Full Special Report: Israel declares war after surprise Hamas attack | NBC News

[Music] this is an NBC News special report good morning everyone I'm Laura Jared alongside Joe frier here in New York we have breaking news out of Israel this morning where Hamas has launched a surprise attack within Israel's borders overnight first launching Rockets from the Gaza Strip then selling militants into the streets of the southern part of Israel hundreds of people have been injured several have been killed but that number could be much higher you are looking at live pictures there let

's go right to NBC's Raph Sanchez who is in the south of Israel Raph good morning what is the latest where you are Joe lur good morning Israelis woke up today to find their worst nightmares had come true in the form of a massive surprise attack by Palestinian militants from Gaza as we speak Palestinian gunmen are inside Israeli cities and towns something we have never before seen seen on this scale and they are fighting running gun battles against Israeli Ground Forces Hamas the major Palestinia

n militant group that controls Gaza says they have taken Israelis hostage and they have taken them back inside of Gaza now the Israeli military says this infiltration came by land by sea and by air in the form of Hamas gunmen on paragliders infiltrating into Israeli territory and this was done under the cover of a barrage of more than 2,000 Rockets fired in the early hours of this Shabbat morning guys I wanted just to explain to you what the scene is where we are right now we are on one of the m

ajor highways in southern Israel you would expect this road to be full on a holiday weekend and instead you can see behind me this is an Israeli military checkpoint Israeli forces here are searching all cars that are going past because they do not know at this point where these Palestinian gunmen are and they are afraid these gunmen may try to be getting north towards Tel Aviv towards Jerusalem as we've been here we have seen just a stream of Israeli Special Forces driving South towards the Gaza

border and they are heading to confront those gunmen in the towns and cities in the South guys Rob just an incredible scene playing out there the idea of armed gunmen going and can you tell us more about the power gliders we have never seen anything like this before Laura when Hamas has tried to get into Southern Israel previously they have done it sometimes through underground tunnels under the Border they have done it sometimes in small boats going out into the Mediterranean and then back ont

o the Israeli Shoreline this morning for the first time they crossed by air in paragliders it is not clear how many of them but these are armed highly trained Hamas militants Landing by air catching the Israeli State completely by surprise prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed his people earlier today and he said Israel is at War this is above and beyond those rounds of fighting that the world has got used to over the last decade where we see Israel and Hamas fighting for 72 hours a week t

his is on a much much bigger scale there is at this point no official word on death tolls but the videos we are seeing are absolutely harrowing showing bodies what appear to be bodies of both Israeli soldiers and civilians and this is a country right now that is bracing for the absolute worst rap do we have any idea how many of these attackers have infiltrated Israel Joe it's a really good question and I asked the Israeli military earlier they would not say but just judging by the number of loca

tions at at this moment there is fighting the most recent information we have at least five locations across Southern Israel that suggests that we are looking at squads in large numbers I asked the Israeli military are we talking dozens are we talking hundreds they would not say what they were prepared to say is that Israeli fighter jets are in action right now we've been seeing them in the skies across Southern Israel they are striking targets inside of Gaza trying to stop this barrage of Rocke

t fire but prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu there's an ambulance just coming past us now prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says what is going on right now in terms of Israeli air strikes in Gaza is only the beginning of what will be a major major Israeli retaliation but guys the priority for the Israeli military right now is to regain control of these cities where there are still Israeli C civilians inside and nobody at this point knows the scale of the death Soul right that's got to be the fir

st priority obviously R do we have a sense of exactly how many people were taken I know you you told us that they were going across the border making sure obviously that no more people are taken essentially as hostages do we know at all right now Laura there is no more sensitive piece of information in Israel right now than how many people have been taken hostage how many are alive or how many are dead the Israeli government the nation of Israel will go to enormous lengths to get its people back

whether they are live civilians whether they are dead soldiers and the scale of the Israeli response will be determined by how many Israelis are inside of Gaza right now if there are civilians in large numbers there we may see a situation where the Israeli government feels it has no choice Lord we're just hearing the air defense going off here there's no Sirens at the moment so we're good I'm going to keep talking to you but this is just a very live situation you can see Israeli forces on the g

