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Israel warns Gaza residents of a possible ground invasion, while U.S. intelligence reports raise questions about the timing of the Hamas attack; Speaker vacancy in the House of Representatives hampers U.S. response to global crises, including the Israeli- Palestinian conflict; Escalating tensions in Israel prompt concerns about a potential regional conflict . Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired October 13, 2023 - 14:00   ET

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

[14:00:00]

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN ANCHOR: This hour, we're following major breaking news as Israel's ground invasion of Gaza appears to be near. I'm Boris Sanchez in Washington with Brianna Keilar and our colleague Anderson Cooper is on the scene in Israel. The IDF says that in the past 24 hours, troops have entered Gaza carrying out raids and searching for hostages.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: Earlier today, the IDF dropped flyers on Gaza. You see that here, these flyers telling people in the northern part of the Gaza Strip to evacuate south within the next 24 hours. The UN saying evacuating more than a million people in one day is impossible. And CNN has learned that US intel warned the Biden administration of the potential for a clash in the region days before the Hamas attack on Israel. We'll have more on that new information here in just a moment. Anderson, what's the latest on the ground?

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN SENIOR ANCHOR: Yeah, soldiers and tanks are massing near the Gaza border. We've obviously been seeing that now for days. Fighting along the northern border with Lebanon has been, there's been an uptick in that. The IDF says it's conducting drone attacks on Hezbollah targets inside Lebanon. We're covering all the angles of this major breaking news with our reporters, also our analysts standing by. There's a lot to get to in the hour ahead.

I want to go first to CNN chief global affairs correspondent Matthew Chance, who's here with me in Tel Aviv. What more are Israeli officials saying about, about these raids that they've conducted?

MATHEW CHANCE, CNN CHIEF GLOBAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: The raids they've conducted inside Gaza, they say, are of limited in scope. So, they're not the sort of big push for the land invasion that we've all been bracing ourselves for. They're much more pinpoint. They're designed to eliminate the threat from terrorism, they say, but also designed to try and locate some of the hostages that are being held by Hamas militants inside the Gaza Strip, or at least to look for evidence as to where they might be. And remember, this is one of the major complications of any big assault on the Gaza Strip. It's densely populated. It's got a network of tunnels underneath it. But there's also 100 to 150 hostages that are hidden somewhere, secreted around that very densely populated area.

Already, Hamas say that because of the intensive airstrikes that have been carried out by Israel on areas of the Gaza Strip, airstrikes, by the way, that have leveled entire neighborhoods in Gaza City, 13 of the hostages that they've taken have been killed. That hasn't been verified. But again, it underlines the problem military planners have considering going into Gaza.

COOPER: Hezbollah says they've conducted a number of strikes on the northern border with Israel. This is something, obviously, we have all been watching very closely now for several days. What's the latest on that?

CHANCE: Yeah, I mean, at this point, it looks like a tit for tat response. Israel carried out some artillery strikes earlier on Hezbollah positions. Hezbollah has returned in kind and attacked some settlements with missiles. But what it's not, is the kind of full scale retaliation or response that Israel and that many people in the region are bracing for once the Gaza operation begins. Hezbollah has said, if you go into Gaza by land, we're going to strike. In the past, they've done that. In '26, we were both there, in fact, in northern Israel, when Hezbollah unleashed its arsenal of rockets onto it. It was a tough fight. --

COOPER: Yeah, it was a tough fight.

CHANCE: And it was potentially and it's worse now because Hezbollah have a much bigger arsenal of much more powerful weapons. This isn't that, but it's a little indication of what might be to come.

COOPER: The push for to try to get Gaza residents to leave to the south. Israel is called just a million people try to move down to the south. A number of humanitarian organizations are saying this is catastrophic. This is impossible. Hezbollah, we should point out, Hamas is telling residents not to actually go to the south for their safety.

CHANCE: Yeah. And I think one of the reasons Hamas is saying that is because they are concerned as Palestinian nationalists that if Palestinians leave areas like north of the Gaza Strip, they'll never get it back. That will be another sort of loss of land to the Israeli state. Remember, there are millions of refugees all over this region that left their lands thinking they were going to go back. They're now in Syria, in refugee camps, in Lebanon, in Jordan, and they can't get the lands back. And Israel's built a country on it. That's what Hamas are talking about.

