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Israeli Strikes In Lebanon Threaten Fragile Ceasefire With Iran; Israel's Netanyahu Calls For Direct Talks With Lebanon; Artemis II Crew To Splash Down Tonight In Pacific; NASA and Navy Prepping To Pick Up Astronauts After Splashdown; Powerful Multi-day Storm Lashing Hawaii With Heavy Rain. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired April 10, 2026 - 13:30   ET

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

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[13:32:43]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": The brittle ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran is facing more strain today, as Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah exchange more attacks in Lebanon. We're also seeing some new photos of how the war is impacting people in Lebanon. Pictures showing displaced families desperately waiting for donated food in Beirut.

UNICEF says more than a million people in Lebanon have been uprooted from their homes since the U.S. launched its war on Iran. Today, Iran's parliament speaker says ceasefire talks with the U.S. cannot even begin until Lebanon is included in the ceasefire and Iran's blocked assets are released. CNN's Jeremy Diamond is with us now from Tel Aviv.

Jeremy, is the ceasefire in Lebanon something that Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu will consider at this time?

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN JERUSALEM CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brianna, publicly the Israeli prime minister has been adamant that there will be no ceasefire in Lebanon, that any negotiations that take place between Israel and the Lebanese government will take place "under fire." But privately, there's no question that the Israeli prime minister is under a lot of pressure to at least at a minimum scale back strikes in Lebanon that the Israeli military is conducting and at most to agree to that very ceasefire that the Iranians are demanding, that the Pakistani mediator said was always supposed to be a part of this negotiation.

And in fact, some of the pressure that Prime Minister Netanyahu is facing is coming from President Trump. We're told by an Israeli and an American source that there was a third conversation this week between Netanyahu and Trump that took place yesterday, which sources described to us as a very tense phone call and one following -- after which, the Israeli prime minister felt that he had to publicly state that he was willing to enter into negotiations with Lebanon, fearing that President Trump might simply announce a ceasefire in Lebanon, one that the Israeli prime minister would then be backed into a corner and have to follow. Now, privately, we're told that President Trump certainly asked Prime Minister Netanyahu to scale back strikes in Lebanon. And sources familiar with the matter tell us that that is the plan for the Israeli military. But it's very hard to see whether or not that's actually the case on the ground. The Israeli military is continuing to carry out strikes in Lebanon today. They are continuing to carry out ground operations in southern Lebanon.

[13:35:00]

And Hezbollah, we should also note, for its part, is continuing to fire rockets at northern and central Israel. So the real question is, ultimately, whether these threats from the Iranians to not engage in these talks in Pakistan with the United States over this issue of the Lebanese ceasefire, whether or not that is simply bluster or if they're actually going to put their money where their mouth is on that. What is clear though is that it is an enormous risk to the overall fragility of the ceasefire and we'll have a lot more clarity likely by tomorrow.

The last thing to just quickly note is that the Israeli public also is largely supportive of continuing to carry out attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon. That's also a big political factor that the Israeli prime minister is considering.

KEILAR: All right, Jeremy Diamond, thank you. Omar?

OMAR JIMENEZ, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": All right. Joining me to talk more about these developments is Ian Bremmer. He's the President and Founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media. Thank you for taking the time. Good to see you.

I want to start on these two preconditions from Iran's parliament speaker. A ceasefire in Lebanon is reached and the release of Iran's blocked assets. Do you see the United States as agreeing or being able to even secure these conditions? I mean, there already seems to be confusion over whether Lebanon was included in the previous ceasefire agreement.

IAN BREMMER, PRESIDENT & FOUNDER, EURASIA GROUP & GZERO MEDIA: Yeah, it does seem to me that the Pakistani prime minister would not have told the Iranians that Lebanon was included if they hadn't heard that from the United States. And then Vice President Vance said, well, there was a misunderstanding, which is very different from saying the Iranians are wrong, right? So I think that there is some egg on face.

The Americans clearly have been pushing the Israelis on this issue. The Israelis have now agreed to engage directly with the government of Lebanon, which of course is a very different thing from Hezbollah. And I expect what you're going to see over the coming days is some willingness on the part of the Israelis to extend the ceasefire to Lebanon.

But they're going to take as a buffer zone, occupy some significant amount of southern Lebanese territory. And they're going to extract commitments from the government of Lebanon to move more quickly in disarming Hezbollah, which they had committed to do, but they were not very effective at it. So I think as part of getting to yes on a ceasefire, there's movement there.

And I think part of the reason why the Iranians are now talking about, oh, we want our assets to be unfrozen too, is because they're making progress on the Lebanon front. And they're saying, can we get more? Can we -- how far can we go on all of this? The danger, by the way, in all of this discussion is not that the Iranians aren't going to show up. They want to show up.

They want to engage in negotiations. The danger is that they engage in negotiations for days, for weeks, for months, and the Americans actually never get a lot of what they are demanding. Meanwhile, the Strait is disrupted. Meanwhile, the Iranians are collecting tolls.

JIMENEZ: Yeah.

