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Israel Pounds Gaza as Hamas Threatens to Execute Hostages; Israeli Troops Massing for Potential Ground Operation Into Gaza; Rallies Seen Across the World in Response to the War in Israel. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired October 10, 2023 - 08:00   ET

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

JOHN KIRBY, NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL COORDINATOR FOR STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS: The National Security Council and at the White House, we are having a range of conversations with allies and partners in the region and outside the region.

[08:00:06]

The president spoke to four of our European allies just yesterday on the phone. And there'll be additional conversations with those partners going forward.

So, we are having all kinds of conversations with folks all throughout the region. But the prime focus and main set of conversations that are happening are happening with Israel and at all different levels of the administrations in both countries to make sure that Israel knows the United States has their back and that we'll continue to make sure that they're -- they've got what they need to defend themselves.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Admiral John Kirby, thank you very much for your time this morning.

KIRBY: My pleasure. Thank you.

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN ANCHOR: And CNN THIS MORNING continues right now.

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

HARLOW: The war between Israel and Hamas is escalating this morning. Right now, Israel is pummeling Gaza with those counter airstrikes despite Hamas's threats to execute hostages in retaliation.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says this is just the beginning.

Now, take a look at this. We are showing you new drone video of destruction inside of Gaza City. We are told up to 150 hostages, including children and likely Americans, are believed to be held right now in Gaza after being kidnapped by Hamas militants during that invasion of Israel. Hamas is threatening to kill them and to televise it.

MATTINGLY: Meanwhile, Israeli troops, tanks, and armored vehicles are massing at the border as they prepare for possible ground incursion into Gaza.

This is video from our crew on the ground a short time ago. The Israeli military reported it found the bodies of around 1,500 Hamas fighters inside Israel.

The death toll continues to rise on both sides of the border. At least 900 people have been killed in Israel. Nearly 800 Palestinians are now reported dead.

Clarissa Ward is live on the ground near the Israel/Gaza border.

Clarissa, we've been talking to you and Nic throughout the course of the last couple of days. What are you seeing there on the ground?

CLARISSA WARD, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, it's definitely fair to say, I think, Phil, that it's still a fluid situation here along the border. We have just heard in the last couple of minutes the Iron Dome being activated. We also heard coming from that direction intense gunfire at one point and they have completely, Israeli forces, blocked off the road behind me there, saying it is still not safe for people to cross the road, that they are still engaged in various operations to try to clear it.

This is interesting because the IDF had previously said that they do think that they have cleared the entire area along this border. So, it's difficult to know that with 100 percent clarity.

But if we move over here a little bit, we will try our luck, because they have been trying to push us back, but we've been seeing -- hopefully, you can run some of that video that we shot. We've been seeing a huge amount of armor coming through. We saw tanks coming through. A lot also of Israeli security personnel coming through. You can probably see as well, I don't know if Clayton Nagel (ph), our photojournalist here -- that's the body of a Hamas fighter.

So, this was the scene, one of dozens of breaches along this border where Hamas militants burst through and started creating havoc and mayhem and the bodies of the civilians and Israeli soldiers killed in the battles have been removed. But the Hamas militants, we notice their bodies have been left out. It's been a few days now, obviously.

And so, yes, I would say it's still tense here, definitely. Still hearing that gunfire. Still hearing that Iron Dome, and still not clear that this area despite previous statements has been totally cleared -- Phil, Poppy.

HARLOW: Yeah, we can see that in the images. And, Clarissa, we were playing that video of all of those armored vehicles coming in as well as you were talking about it.

When you are not on camera with us and when you are speaking with Israelis near where you are, what are they saying to you and what are they asking you not only about the threat there from Hamas, but also about the threat from Hezbollah in the north?

WARD: So, it's interesting. I mean, generally speaking, I think the Israelis are very supportive of journalists being here. We had a few people shout out to us like, this is your job, this is your mission, show the world what's going on here.

It's no secret there are some differences of opinion as well here internally within Israel.

HARLOW: Uh-huh.

WARD: We saw a group of sort of orthodox people had a near clash with another group of people, all of them Israelis. But, you know, this is what democracies are like. People have different ideas and different opinions.

I think that right now, most Israelis though are very focused on this issue of the hostages and trying to find a way to get them out safely.

[08:05:04]

And, obviously, the prospect of some kind of a deal with Hamas is incredibly unpalatable on one level, given the carnage and massacres that we have seen over the course of these days. But at the same time, the overwhelming sense is there are women there, there are children there, there are families here who are petrified, who are learning about the fates of their loved ones from social media, who are looking for answers, who are looking for clarity.

There is a lot of kind of chaos and confusion and misinformation that thrives, Poppy, in these types of atmospheres. In fact, a school sent a note to parents saying, listen, delete TikTok from your children's apps. We are hearing they might release hostage videos with hostages pleading for their lives.

