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Early Start with Rahel Solomon
Researchers Work To Keep People Safe From Future Storms; INARA Working To Get Help To Children In Gaza; Bryan Kohberger Sentenced To Life Without Parole. Aired 5:30-6a ET
Aired July 24, 2025 - 05:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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BILL WEIR, CNN CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT (voiceover): And she is especially worried about Enchanted Valley, just over the hills. The folks living in these permanent trailers sit smackdab on the Hiwassee River next to one of the flashiest river gauges in the nation.
LAURA BELANGER, SENIOR SERVICE HYDROLOGIST, NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE, ATLANTA: And so those are the places that keep me up at night. Regardless of the amount of readiness or preparation, the fact that there are people and property that close to the river, that's what the concern is.
The biggest question we get is when we see a 100-year flood plain and maybe the water level has risen to this point, and someone says oh, thank goodness we don't have to deal with this for 99 more years -- and it happens. The reality is what that means is that there's a one in 100 chance of occurrence of a given year of that happening again.
WEIR: Right. But that math is changing, right?
BELANGER: But that math changes over time as you --
WEIR: Yeah.
BELANGER: -- see flooding occur more frequently.
WEIR: The kind of flood that happened once every 100 years could now happen every decade, the experts tell us from the First Street Foundation. This is a nonprofit that maps flood risks around the country.
The CNN climate team partnered with them to try to evaluate which communities are most vulnerable to a disaster like we saw in Texas and from Santa Barbara, California to the Catskills of New York, from Nogales, Arizona to Appalachia. We found this combination of topography that creates the flashiest floods, lack of warnings systems, a lot of tourists who may not understand the risks.
And as the flood -- flash flood warning set new records in 2025, knowledge is power and possibly life or death.
Bill Weir, CNN, Helen, Georgia.
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MJ LEE, CNN ANCHOR: Coming up, the head of the World Health Organization is warning of mass starvation in Gaza, and Israeli officials say they are not to blame.
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[05:36:30
LEE: Starvation is rampant, ceasefire talks are at a standstill, and new scenes of utter destruction are emerging in Gaza. Refugees forced to evacuate from tent camps in the central part of the enclave returned on Wednesday to find nothing left after Israeli launched a new ground operation this week.
The head of the World Health Organization says food distribution sites have become places of violence, but while visiting troops in Gaza, the Israeli President Isaac Herzog blamed Hamas for sabotaging aid distribution.
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ISAAC HERZOG, ISRAELI PRESIDENT (through translator): We are acting here according to international law. We are providing humanitarian aid according to international law. The ones trying to sabotage this aid are Hamas and its people who are willing to do everything to prevent our forces from dismantling infrastructure that could harm us and our citizens.
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LEE: One group that's working to get help to the children of Gaza is INARA, founded by former CNN international Arwa Damon.
Take a look at this video from a recent trip to the territory.
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ARWA DAMON, PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER, INARA: Look at what's left of the baby milk powder. It's barely a couple of scoops. But there isn't any available on the market or anywhere else because Israel has restricted the entry of baby milk powder.
The kids are hungry. They haven't showered in ages. Mom shows us how she had to chop off one of her daughter's hair. It was so lice-filled that her scalp was bleeding.
Our INARA team is able to provide them with whatever meager supplies that we still have.
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LEE: And Arwa Damon joins me now live from Istanbul. Arwa, I really appreciate you being here this morning. So the World Health Organization's director general said Wednesday that there is a manmade mass starvation across Gaza. He said, "Parents tell us that their children cry themselves to sleep from hunger."
What are your aid workers seeing on the ground when it comes to the youngest Gazans right now?
DAMON: Thank you, MJ.
You know that clipped that you just showed there, that was a visit that was carried out by our team that is on the ground and trying to actually struggle through their own fatigue and hunger every single day just to be able to provide these bare basics.
And if we go back to that family, for example, one of the boys -- the slightly older boy than those two babies -- his birthday was coming up. And you know what he asked for? He didn't ask for a birthday cake; he asked for loaves of bread.
And so Yousra, our program coordinator, actually ended up going back to the family on her own time having secured a couple of loaves of bread, which she would normally actually use to feed her own children. But she went with these loaves of bread and stuck a candle in them just to give that little boy a little bit of something and a little bit of joy.
Look, what's happening in Gaza is a manmade, very deliberate effort to starve the population. If we look at the numbers just of children who have died of malnutrition, it's pushing 90. And the thing is those numbers might actually be on the lower side because what does starvation and hunger, and malnutrition kill first? It kills children and infants who already have preexisting conditions or congenital conditions. But because they have got underlying conditions their death doesn't necessarily get counted in the -- in the overarching death toll.
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Look, more than 80 percent of Gaza is under Israeli control. Israel controls Gaza. Israel controls all of the crossing points. Israel controls the territory.