BREMMER: Meanwhile, there's massive economic damage all over the world. That's the danger you need to focus on, not the idea that this is going to break apart before it even starts.

JIMENEZ: Well, and it sort of raises the question of where is the United States going here? What would any deal look like? I mean, President Trump constantly trashes the Iran nuclear deal, for example, reached under President Obama, which said Iran will limit its nuclear ambitions, cap its uranium enrichment, allow international inspectors into its sites in exchange for lifting of some sanctions on its oil wealth, unfreezing billions in frozen Iranian assets. I know you know this. Critics said that the latter portion just freed up more money to fund terror proxies that harmed U.S. forces.

BREMMER: Right.

JIMENEZ: But regardless -- I'll let you respond on that for a second -- but I was just going to say, but regardless, here we are more than 10 years later. What kind of a deal is Iran willing to accept and how far would we be able to stray from what was previously agreed to?

BREMMER: No, but that was Obama's deal.

JIMENEZ: Yeah.

BREMMER: I mean, if Trump had done the same deal, it would have been the best deal ever. Right? So I mean, the criticism is because it wasn't him. It was done by somebody else. Anything that Trump eventually agrees to, whether it is objectively better or worse than a previous administration, Democrat or Republican, by the way, Trump doesn't care. If it's not him, it's no good. That will then be a better deal.

So it's not like he's going to have a problem selling it to his people on that front. The question here is whether or not Trump has decided that he wants to de-escalate. This war is his. He's responsible for it. He started it. He decided what the war goals are. And he has since decided for lots of reasons, and I think the reasons are pretty good reasons, that continuing the war is kind of a bad idea. Right? I mean, the Iranians have much more ballistic missile capacity than he thought, doesn't have a good military strategy for opening the Strait, the economic consequences are massive.

[13:40:00]

So he has unilaterally de-escalated. Now, here's the question. In part, he has de-escalated because of all the pain. In part, he's de- escalated because the military forces aren't in place to effectively further escalate. So if you want to be skeptical about this deal, you're probably asking yourself, well, sure, he's talking the markets up now. He's talking oil prices down now.

But all of these troops, these thousands of additional troops, the further, the third aircraft strike group, they're all steaming still into the region. And when they're in position, and when Trump then hears from CENTCOM and his military advisers, OK, give the order, we're ready to go. Will he then decide, I'm going to take the oil? Because he keeps saying, he keeps coming back to, I want to take this oil.

And the only way that the Americans can really stop the Iranians from disrupting the Strait is by the Americans saying, OK, you want to disrupt the Strait? We're going to stop you from actually exporting a damn thing. And there'll be huge consequences of doing that. But there is that leverage if --

JIMENEZ: Yeah.

BREMMER: -- Trump decides he wants to go further.

JIMENEZ: Yeah, and even in this, we're talking a long way away based on where the two sides are right now. We've got Vice President Vance heading over to Pakistan. And we're just trying to get around some non-starters at this point, including whether Lebanon was included in that ceasefire deal and will be in one moving forward.

Ian Bremmer, I got to leave that conversation there. Good to see you. Thanks for taking the time.

BREMMER: Thank you.

JIMENEZ: All right, coming up for us, we are going up. We are going way up. The riskiest part of the Artemis II mission is just hours away. We're tracking it all. Stay with CNN.

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[13:46:46]

KEILAR: The historic homecoming of the Artemis II mission is now just hours away and re-arranging furniture has never been so exciting. In just a few minutes, the four astronauts will reconfigure the Orion capsule's cabin, they'll stow away cargo and netting, they'll install and adjust their seats, all to prepare for the fiery descent back to Earth. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen will travel nearly 25,000 miles per hour when re-entry begins, very fast. Then humanity's furthest voyage through space will literally end with a splash. Orion expected to splash down off the coast of San Diego at 8:07 p.m. Eastern tonight, very punctual splashdown.

We're joined by retired Navy Captain, Jerry Linenger, a retired NASA astronaut. All right. Jerry, so right around now, they are, as we said, moving furniture and we are wrapped. So tell us how they're ready for this re-entry.

JERRY LINENGER, FORMER NASA ASTRONAUT: Yeah. Pretty neat vehicle, actually compared to the Apollo capsule. It looks almost like twice the size, so that was a livable sort of space station, as you know, for the last nine days or so. So now, you got to get everything, the seats, you know, inserted on the floor. You have to have everything locked down because you are coming in with some serious G force.

You know, you'd be coming in, hard to predict, but maybe four or five Gs being thrown back in their seat. You don't want objects flying by. But they are mentally just getting ready. I'm sure they're compartmentalizing any of the fear, any of the anxiety that a normal person might feel. And I would say among astronauts, that's kind of the key characteristic that I found different than, you know, the average person.

They're able to take fear, tuck it away, and have almost two films going in their head, and the other one, you just focus on what's going on. I know I had a fire on Space Station Mir. During that fire, I think my pulse was probably 60, just tucked the fear away, said hey, I know I can die, tuck that away, and then just concentrate, all right, I'm going to do everything right.

