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Hamas Launches Unprecedented Terror Attack On Israel; Netanyahu Says Israel Is "At War" After Hamas Launches Assault By Land, Sea And Air; President Biden "Unequivocally Condemns" Attacks On Israel; Jonathan Greenblatt, Anti-Defamation League CEO, Discusses Hamas' Surprise Terror Attacks On Israel; Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) Discusses Hamas' Surprise Attacks On Israel; How Did Intelligence Agencies Miss Signs Of Hamas Attacks? Aired 4-5p ET

Aired October 07, 2023 - 16:00   ET

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

[16:00:00]

DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: This attack also comes on the Jewish Sabbath, and it came on a Jewish holy day. At least 200 Israelis are dead and nearly 1500 wounded. Hamas has fired thousands of rockets. Israel has retaliated with air strikes on Gaza. More than 230 Palestinians, they say, have been killed.

We want to warn you that video we are going to show you from Hamas may be disturbing. Fighters are seen storming the main border crossing between the Israel and the Gaza Strip. Fighters have infiltrated Israeli cities and there have been gun battles in the street.

CNN teams are deployed around the world to bring you all the latest developments. CNN's Nic Robertson has just landed in Israel. He got off the plane at the main international airport where sirens warned of possible in incoming rockets.

And before we get to you, Nic, I want to show our viewers how it unfolded on the tarmac.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: We literally just got off the plane here in Ben Gurion Airport. The sirens have gone off. People are taking cover. We got off the bus, people are taking cover, and you can hear the intercept missiles banging in the air. Nothing incoming here. But everyone is taking cover. They've gotten down. A lot of concern about what's going to happen here this night.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: Again, Nic, we just showed our viewers what happened when you and our team arrived at the Ben Gurion Airport in Israel. You have now made your way to an area right outside of Ashkelon. You say that there's a lot of concern there tonight. First, explain to people who are looking at you, 11:00 local time, where exactly you are, what does that mean, Ashkelon, and what is happening there.

ROBERTSON: So, when we came out of the airport in Ben Gurion, Tel Aviv Airport, we headed south along the coastal highway. That's the coastal highway there. What you're seeing at that blue flashing light is a checkpoint on that highway, and that, as far as we know, is as far as we can go. The civilian traffic is allowed to go because 15 miles further down the road from there is Gaza. And while we've been standing here, we've been able to hear what sound like fighter jets in the air, and the sound of detonations, possibly detonations from explosions that are happening inside Gaza.

But I want to show you something else here as well. Take a spin around and look. There's just a couple of vehicles on the highway down here, but this is in relative terms absolutely deserted. The further south we've come towards Gaza this evening, the quieter the roads have been. There is very, very little traffic compared to how it would be normally.

Now, at this time, I saw a few people like this gentleman here coming out to see what's going on, but it is going to be down this road here, where you see the blue flashing light that we can expect to see potentially deployments of Israeli Defense Force troops around Gaza. It is further south from here where those Hamas militants came out of Gaza, broke down the fence, and got into communities that are just 20, 30 miles south of here.

That's where we saw the terror on the streets, the people being kidnapped, the people shot in their cars on what appeared to be on this highway or roads very close to it earlier on this morning. It is a sort of lull at the moment, but it is very much a dynamic situation because the government now needs to decide how it's going to move forward.

And with the potential Hamas says it has, hostages, it's got these people -- got people captured, this is an entirely different dynamic than the Israeli government has really faced on this kind of scale before, for perhaps a generation or more, so this will be a huge challenge tonight for the government.

[16:05:01]

And although we are seeing some small number of troops around, not seeing any large military deployment so far, but we are seeing checkpoints on this highway, as it goes north because obviously the Israeli Defense Force concerned that there might be other Hamas militants out there who want to try to move further north tonight. That would be an ongoing concern until the Israeli Defense Force are completely sure they've rounded them all up -- Dana.

