let's bring in Chief Foreign Affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell who can certainly help us unpack the historical context of this just remarkable attack Andrea good morning to you thank you for waking up right and early for us there are skirmishes like this in this region all of the time but for folks at home who are just waking up there has been nothing like this in terms of its complexity in scale in recent memory help people understand what is the objective here from Hamas is this just sheer
Terror uh is this about a fight over land what is it it is sheer Terror certainly according to the Israelis and Joe and Laura this is not just unprecedented uh nothing on this scale has ever been contemplated this is not something that the Israeli government was clearly you know prepared for the Iron Dome I just spoke to a spokeswoman at the embassy here says that the Iron Dome is working but that the fact that they came by land sea and air was what was so remark remble uh she said that at leas
t three villages in southern Israel are now occupied and controlled by Hamas but the main concern is to liberate those Villages and also to try to get to the citizens the Israeli civilians women and children she said who are inside Gaza that kind of kidnapping has never happened before except for one soldier many many years ago and it took years to get him back and the release of a thousand Palestinian prisoners in exchange so this is a crisis for the us as well as for Israel uh the meeting that
just took place couple of weeks ago at the UN and New York between Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Biden made it clear that Israeli security is a top concern but they were talking about peace and a broader peace throughout the region that now is completely off the table what does the United States do with this this is one of our closest allies this is an attack like nothing everyone has ever seen before I I mean what the there's going to have to be a response there has to be a re
sponse and there will probably be engagement you will see an American American officials probably the Secretary of State at some point and others will have to physically go there but not right now while the conflict is at its peak uh they are going to be calling everyone in the region Egypt certainly Jordan and others nearby with whom Israel has relationships uh Iran right now is going to be a potential Target if they see any engagement there and one of the top priorities now that Israel is watc
hing very closely in syan Border and whether hisbah Iran's act gets into this and whether this becomes multiple fronts against Israel which literally surrounded all right Andrew Mitchell as we said our thanks to you for getting up for us obviously this is still a unfolding situation at this hour and we're going to continue to follow this closely hey thanks for watching don't miss the Today show every weekday at 11:00 a.m. eastern 8 Pacific on our streaming Channel today all day to watch head to
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