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Fifteen Killed, 100 Plus Wounded in Double Tap Strike on Ukraine; Strait of Hormuz Ship Traffic Increases 27 Percent in Past Week; Israeli Airstrikes Continue in Gaza Despite Ceasefire; Trade Talks Collapse between U.S. and Canada; Prince Harry, Elton John and Others to Pay $13 Million after Losing "Daily Mail" Case. Aired 4- 4:30a ET

Aired August 22, 2026 - 04:00   ET

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

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SALMA ABDELAZIZ, CNN ANCHOR AND CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Hello and welcome to our viewers joining us from around the world. I'm Salma Abdelaziz in London. Let's go straight to those headlines.

Ukraine is reeling from a massive Russian strike on a shopping center. President Zelenskyy is vowing to respond. We're going to have a live report for you.

And Iran is reacting to president Trump's threat of an economic D-Day. We're going to break down the stakes in that conflict.

Plus, the U.N. Is raising the alarm over Israeli airstrikes that continue to claim lives in Gaza. I'm going to speak to a doctor currently inside the enclave about what he's seeing on the ground.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): Live from London, this is CNN NEWSROOM with Salma Abdelaziz.

ABDELAZIZ: We start in Ukraine, where president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is promising to retaliate after a devastating Russian attack on a shopping center. Ukrainian officials say a double tap drone strike has killed at least 15 people and it's also wounded at least 130 others.

Video shows a drone hitting the shopping center -- this is in central Ukraine -- and bursting into flames. Smoke from an apparent earlier strike is already visible, rising in the background there.

President Zelenskyy says a second wave of drones targeted emergency crews just half an hour after that initial strike. I want to go now to CNN's Sebastian Shukla. He is joining me live from Berlin.

Good morning to you. So president Zelenskyy is describing this as an attack on a mall, a clear civilian target.

What are you learning? SEBASTIAN SHUKLA, CNN PRODUCER: Yes. Good morning, Salma. There's no other way to describe this other than a double tap, double tap attack, which is particularly callous. And it has now left 16 people dead, 130 people injured, including 23 children.

A double tap attack, Salma, is something that is really quite callous and really extraordinary and quite shocking to see. The motive behind it is to effectively cause as much damage as is possible and inflict as much pain.

The initial strike is there to hit a particular target. President Zelenskyy is saying that the second drone then slammed into the building around 30 minutes later. And obviously what we're expecting to see around then and the targets for this are the emergency services and the first responders, who then are subsequently injured.

Again, it is really quite callous and it's actually something that we've seen, as you well know, from Syria to where the Russians deployed these double tap attacks across civilian infrastructure targets, including hospitals.

We haven't seen many of them in Ukraine but this one is really a highlight. But we are also now in this escalatory phase. And president Zelenskyy himself saying that this will not go unpunished. Take a listen to what he's had to say.

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VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY, UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT (through translator): This is an absolute atrocity committed by the Russians. They're nothing but beasts. We will definitely respond.

It's crucial that we have everything we need to protect lives. It is important that the world does not remain silent about all of this. This Russian war must come to an end and the world must help us achieve that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SHUKLA: Salma, this war must come to an end. Doesn't really show any signs or likelihood of being the case. In fact, instead of de- escalating, we seem to be in a spiral now of continued escalation.

Overnight, we saw both sides attacking each other, Ukraine reporting now that -- Russia reporting that Ukraine has hit targets in Samara region, an oil refinery and a logistics hub.

And it going the other way, Ukraine is also now reporting damage, particularly in the Ukrainian capital city, Kyiv, but also in the southern port of Odessa as well.

The problem that we've seen now, Salma -- or at least it appears clear to me -- this is a phase now that is very close or could be close to spiraling out of control, because we have the escalatory nature from both sides. This attack that we saw in Kryvyi Rih yesterday on the shopping center is very clearly a civilian target. [04:05:00]

What we've seen, conversely, the other way, in -- with Ukraine strikes in Russia is that they are also widening the scope very slightly from purely military targets oil refineries, military installations, to hitting things like just warehouse depots for Ukraine's Amazon -- for Russia's Amazon -- excuse me -- known as Wildberries.