BASH: It certainly is eerie. I can't imagine what it feels like to be there because it does feel calm. It feels like it's 11:05 there at night, and that's probably typically what you see which is not a whole lot of action when it's that late at night, but for this moment, it is because people are scared to come out.

It actually, frankly, surprises me that I'm seeing even a few cars heading towards Gaza right now. Yes, there's a checkpoint there, but it's surprising that you're seeing civilians even trying to get up there. Perhaps they have family or their homes are between where you are and the Gaza border, but this is, as you said, a very, very dynamic situation.

ROBERTSON: And that -- and for people living in Ashkelon here, in Ashdod a little further north up the coast, and Tel Aviv, it's going to be a big worry through the night. Are there going to be more rockets? Where we landed, there was a salvo of about 150, 200 maybe rockets fired from Gaza into Tel Aviv. Go back 10 years or so, Hamas didn't have rockets that could reach Tel Aviv.

The dynamics of the situation here have been evolving. Hamas has been getting longer range weapons systems, they've been trying different techniques to attack Israeli civilians, but what we're seeing today, of course, by breaking out of Gaza and storming military positions, Israeli Defense Force positions, as well as civilians, that is an order of magnitude, a quantum step as we said before, different to what people have experienced here before.

So we have seen a couple of vehicles go through that checkpoint, going south that way. They seem to be military vehicles, and there are military on the move here, and if you look at their vehicles, you wouldn't potentially know they were military.

BASH: Yes. Well, that actually makes a lot of sense.

Nic, I want to show our viewers some new video that we have in from what is going on this evening in Tel Aviv. We have some video of a building that was hit by a rocket, you see it there. You see the aftermath of what is going on there in Tel Aviv. I mentioned to you earlier that I've been in touch with people who are in and around Tel Aviv, who were hearing the sirens, going up and down from the bomb shelters.

For the most part, they have been protected by Israel's famous Iron Dome system, which protects from rockets, but obviously it is not foolproof. And we're seeing that right now in new video that we have from Tel Aviv, which is an important note because yes, what is happening where you are closer to the border with Gaza, Nic, it is sort of where everybody is focused for lots of reasons, first and foremost because that's where the Hamas terrorists physically came in, killed civilians, took civilians across the border into Gaza, but it is not limited to that area.

ROBERTSON: Not at all. I mean, typically in the past when Hamas had shorter range missile systems, they would hit the towns of Ashkelon here and Ashdod just a little bit further north, but now they can reach Tel Aviv. It seems that that is their preferred target. Potentially because it's a greater density of population. Potentially because they know, for Israelis, that's more -- has a greater psychological impact.

Literally as we're standing here talking now I can hear explosions in the distance coming from the direction of Gaza. We can't say with certainty what those explosions are, but they feel like quite big detonations that we're hearing from a distance. Gaza, the northern end of Gaza, is about 15 miles in this direction here.

BASH: And Nic, we're showing our viewers, it's very dark so you can't see a whole lot, but kind of an aerial view of Gaza City, and what Oren Liebermann here was reminding us, and you have certainly reported on like he has from the ground there is, when you're talking about Israeli retaliation inside Gaza, how difficult that is even without Israeli hostages who are apparently there now, because it is so dense, because it is so hard to navigate for the Israeli military.

[16:10:02]

Now, on top of that, you have the Israeli military, according to Prime Minister Netanyahu, very clearly ready to retaliate, but the challenge is how are they going to do that, not only to avoid Palestinian civilian deaths, but also the Israeli hostages who were intentionally brought in there as shields.

ROBERTSON: It's a huge, huge challenge. Look, Hamas hides out in the civilian population. They live in the same houses civilians live in. They build tunnels under civilian properties. So that presents a military challenge. But I think you've also got to take a step back and analyze this from the new scenario that we've witnessed today, not just the hostage scenario, which is terrible for any government to deal with, but particularly in a pressing situation like this.

But the very fact that there appears to be an intelligence deficit on the Israeli side, they didn't know this was coming. What else don't they know? What else don't they know about the terrain that they would have to physically cross on the outskirts of Gaza City to get into Gaza? What awaits them there that they're not aware of that they haven't faced in the past? So all these are going to be calculations and things that the military is trying to determine.

