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Israel Pounds Gaza With Airstrikes; Hamas Rocket Attacks Continue; President Biden to Deliver Address on Israel-Hamas War. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired October 10, 2023 - 13:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[13:00:53]

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: I'm Boris Sanchez live in Washington, where, at any moment, President Biden will address the nation and the world on the escalating war between Israel and Hamas.

We're going to bring you that speech live, a speech in which we have learned Biden is not expected to urge Israel to exercise restraint in a potential ground incursion into Gaza, something that President Biden, we have learned, has not tried to dissuade Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from carrying out.

We want to take you now live to Israel with my colleague Anderson Cooper, who's on the ground there for us -- Anderson.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: Boris, thanks very much.

Today, the bulk of the fighting has been in the skies here in Israel, airstrikes, Hamas rocket attacks ramping up on this fourth day of bloodshed.

Here, take a look at the aftermath of airstrikes on Gaza, entire city blocks wiped out. The Israeli Defense Forces say that they have hit hundreds of Hamas targets. On the Israeli side, the scale of Hamas atrocities is now just really fully coming into view.

New video shows the scene left behind after more than 250 civilians were massacred by Hamas at that music festival on Saturday. The IDF says the terrorists brutally butchered women, toddlers, and the elderly in a southern Israeli town this weekend. Hamas has also taken dozens of hostages, as you know, the exact number unknown.

The son of a missing American citizen was, understandably, emotional speaking to reporters today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NAHAR NETA, SON OF HOSTAGE: My mom used the little bit of Arabic that she picked up working as a nurse in the hospital in Soroka for 20 years to calm down the terrorists.

And it is our hope, which is a little bit ridiculous at this stage, to say that the optimistic scenario here is that she's held hostage in Gaza, and not dead on the street of the kibbutz where we grew up.

I want also to speak about the responsibility that the U.S. administration, President Biden, and the secretary of state, Blinken, has for the lives of every U.S. citizen that is out there, and they are responsible to bring the U.S. citizens back home safe and sound.

We expect nothing less.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: The hostage crisis certainly likely would be part of President Biden's remarks momentarily.

As we await that, we have CNN's Clarissa Ward in Ashkelon and CNN's Nic Robertson from Sderot.

Nic, I want to start with you.

IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, say that Hamas gunmen carried out a massacre in Southern Israel. This is just now becoming apparent. Tell us what you have seen.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: Yes, we were taken to Kfar Aza. It's a -- Kfar Aza.

It's a small kibbutz that's about half-a-mile, three-quarters-of-a- mile from the border fence with Gaza. And this was one of the places that Hamas stormed into early Saturday morning, 70 Hamas fighters, about 700 residents.

And it was a 48-hour firefight by the Israeli Defense Force to take back control. They only got control of it back last night. And the general who was in charge of that took us in there today. And he told us the reason he wanted to bring journalists in there, he said: "The horror that I found, the massacres that I found, the brutality that I found," he said, "it reminded me of General Eisenhower being taken and shown the death camps after World War II."

And he said: "Eisenhower said, get the journalists in here." And he -- and the general told me: "That's what I told my commanders." He said: "Get the journalists in here."

So we were taken in today to see the aftermath. But what he had to say about that brutality that's being described as ISIS-style executions, he said very clearly that Hamas was cutting the heads off of people. Listen to his words.

[13:05:07]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAJ. GEN. ITAL VERUV (RET)., ISRAELI MILITARY: What I saw, hundreds of terrorists with full arms, full gear, with all the equipment and all the ability, make a massacre, go from apartment to apartment, from room to room, and kill babies, mother, father in their bedrooms.

ROBERTSON: You were telling me some of them went -- you went in. Their hands were tied together.

VERUV: And lock themselves in the protection room from the bomb, the house and people are out with their children, and they kill them. They kill babies in the front of their parents and then kill the parents.

They kill parents. And we found babies between the dogs and the family that kill before him. He cut head of the people.

(CROSSTALK)

ROBERTSON: And this is the first time -- I mean, when did you secure this area here, was late last night?

VERUV: So, we fight here wave after wave of terrorists, until, yes, last night.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROBERTSON: And the aftermath is quite brutal, the apartments ransacked.

There was one apartment there, Anderson, just to tell this other one story from there, where I was told that the parents realized that Hamas was coming. They had 10-year-old twins. And they locked the 10- year-old twins in a cupboard and then went out to fight Hamas and hold them off. And then they were killed, the parents were killed.