Where does this go?

There shows no signs of peace. Talks are effectively dead or dead in the water, it seems. There is no movement either way on the battlefield. And the U.S. and the European allies don't seem to be able to make any impasse and inroads with the Russians and the Kremlin, who obviously are the key party when it comes to ending this war. Salma.

ABDELAZIZ: Thank you, Sebastian. And I believe Kryvyi Rih is president Zelenskyy's hometown. So very personal double tap attack there. Thank you for that update.

As soon as the war with Iran is over, president Trump says oil prices are going to fall. Speaking in South Carolina on Friday, the president also said that he believes the Strait of Hormuz is an American territory. Here's what he told reporters earlier in the day about the state of the conflict.

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TRUMP: And we have total control, as you know, of the border. We have total control. If you look at the blockade, we have total control of that entire region having to do with the Strait of Hormuz. And that means well into it, the land areas. So they would love to make a deal but they're not ready to make the right deal in my opinion.

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ABDELAZIZ: Now president Trump is hiring (sic) pushback from Iran on that threat of, quote, "economic D-Day" he had earlier threatened, the most crushing economic operation against Iran. This was in a social media post that you can see there.

In response, Iran's foreign ministry said new sanctions would pave the way for a return to full-scale classic colonialism.

Meanwhile, shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz has increased this week, reaching about 20 percent of the pre-war weekly average. The U.K. Maritime Trade Operations Center recorded just 103 ships entering the strait and 89 leaving.

Alex Plitsas is a CNN national security analyst. He is also the director of the counterterrorism program at the Atlantic Council and he described what that economic D-Day might actually look like for Iran.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) ALEX PLITSAS, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: So what we're expecting is the announcement of a package of what are called secondary sanctions. So primary sanctions against Iran itself have already been in place.

But now secondary sanctions would be against other countries, who engage in economic trade with Iran. That would extend them what the administration is calling an economic lifeline.

Because the administration has moved on from military strikes at this point, I think they've realized Iran is able to absorb a lot of this and the regime hangs on.

But can they really deal with a significant economic blow?

And the only way to know is if they can completely choke it off from an economic perspective. And so there's an idea that this additional set of sanctions measures is really going to put the financial squeeze on Iran.

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ABDELAZIZ: Now as we mentioned, traffic in the Strait of Hormuz is starting to increase. This is despite the ongoing conflict, of course. CNN analysis found ship traffic rose by about 27 percent in the past week. That's still far below the pre-war average.

Oil shipments in the waterway are a pivotal issue, of course, in both the war and the diplomacy. CNN's David Goldman looks at how some of those ships are getting through.

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DAVID GOLDMAN, CNN BUSINESS SENIOR REPORTER: There's a new tactic in the Strait of Hormuz that's getting much more oil through than we had previously believed. These ships are going dark.

Now, I mean that literally. They are usually doing it at night and they're doing it with a military escort. But I also mean dark in the sense that you can't see them on transponder data. So let's take a look at a couple ships here in the Strait of Hormuz.

A little hard to see; there they are. This is satellite data. And you can see them. But when you use actual transponder data that would track them live, they disappear. And so this makes it much more difficult for Iran to detect ships that are coming through the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran's been attacking ships that are trying to make their way through the strait and take Middle Eastern oil out to customers, trying to inflict as much economic damage as possible during the course of the war. So this tactic seems to be working.

And here's a ship called the Kiku that is on the other side of the strait. It had made a transponder list trip through the strait. Here it is on the other side. What's it doing?

Well, it's making a ship-to-ship transfer, taking the oil that it had shuttled through the Strait of Hormuz to another ship called the Nave Electron (ph).

And there they are, making a oil connection so that the Nave Electron (ph) can take that oil to its customers. The Kiku can go back.

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Now this is the actual journey that the Kiku took, a Greek-owned ship that made its last signal on July 31st, and then makes its way through the Strait of Hormuz.

We see it again on the transponder data on August 1st, on the other side of the strait, next to that Nave Electron (ph), which then goes to Asia. And then the Kiku makes its journey through the Strait of Hormuz, turning its transponder off and then reappearing inside the Persian Gulf.

