I'm John Batchew with my colleague Jonathan Shanzer of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy

as Senior Vice President for Research, Gaza, Hamas.

The hostages remain part of the conversation.

And within these last hours, the president-elect of the United States has issued a warning

that sounds extremely credible to me, given my

memory of how he served chocolate cake and rockets into Syria to Xi Jinping once upon a time at

Mar-a-Lago. I used a poetic metaphor of unleashed the dogs of war. Let's leave it that way,

but Hades is involved. Jonathan, how do you measure this?

What would he be striking?

You know, I think it's a big question.

And I think the president's credibility here will be put to a test if, in fact, we don't see the release of hostages before January 20th, because then he would come in and he would have to make good on that threat.

There are things that can be done here that can help tip the balance.

One would, of course, be removing the Qataris and the Turks from the American Alliance structure,

but that is not an easy thing to do, putting sanctions on their leadership,

which, by the way, the president

elect has done against some of Rejip Tayyip Erdogan's inner circle.

That's something that is feasible.

So I could imagine that perhaps sanctions, targeted sanctions, could be on the table.

You know, providing the Israelis with intelligence in order to carry out strikes, whether they be

in Gaza or in Lebanon or in Iran itself, that's also feasible. But these are big, big moves. All of

them would be big moves. So I'm not sure exactly what the president was implying, but I do believe

that that message is taken to heart. I believe that the

...