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Israel Orders Gaza Evacuations Ahead of Unprecedented Attack; Nine of Gaza Doctor's 10 Children Killed in Israeli Airstrike; Rock Band Launches House Party Tour in Protest Pricey Arena Shows; Crypto Investor Charged with Kidnapping, Torturing Man for Weeks. Aired 1:30- 2p ET

Aired May 26, 2025 - 13:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[13:30:00]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: We're following breaking news out of the Middle East, where Israel has issued evacuation orders for southern, and also eastern Gaza. A spokesperson for the Israeli military warning that the attack will be, quote, unprecedented. And this comes after Israel launched deadly strikes overnight, including on this school in central Gaza, where 20 people were reportedly killed.

Israel claims it was targeting a Hamas commander.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: As part of its new military offensive, an Israeli military official tells CNN that Israel now plans to occupy 75 percent of Gaza within two months. Today, U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff told CNN that a ceasefire hostage deal for Gaza is currently on the table with a pathway to end the war, and he urged Hamas to accept it.

Let's take you now live to Jerusalem with CNN's Jeremy Diamond. Jeremy, what more are we hearing from Witkoff?

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN JERUSALEM CORRESPONDENT: Well, Boris, Steve Witkoff told me today that there is a deal on the table for Hamas to accept. He says it is a deal that Israel will agree to. And he says that so far, any reports that Hamas has accepted a U.S. proposal are false. This is part of what he told me, said Israel will agree to a temporary ceasefire slash hostage release deal that would see half of the living and half of the deceased return and lead to substantive negotiations to find a path to a permanent ceasefire, which I have agreed to preside over. That deal is on the table. Hamas should take it.

He said that these reports that came out earlier today from Palestinian officials close to Hamas suggesting that they had agreed to a Witkoff proposal were simply false. And he said that what he has seen is, quote, completely unacceptable. So it's clear that these negotiations are still ongoing, but that there is also just not a deal at this moment and that Witkoff is trying to put the pressure on Hamas to accept what is indeed on the table.

And as that is happening, we are seeing that in the Gaza Strip, Israel is continuing to escalate its attacks and ramp up the military pressure on Hamas. But civilians are paying an enormously high toll. One strike in particular overnight, killing at least 20 Palestinians as the Israeli military attacked a school that was turned into a makeshift shelter like so many schools in the Gaza Strip at the moment.

The scenes there, absolutely grisly. We saw these images of flames engulfing the school and rescue workers talking about having found the charred bodies of women and children. The director of the al-Ahli Hospital, which received the bodies of the wounded and the deceased, said that a majority of those who were killed in this attack were indeed women and children.

The Israeli military, for its part, claiming that it struck a Hamas and Islamic Jihad command and control center. And clearly the military intending to escalate this latest offensive even further, issuing a new and urgent evacuation order for most of southern Gaza, covering areas including Rafah, as well as the city of Khan Yunis, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are currently living. The military warning of a, quote, unprecedented attack to come from the Israeli military, calling on Palestinians to move to the Al Mawasi area.

This, as an Israeli military official tells us, that they intend to occupy about 75 percent of the Gaza Strip within the next two months. All of this, of course, likely to result in the massive, forced displacement of Palestinians within Gaza at a time when the humanitarian situation is already disastrous. And of course, so much riding on those ceasefire and hostage release negotiations -- Boris Brianna.

SANCHEZ: Jeremy Diamond live for us in Jerusalem, thank you so much.

A doctor in Gaza is mourning the deaths of nine of her 10 children who were killed in an Israeli strike on their home on Friday.

KEILAR: The doctor was on duty when several of her children's bodies arrived at the hospital. Her husband and lone surviving child were also injured in the blast and are now being treated for their injuries. CNN's Paula Hancocks has details on this heartbreaking story.

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PAULA HANCOCKS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Dr. Alaa al-Najjar is used to seeing the horrors of war in Gaza. She's an emergency room doctor in Khan Yunis.

[13:35:00]

But the charred bodies that arrived at her hospital on Friday were of her own children. She'd left them at home just hours earlier to go to work.

Nine of her 10 children were killed in an Israeli airstrike. One son and her husband cling to life, according to Nasser Hospital. Her brother-in-law describes the moment she found out. One of the civil defense workers was handing me one of the bodies, he says. She was standing next to me and recognized it. She said, this is Ravel, give her to me. Her instinct as a mother, as if her daughter was still alive, she asked to hold her in her arms.