round behind me behind my camera operator Dave Copeland's there's actually smoke from where a rocket hit earlier on but depending on the number of Israeli civilians who are inside of Gaza that will determine the scale of the Israeli response and it may very well be that the government of Israel feels it has no choice but to mount some kind of large scale ground defensive into Gaza the densely populated cities of conun of Gaza City where there are so many civilians among these Palestinian militan

ts and it is a situation like that we have already seen what appears to be a very serious loss of life this morning but an Israeli ground Invasion inside of Gaza could take this death toll to a whole new level so everyone in this region is holding their breaths right now guys R Sanchez you and your team continue to stay safe we'll let you go for now but we will be checking back with you later this morning yeah that's for sure okay let's bring in NBC's Chief foreign correspondent Richard Engle he

is on the phone with us Richard good morning your first reaction to this news well I think uh that Hamas and Israel are at War and I think this is going to escalate into a more significant conflict over the next several hours over next several days uh this is unprecedented as Raph was saying we've seen violence from uh the Palestinians we've seen attacks from Gaza uh into Israel but not this scale where you're having potentially dozens of militants flying in on hang gliders and coming in By the

Sea and and Crossing in by land presumably by by tunnels or holes in the in the Border fence uh and the fact that they are still engaged in running battles in multiple locations in southern Israel uh is something that will uh be shocking to the is Israeli people I know that several of the uh airports and uh Transit points into Israel are already uh facing delays or cancellations the the country is is on alert uh Israel said that it is now on war footing uh we've heard from Hamas uh they have ac

knowledged uh this operation there have been some uh videos that have come out as well showing gunmen dressed in black uh preparing for this Commando style raid uh and they say that it is retaliation for Israeli actions in Jerusalem uh for Israeli actions around the alak amas compound so we've seen this tension this is an old tension where you there's buildup of tension and the Palestinians will launch an attack uh in order to to to punish the israelies from their perspective for for excesses an

d atrocities but we haven't seen something like this this level of sophistication and to catch the Israelis off guard and then to keep this operation moving for for for for hours now this began at dawn uh it is already afternoon uh in Israel so this has been going on for for multiple hours now uh we I think it's very likely that we're going to see an escalation in some sort of smallscale uh War uh maybe bigger scale war between uh Hamas and Israel and I think we're we're in the early phases of t

hat right now Richard talk to us about that surprise Factor you know Israelis have some of the best military intelligence anywhere how does something like this happen well they don't have a lot of visibility inside Gaza now Gaza itself they have lots of intelligence but clearly it wasn't as good but Gaza is a place that is run by the Palestinians we're talking about an area that is more or less closed off it's often compared to the biggest prison in the world we're talking just over two million

people that live there Gaza City being the the the biggest population Center very H densely populated and the Israelis they have informants they have intelligence but they don't live there they don't Patrol there there are no Israeli settlers there this is an area that is locked off that is run by Hamas and the Israelis would prefer to forget about the place and not have anything to do with it but uh what happened is is Hamas is in charge Hamas is is very militant very organized they've been loo

king for the leader of Hamas Muhammad Dave for years uh he's the one who personally announced this operation so this from from hamas's point of view is is an enormous coup of to carry out a sophisticated surprise attack like this Israeli officials have said Hamas made a huge mistake because it's going to bring an enormous reprisal all right Richard angle thank you so much for joining us we appreciate your reporting and your context on this we want to go back to Raph Sanchez who is in the south o

f Israel Raph what is it you are seeing and hearing right now so Joe there is just so much activity around us a convoy of Israeli Special Forces just drove passed sirens on heading south and the fact as Richard was saying this attack began hours ago it is now 110 in the afternoon the fact that we are still seeing Israeli reinforcements flooding to the South shows you that the Israeli military does not yet have a grip on this situation this is not something that we are used to seeing it is normal

ly the Israelis who are confident who are in control but they seem to have been caught completely off guard here caught off guard in a way that we have not seen Israel surprised in exactly 50 years you have to go back to October 1973 the Yom kapor War when Israel was surprised by a combined Egyptian Syrian military assault that was a war where in the first days people in this country really thought it might be the end of Israel and there is obviously I wasn't here in 1973 but you were hearing th