And so, that crew is thinking about we're going to do everything right and we are not going to be the leak -- the weak link in this incredible chain of NASA and all the success that we've had.

KEILAR: It's incredible the way they think about things. Next hour, they're doing this thing called the RTC burn. Tell us about this, how crucial it is to getting them in the precise spot they need to be.

LINENGER: So it's a trajectory burn. They've already done two. So along the way, Brianna, it's just boggles the mind, you know. They're going like 25,000 miles an hour. They do these correction burns that make you go about another foot per second, so it's as if you know you're driving your car at a hundred miles an hour and now you're going to adjust it by going 100.0001 miles an hour.

That's how precise they are because you have to hit the atmosphere. And by the way, they start hitting it kind of in the Indian Ocean and then you have to hit it precisely at the right angle, and then you come screaming through, plasma around you, the friction rubbing, rubbing, rubbing, slowing you down, slowing you down. And then at the end, the final way to slow down is the parachute deployment, and it's a rather complicated parachute deployment. They have parachutes pulling the cover off the nose cone, then they have drogue chutes going out to kind of stabilize the vehicle, and then finally the big parachutes come out, three of them, and they are huge. They're like the size of a third of a football field each.

KEILAR: Wow.

LINENGER: So a lot of things have to go right. I have good confidence in what NASA has been doing. It's been a perfect mission.

KEILAR: A third of a football field each. So the Artemis II is using a heat shield that is nearly identical to the Artemis I test flight, which had some of those issues during re-entry that we've been talking a lot about. This shield protects them from those extreme temperatures as they're descending, and NASA says it is mitigating this by slightly altering the mission's flight path to reduce exposure time at peak heating.

Artemis II Commander, Reid Wiseman expressing his confidence in that new re-entry plan. How do they think about this, these potential risks? I mean, I hear you saying they kind of compartmentalize, but how much confidence should we be putting in this sort of tinkering that they've done with this path?

LINENGER: Yeah, so, Brianna, the heat shield was already built for Artemis II, then Artemis I got back, and that's why this is an iterative learning process. So they decided, cost-effective-wise, we can still use that heat shield. It did the job, but we'll just alter the trajectory a bit.

The main problem was not the ablative material getting burned up, kind of like if you're driving really fast and you slam your brakes on, all the rubber, you know, burns on the road. The ablative material sort of gets eaten up.

The problem was inside it, some air bubbles or gas bubbles popped out and put some kind of potholes, in Earth terms, in the protective shield. That protective shield is critical, you know, my old friends on Columbia found that out with that tragic accident.

Everything's got to go right, but I think NASA looked at this very hard. They modeled it. In Artemis III, they have a new ablative material, and so this will not be an issue, and you can do any trajectory coming in that you choose.

KEILAR: They have a new ablative material. That is good to know. I think that is the key to know.

LINENGER: Yeah.

KEILAR: Jerry Linenger, great to speak with you. Thank you so much. This is obviously a really big day.

LINENGER: It's a huge day. Thank you, Brianna. A privilege to be talking with you. Thank you.

KEILAR: Thank you. And we'll be right back. Stay with us.

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[13:57:52]

JIMENEZ: Over a month's worth of rain has fallen on parts of Hawaii and now thousands of people there are under a flood wash as a storm threatens major flooding. This is unfolding as the state is recovering from last month's flooding, the worst in 20 years. I want to get right to CNN Meteorologist, Chris Warren.

So Chris, what are the conditions like right now?

CHRIS WARREN, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Right now, Omar, the conditions are prime for flooding and the reason is because of all of the rain that has already come down recently and this right here. On the radar, we're seeing a pretty healthy slug of tropical moisture moving into O'ahu right now and this is the scene. The area where we've seen the scenes, with the last one, we've seen already a couple of drenching, flooding rains, first in Maui, then O'ahu, and again we're watching O'ahu, but we're also watching the big island right here.

Part of the reason why the Konalos that we've seen and then this is kind of like a Konalos, not exactly, but similar possible impacts because of the direction all this moisture is coming from. A lot of the tropical look that you get in Hawaii is generally and quite predominantly on the east side of the islands because of the trade winds, the moisture coming into this very high terrain.

In some cases, mountains on the big island big enough to have snowfall, right? So we're talking big mountains and a lot of hills that help wring out the atmosphere. But when the moisture is coming in the other direction to areas that are much drier, look more like the Central Valley of California than Miami. So it can be that dramatic in some areas from one part of the island to the other.

So the potential for all of the rains to come and what has already happened leading to these flood watches for all of the islands. That's why they're all green right now. Those are the flood watches and this is what has already primed the streams and a lot of the drainage systems.

It's a foot and a half to more than a foot and a half of rainfall in some of these areas with this latest round. Forecast is showing that the rain with this round should be moving fairly quickly. That should help us, Omar. But if it does stall out and that rain does linger over some of the same areas like on the big island from Kona to Hilo, it will absolutely be worth watching for the potential of more flooding.