Look, we know in the past that Israel has got some super sophisticated equipment that can detect Hamas tunneling going on, but they were unaware of, it seems, that there was going to be a breakout from Gaza by Hamas into the civil communities. So that's going to be on the minds of the military. And typically what we've seen in the past it takes some time to organize the tanks, to get the reservists in place, to bring forward the artillery, to put suppressing fire if you will on Hamas attacking and firing positions.

It takes some time. And even when you do that, and you move into an arena that Hamas is able to use as they want, almost effectively freely, this is being inside Gaza, and there are unknown dangers for the Israeli forces. So it is a very dangerous scenario, crossing that open ground, and then where do you go? Which buildings do you target? What happens when you get within the buildings of civilian infrastructure?

That is an entirely different fight from a fight that tanks can be useful at. And artillery can be useful at. It becomes infantry. And you'd think that maybe special forces would try to do a rescue and recovery on the hostages. Intelligence is going to be the lead part of that picture. But we're already saying that the intelligence is lacking here. So the challenges are vast at this stage.

BASH: They sure are, and I'm so glad that you put that in perspective. I don't want to belabor the 9/11 sort of illusion, but when you're talking about the intelligence failure and talking about that the Israeli government, the Israeli intelligence doesn't know what they don't know, it does remind you of the fear in the United States and frankly around the world, after 9/11, because they were caught so flat-footed. They didn't know what else could potentially be coming.

Thank you so much, Nic, for that incredible reporting, to you and your team. We will definitely get back to you.

I want to go to Sam Kiley to stay on this thread, this question, of the Israelis not knowing what they don't know.

SAM KILEY, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, yes, Dana. I mean, on top of that, all day, and Nic and I have been in and out of the Gaza Strip, my case, for 25 years, I've never been into that strip or out of it, near it, without being within sight of an Israeli helicopter. Where were those helicopter gunships? They have Apache, they have Cobra, they have Zeppelin type observation balloons.

It's almost impossible to move anywhere in Gaza without being observed, particularly now by Israeli drones. And yet we were witness to -- by video and by social media, an incursion from Gaza into Israeli territory without any kind of aerial response from the Israelis whatsoever. There's been no evidence whatsoever that they managed to get an Apache into the air and go after Palestinian gunmen who were brazenly walking down the streets in Sderot, opening fire on passing civilian vehicles, opening fire on police officers, overrunning two different small IDF bases on the edge of the Gaza Strip.

This is an absolutely extraordinary piece of planning by the Gaza militants of Hamas, but also they could not have imagined that it might have been quite this easy. This is absolutely extraordinary, that they would have been able to capture what may be really seriously significant numbers of civilian hostages and indeed what the Israeli Defense Forces are calling prisoners of war, in other words, soldiers that have been taken alive back into the Gaza Strip.

[16:15:07]

Now we haven't seen very compelling evidence yet from Hamas about the numbers, but we have seen video of them being taken back in. So these air strikes that we've seen going in the early stages of the Israelis trying to figure out, as Nic was rightly pointing out, what on earth to do next. These spectacular attacks that you see with buildings targeted, coming down, we've seen this before, but what we haven't seen before are these Gazan incursions from Gaza into Israeli territory.

Some of which we've got every reason to believe may be ongoing. And that I think as Nic was explaining there, is why he's not able to get further down the road because there still are likely to be militants, armed militants roaming around just near the Gaza Strip, but by now maybe as far as Eilat. Maybe trying to penetrate into Jerusalem. These are very serious, complex responses that the Israelis are going to have to make, on top of that, trying to figure out how they will, other than just by air, conduct operations inside Gaza. BASH: And Sam --

KILEY: They move -- sorry, go ahead.

BASH: Sam, forgive me for interrupting. I just want our viewers to know what we're looking at. We heard Nic talking about the fact that he could hear rockets going off in Gaza, and what we were just looking at was moments ago, that very thing. Waiting for the tape to rerack, but continue what you were saying.

