighborhoods...

brutally killing civilians of all ages and taking hostages.

These homes were in communities

just a few miles from this border with Gaza...

where for two decades

the Israeli army has guarded this wall...

which holds more than 2 million Palestinians

in what's been called an open-air prison.

Little water.

Little electricity.

Virtually no way out.

Hiding in fear.

Israelis texted their friends and family

a very similar question.

Where is the army?

Israel is one of the biggest military spenders in proportion to its population.

That coupled with billions in military aid from the US

has made the Israeli military

one of the most advanced in the world.

We have planes. We have helicopters. We have tanks.

We have everything.

For the first couple of hours, it's like we have no army.

“The words of survivors...”

“Where was the army?”

“Where was the army?”

You can see the strength of Israel's military

in its response to the Hamas attacks.

Persistent bombing in Gaza, leveling neighborhoods

killing more than 2000 people, including at least 700 children.

Preparing for a ground invasion.

But on the day of the Hamas attacks in Israel.

At the sites of some of the worst violence...

soldiers didn't arrive for about 8 hours.

By then, hundreds were dead, missing, or kidnaped.

Why did it take so long?

To answer that question, we need to look here:

In the West Bank.

In 1947, this entire area

was home to nearly 2 million people.

The vast majority of them Palestinian Muslims and Christians.

When World War II ended in the wake of the Holocaust in Europe...

the newly formed United Nations voted

to divide this land into two states:

A Jewish state and an Arab state...

with Jerusalem as a separate UN-controlled entity.

But in 1948 zionist militias and paramilitary groups carried out

a mass expulsion and massacre of Palestinians...

seizing their villages to expand the Jewish state.

Then, in 1967, after a war with its Arab neighbors...

Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip

taking more land designated for Palestinians.

And started turning parts of those Palestinian territories

into illegal settlements for Jewish Israelis.

Today, the most extensive examples of that

can be found here: In the West Bank...

where some of the settlements have gotten so big

they've achieved city status.

And they're just some of the hundreds of settlements

in the occupied West Bank that have been built on land

originally intended for a Palestinian state.

And where Palestinians still live...

under Israeli military rule...

with far fewer rights than their Israeli neighbors.

From the very earliest beginnings

of Netanyahu's career in politics

he's been an opponent of the two state solution...

been in the central part of his ideology.

And it is just intimately bound up in his idea

of what Israel is.

That it needs to have control of the West Bank.

“Israel must retain the overriding security control

over the entire area west of the Jordan River.”

The government has encouraged settlements in the West Bank

like the one advertised here.

“Home of your dreams.”

“The tranquility of a picturesque setting and crisp mountain air...

with all the benefits and amenities that Jerusalem has to offer.”

Enormous resources

have been devoted to this project.

And this is bipartisan to put it in American terms.

This is a state project.

They are funding them.

They're paving roads for them.

They're providing security for them.

They're creating infrastructure

and water and electricity for them.

Tax breaks to incentivize Israelis to move there.

The number of Israeli Jewish settlers in the West Bank

began growing before Netanyahu came to power in 1996...

and continued even when he was out of office from 2000 to 2009.

But if you look at the number of new settlement outposts each year...

you can see that there's a noticeable gap right here.

Under international pressure...

those new outposts were halted.

But after Netanyahu came back to power...

his government started legalizing some of those old settlements.

And at the same time, they built and promoted new ones.

As this map shows, they've proliferated ever since.

This is a project of slow-motion colonization.

So what you have is Palestinians

living in these tiny little pockets

these little urban islands of control.

And so when you look at the West Bank...

what you see is that more than 60% of it

is under full Israeli control and administration.

And that's where the more sparsely populated Palestinian communities are

that are slowly being forcibly transferred.

The United Nations put out a report...

saying that since the beginning of 2022...

more than 1,100 Palestinian Bedouins

have been forcibly transferred from their communities in the West Bank.

In the founding statute of the International Criminal Court

there is a section defining war crimes.

The transfer, directly or indirectly

by the occupying power of parts of its own civilian population

into the territory it occupies.

Or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population

of the occupied territory within or outside this territory.

It's part of the reason why the United Nations

has called the Israeli settlements...

unlawful under international law.

But Salem, a Jerusalem-based nonprofit...

has documented numerous instances of violence

against Palestinians in the West Bank.

Israeli settlers have attacked Palestinian houses with stones...

torched cars...

vandalized a supermarket and burned homes.

According to other reports

the Israeli military has killed hundreds of Palestinians

in a series of violent events this year alone.

The deal with Israelis is, we will live in these dangerous places...

and you, the army, will protect us.

So at that point settlement enterprise necessitates

the misallocation of military resources.

Those were the military resources that were missing

when Hamas broke through the border with Gaza.

There were empty posts on the border there.

Troops weren't getting the proper security notifications.

It was clear that the entire system...

for monitoring...

what was happening on the Gaza border had broken down.

There is a real ground swell

among the Israeli population that this was just an immense disaster

presided over by Netanyahu.

And in the West Bank, trying to colonize it

and seize Palestinian lands...

that you devoted resources and attention to those initiatives...

at the expense of protecting us from Hamas.

“We have to go immediately.”

“Immediately.”

“He is a murderer.”

“We're all very, very frustrated that they're still there.”

A recent poll found that four out of five Jewish Israelis

believe the government and Prime Minister Netanyahu are to blame for the attacks.

More than half say he should resign when the war is over.

Netanyahu really has been the architect

of Israel's long term strategy towards Gaza.

That's happened under his administration.

He thought that he could contain Hamas

deter it from doing the worst stuff.

Periodically fight with them in ways

that would not hurt very many Israeli civilians...

and encourage division between Hamas and the West Bank...

to make sure that the Palestinians could not make

a more credible case for a peace agreement.

That policy has just...

it's an obvious failure at this point.