Hello there. I'm Kristen Welker. I just stepped off the Meet the Press set where I interviewed Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former Speaker of The House Kevin McCarthy, and former Vice President Mike Pence as Israel's neighbors pushed for de escalation, worried the war could turn into a wider Middle east conflict. There were some positive strides reached this week, namely the release on Friday of two Americans held hostage by Hamas and the arrival of the first humanitarian aid shocks in Gaza.
But anguish remains in the region where more than 200 Israelis are still being held captive and the threat of an Israeli ground invasion continues to loom. President Biden traveled to the war zone this week, underlining his support for Israel, while also urging his ally to maintain some level of restraint in its retaliation. I am sitting here now with Amna Nawaz, co anchor of PBS NewsHour, who was just recently reporting in the region. Amna, welcome to Post Game.
Thank you for being here, Kristen, thank you so much for having me. I want to just start off by saying your coverage was incredible while you were in Israel. Thank you. It was incredibly brave.
And you have come back with a unique perspective and a firsthand look at everything that is unfolding there. So, big picture, what were your big takeaways after being in Israel? Well, first of all, I say thank you on behalf of the entire team that it takes to get these things done when we're out there, as you know, and the team that remains that continues to be in harm's way to get the story out. The biggest takeaway, I think, is just as I said on the show, this is something different.
You know, Israel has been forever changed by this moment. Everyone we talked to recognized this was something palpable. The nation is not today who they were before October 7th. And what that means is that people who opposed the government of Benjamin is now who have not protesting against his government.
Remember those folks in the street we saw protesting the judicial reforms in the weeks prior are now behind this government. They want them to do whatever it will take to keep them safe, because the answer is now, never again. This cannot happen. We live next door to a terrorist group that has claimed they want to end Israel.
We're not going to live under this, under threat of this sphere anymore. And so that is that is one side of it. And as we cover that, I think that underpins all of the emotion and all of the policy and all of, quite frankly, the ferocity of the Israeli response right now is this government knows they have the people behind them in this moment on the other side of it, of course, is where that response is landing. And this is the difficulty in covering this right now because we cannot go to Gaza and we are relying wholly on the work of journalists who are on the ground.
We have our own independent teams. We know we're getting credible information, but we don't see where those bombs are landing. I have to pause you here. That's so significant.
Explain why that's so significant. I mean, I've covered war before and bearing witness is what's key. Showing up is what's key because in the fog of war, there's very little you can verify. Death tolls come in from different people on different sides of the issue.
We have to treat all of that with skepticism and say when we're not able to verify things, but at least being able to say what you see with your own eyes. I talked to this family. I saw the aftermath of this attack. I spoke with a number of families in Israel whose families are still being held hostage, who lost loved ones in those atrocious among us attacks on the kibbutzim who are living in fear every day.
I can say with certainty as a reporter, I understand because I was able to witness it firsthand and hear from this firsthand. I can't talk directly to people on the ground in class I in the same way we had a crackly phone connection with this one 25 year old, we managed to get on the line and that was occasionally when she had enough connectivity, we talked to her and record the conversation. There's not enough bandlet to send us photos or videos of what they're living through. When we have handful of reporters on the ground, we consider to be credible sources of information and anyone on social media is seeing this relentless wave of children being killed in these airstrikes don't have nothing to do with Hamas.
But again, we can't verify a lot of this. And this is the challenge for us as journalists, I think right now. How do we cover this skepticism for people in positions of power, but then relentless empathy for the people who are caught in the middle. Yeah, and I think you're right.
This is going to be one of the most challenging conflicts to cover for all the reasons you just laid out and because of something that I spoke to the Secretary of State about today, which is the administration's real concern, that this could be a widening war. There have been attacks against U.S. service members serving abroad. When you were there, did you get that sense?
There is obviously there's always the fear of a broadening conflict, especially for the unique place that Israel holds in our world history. Right. They live in a hostile neighborhood. And part of the relationship, a key part of the relationship between the US And Israel is that they will always support Israel's right to defend itself.
And that's why we've seen this sweeping sport. Right? They are just surging firepower to Israel right now in a way we haven't before, which is not only to help Israel defend itself right now, but also to send a message to any hostile actors in the area. We have their back.
You better think twice before you think about crossing these borders. But, you know, this feels. I don't want to say it feels different, but it is new only because it's happening now. We've all seen wars in the region before.
Actually, one young gentleman I spoke to had lived in Gaza during the 2014 war and remembered what it felt like on the ground. He's now here in the United States trying to reach his family back home. As they live through this war, we're just at a different geopolitical moment. And I think everyone who covers these issues feels this way, that there is so much at play when it comes to where China is aligning itself, how Iran is viewing this moment, the ongoing war that Russia is waging in Ukraine.
We're at a bit of a tipping point. And it feels as if any one miscalculation by any one of these players could set things ablaze. It's an incredibly tenuous moment. Well, and speaking of that, I've spoken to you, but others of our colleagues who've been in the region, and they say this feels different already.
People who have been in Ukraine recently, they say in Ukraine, the blasts were far away, but covering this conflict in Israel, it felt like the blasts were happening over them and you had to evacuate a number of times. Geography here is key. Right. Even when you look at the map of the Kibutzen that were attacked, these are people who lived right along the border of Gaza Strip where Hamas is in charge.
And Hamas said that we want to end Israel. Just think about the bravery and that entails each and every day. So running into shelters every day is part of what they live through. They know that these rounds are often fired back and forth, nothing like the attack that unfolded on October 7.
But even for us, you know, I was working mostly from Tel Aviv and from Jerusalem, we had Tingu down to the south and up the northern border as well. There are constant air sirens. You get alerts on your phone. You hear the air sirens wailing.