And all of that sort of contributing to a kind of contagion here of terror, of horror, which is exactly, of course, what Hamas has wanted.

HARLOW: Contagion of terror and horror.

Clarissa, thank you to your team and you for being on the ground there right near the Gaza Border. We'll get back to you very soon.

Phil?

MATTINGLY: Well, joining us now to help us understand where exactly this conflict is unfolding, former NATO supreme allied commander, General Wesley Clark.

General Clark, we appreciate your time.

I want to start with -- we are taking a look at the map of the region itself. And, obviously, we have been talking predominantly about Gaza here.

But what I want to talk about right now is where the actual attacks that we saw over the weekend happened. If you give people a sense of the ongoing conflict, where people like Clarissa, Nic Robertson have been, these kibbutzes, what exactly they represent and why this is at a scale that we just simply hadn't seen before?

GEN. WESLEY CLARK, FORMER NATO SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER: Well, first of all, this is a large number of people who penetrated a secured border. They used heavy equipment to get through there. And then they shot and killed indiscriminately and took hostages.

So, this is -- Gaza is 2 million people. It's 25 miles roughly north to south. And what you are looking at in Gaza at the northeast corner of Gaza is where most of the conflict apparently was. But that doesn't mean that there is not a threat elsewhere.

So you try to put an armored force, mechanized force around that spot, 25 miles north to south, six miles or so in depth, that takes a lot of forces 24 hours a day. That's the first thing to do, is to isolate the area.

And then while we're -- what we're watching is the IDF aircraft taking out known targets. There are only so many targets. I have run an air campaign. It's difficult to continue to develop targets during something like this.

So then that's going to slow down. So, Israel is probably going to have to go in on the ground. And that's going to be the real challenge.

How well is Hamas organized on the ground? Can they defend block by block? Are they discombobulated now as a result of the bombing? Have enough of the leadership been taken out so that the Israelis can penetrate and clear quickly, block by block, or is it going to be a terrible fight with snipers in every building and drones and RPGs and so forth? We don't know that yet. Israel has to be prepared for that.

So this is going to be a tough fight. At the same time, if you look to the north, you have Hezbollah. You have Syria. You have threats in the north, already some penetration of the border, forces deployed up there.

This could be a weeks-long, amongst-long occupation? Gaza. And at the end of it, still have those 2 million civilians to deal with. What's the end result? How is Israel going to handle this now since Hamas has to be eliminated? Some really tough strategic, diplomatic and military issues here.

MATTINGLY: Yeah, which -- for which there's at least at this point, is currently no precedent.

I want to walk through, General, some of the things you were walking through because you were talking about how at least the attack itself or the decision over the course of the weekend for Hamas to strike really came from the northeast.

If you look where Israel airstrikes have been over the course of the last several days, really focused on that very specific area, but there is something else you mentioned that I think is critical here as you look at the initial strikes and you look at the scale of the strikes. You can go through, including several mosques, before and after what the strikes have done, making very clear as you have heard from IDF spokespeople that they are going after that are targets and not thinking too deeply about what else may happen with it.

[08:10:01]

You are seeing right now, General, showing pictures of the before and after of three specific mosques that were taken out, saying that they were military targets, or at least tied to military targets. But the actual dense population itself -- we are going to show a video of what happens, where there's a strike, and you see, General, just how tight everything is confined. You talked about 2 million people in an area about the size of Chicago, maybe a little bit less.

Can you talk about the house-to-house fighting, the block to block fighting, that would be required should there be an actual ground incursion here?

CLARK: So, the way this would have to be done is to section it off and clear it step by step. And it all depends on what's left standing after the aerial bottom bombardment and artillery and tank fire, so forth. So, where is enemy fire going to come from? You have got to know the street maps. You've got to figure out where you can penetrate, what you can hold, and then you've got to work back to clear it.

And what we haven't talked about is the tunnel network. We know there is a tunnel network here, a deep tunnel network and multiple tunnels. So you have to believe that you've got to go into the basements. You've got to really work this.

Otherwise, the enemy is going to come up from behind you. So in the middle of all this are the civilians running around, moving around. You can't tell necessarily the civilians from the enemy fighters.

They're not going to be in uniform. They're not going to wave their flags at you. They're not going to identify themselves. They're going to wait and they're going to try to attack from the side, from the top with drones.

They're going to attack at night if they can. So this is going to be a brutal, tough fight, and that area is big enough -- it's not a day -- this is not like when the United States ran into Baghdad and the Iraqi opposition collapsed.

This is an armed populace, maybe 40,000 people with weapons in there, who are waiting for the Israelis to come in. And if you think about it from the Hamas standpoint, this is a 1-2 fight. It's first to provoke the Israelis, do as much damage as you can, throw them off balance, and then draw them in where you can pulverize them in urban combat, which is the toughest kind of combat for an armored force or western armored force trying to protect civilians and not create unnecessary damages, finds its hostages, preserve it's own force from needless casualties.