But just a humanitarian obstacle to transferring more than a million people from the north of the Gaza Strip, which is the most densely populated to the south. It's basically not feasible, is what everyone is saying. The UN, the United States, the European Union, and it will complicate the already severe humanitarian crisis. Remember, there are more than 400,000 people in the Gaza Strip that have already been displaced.

The hospital situation is dire. People are short of food, of water, of fuel. A transfer of a million people out of their homes is going to make it so much worse.

COOPER: It would also put more pressure on Egypt to try to allow those people into Egypt, something Egypt has resisted. But obviously, Egypt controls the southern border with Gaza. They could allow those people in. And that border crossing between the Gaza Strip, the Rafah border crossing into Egypt is controlled by Egypt.

CHANCE: They could. You're right.

[14:05:09]

But you know, Egypt are not at the moment conceding that they will open up that crossing to allow humanitarian colonists [ph].

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: It's a huge potential security threat and humanitarian concern to have that number of people in northern Egypt.

COOPER: I think that's what's behind it. They're worried about having Palestinian militants transfer into the very volatile area of Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula, which is just across the Rafah border. --

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: Which they've already had security problems in.

CHANCE: -- Massive problems, and this would compound those problems. But, you know, look, there are negotiations underway right now, and I've been told this by Israeli officials, to try and get the Egyptians to concede and to back down. At the moment they haven't, but there's still diplomatic pressure to try and make them to do that.

COOPER: Matthew Chance, thank you. I want to go now to Jeremy Dimond, Defense Secretary. Lloyd Austin met with top officials in Israel today in a major show of U.S. support. He sat down with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said that the U.S. has Israel's back, our Jeremy Dimond has been following that from Ashdod. Jeremy, I want to get to the latest on what Austin told you, but first, you're at a shelter. What's happening there?

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN CORRESPONDENT: We actually just came back out to the balcony, Anderson. Sorry, our shot is a little bit fluid, but the sirens just went off here in Ashdod. I heard at least two booms of the Iron Dome missile intercepts, and it's relevant to the story that you were going to come to us to talk about, which is what we saw today at the Neva Team Air Base in southern Israel, where the second shipment of U.S. military aid to Israel arrived just this week.

And we were the only news crew on the ground to witness that plane landing, and also as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin came and greeted that plane. The reason why it's relevant to what we just did now is that one of the munitions that the United States is providing Israel with as part of this latest package is additional Iron Dome missile interceptors. And beyond that, they're also providing cluster munitions as well as precision-guided munitions. I was able to speak with the Secretary of Defense today as he greeted

this military cargo plane landing at the Neva Team Air Base. I asked him, first of all, about what this means for Israel, what kind of a show of support this is, but I also asked him whether he has gotten any assurances from the Israelis about how they will use this given the concern about civilian casualties.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LLOYD AUSTIN, DEFENSE SECRETARY: It's not just a show of support, it is support. And this is the leading edge of war to come.

DIAMOND: We've already seen some civilian casualties in Gaza. What kind of assurances do you have from the Israelis about how they'll use these munitions? What kind of assurances?

UNKNOWN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

AUSTIN: This is a professional force that's well-led, so I'm sure they'll do the right thing.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UNKNOWN: Here we go.

DIAMOND: And, Anderson, that was a brief exchange that we were able to have with the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Earlier in the day, though, he did make some comments about the importance of upholding the rule of international law, upholding international law as it relates to the laws of war, saying that democracies are stronger and more secure when we uphold the laws of war. But he also made very clear that there is no daylight between the United States and Israel. And he insisted that the shipments that we saw today, the shipment that we saw earlier this week, it is only the beginning of much more U.S. security assistance to Israel to come as Israel prepares for the next phase of its military campaign against Hamas. And he said that those shipments will not only continue to flow, but that they will continue to flow at the speed of war. Anderson.

COOPER: Jeremy Diamond, thanks so much. I want to bring in, our coverage continues here, I want to bring in CNN's Katie Bo Lillis. She's got new reporting that U.S. intelligence did have some warnings about a prospect of more violence here from Hamas just days before Saturday's surprise attack. Katie Bo, what did these reports say? How specific were they?