KILEY: Well, very interestingly there, you've seen also the activity of the Iron Dome actually shooting down some of those missiles. Those flashes in the air are sometimes thought of in a grim way as almost sort of English pheasant shoot where these missiles go shooting overhead and then they're shot down by the Iron Dome in an automated system.

BASH: I think we have it again. So you can explain it again while we see it. There you go.

KILEY: Yes, it's a remarkable piece of equipment, it's a big box-like piece of rocket that sends up a kinetic missile, essentially a very fast-moving dart that is able to bring down these Hamas rockets in the air. And when you see them explode in the air like that, that is when they've been hit simply by the kinetic force and detonated in the sky over usually Israeli territory. Some of them, of course, misfire, too, and even kill civilians and others inside the Gaza Strip.

But those detonations we've been seeing in the sky are those missiles being shot down by the Iron Dome. Very sophisticated piece of equipment that has saved without question many thousands of Israeli lives -- Dana.

BASH: Sam Kiley, thank you so much for that excellent reporting.

We are going to take another quick break. Don't go anywhere. More of our breaking news out of Israel. Hamas launching an unprecedented attack on Israel. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[16:21:55]

BASH: Welcome back to our breaking news coverage of the Hamas terror attack inside Israel. We're going to go to the White House in a moment, but before we do, I just want to show our viewers, it's very disturbing, but it's important to see what we're talking about here when we discuss the terror attack that happened on the Jewish Sabbath, on a Jewish holy day, and that is something that happened to a civilian woman who was in a car and she was driving.

I believe we have this video? In the car, and it was overtaken by terrorists and then she was taken by terrorists.

(VIDEO CLIP) BASH: And again this is very difficult to watch, but it is just unfortunately one of many images, videos and photos that we are seeing coming out of Israel, of innocent civilians being captured, being killed, and this is going on, went on all day. It is now nighttime in Israel, nighttime in Gaza, and I want to bring back our panel and I want to start here at the table with Oren Liebermann, our Pentagon correspondent who spent many years in Israel, and also Colonel Leighton.

And I want to start with something that I heard from somebody about Israel -- in Israel about whether or not the fact that Israeli military forces have been very focused on the West Bank, not on the Gaza border. And we actually saw earlier that there was an example of an Israeli military base being overrun. And is that because -- and we have to be carefully, obviously it's early and we're doing reporting, is it because the focus of the Israeli military was not in Gaza, which is what the Hamas terrorist organization and individuals took advantage of?

OREN LIEBERMANN, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: It certainly looks that way. We have seen Israel in recent months focus its efforts on the West Bank, carrying out raids in cities like Tulkarem in the northern West Bank, and Jenin going after terror cells there and essentially hot spots to try to control it. So that's where Israel's military focus has been.

That leaves open the question, did they simply stop paying attention to Gaza and to the Gaza border? It has not been completely quiet, but certain relative to the West Bank, from what we have seen, the focus was simply on the West Bank, and it leaves open the question, were they caught sleeping in this case?

[16:25:07]

And I want to add one more thought to that, the video we just saw, the woman being taken hostage, at least according to the license plate, that was an Israeli military vehicle. So they not only got an Israeli civilian there, they have now, it appears, stolen Israeli military vehicles as well, in part of this raid that caught Israel completely by surprise.

BASH: I'm so glad that you added that. That's really important to know. Colonel?

COL. CEDRIC LEIGHTON, CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Yes, Dana, and I think it's -- you know, it's a question of resources. You know, like any other military force, you have a situation where -- what do you focus on first? What is your top priority, what is your top threat? And if the Israelis believed that their top threats came from the West Bank, it's not surprising that they didn't focus as much on Gaza.

But having known the history of Gaza and knowing Hamas, it's pretty clear that they, you know, in retrospect, you could say, if this is true, they should have been paying more attention to Gaza and they certainly should have been paying attention to the fact that from an intelligence perspective, their sources were beginning to dry up. And that, of course, is a major, major problem for the Israelis at this point.