It's a very tough operation the Israelis are moving into. They have got to take it step by step and they have to got toe think through not only the tactics of going block by block, but what's the end game here. And this is something the United States has to be helping with right now.

MATTINGLY: Yeah, no question about it.

CLARK: What about these 2 million people.

MATTINGLY: Yeah, and of those 2 million civilians with nowhere to actually go, keeping in mind, as well as you noted, the threats from the north and the east as well.

General Wesley Clark, we appreciate it. Thanks so much.

CLARK: Thank you.

HARLOW: People around the world are reacting to the war between Israel and Hamas. We'll show you the global protests ahead.

[08:15:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HARLOW: Welcome back as we continue our breaking news coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas. It is also sparking protests around the world. Supporters of both the Israeli and Palestinian causes held competing rallies yesterday inciting both in the US and overseas.

On the University of Florida campus, at least 30 people were injured last night. A witness says around 1100 people had gathered for this candlelight vigil last night when someone fainted. That startled people and they started shouting and calling 911. The confusion triggered a panic and sent the crowd running for their lives.

People fell on top of one another, some were trampled. The injuries treated at the hospital include broken ankles and ribs, concussions, and minor cuts. Thankfully, no life-threatening injuries have been reported.

Joining us this morning to talk about what we're seeing around the world and what is happening right now on the ground, are CNN Chief International Anchor, Christiane Amanpour, editor-chief of The Forward, and former New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren, and also the host of the Mo News Podcast, Mosheh Oinounou.

Thank you all for being here. Christiane, I actually want to start with you and what we heard from an IDF spokesperson speaking last night to Anderson about their goal and what they will do here it is.

(BEING VIDEO CLIP)

JONATHAN CONRICUS, IDF INTERNATIONAL SPOKESPERSON: the issue here is that we have been tasked with mitigating or making sure that Hamas doesn't have any military capabilities at the end of the war and that will be achieved.

(END VIDEO CLIP) HARLOW: Is there any way that that can be achieved given all your expertise in the region without a ground incursion?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: So, we spoke to Conricus as well yesterday, and this is the line coming out of Israel. Obviously, they have been shocked beyond belief by what's happened. The worst single mass casualty since the founding of the state.

900 civilians were killed on that one day. Now we understand some 1500 Hamas bodies have been found as Israel tries to secure and says it has mostly secured its border with Gaza at the Erez crossing.

And hundreds of casualties, many civilians according to Palestinian authorities in Gaza. So, what is the aim? You just heard from somebody who really knows, and that is General Wesley KAG. As he said, he conducted an air campaign. I covered it. It was the intervention to help save the Kosovars from a Serbian attack back in 1999. It was extremely difficult they didn't go in on the ground.

They might have done so, but they didn't because they know how difficult it is and how terribly difficult urban warfare is, particularly with the dense population, which is essentially an open- air prison refugee camp that is Gaza and has been, known for decades.

During the Israeli occupation, after the Israeli occupation. It is a benighted place of poverty and overpopulation there. So, the aim, clearly, as they say, is to get back their hostages. As you've heard, one of the, if not the most important thing for Israelis now, family members and also the government and the military, is to release their hostages.

We don't know how many. Maybe 100, 130, or 150. We don't know how many. I'm hearing stories from people who tell me that their people, their friends, their relatives have been taken, and that's just me. So, everybody is hearing these stories, and then what is the end game? How do you decimate Hamas? How do you degrade them?

[08:20:00]

Up until now, this is now the fifth encounter between Israel and Hamas. This one is different because Israel has declared formal war before. They were, you could say, and it's a horrible word because so many people die, skirmishes that ended in truces that sometimes didn't last more than a couple of weeks, that always left Hamas in place.

There were negotiations, there were hostage releases, and there were reasons why Hamas stayed in place. Although Israel hoped that they would be somehow degraded each time. Clearly, they have not been. And so now the question is, as Benjamin Netanyahu has said, we will exact revenge. We will end this threat once and forever, and we want to reshape the Middle East or this region.

What does all that mean? It's very difficult to see it, but we know there's going to be some very difficult days, as he himself says, for Gaza coming up. MATTINGLY: Jodi, Christiane had several points I would want to dig

into there that are really important, but one, in terms of how many people she knew that knew someone, it's been striking over the course of the last 36 hours.

It seems like everyone knows someone and what that means for the country, and the collective psyche of Israel, but also in a political situation that had been very fractured over the course of the last several months and longer. What does that mean going forward?

JODI RUDOREN, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, THE FORWARD: I mean, it is a very small country. It's 9 million people. The impact of 900 dead there is, like eleven times the number who were killed in 911 here. I was struck in 2014 when I was on the ground and covering the war there, that everybody I knew in Jerusalem had somebody who had been called up in the reserves.