ose comparisons on the Israeli radio and there is just a State of Shock in this country that they could have been caught so off guard something else we've been seeing on the road the truck has moved away now but we just saw a truck carrying a battery of Israeli Iron Dome missile interceptors this is this highly sophisticated Israeli air defense system developed with support from the United States it is the backbone of Israel's defenses it is what Israel relies on to protect its civilians from th

is rocket fire from Gaza but whatever happened to the early hours of this morning the Iron Dome was not able to stop this barrage the Israeli military says it was more than 2,000 Rockets fired and Joe we have just seen plumes of smoke all across Southern Israel where these Rockets landed on homes on warehouses and there is just a sense of disbelief at what is happening right now guys R do you have a sense of was was there a failure of of the defense system of the Iron Dome or was it that they we

re just getting hit in so many different ways at all at once you just can't prepare for something like that it's a really good question Laura we asked the Israeli military earlier was this an intelligence failure how is it on almost to the day the 50th anniversary of the 1973 war that Israel could be surprised again and on such a scale and I will tell you the Israeli military spokesman said it's a good question he to answer it but he said that there is going to be a lot of time to ask very hard

very probing questions about what happens here but right now their priority is this live firefight going on in cities to the south of me and potentially a massive hostage rescue operation both inside of Israeli cities but potentially inside of Gaza as well guys Raph this is an area that is familiar with conflict help us understand put into context what's happening right now how that fits into the historical context of conflict in the region yeah so we have seen rounds of fighting between Hamas m

ilitants in Gaza and the Israeli military almost on a yearly basis going back to sort of 2008 2009 major war in 2014 there was another major war in May 2021 not on the same scale what is happening today is just a different order of magnitude normally the fighting in these situations takes place inside of Gaza with the exception of the rocket fire on Israeli cities what is happening right now is the fighting is on the Israeli side of the border and that is not something we have ever seen on this

scale before just to give you a little more historical context during that war in 2014 one Israeli soldier excuse me go going going back into the early 2000s one Israeli soldier a young man named gilad Shalit was captured by Hamas militants he was taken inside of Gaza he was held for years there and Israel unable to rescue him by force was ultimately forced to release more than a thousand Palestinian militants to secure him and that gives you a sense of the value Israel places on the lives of it

s people it is hard to overstate what a crisis it is if there are multiple dozens potentially of Israeli civilians being held inside Gaza and it is hard to overstate the urgency with which Israel feels it will need to respond to a crisis on this scale guys all right rap stay safe there we are going to come back to you regularly throughout the morning we want to turn now to our chief Foreign Affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell joining us by phone Andrea good morning to you I I I I I imagine thi

s was not what you thought you would wake up to on a Saturday morning talk to us about the larger historical context we heard there from wrath is the 50th anniversary of that other awful surprise attack back in 1973 set the scene for us if you will well you know rap is exactly right this is so unprecedented we've had the skirmishes before and outbreaks uh I was there in 2021 but there was always a trigger something that happened and then it was the Alexa mosque a holy sight to the Palestinians a

nd to all Arabs in fact uh where there had been a trigger you know in in each of these instance in the inas the first second and third in in the West Bank but the Gaza is different Gaza has always been as Richard and rth were saying a place a No Man's Land really for Israelis and there have been these incidents before the US in the past secretaries of State Hillary Clinton in 2009 you know intervened went there negotiated a solution but it was always a small scale uh small scale though was alway

s major to Israelis Israelis take this you know so so seriously and this is beyond anything that we've ever seen before and it is on the 50th anniversary of the Oma War which is something that you know people were holding conferences here I was at one in New York on Thursday at the Council on Foreign Relations with the former Israeli Prime Minister and other officials from both countries and some of my journalist colleagues so it was always an academic exercise on the anniversaries of the y k wa

r never anything like this and as again there was a lot of tension growing in the West Bank and elsewhere in the country because of growing friction between the pales Ians and the Israelis because of the uh most right-wing Coalition netanyahu's Coalition um possibly taking more land you know because of the settlement conflicts but that was in the West Bank Gaza has been something that Israel as Richard angle was saying would prefer to ignore because it is ungovernable and it's always been a trag

