IDF Begins Ground Invasion of Southern Gaza Transcript

All right. Let's turn back to the war in Israel. Richard Engel is standing by for us in Jerusalem. He is NBC News chief foreign correspondent. Richard, good to see you today. So we're talking a few minutes ago about Israel's continued push into Southern Gaza, what that means for civilians there, how Hamas is responding, putting civilians between it and the Israeli military. What are you hearing and what are you seeing on the ground there?

So we still have two teams in Southern Gaza. And one team is in Khan Yunis, another further south in Rafah. And that is the main focus of the Israeli operation right now, around the city of Khan Yunis. (00:40) So going back a little bit, this war began two months ago and it started in the northern part of the Gaza Strip with strikes in and around Gaza City, some towns around Gaza City. And at the time, Israel ordered Palestinians to move south. And many of those Palestinians moved to Khan Yunis. Even though there were occasional attacks, sometimes very bloody attacks in Khan Yunis, many people were displaced and relocated in that city. (01:08) Now, Khan Yunis is under fire. Israeli tanks have not entered the city center according to our teams and according to witnesses. But they are near the city center. And people are starting to leave any way they can. They are leaving in cars, not a lot of fuel in Gaza. So they're leaving on bicycles, they're leaving on horse and donkey carts. And they are heading toward the city of Rafah. And Rafah is right on the Egyptian border. It is the end of the line. There is no place further south to go. And the humanitarian conditions in Rafah are dire. There's trash on the streets. There are hundreds of thousands of people crowded into what was effectively a small town. (01:50) Rafah, I've been to Rafah. Normally it has around 300,000 people. It has many times more that population right now, maybe 600,000 or 700,000. And they are expecting the arrival of another 600,000 or 700,000 people for Khan Yunis. So there's a possibility that in a small town that had 300,000 people, you could have a half a million people by the end of this week or next week. And Rafah simply can't sustain it. They don't have enough food, they don't have enough water, they don't have enough places to sleep. Already people are sleeping out in the open or sleeping wherever they can because there just aren't beds. There aren't homes, there aren't shelters. And there's a concern about the spread of communicable diseases. (02:35) And what many people in Rafah will tell you is that what they fear is that Israel's goal is to push them out of the country, push them out of the Gaza Strip entirely and to drive them into Egypt, which is something that Egypt also fears, which is why Egypt is keeping its border closed. So a very serious humanitarian situation in Southern Gaza escalating right now. And what Israel says it is doing is says it is completing its mission. It is going where Hamas is, and that Hamas moved south with displaced people, and that Hamas also moved to places where it could find safety and shelter. And that Israel believes it has no choice but to go after Hamas leaders, even if they're still surrounded by people.

Richard, you started to answer my next question, which is why Egypt hasn't opened up to refugees to allow more people to come in the ways we saw European nations do with Ukraine over the last couple of years, namely Poland or Lebanon, or why other Arab nations have not welcomed these refugees who clearly are living in dire conditions.

Well, the Egyptian, this is a conflict that goes back decades and longer than that depending on how you do the math and how you think about it. If it's in religious terms, it goes back a few thousand years. But this particular conflict over Gaza, we're talking about decades. And the Palestinians believe, and Egyptians believe, that after this terrible attack, after this Hamas atrocity, that Israel's secret undeclared mission is to empty out the Gaza Strip to destroy as much of it as they can in the process. (04:18) Israel today, the Israeli military said it had located 800 tunnel shafts so far by Hamas and destroyed a hundred of them and to drive people into Egypt, in which case Gaza would be no more. The people of Gaza would become permanently displaced living in the Sinai Peninsula. And that is something that Egypt does not want. It is something that the people of Gaza don't want. (04:43) So instead we have this captive population, which is being moved around, shuffled from one place to the next that is under attack. And there's desperation growing in Gaza. There's real fear, there's anger. I think the people I've spoken to in Gaza, and some of them I've known for years, I've never seen them this disillusioned, this disheartened and this depressed. But they do not say that the solution is a long-term resettlement of Gaza into Egypt.

NBC's Richard Engel. Great job explaining all that for us this morning as always, Richard. Thank you.