We, as humanitarian organizations, have not been able to bring in our assistance, our trucks, nor have we been able to use the preexisting aid distribution mechanism that we have used in Gaza -- highly successfully as the ceasefire indicates -- that includes more than 400 sites to ensure that the people that need the aid the most are the ones who are actually getting it.
LEE: And Arwa, not only is there a desperate shortage of food right now, the act of going out to search for food is so dangerous right now for so many Gazans. The U.N. says more than 1,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces while trying to get good since late May.
How big of a shift have you and your colleagues seen since GHF -- that's the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation -- began operation there? DAMON: You know, I mean, even calling it a humanitarian foundation is
rather ludicrous. And not matter what Israel says and no matter what tours they sort of undertake in Gaza, this will be Hamas' fault. It is really very much of a smokescreen. When you go to Gaza -- when you're in the area where the population is concentrated, which is the areas that we as humanitarian organizations obviously work in, you don't see Hamas.
These GHF distribution sites are in Israeli-controlled territory -- what is otherwise known as the red zone. There is only four sites. Again, remember, we humanitarian organizations have 100.
And so when you have 2.2 starving people and only four sites where they can potentially access aid, and these sites are located deep inside a red zone, this is exactly what is going to take place, especially when the IDF, as Israeli soldiers themselves have testified to Israeli media are basically under order to shoot. They're using gunfire and tank fire for crowd control.
And this is one of the many reasons why we keep trying to sort of raise the alarm as to why it's so imperative that we actually be the ones that are permitted to work and do the job of humanitarian aid distribution because what GHF is doing is it's not distribution. You end up with these crowds of people numbering hundreds of thousands that are given a signal from the Israeli side to be able to move forward, and then they just end up rushing these sites and grabbing at boxes. It's an insane free-for-all all the while happening under fire.
LEE: And Arwa, part of the really important work that your organization does is tending to the psychological and emotional well- being of children in war-ravaged places like this.
I wanted to ask you what, if anything, is fueling Gazan children right as they try to survive and stay alive? Are you seeing the capacity for these children to feel even moments of joy and levity? What is bringing them those moments?
DAMON: Very little, and that is one of the biggest tragedies in all of this.
Look, when we talk about mental health and psychosocial support for children when the trauma triggers are always there, which obviously they are in Gaza, the activities that you do with kids are really just to try to give them a bit of a distraction -- a bit of mental break. So it's a lot of -- you know, it's games. It's a lot of activities that are really trying to pull them away from the reality around them. But it's a reality that is impossible to escape because hunger is gnawing at their own guts.
You know, they themselves are watching their parents lose the capacity to be able to protect them -- and if we just think about how traumatic that is. Look, the vast majority of us, when we were growing up, we knew that mommy and daddy could make the hurt go away to a certain degree. That they could protect us from the monsters under the bed. Gaza's children know that their parents can't protect them from that anymore. And then there's obviously also the toll of the spread of illnesses
and diseases. Things like diarrhea. Things like this rather disturbing increase that hospitals have been seeing in what's known as rapid flaccid paralysis. And basically, this is a syndrome which doctors believe is Guillain-Barre syndrome, but a child wakes up unable to move their limbs. So we have one case that we're working with at our -- at our clinic trying to provide this child physical therapy.
But normally you get one to two such cases every 100,000 children. One hospital in Gaza has three children that have been impacted by this in the ICU.
And here's the thing. It's not only does a child wake up really unable to move their limbs within 24 hours, that's at the initial stages of this syndrome. If that syndrome then moves on to the involuntary muscle system, the child can die. But there is no machinery in Gaza to do the proper diagnosis. There is no treatment for this that is available in Gaza right now.
[05:45:05]
And so when you look at all of the various different sort of medical and mental risks that children are under, not to mention the very real physical risks -- I mean, it's -- it can't even be called anything remotely close to a childhood. There's nothing that's been left.
Kids spend their days waiting in line for water. Running around trying to see if they can find any food at any of the community kitchens. And let's keep in mind right now when we're talking about what community kitchens are distributing, it's little more than a bit of broth.
And this is what it has become to be a child in Gaza today. To live something that no one -- not even an adult -- can psychologically handle, never mind a little kid.
LEE: Yeah. When your sole birthday wish is to have some loaves of bread to eat that's not desperation any child should have to experience.
Arwa Damon, thank you so much for this important discussion.
Still ahead, confronting a killer. Families of the Idaho student murder victims deliver emotional statements before Brian Kohberger's sentencing.
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LEE: Welcome back. I'm MJ Lee. Here are some of the stories we're watching today.
Cambodia's prime minister is calling on the U.N. Security Council to convene an urgent meeting to stop what he called Thailand's aggression against his country. This comes after cross-border fighting intensified between the two countries earlier on Thursday. Thailand has closed its border with Cambodia.