This can't last forever, though. It's a tactic that's working right now and we're getting maybe 9 million barrels of oil a day, about double what we were getting through the Strait of Hormuz before this tactic a couple weeks ago.

But we were getting 20 million barrels through the Strait of Hormuz before the war started. A lot of it's getting piped through, you know, to the Red Sea. But nevertheless, we're still not back to normal. And until the war is resolved, these kind of tactics, they may work for a little bit of time but it's not a permanent solution

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ABDELAZIZ: Palestinian civilians continue to be killed and wounded by Israeli airstrikes, shelling and gunfire. This is despite a ceasefire, according to the United Nations. It comes as some 50 Palestinians, 19 of them children, were laid to rest more than two years after they were killed.

Efforts to recover bodies have been limited by restrictions on bringing heavy machinery in to Gaza. A U.N. spokesperson says 94 percent of Gaza's Palestinian population now requires shelter, with many people living in tents.

On Wednesday, medics raced to Gaza City after an Israeli airstrike that killed nine people at a police station. More than 1,200 Palestinians and four Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza since that ceasefire deal was reached last October.

The strike came two days after U.S. envoy Jared Kushner was in Egypt, trying to bring a permanent end to the conflict.

I want to welcome to the program now, Dr. James Smith. He is an emergency physician and a lecturer in humanitarian studies at University College London. He joins us live from Gaza. Good morning. First of all to you, thank you so much for joining us

today. I understand that you have now been working in Gaza for seven weeks. You are currently inside a community clinic.

Just begin by explaining to me what you have witnessed over the course of the last few weeks and what that community clinic, where you're working right now, what supplies do you have?

What help can you offer people?

What ailments are you seeing?

DR. JAMES SMITH, EMERGENCY PHYSICIAN: I would say that the stage that we have reached now -- you know, we're seeing the cumulative effects of manufactured deprivation of a scale that, for most of us, is simply incomprehensible.

We're seeing, to use the legal language, the conditions of life intended to bring about the destruction in whole or in part. We are a clinic that is surrounded by displaced people.

As you've mentioned in your introduction there, the U.N. last week released a report, saying 94 percent of Palestinians in Gaza lack proper housing. And this is what we see every single day, people living in flimsy tarpaulin shelters.

And then, of course, presenting to our clinic with the health consequences of being forced to live in abysmal conditions, people who have no access to proper sanitation services. More than 65 percent of Palestinians lack access to the basic level of drinking water per person per day.

So, of course, people are presenting with really awful gastrointestinal diseases, skin conditions and a whole host of other complications, people presenting with respiratory problems because of overcrowding.

And, of course, all of those patients with chronic conditions -- diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, who have been deprived access to the medical care that is their right.

ABDELAZIZ: What would you say to those outside of the Gaza Strip who believe that, you know, there was a ceasefire deal; it was signed in October. The gunfire has fallen silent, even though, of course, we are hearing that Palestinian civilians continue to be killed.

Does it still look like a conflict to you?

Does it still look like war to you or does this look like peacetime?

[04:15:00]

SMITH: Salma, I mean, this is the --

(AUDIO GAP) SMITH: This is the time of illusions, Salma. I think that the conditions here in Gaza are abysmal. They are horrific. And there is no correlation at all between media coverage and political rhetoric at an international level and the conditions that Palestinians are being subjected to here in Gaza.

There is no respect for Palestinian life here in Gaza or, indeed, from those who wield power and influence outside of Gaza. This is really the culmination, as I say, of decades of indifference, neglect and anti-Palestinian racism.

And the consequences here that we are bearing witness to every single day are death, disablement, indignity and profound suffering.

ABDELAZIZ: And you've given me this, this wider picture, the overwhelming need for shelter, the lack of basic conditions, the lack of sanitation. But I want you to bring me maybe a personal story.

When you speak to Gazans, when you speak to families, what fears and hopes do they voice?

What little do they cling onto when there's so much that is gone?

SMITH: Almost everyone that I speak to, they feel hopeless. They are simply trying to survive from one day to the next. And certainly there is a very different emotional state among colleagues as compared to when I was here back in 2020.