And it was several hours later that neighbors heard the twins screaming in the cupboard. And they went in. And the 10-year-old twins were OK, but how did they tell them that their parents have been killed by Hamas?

This is just one of the myriad of stories that we're learning today, Anderson.

COOPER: So, Nic, we should explain, a kibbutz, like -- which is an agrarian community, usually a small community, could be several hundred people, there are a number of them along -- near the Gaza border.

Many of them have been there for decades and decades. These aren't necessarily the settlements that we have seen in East Jerusalem and elsewhere. A lot of these are older, established communities. But they were on literally the front lines when the walls were breached, when the border was breached.

It was often these kibbutz communities that were first assaulted. And some of the brutality, some of the worst brutality we were seeing, it occurred very early on. And, as you said, this battle in Kfar Aza seems to have been going on until just the last 24 hours or so.

Did you actually witness with your own eyes what the commander was saying? What have you seen?

ROBERTSON: We saw -- we were shown a lot of different areas, but one of the areas was where the young families lived, the young parents with young children.

And when we were there, there was a team in forensic white suits taking the dead in body bags and loading them into a van. So the stage that we were at was -- that we were there was -- the dead people were being taken away.

There were, I will say, a lot of Hamas fighters lying where they had been shot and killed in the firefight there. And the proximity you're talking about of all these little small communities, as you say, I -- you and I have probably both been to some of the same ones over the years.

I have been in some of them 20 years ago. It is. It's a group of very peaceful people living, as you say, an agrarian life. The gates to that community were broken in that -- where Hamas forced their way in. Right now, there's a big tank blocking that hole.

But we also shown one of those paragliders, the small portable paraglider with a small engine on it and a motor and a fuel pack on it that Hamas had used actually to fly into the kibbutz as well. So, again, as we have seen so many times, this was so well-planned.

The fighters that came through one hole in the fence knew exactly where they were going and what they were doing and what they were targeting, 70 armed gunmen against 700 civilians. And now we see the cost.

COOPER: And, Nic, we know of children who have been kidnapped from other kibbutz locations along that border.

I talked to a woman today whose cousin was kidnapped with her two very young children, a 9-month-old, a 4-year-old. Is it clear if there were any people taken alive from that kibbutz, from Kfar Aza?

[13:10:05]

ROBERTSON: Some were. Some were.

I think we're still in such an early phase of what's happened that, really, they're trying to -- the Israeli Defense Force, that the police are just trying to figure out the numbers. Who's safe and got away? Who escaped in the day? Who was taken out of a safe place by the Israeli Defense Force and who wasn't? And who was killed? And who was taken into Gaza?

But some people from that, from Kfar Aza, were taken back into Gaza.

COOPER: Nic, stay with us.

I want to bring in Clarissa Ward.

Clarissa, you have -- explain where you are and what you have been seeing, because I know you have witnessed numerous volleys of rockets being fired today.

CLARISSA WARD, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Anderson.

Hamas had put out a message on their Telegram channel, on their social media app basically saying that people in the city here of Ashkelon should leave by 5:00 p.m., that there was going to be retaliation for what they call the forced displacement of ordinary civilians in Gaza.

And then at exactly 5:00 p.m., we heard the first, I won't even say volley, barrage of rockets come slamming in. We have subsequently been watching every 20 minutes or so of the air raid sirens go off. You see the sky light up. The Iron Dome starts intercepting those various rockets.

Some of them have made impact. There have been reports of at least one home that we know of that took a direct hit. We actually spoke briefly earlier to the woman who was living there. And she is miraculously, perhaps, alive. She was in her shelter.

But, certainly, I would say, a definite uptick in the town here in Ashkelon. Again, this is a city that is not a stranger to rocket attacks. There are shelters all over. There's shelters on every floor of this hotel, but people here say that they haven't seen anything approaching this level in terms of the ferocity, the volume, and the continuous nature.

And now everyone really just bracing themselves for what the night will bring ahead -- Anderson.

COOPER: Clarissa and Nic, if you can, stand by.

As we wait for President Biden to speak, we're joined again by Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus. He's an international spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces.

Colonel, so we just got this report from the IDF from Kfar Aza that women, children, elderly were -- quote -- "butchered" over the weekend in this kibbutz in the south. We have certainly seen plenty of butchery in other locations as well.

Can you just talk about what you think the significance of what you understand IDF forces have seen in Kfar Aza?

LT. COL. JONATHAN CONRICUS, INTERNATIONAL SPOKESPERSON, ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES: The scenes in Kfar Aza, what up until a few days ago was a peaceful society, many of the residents who live there believed in peace, coexistence, and mutual respect and had friends in Gaza.