Rescuers searched the smoking debris of the house to recover seven of the nine bodies and say the children were aged from seven months to 12 years. Family says the 10 children were at home when Dr. Najjar's husband Hamdi dropped her off at work, then went to find food for them all. When he returned, he saw an Israeli missile strike hit his home, they say, which failed to detonate. He rushed inside to rescue his children and was injured when a second strike hit.

Hospital staff say despite the unimaginable loss, Dr. Najjar continues to work, while also checking on her husband and her 11-year-old son, Adam. Her brother-in-law says she's now caught between the dead, her only surviving child, and her husband who is between life and death. May God grant her patience and grant us patience too.

The Israeli military says its aircraft had, quote, struck a number of suspects who were identified operating from a structure adjacent to IDF troops in the area of Khan Yunis. It said it was reviewing the claims civilians had been killed.

Nine members of one family gone in an instant. As it has been since day one of this war, children bear the brunt of the never-ending violence.

Paula Hancocks, CNN, Abu Dhabi.

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KEILAR: All right, that was the rock band, the All-American Rejects, performing one of their new singles, Easy Come, Easy Go. Not on stage at, you know, some concert hall, some stadium, but in the backyard of a home in Nashville. The band, whose hit songs include, of course, Swing Swing, Dirty Little Secret, and Move Along, call these sets house party tours.

It's a surprise pop-up concert. There's a number of them. They're free. They've taken place in non-traditional settings, including a bowling alley.

SANCHEZ: Very nice. The band says it's their answer to overpriced venues that are pushing music lovers away because fans can no longer afford the cost of soaring concert tickets. A recent report showed that the average ticket price for the top 100 tours back in 1996 was $25.81, or about $52 adjusted for inflation. In 2024, the average ticket price is up to $135.92.

Tyson Ritter, frontman for the All-American Rejects, joins us now live. Tyson, great to have you on. Where did this idea for a house party tour come about?

TYSON RITTER, FRONTMAN, ALL AMERICAN REJECTS: Hey, thanks for having me. The idea came, it was born out of just a real pure, intentional moment of like, let's go have fun and get back to the way we started when we started touring with this band in a van. And it was thrust from the lips of our new manager, Megan, who's a 29-year-old genius, who said, I want to put you guys at house parties again.

And we did one at USC a couple weeks ago. And it felt like, you know, this pure connection to the spirit of what rock and roll and that whole, like, non-denominational gathering of a love for music could create. And it's been gone for a long time.

For us, at least 30 feet away up on an ivory tower, it's hard to connect to an audience. And this was a way to kind of embrace that spirit again.

KEILAR: Well, the reaction has just been huge. Have you been surprised at all by that?

RITTER: Surprised? I have been humbled and completely shut down in, I don't know. We went out with 12 people on a sardine can steel horse of a bus. We put 50 grand of our own money together and said, let's just take a bet on people coming. And, I mean, this is a crew that is sleeping on top of each other.

They're all younger than us. And they're hungry. They're setting up these stages. They're catching shoes, hitting me, coming so close to knocking my teeth out as people are crowd surfing in this rite of passage moment for this Gen Z crowd.

We are beside ourselves. We are rocking and rolling right now, man. This is the dream.

SANCHEZ: How do you go about picking a venue? And how much do the neighbors come into consideration? Because I imagine you can't play too late. You might get the cops called on you.

RITTER: Well, we did in Mizzou. We got the cops called on us. It was their graduation day just by the fates.

[13:45:00]

And the cops came. They shut us down before we played our last song. And I walked out and my guitarist, bless him, he just goes, boo. And the crowd went feral.

And I walked up to the cop and I said, hey, buddy. I said, listen, if you want these kids to get out of here peacefully, you better let us play one song. And he goes, oh, man, I didn't know it was you guys. I love you. Go, go play. And I was like, and the crowd just went. It was just, oh, it was evangelical band. It was beautiful.

KEILAR: Well, so I imagine I'm just thinking roughly the age that that police officer could have been. Right. Because your music for me was very present in my mid-20s. I asked Boris. He said it was more high school for him. That's our age difference here.

RITTER: OK.

KEILAR: But it's very -- it was at a really important time in our lives that we were hearing a lot of you. And I wonder for that police officer, I bet he was, too. What was --

RITTER: He was a baby. He was a baby, baby.

KEILAR: Oh, was he, oh a baby?

RITTER: He didn't even have a -- I don't even think the man had facial hair, God bless him.