Around you. And whatever it is you're doing at that moment, you have 90 seconds to drop it and find your way into a shelter. And as a working journalist, you know, I can say on the least end of my worries that was a severe interruption to our work. Just having to do that a few times while we were there.
If you're out in the street walking around, you just had to ditch the car and run until we found the shelter. And sometimes we get the after action reports not knowing if the siren was because of incoming or outgoing. You could hear the booms in the distance. And some of those rockets were intercepted with that Iron Dome defense mechanism on the ground.
And when you get the reports afterward, you see just how massive a strike it would have been had any of those landed. And you realize, like, what a precipice people are living on right there. And but for the defense mechanisms they have in place, are they able to remain safe? And the other piece of this, of course, what you talked about, which is the citizens of Gaza themselves, and this comes as the fact that the US Is trying to get aid into Gaza.
The aid that has arrived right now is really a drop in the bucket or ocean or many oceans, as one aid worker said to me, of what's needed enough for 22,000 people to have water. There are 2.2 million people in Gaza, and half of them are children. And over half of them are children. What is the sense right now of urgency based on your conversations with administration officials about getting more data?
Because the Secretary of State. Obviously, we're working on it. We're working on it. That's our goal.
But people are suffering right now. It's remarkable as it's been two weeks now. Yes. The line is still, we're working on it.
And every day that's gone by since Israel began retaliatory strikes has meant hundreds of more people dead and supplies dwindling even further. And we're talking about water. Yeah, we're talking about medicine. And that 20 trucks being allowed in at the border where 3,000 tons of aid is waiting, that 20 trucks was somehow held up as a victory or as a win that the administration was able to concede from Israelis.
Man, that feels like the bar is really low at this moment. Now administration officials will say we've asked the Israelis to minimize casualties. We press for that behind closed doors, that civilians are not to be held responsible for the actions of a terrorist organization. But we're not seeing that.
We're not seeing that at all on the ground. And I think there are a lot of concerns and a lot of questions to be asked that in support of this war. Are we asking about what they expect the impact to be on the ground? What is the end game for all of this?
How is this war going to be waged and what does success actually look like? And this is where I go back to what President Biden say I've learned from the lessons of 9 11, because you all remember what that was like. That was the first big story I ever covered, the first war I covered. And these were a lot of questions we didn't ask back then that I think is incumbent on us now.
Well, and as Peter Baker was saying on our panel today, that's one of the messages that President Biden is conveying. Privately, it is believed to Prime Minister Netanyahu learn from us, we did not have a clear exit strategy when it came to Iraq and Afghanistan. And that very challenging line that needs to be walked right now. Do you get the sense that Israeli officials are listening to that message?
If they are, we haven't seen it in any of their actions and we haven't heard it in the way of the crucial questions, which is to say, what do you consider to be an appropriate level of civilian casualty? What is the plan after the ground invasion? There is no authority other than Hamas right now as a result of 70 plus years of history. We're not going to unpack right now in this conversation.
The Palestinian Authority that runs the west bank lacks credibility and doesn't even control all the West Bank. There's nothing to indicate that Abu Mazen, who's in charge there, would be able to govern across the Gaza Strip as well. There's been talk about other officials. I spoke to former senior Israeli officials and other Palestinian officials that maybe a consortium of Arab nations could come together and step in that there's no real discussion or any real appetite or willingness for that among the other Arab neighboring leaders as well.
So there, there's a real question and we're talking about more than 2 million people who have already lived under oppression and occupation for years and years and entire generation of young Palestinians now whose life has been defined by a blockade for the last 16 years and who are living through another war. The 25 year old woman I talked to, this is now the fourth war she's lived through. She's 25 years old. That is just heartbreaking.
And it comes, of course, against the backdrop, President Biden asking Congress for more than $100 billion in aid for Israel, for Ukraine, for Taiwan, for the border. We don't have a Speaker of the House. And so and I spoke we may not this week I spoke for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He didn't seem to have a clear idea of how this ends.
He also notably didn't rule out running again himself. He didn't lean into it, but he didn't rule it out. But even once there is a speaker of the House, there are serious divisions over linking aid to Israel to Ukraine. I mean, there's consensus about the support for Israel.
Yes, that is one side of it. Aid for Ukraine has become not just hotly divided, incredibly divisive, is now a hot partisan issue. And as we've seen in the last few years, those partisan issues are not easily compromised on. So it's really unclear how this is going to move forward.
And there's no one within the House Republican Conference who has stepped forward as a more moderate voice on any of that just yet. I mean, we'll see. As I know they have the speakers and the potential candidates are going to be on the forum on Monday, maybe have a vote on Tuesday. But it's unclear if anyone who steps up to represent the conference would be able to convince folks to link the two at a time that is badly needed for both.
So we will see. I mean, it's one of these moments in news where we have to say we don't want to get ahead of it where people are right now. We will see. We'll cover it as it goes.
And just finally, Amit, what are you going to be watching for in Israel this week? What is it in the region? What are the key things that you're watching? There is this inevitability of the ground invasion we seem to be circling.
And I think Israeli Defense Forces officials now saying that seems to be coming soon. I think that's going to be a key milestone moment in what this war is and the shape that it will take in the days and weeks ahead. And I think it's I think all eyes served on Capitol Hill as well as it relates to the Middle East. What does any package going to look like?
How quickly can those things get over With Ukraine in particular, there's a much more urgent need to get that funding over there because that support is going to run out much faster than support for Israel. There's a lot to watch overseas and at home. Well, thank you for helping us understand what is such a complex and just heartbreaking moment, I think all around the world. Thank you, Amna.
Appreciate it. Thank you. You.