I know that, personally, I know many people in Kfar Aza who had friends in Gaza. And the butchering and the executions -- and I don't want to confirm yet. There are many reports out there about beheadings. At this stage, I cannot confirm that, but I know of atrocities in Kfar Aza, in Be'eri, and in many, many other communities, things that are -- that are hard to imagine.

What -- we have seen that. And the reports that are coming up from Israeli soldiers that are clearing communities are unimaginable. It's like things that you would see in a zombie movie or that you would see on online snuff terror movies distributed by ISIS. There's no comparison.

It is unimaginable, the cruelty of just families being executed, children mutilated. It is horrendous.

COOPER: The -- can you give us an update just on what -- the progress in terms of what is happening on the ground? You and I have been talking now for several days, and you have been very up front about what areas have been secured, as best as anything can be secured, and what the situation the border is.

What is it like now at this hour? Are there still -- I mean, in Kfar Aza, there was fighting, according to that on-scene commander, up to 24 hours or so ago or last night.

[13:15:06]

What are you seeing on the ground?

CONRICUS: Yes, what we're seeing on the ground and the reports that are coming up is that the -- just less than an hour ago, the Israeli troops in another kibbutz called Mefalsim were able to kill two Hamas terrorists who somehow made their way to that kibbutz.

They were engaged in battle. And the Israeli troops were able to kill them swiftly. I'm not aware of any civilian or Israeli casualties in that event. This tells us that it is still a combat zone, as unimaginable as this is to say, but Southern Israel is still unfortunately a live combat zone.

Today, when international correspondents, CNN included, were granted access to those areas, it was like a combat embed. It wasn't taking the international media to a community in Israel. It was like taking the international media to see a combat zone.

And we had to have security and armored vehicles, and the journalists had to wear their protective gear because it is an active combat zone, even in an area where there are so many troops. So, it is a situation that we definitely did not imagine before. We are coming to terms with the situation.

And as I think your reporters have also said, the resolve is high and the level of commitment of the public in general, general sentiment, but, most importantly, of soldiers, of reserve soldiers and the regular soldiers, is very high.

As we see the atrocities, it saddens and tears our hearts, but it also serves to galvanize our spirit and our focus on what needs to be done against this monstrous terror that we have on our doorstep.

COOPER: I also want to be very -- just I'm trying to be very careful in our reporting on what Nic Robertson saw at Kfar Aza. As you said, you have not been able to confirm all of the reports that have been coming out from troops on the ground, from others.

But, obviously, there is more to be learned in the coming hours. You gave an update, saying that the IDF recovered the bodies of roughly 1,500 Hamas gunmen inside Israel. If that is the number of dead, do you have a sense of how many Hamas terrorists were involved in this overall offensive?

Do you have an idea of how many are left on the Hamas side?

CONRICUS: Yes, we are -- it's an evolving number. The figures here are rolling, and we're trying to provide as much information as quickly as possible and as accurately as possible.

And we're working on counting bodies. The priority is, first and foremost, to identify Israeli civilians and try to match using DNA and other information and to inform families. There is tremendous outcry in Israel of lacking information. I don't know how much that has been reflected in international media, but that is the talk of the day in Israel.

So that is priority number one, getting information to Israelis. And second priority is, yes, finding terrorists and then counting the bodies. I am aware of that high number that you mentioned. It's not an official IDF tally yet. It will be, I hope, during the night or in the morning.

And then we can put pieces of the puzzle together and start to assess the combat capabilities of Hamas, since they have sent over so many of their trained terrorists, some of them highly trained of their best units called the Nukhba, which is their equivalent of the special forces, if you can draw a comparison to a military, with the better equipment, better training, and that are really, really task-oriented to do this kind of butchering, going into Israeli communities and murdering Israeli civilians.

So they sent over those, but also, let's say, rank-and-file, run-of- the-mill terrorists, perhaps with less training. We will get to the bottom of it. Our intelligence people will analyze and make sense of every piece of information.

We have live terrorists that we have apprehended, quite a few of them. They are being interrogated in order to extract intelligence, very important intelligence, exactly to answer those questions and others. How did this happen? How did they plan it? How did they enter, et cetera, et cetera?

[13:20:07]

And we will make sense of it, and we will use it for future operations.

COOPER: Just briefly, Reuters has reported that Hamas built a mock Israeli settlement to train for the operation. Can you confirm that?