Sources tell CNN that Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche is expected to meet Ghislaine Maxwell in prison today. Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in federal prison for carrying out a yearslong scheme with Jeffrey Epstein to groom and sexually abuse underage girls.
Ukraine's president is reversing course on an anticorruption bill he signed into law on Tuesday. It has led to large antigovernment protests as critics said it would hurt the autonomy of the country's anticorruption agencies. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is now promising a new bill that would protect their independence.
And convicted murdered Bryan Kohberger will spend the rest of his life in jail without the possibility of parole. He was sentenced on Wednesday for the killing of four college students in Idaho in 2022.
CNN's Sherrell Hubbard reports.
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JUDGE STEVEN HIPPLER, IDAHO FOURTH JUDICIAL DISTRICT: I sentence the defendant to a fixed term of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
SHERRELL HUBBARD, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voiceover): Bryan Kohberger sat emotionless as the judge read his sentence. The 30-year-old former PhD student of criminology sentenced to life without parole for murdering four University of Idaho students in an off-campus home in November 2022
HIPPER: No parent should ever have to bury their child. This is the greatest tragedy that can be inflicted upon a person.
HUBBARD (voiceover): Victim impact statements covered a range of emotions from forgiveness --
KIM CHEELEY, GRANDMOTHER OF MADISON MOGEN: Bryan, I'm here today to tell you I have forgiven you.
HUBBARD (voiceover): -- to remorse --
BETHANY FUNKE, ONE OF TWO SURVIVING ROOMMATES: Why me? Why did I get to live and not them?
HUBBARD (voiceover): -- to unadulterated anger.
ALIVEA GONCALVES, SISTER OF KAYLEE GONCALVES: The truth is you're as dumb as they come.
HUBBARD (voiceover): Speaking directly to Kohberger, the sister of Kaylee Goncalves called him "stupid, clumsy, and weak."
GONCALVES: If you hadn't attacked them in their sleep in the middle of the night like a pedophile, Kaylee would have kicked your (bleep) ass. HUBBARD (voiceover): Starting Tuesday night crowds camped outside
Idaho's Ada County Courthouse for the chance to attend Kohberger's sentencing hearing, gathering around a shared grief.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's like it's important to be here for the families of the victims.
HUBBARD (voiceover): Kohberger was given an opportunity to address the court but only said three words.
BRYAN KOHBERGER, SENTENCE TO LIFE IN PRISON WITHOUT PAROLE: I respectfully decline.
HUBBARD (voiceover): One prosecutor says he hopes the community can now heal.
BILL THOMPSON, LATAH COUNTY PROSECUTOR: We have finality and conclusion not just for the families but for everyone who has suffered because of this.
HUBBARD (voiceover): I'm Sherrell Hubbard reporting.
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LEE: The rideshare service Uber is launching new features to help its women passengers and drivers feel safer. The "Women Preferences" features will roll out as a pilot program over the next few weeks in U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Detroit.
The features will allow female riders to see a women driver's option when they request a ride on demand or in advance. Riders can also set a preference option. Women drivers will have the option to request trips with female riders, including during peak earning hours.
The company says testing in overseas markets generated overwhelmingly positive feedback.
And big news for Fleetwood Mac fans.
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FLEETWOOD MAC, ROCK BAND: Singing "Crying In The Night."
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LEE: Two of the band's big stars are re-releasing a rare album.
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FLEETWOOD MAC: Singing "Crying In The Night."
(END VIDEO CLIP) LEE: Rock legends Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham together again, sort of. That tune is from the first and only studio album they put out before joining Fleetwood Mac. And now the on again-off again duo are reissuing that 1973 album called "Buckingham Nicks." It's been out of circulation in any format for more than four decades but now will be available digitally and on CD in September.
The singers built suspense this week when a billboard with the album cover appeared on L.A.'s Sunset Boulevard. Nicks also teased that something was in the works with the cryptic Instagram post "And if you go forward..." to which Buckingham added "I'll meet you there."
The two have a lengthy history of coming together both professionally and romantically and then breaking up. No word yet on whether there will be a reunion tour. Very exciting.
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Superstar Taylor Swift is being honored 13 times over.
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TAYLOR SWIFT, SINGER-SONGWRITER: Singing "Cruel Summer."
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LEE: Madame Tussauds is commemorating Swift's record-smashing Eras Tour. The chain of waxworks museums has immortalized the star in wax not once but 13 times -- a nod to Swift's lucky number. Each of the new figures has its own look from the Eras Tour and each will appear in a different location across Madame Tussauds global chain.
It's the first time in the museum's history that it has launched so many figures of the same person all in one go. It took 40 artists 14 months to recreate Taylor in wax.
And thank you so much for joining us here on EARLY START. I'm MJ Lee in Washington, D.C. "CNN THIS MORNING" starts right now.