edy from the Palestinian perspective and this this division between Hamas which runs Gaza which has always been the most radical of the Palestinians the other piece of this is that there has been really no Palestinian strong leadership for many many years no negotiations really between the Palestinians and the Israelis since 2014 and uh they have been you know tentatively talking intensive negotiations actually which haven't reached anything other than a framework for a very different kind of re

solution of the Israeli Arab situ situation between the Saudi and Israel recognition by Saudi Arabia and Israel which people in Israel have been saying and some in the Netanyahu Coalition um Netanyahu himself has been saying would be the end of friction in this region something that hard right members of the Coalition have opposed but that's the kind of thing that has been discussed at the UN when we were there just a few weeks ago nothing nothing has been contemplated like this the surprise asp

ect of this is also shocking you've been talking about the Iron Dome the Iron Dome has been you know virtually impenetrable uh there have always been one or two uh stray Rockets but nothing on the scale of this and as rth was saying uh back when one Israeli soldier was held for many many years a thousand Palestinians were turned over when negotiations to try to get them out failed they never forget they never leave anyone behind and here when you have potentially soldiers as well as civilians an

d all Israelis serve in the military uh all except the most religious group of Israelis have required military service men and women for decades well the entire country will be you know completely seized with this this is not something that will divide Israelis there will be an investigation as to how they fail to see it coming and there will be political ramifications from this but this comes after after a period of a full year of full you know angry divisions involving the military Former Inte

lligence uh protests against the naho government the coalition government uh that was over judicial reform that was over Democratic principles nothing like this uh though could happen without uniting the Israeli citizenry and so the how did this happen aspects of it will come much later this is as nahu says war and uh there's no real Palestinian leadership in Gaza uh no communication with any of them in order to have negotiations to try to resolve this this will have to be resolved the Americans

will have to get into it um this is something that the state department and the National Security Council are going to have to address immediately because um they they cannot see America's closest Ally and and the only real democracy in the Middle East overwhelmed the relationship between Israel and the United States is so critical right all right Andrea Mitchell thank you so much for joining us early this morning we really do appreciate it we do want to go back to Raph Sanchez one more time an

d check in with him Raph do we have an idea this surprise attack by Hamas what the objective is here is it terror is it to get territory are we hearing anything about why this is happening and why it's happening now yeah Jo so we have heard an official statement from what Hamas calls its military Wing earlier and they say that this is retaliation for the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in East Jerusalem they say that this is retaliation for what has been happening at the aloa mosque in Jerus

alem that is the third holiest site in Islam it's known as the Temple Mount to Jews it's the holiest site in Judaism it is one of the most combustible incendiary spots in this entire geopolitical region and they say that this is an act of Revenge for what they see as decades and Decades of Israeli occupation and mistreatments of the Palestinian people now to the Israeli government to the Israeli people this is very clearly an act of terrorism that these are armed Hamas gunmen going into civilian

areas firing rockets at cities and at towns all across Southern Israel and they say they will treat this as terrorism just to give you a sense of the activity here you have behind me these are Israeli Border Police they are Manning this checkpoint they are making sure that none of these gunmen are able to hide in cars and head back further into Israel and then over this way you can see there are at least five ambulances behind me and guys every couple of minutes more and more Israeli reinforcem

ents are speeding to the South through this checkpoint heading down towards Gaza we just a moment ago saw an Israeli armored vehicle mounting the sidewalk here driving around a police car and absolutely flying to the South you can see these are members of the Israeli Border Police who are just walking past me now this is an all hands on deck situation the Israeli military is calling up thousands and thousands of reservists as they try first of all as the absolute top priority to clear these Hama

s militants out of these Southern cities and then begin to strike back inside of Gaza guys all right Raph we are going to come back to you soon stay safe out there our thanks to you and your team we will have much more coming up this morning on Saturday today and throughout the day on the networks of NBC and nbcnews.com for now we're going to return to your regularly scheduled programming have a good morning thanks for watching stay updated about breaking news and top stories on the NBC News app

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