CONRICUS: Yes. I mean, we can see -- you can see it on their propaganda videos that they're disseminating, both with their Bakai (ph) aerial unit, those gliders, motorized gliders, and other units.

And we have seen that in the past, that they use the ruins of Israeli communities in Gaza, Gush Katif, and other communities, and they have used that to practice on. We have seen that in the past. That is not necessarily a new thing that they have urban training centers.

And now they release this propaganda video, so it confirms it.

COOPER: Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus, thank you.

CONRICUS: Thank you.

COOPER: We are waiting on President Biden.

We are anticipating his remarks, reaction to what is happening in Israel and Gaza. We're going to bring you his remarks once they begin.

Also, we are monitoring the live pictures from the region, Hamas and Israel exchanging, as Clarissa Ward was reporting, a barrage of rockets. We are on top of the fast-moving developments.

As we head to a quick break, here is an Israeli man whose daughter is one of the many people still missing after the deadly attack on that music festival.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You cannot imagine the situation that kids going to dance and have fun and going to a club, or -- and they're not coming back home because they have been captured as war prisoners.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:26:03]

SANCHEZ: We just learned that he wrapped a call moments ago with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Let's take you to the White House now with CNN's M.J. Lee.

So, M.J., talk to us about what you have learned regarding the call and what we're anticipating will be Biden's message during these remarks.

M.J. LEE, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Boris, we are told by officials that we should expect President Biden to address a couple of things here.

First and foremost -- and this is no surprise -- we should expect President Biden to reiterate the U.S.' support for Israel, both the government of Israel and the people of Israel, and that the U.S. is willing and ready to provide whatever resources and tools the country needs to get through the next couple of weeks.

We also expect that the president will address the hostage situation unfolding over there. Of course, this comes as officials have made very clear that they are sort of accepting the very real possibility that Americans could be among the hostages that have been taken into Gaza. But this is a very, very precarious and complicated situation, where they really, really can't at this moment in time give us even a number, an estimate as to how many hostages might have been taken and certainly the conditions of those people that are inside Gaza right now.

We also are told by officials that there should be a message from the president broadly to the Jewish community. Obviously goes without saying that the events over the weekend and the scenes that are coming out of Israel, they have been deeply upsetting and traumatizing for everyone, but particularly this community.

Now, Boris, as for the situation the ground and just the questions of what actions Israel might take next, we are told this by one official: "We are not urging restraint right now."

I think that really just goes to capture just how unique and shocking and just the complexity of this, the attack that we saw over the weekend that the president right now at this moment in time feels like it is wholly inappropriate for him when he is talking about the situation to urge kind of -- any kind of restraint to Israel.

Now, as you mentioned., we did just get word from the White House that President Biden wrapped up his phone call with Prime Minister Netanyahu. This is the third time that we know of that the two men have spoken since the attacks began on Saturday.

And, of course, while we don't have a full readout, we fully expect that the president reiterated the U.S.' support for Israel. And I can tell you, just based on information that we have about their prior phone call on Saturday, we are told, when -- that Prime Minister Netanyahu brought up the possibility of a ground incursion into Gaza, again, the president privately in this phone call did not urge restraint.

So, again, all of this just goes to capture what U.S. officials here are navigating and the shocking sort of wide breadth of the attack that we are told both Israeli officials and U.S. officials were really caught off guard by.

SANCHEZ: Yes, we will see what President Biden says about his phone call with the prime minister of Israel in his remarks just moments away.

M.J. Lee from the White House, thank you so much.

As we await remarks from President Biden, let's discuss the situation with CNN global affairs analyst Kimberly Dozier.

Kim, always great to see you.

What are you anticipating we're going to hear from President Biden?

KIMBERLY DOZIER, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: I think President Biden has to prepare the American public for what the Israelis have told him is coming. It's very clear from the positioning of their military equipment

they're going to do a ground assault. And they have promised something like the Hamas fighters have -- quote, unquote -- "never seen before."

SANCHEZ: Right.

DOZIER: So you can expect that it's going to go into several parts of Gaza.

When you do something like that in a tightly populated area, 2.3 million people inside this area...

SANCHEZ: Right.

DOZIER: ... U.N. schools that have been used as bomb shelters are overflowing.

People literally don't know where to go to get out of the way. There are going to be civilian casualties. And Israel is going to need U.S. support for the days that are coming at the U.N. Security Council. The U.S. in the past has been one of the few countries that has abstained or stood with Israel when there are votes of censure.

SANCHEZ: Sure.

DOZIER: They're going to need that support.