And now it's like everybody has that several people called up in the reserves and somebody who's missing. Just in the hour since I was on, I was receiving text messages from a woman I used to go to spinning class with, and she was asking for help from her friends whose son was kidnapped.

And that my rabbi in Jerusalem is very close friends with Vivian Silver, who was kidnapped from Beri. A lot of Americans know her. And so, yeah, the intimacy of this country and of this conflict within this country is powerful and I think hard for Americans to understand.

Some New Yorkers felt that way with 911. We felt similarly, but I think the intensity of this is just really small, and it does have somewhat of a family feel. And as you said, it is a family that has been fractured in a way that it hadn't seen before this year.

So, it's been very interesting to watch. Yes, there's some unity that we're seeing, but we're also seeing, I think, a surprising openness in which people are questioning the government response questioning the government's failure to be prepared for this attack in a way that I did not see when I was there in 2014 and 2012 during the previous conflagrations with Gaza.

HARLOW: Mosheh, it was clear from our conversation with Admiral Kirby at the White House and from what the White House has been saying publicly, that we're not going to know a lot of what President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke about or what they're going to speak about. But there are major questions about Iran and if there is any determination that they have not made yet any direct determination of.

But also, there is the question, is there not, about how the US would respond if there is a ground invasion by Israel of Gaza.

MOSHEH OINOUNOU, HOST, "MO NEWS" PODCAST: Right, how long would the US let it go on now, given what we've laid out here, a national trauma at the scale of eleven times 9/11 lighting up the White House in blue and white, I mean, that's a scale of support that you haven't seen in a long time. Even former President Obama tweeted out that we're going to be behind Israel as they eliminate Hamas.

HARLOW: Yeah.

OINOUNOU: Okay, significant, right, given what we saw. So, the US here clearly behind the Israelis. The question is, as the Israelis go, know what Christiane laid out there was the short term, which is to get the hostages home and deal with Hamas's capabilities. Long-term, who are you replacing them with? What does Gaza look like?

Israel has no interest in reoccupying the place, but who's running the place? Who's running the place and who do they ensure that the residents there feel has legitimacy that wasn't placed there by the US or Israel? So, there are a lot of questions as they deal with the crisis at the moment. But really, what is the strategy long term?

They have to focus there because I think if there's mission creep if things evolve, that's where you'll start to see potential support from the US and other allies start to slip.

MATTINGLY: Christiane, with the time we have left the Palestinian Authority, I know it had been a great source of frustration when I was covering this White House and this administration in terms of trying to find some pathway for them to step up to some degree or to be active players...

[08:25:00]

Their atrophy, and I think the inability to do so has made things extraordinarily difficult. What is their role here?

AMANPOUR: So this is very, very difficult because separate to this and in the weeks and months leading up, particularly as Netanyahu has been really catering to his far-right flank and there has been a lot of violence in the West Bank, a record number of Palestinians have been killed this year in violence that was separate to what we're talking about now.

There's a lot of incursions, there's a lot of settler violence, there's a lot of Palestinian violence. It's just a lot of violence in the occupied West Bank. And the question is, I have spoken even in the aftermath of this terrible massacre that we've seen over these last few days, two former Israeli Prime ministers, for instance, to former Israeli officials, to the current leader of the opposition Labour Party and to the current IDF spokespeople.

And certainly, former prime ministers are saying that listen, we have to be able to talk to the Palestinian Authority. It is not an option to just leave this, to keep simmering when this is all said and done, when we see what happens after the outcome of this war that's been declared now, it cannot go back to status quo ante.

There has to be some kind of political resolution and that has been completely ignored for many years because the wall between Israel and the West Bank has dropped the number, the amount of violence into Israel in the last few years. The United States has not had its eye on this region for a long time.

And this idea of trying to get Israel and all the other Arab countries in the region to somehow normalize, well, that hasn't worked in terms of tamping down the actual existential crisis inside the Israeli- Palestinian territories, which is that that is, according to Israeli security people, the existential crisis that faces Israel.

So, after this is over, as I've been told by all these former and current officials, including IDF, as to where was the army on the day of Saturday the 7th, all these questions have to be answered. But they're not answering them right now because they have the military objective and the military momentum right now.

But these are very important questions, including the fear of a wider conflagration and how that is going to be avoided.

HARLOW: Jodi nodding her head alongside the former bureau chief in Jerusalem with all those significant huge questions and the immediacy of what they're fighting right now.

Christiane, thank you. Joining us from London. Also, Jodi and Mosheh. We appreciate it very much. The House remains speakerless. Congressional Democrats are weighing the idea of tying aid to Israel to more aid to Ukraine, something many Republicans in the House have advised against. We'll be joined by Congressman Jim Himes to ask how Congress will show its support for Israel right now.

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