BASH: All right. It sure is. We're going to talk a lot more with the reporters and experts that we have. We're going to take a quick break. And on the other side, we're going to go to the White House and talk about what they're doing inside the Biden administration right now. We heard from the president earlier. What's actually happening behind the scenes?

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[16:30:45]

BASH: Welcome back to breaking news, the Hamas terror attack in Israel. You're looking at live pictures of Gaza City, 11:30 p.m. there.

And as we are getting more information, we want to tell you that the U.S. embassy in Israel says that all personnel are accounted for, and they continue to shelter in place. These are U.S. diplomatic personnel in the embassy in Israel.

I should also add that Oren Liebermann, our Pentagon correspondent, who is with me, reports that U.S. troops are also all accounted for in Israel.

As we continue to look at pictures of Tel Aviv this morning -- again, this is not on the border. This is inside Tel Aviv, a very, very large city, a metropolis. The metropolis, other than Jerusalem, of course, inside the country of Israel.

I want to go to the White House, and our M.J. Lee is there.

M.J., we heard from President Biden earlier today saying multiple times that the U.S. stands with and stands by Israel.

The question, of course, going forward, is, what does that mean, and what the posture of the U.S. is, as Israel undeniably will counterattack?

M.J. LEE, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Dana, it was clear that the president wanted to use these brief remarks to, first and foremost, resoundingly show support to the government of Israel and the people of Israel.

And to condemn these attacks. He said that the scenes pouring out of Israel were "unconscionable" and "heartbreaking."

Just take a listen to a little bit of what he had to say earlier.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: When I spoke to Prime Minister Netanyahu this morning, I told him the United States stands with the people of Israel in the face of these terrorist assaults. Israel has the right to defend itself and its people, full stop.

There's never justification for terrorist attacks.

And my administration's support for Israel's security is rock solid and unwavering.

This is not a moment for any party hostile to Israel to exploit these attacks to seek advantage. The world is watching.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEE: And, Dana, his top national security advisers were in that room with him, including Secretary Blinken. They were all in the room, showing what an "all hands on deck" moment this has been for this White House.

I can tell you, the speech certainly was not the president laying out any kind details in terms of U.S. intelligence about the attack.

But we have been speaking to, myself and my colleagues, to U.S. officials all day, and they are already expressing concerns about the big question right now, which is, why did these the Israelis seem unprepared an unaware that an attack of this size was coming their way?

U.S. officials say that, yes, tensions have been escalating over the last several months, but there was no indication that an attack like this was going to happen today.

And U.S. officials also making clear that if the U.S. had been aware and had been given a heads up via their intelligence, they certainly would have let their Israeli counterparts know.

But the Israelis are making clear right now they did not expect an attack of this size -- Dana?

BASH: M.J., thank you so much for that report. Appreciate it.

Now, I want to go to the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt.

Thank you so much for joining me today on this very, very sad day.

First, your reaction to what we're seeing out of Israel.

JONATHAN GREENBLATT, CEO, ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE: Well, I think, Dana, you know, the news reports are filled with -- you've been doing a great job of talking about was this an issue with military readiness, and what are the statistics about the numbers of Israelis murdered or missing?

But my first thoughts are, number one, with the people who have been killed. Family members and friends of mine, staffers of my organization are in hiding today because of this act of unadulterated evil.

[16:35:05]

And let's just put this in some context, Dana. When you serially and viciously dehumanize the Jewish state, whether it's the tyrants in Tehran or the Hamas leaders in Gaza, when you viciously dehumanize the Jewish people, it leads to dehumanization against all Jews.

This kind of violent apocalyptic rhetoric brainwashes people and it conditions them to commit the kind of acts that you're showing in these clips.

I mean, I don't think we should be surprised, because we know that rhetoric has consequences. And we see it here.

I think this moment, Dana, exposes the lie that Hamas is some kind of political entity, some kind of popular movement. It's an extreme terrorist organization, like Hamas, like ISIS or al Qaeda or Hezbollah or Al Shabab.