KATIE BO LILLIS, CNN REPORTER: Yeah, so, Anderson, what we have learned is that the intelligence community was circulating a pair of two separate intelligence assessments just in the days leading into October 7th's devastating attack. One of them on September 28th warned, based on multiple streams of intelligence, that Hamas was poised to escalate with some cross-border rocket fire into Israel. A separate October 5th wire from the CIA warned sort of generally of the increasing possibility of violence by Hamas.

But, Anderson, I think what's really important to understand here is that none of these two, neither of these two reports provided any sort of specific tactical detail about the size, scope, scale, brutality of the attack that actually did occur on October 7th. So, they were these sort of kind of high-level warnings that, you know, look, the tensions in between sort of Palestinian militant groups and Israel are growing, there's an increased possibility for violence, but they weren't offering any sort of specific evidence of the planning for the attack that actually unfolded on Saturday.

[14:09:59]

COOPER: Do we know if those reports were passed on to Israeli intelligence or, I mean, it sounds like it didn't really sound any particular alarm bells, because it kind of sounded like, well, there may be more rocket attacks, but nothing really too specific.

LILLIS: Yeah, so this is the important thing to understand, the nuance here to understand here, Anderson, is there's a big difference in between sort of strategic warning and kind of more kind of tactical warning about, okay, here's exactly what's about to happen. And so, this was certainly kind of in the camp of strategic warning, right? And I think based on what our sources are telling us, for a lot of officials who were reading this intelligence, they were interpreting it correctly as like, look, there's heightened tensions in the region, there's something to be concerned about, something could happen here.

But they were sort of viewing this as likely another round of cross- border rocket fire, you know, maybe the Iron Dome intercepts some missiles, maybe Israel retaliates, you know, maybe we even see something as dramatic as the clash that took place in 2021 in between Hamas and Israel, but they weren't in any way sort of imagining that these warnings were indicating something of the size and scale of what we did see on Saturday.

As for whether or not this was shared with Israeli officials, but -- because the United States doesn't do a lot of its own intelligence collection inside Gaza, it really relies on Israel to do a lot of that sort of raw reporting and a lot of that collection, it just sort of takes the information and then analyzes it for itself. Many of the officials that we spoke to said it wouldn't necessarily be indicated for the US to sort of turn around and share these reports or share these sort of assessments with Israel, again, because much of the raw information in these intelligence assessments was coming from Israel in the first place, and Israel wasn't raising these alarm bells with the United States.

COOPER: Katie Bo Lillis, appreciate the reporting, thank you. Joining me now to talk more about this and other things happening in the region is Mark Esper. He was Defense Secretary under President Trump, is author of the book, A Sacred Oath, Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense during Extraordinary Times. Secretary Esper, appreciate you joining us. First of all, what do you make of this new information about US intelligence warning that something may be happening, some uptick, not too specific? What do you, should it have been caught? Should that have raised more alarms?

MARK ESPER, FORMER DEFENSE SECRETART UNDER TRUMP: It's very interesting. I'm not surprised that we had some type of intelligence at that level. I am a little surprised that there wasn't more preparation taken on the Israeli end, if you will, to heighten the security level along the fence line, the borderline between Israel and Gaza. I think there've been two failures, if you look at the situation now. One has been the intelligence failure, but the second one is a military readiness failure to step up patrol surveillance or whatnot along the border. So, look -- , there'll be time for that later, but that's kind of what jumps to my mind when we talk about this.

COOPER: Yeah, and as you said, I mean, time for that later, but CNN did do a report, just our clerical board was looking at what the Hamas, the training videos they were putting out, and we've geo- located a site that they built, which mirrored a Israeli settler community that they were doing training on that was very close to one of the major boarding crossings and was visible from the air. It's remarkable that Israel did not pick up any real signs of this operation, which was clearly planned for a very long period of time involving many, many different people.

ESPER: Yeah, that was a very interesting report, and I read it with a good deal of curiosity that it would go back that far and it should have been visible. Like I said, I think there'll be time later, they'll go back and really dig into this. I think the immediate question, though, when you look at these pieces of information that should have been assessed is clearly there was a blind spot, and as you go into this next phase where you're looking at a military incursion into Gaza and maybe some other things, I do think you wanna make a quick check to make sure that those blind spots are no longer there.

And so I think there is a need for an immediate assessment as to what happened and why, and then you can dig later, kind of pull each and every thread later. But that would be my concern, is what didn't we see over the past year and why didn't we see it? And have we rectified that before we step into these next phases of the operation?