For people really have little to no faith in the machinations of the political circus outside of Gaza because they recognized that it, you know, these headlines have had no real impact on people's material conditions.

People are being forced to try and find food and water from one day to the next. Parents are being forced to try and keep their children safe and healthy. And, of course, on a daily basis, people simply don't know if today is the day that they will be killed.

A colleague here who has been forced to live with his family in a tarpaulin tent, literally on the beachfront, on the waterfront, there are Israeli warships positioned off the coastline every single day. We see them as we're traveling to and from the clinic.

And he says, you know, a tarpaulin will not protect me from their bullets and bombs. There is this constant fear that Israel may commit yet more attacks, which, of course, you've described in your introduction. There are at least 230 security incidents on average every week. And the vast majority of those are Israeli strikes.

The Israeli drones are in the sky, constantly making this intimidating noise. People are petrified. And they're also angry and despondent with the wider so-called international community that has failed them. It failed them then and it continues to fail them now.

ABDELAZIZ: Dr. James Smith on a ceasefire, that has brought no respite on horrifying living conditions that continue to claim lives, and on a conflict with no clear end in Gaza. Thank you so much for bringing us those personal stories.

We'll be right back after a break.

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ABDELAZIZ: It has just been reignited, that is the trade war between the U.S. and Canada, after a deadline for a new deal passed just a few hours ago as talks collapsed. This means 50 percent U.S. tariffs on some $20 billion in Canadian goods are now in effect.

Canadian prime minister Mark Carney says he suspended the talks in Washington and that Canada will now match the new U.S. tariffs, quote, "dollar for dollar."

He added, "Progress has not been enough to meet our objectives for Canadians. Last-minute changes in the U.S. proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic and called into question the reliability of any deal."

The U.S. immediately labeled the collapsed talks as a missed opportunity for Canada. In a statement, the U.S. trade representative's office blamed Canada for walking back earlier comments, making new demands and retaliating against the U.S.

A high court judge in the U.K. has ruled that Prince Harry, Elton John and other high profile figures will have to pay $13 million toward the legal costs in their case against the publisher of the "Daily Mail" tabloid. Details now coming from our royal correspondent Max Foster.

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MAX FOSTER, CNN LONDON CORRESPONDENT: Prince Harry and other claimants have effectively been ordered to pay the publisher of the "Daily Mail" millions of dollars over false claims they made about the "Daily Mail"'s reporting.

So this group, that includes Elton John and Liz Hurley as well, accused Associated Newspapers of using illegal methods in their reporting and the way they found stories. So hacking, for example, and bugging.

But the judge in this case said he was presented with no evidence of that. There was no evidence, in multiple stories that the claimants presented to the court, that they had any illegal methods behind them.

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And the judge was quite scathing about that. So when it came to legal costs, the claimants have to pay associated legal costs. And the judge immediately said that the initial tranche of legal costs that the claimants have to send to Associated is $13 million. But that's only the first part of this. In total, Associated is asking

for $47 million in legal costs to be paid by Prince Harry and the other claimants, which is a huge amount, although they do have insurance for something like $20 million worth.

The rest of it, they'll have to find themselves out of their own incomes or their own savings. And that doesn't even include the claimants' own legal costs, which could as well run into tens of millions unless the claimants' legal team said they would do it on a no win, no fee basis.

So this is just the initial judgment. There may be more penalties to pay for Prince Harry but quite an extraordinary level of payment and the judge has said it's not standard payment because so much of this case was ill informed and probably should never have ended up being in court -- Max Foster, CNN, London

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ABDELAZIZ: Now Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, could be planning a return to acting. A person familiar with ongoing discussions says Prince Harry's wife could join the Netflix show, "The Gentleman."

It's all very theoretical for now. The show, created by Guy Ritchie, has not been confirmed for a third season by Netflix. However, it is produced in the U.K. And adding to all the speculation is the fact that Prince Harry and Meghan just announced they're planning to move back to Britain with their two young children.

Meghan stopped acting about nine years ago.

Thank you so much for watching. I'm Salma Abdelaziz. "CNN CREATORS" is coming up next and I'll be back with more news at the top of the hour.