It's a hate group that shoots elderly people at point-blank range at a bus stop, that kidnaps toddlers, and violently seizes teenagers at a peace concert, of all places, that torches houses with Holocaust survivors inside so they will burn alive. Right?

And they celebrates such savagery, not just dancing and mutilating on the corpses, but recording it and gleefully sharing it.

Dana, this is what evil looks like. And at ADL, we monitor anti- Semitism and this kind of evil. And this is Exhibit A why we are so alarmed.

All of it happening while anti-Semitic incidents in America and around the world already hit record highs.

BASH: Well, talk about that for a second, because the -- the fear right now is that not only is what the terror group Hamas -- they're not only trying to terrorize Israeli civilians, they're trying to incite a larger regional war.

GREENBLATT: Yes. Yes.

BASH: And that is a very Israel concern at this time. And it's a concern for the -- the region and for civilians outside of Israel, but also for, what you're discussing, which is using this as an excuse for anti-Semitic attacks globally.

GREENBLATT: Look, you're right to ask the question. We have seen again and again how terror groups try to stimulate -- not just use violence against Israel to stimulate violence against Jewish people worldwide.

In France, in Belgium, in the U.K. in 2008, 2012, 2013, violence in the region, violence against Jewish people, like with Jews murder in places like Marseille, Paris, London, Brussels.

And even here in the United States in 2021. When Hamas lobbed missiles at Gaza, American Jews were assaulted in broad daylight in Times Square, in west Hollywood, in south Florida, on the Las Vegas strip. So at ADL, we're focused on keeping our Jewish community safe.

BASH: Yes.

GREENBLATT: And I don't know if I've been as worried as I have been in all of my time as I am at this moment.

BASH: Well, that's a very disturbing thing to hear. But I'm glad you're sharing it.

And I don't want to lose sight of the fact that -- again, I mentioned civilians, civilians who were under attack today in Israel.

Civilians who could be in serious trouble, will be potentially in Gaza, and elsewhere in the region, because of this terrorist attack, what we saw in Israel today.

Thank you so much. Appreciate your time, Jonathan.

GREENBLATT: Thank you. Thank you.

[16:39:12]

BASH: And we're going to have a lot more on our breaking news, this attack in Israel, after a quick break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BASH: U.S. officials say they received no warning from Israeli intelligence that Hamas was planning to attack. That raises one of many important questions, which is, how could Israel's intelligence have missed this?

And other intelligence agencies, as well, how did they fail to spot any signs of an assault?

I want to bring in Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, who is a Democrat from Illinois, who is a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

Thank you so much for joining me, sir.

My first question for you, knowing not only U.S. intelligence, but also how storied Israeli intelligence is, what your perspective is on how Israel was caught flat-footed on this?

REP. RAJA KRISHNAMOORTHI (D-IL): Well, I'll be going back to Washington to ask some of these questions of our Intelligence Committee officials.

But -- it's similar to 9/11 in a lot of ways, Dana, where, you know, even at that time, the United States was considered to be the preeminent, you know, collector of intelligence in the world.

And yet, because of a failure of imagination and other errors and siloing within our community, we weren't able to detect what happened on 9/11. I don't know if similar issues existed with regard to Israel.

[16:45:01]

Right now, I think Israel properly is responding to what happened and is actively trying to rescue its hostages and deal with the terrorists already in Israel.

There will be more time later for kind of a postmortem. But some of these issues will certainly come up in the days and weeks to come.

BASH: Yes, no question about that.

And it raises very real fears about what is to come when day breaks, what is to come in the next 24, 48 hours that the U.S. -- excuse me, the Israeli intelligence, also the U.S. intelligence, do not know about.

KRISHNAMOORTHI: That's exactly right. I think that, right now, it's probably fair to say that, both on our side and in Israel, they are actively trying to figure out, you know, where are those holes that obviously led to kind of not being able to anticipate what happened?

So that we can plug those holes and make sure that in the 24 hours, 48 hours, and the weeks ahead, that we're not caught by surprise again.

You know, one group that I'm going to be asking a lot of questions about is Hezbollah, which is in the north, in Lebanon, and whether they or any other groups may take advantage of the current situation to launch their own attacks.

We don't want to be --

BASH: Well, that is a very scary question right now. I mean, do you have any sense of the answer to that?

KRISHNAMOORTHI: No, I don't. I haven't seen evidence of preparations in that regard.

But this is precisely the type of -- we don't want to have a blind spot with regard to Hezbollah or any other Iranian-backed militia or terrorist group.

BASH: Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, of Illinois, member of the House Intelligence Committee, thank you so much for coming on this evening during this breaking news to give us some insight into what was not known that helped lead to this. Thank you so much.

We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[16:51:42]

BASH: More now on our breaking news unfolding tonight in Israel. Intelligence officials in both the U.S. and Israel are looking to see if there were any missed signs ahead of this deadly missile attack there.

CNN military analyst, retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling, is here now.

And I know that it's -- looking back is going to maybe be a -- something that's important for the future.

The question right now is, what's going to happen in the next five minutes? What do they need to know in the next 10 minutes, in the next 24, 48 hours, that is happening?

And I want our viewers to understand that you spent a lot of time in this region. You studied this region, particularly wars in Israel. So given that, what are you seeing right now?

LT. GEN. MARK HERTLING, CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Well, first, Dana, you've been talking about the intelligence failure, and there certainly was that.

What we've seen so far is the lack of placement of key military assets near the Gaza in the various areas around there.

Just seeing some of the films of the ease of which Hamas came through the walls, came through undetected, got through the gates with a lot of forces, and that there were no military forces.

As I think one of your reporters on the scene, I think it was Nic Robertson said, they didn't have the helicopters, they didn't have the helicopters, they didn't have the artillery pieces to counter that -- or at least that's the way it seems initially.

Tells me that there weren't as many forces there. And the Gaza Strip is the main effort for the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces.

So the fact that they were displaced possibly in other places, investigations will detail that. We'll say, why did this happen, why did the government tell the military to move to the territories in the West Bank?

Second thing I'd say is, because of the -- just the carnage that we've been seeing over the last 12 hours, this is going to get very bad very quickly.

In fact, I would suggest this is going to be one of the worst reactions by the Israeli Defense Force that we have seen in any of the last wars over the last two decades.

The fact that people are being kidnapped, people are being killed, tanks are being destroyed. When the Israeli Defense Forces goes into Gaza -- and I believe they will very soon -- it is going to be, Katie, bar the door.

We've seen buildings being destroyed. We don't know how many people have been killed and injured.

But they are taking it out against all of the Palestinian citizens in that territory, not just the ones that are terrorists and that are doing this despicable act.

So it's going to be very bad on both parts, both casualties on the Palestinian side, but also the Israeli side.

We have not seen, I think, the measure of carnage that they've suffered given the amount of rockets -- I mean, the rockets that we've seen over the last 12 hours is more that were fired -- more than were fired by Hamas between 2000 and 2008.

BASH: Wow.

HERTLING: You take that into consideration and the fact that Israeli -- you know, the Iron Dome is very good, but it can't defend against 5,000 rockets that have come in so far over the last 12 hours. So all of those things are factors.

The other thing I'm watching over the long term, or perhaps the short term, as you asked, would be who else is going to enter?

[16:55:03]

What's going to happen with Hezbollah, with the Palestinian forces that are in the territory, on the West Bank, other major players like Iran, perhaps even Turkey or Russia or some of these other Arab nations?

So it's worth -- we're at the very beginning of this, and it's not going to be very pretty.

BASH: Iran a big supporter of Hamas.

You certainly put it into context for us, very grim, but sober context.

Appreciate that, General Hertling.

And thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for being here.

Our special coverage continues after a quick break.

Wolf Blitzer will be back in "THE SITUATION ROOM."

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(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)