KEILAR: That's amazing. OK, well, Tyson, then to that point, I mean, is there a whole new sort of audience that you are picking up from this that's younger?

RITTER: You know, it doesn't even -- I wouldn't even say. Of course, yes, that's sort of been a byproduct of it. But I think for our band, it was we were, you know, the songs that had the band.

When we came up, we were we never really had the culture. We got lumped into this sort of definition of emo. And then when pop punk was a thing, but our songs were always sort of the driving force of the trajectory of our band.

But now I feel like we're tying all the music together because we put it out for like a decade of the 2000s. So these kids that are coming and finding us for the first time, it feels like they get to discover, wow, there's this band that has all these great songs. And that feels that I think has been the most humbling revelation of this.

And forgive me, too much to your question before, the criteria for these house parties, you have to have a pretty decent sized yard, I think. We're really avoiding major cities. I mean, we played a barn in Ames, Iowa at this beautiful place called the Black Contemporary.

And five thousand people. It looked like the end of Field of Dreams. We had four miles of cars stretched out in every direction and people running through cornfields. I mean, this is a cinematic experience in every word. And if you book it, they will come.

SANCHEZ: It sounds awesome. It looks amazing. I have one last question because we were speculating and I'm hoping to get some clarity, not just for us, but for fans and listeners.

What is the song My Dirty Little Secret about? Who is it about? Can you clarify that for us?

Is it Emmanuel Macron, the president of France?

RITTER: Oh, man. I saw that video of his lady giving him the old one, too. No, it's not. Maybe it'll be his theme song. Maybe they'll shut the door next time.

For me, it was about I was laying in a bit of a lullaby in Florida, running around, chasing my ex-girlfriend, teasing her. And I brought it to my guitarist and we just kind of were playing around. The song was just a sweet little joke. But it's those are the ones you write that are the accidents that happen and some sort of miracle of acceptance as a result.

So, yes, Dirty Little Secret. If you told my younger self that would have went, I would have said, yes, right.

KEILAR: Well, that is going to be my earworm today, for sure. Tyson Ritter, it is so great to have you. What fun we've had speaking with you. And I hope that you keep doing this and other bands follow suit.

RITTER: You better get ready. Reject's got a record coming out in January. And I don't know, maybe we'll see you at like a New Year's party or something.

KEILAR: All right. I hope so. I love it. All right, Tyson. Thanks so much.

SANCHEZ: Thanks.

RITTER: See you.

KEILAR: All right. We'll be right back.

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SANCHEZ: We're learning new details about a disturbing case out of New York that prosecutors call a brutal plot to steal Bitcoin. They allege that a cryptocurrency investor kidnapped and tortured a man for weeks inside of this Manhattan apartment, demanding the victim reveal his Bitcoin password.

KEILAR: Authorities say 37-year-old John Woltz was arrested on Friday after the man escaped and flagged down an officer. CNN correspondent Gloria Pazmino has the details on this story. Gloria, what were you learning about this?

GLORIA PAZMINO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Boris Brianna, this appears to be at least the most recent in these type of attacks. We've seen a string of similar attacks targeting cryptocurrency, people who are in cryptocurrency. And this investor, we are told, actually lured his victim.

[13:55:00]

His victim came here to New York City from Italy earlier this month, and he was kept inside a Manhattan apartment that was being rented by the cryptocurrency investor identified as John Woltz, 37 years old. That's the man you see being walked out of the precinct in lower Manhattan after his arrest on Friday. Now, police say that not only did he lured his victim to this apartment and kept him there for several weeks, he also tortured him the entire time that he was there, allegedly at one point tying him up with chicken wire, shocking him, threatening to kill his family if he did not give up his Bitcoin password.

Now, this went on for several days. And what we do not know yet is exactly how these two men knew each other, whether they had a personal or a business relationship and how this man who came here from Italy came to be inside this apartment, trapped there for several days until this past Friday when he told police that he believed he was going to be killed.

He gave up the password and that gave him a small window of time where the suspect was looking into his computer and allowed him to flee from the apartment. He flagged down a traffic cop when he ran from the home and flagged down the officer so that he was finally able to get some help. And then police were able to arrest the suspect.

Now, the victim is 28 years old. We have not yet learned of their identity, but we have just learned that police were actually looking into a second person who was briefly detained. Prosecutors telling us today that they are declining to charge that person pending further investigation and that there is a third person, an un-apprehended male who police believe was also involved in the scheme.

They are waiting to learn more about him. And we are learning to wait -- waiting to learn whether or not that person is going to be arrested.

SANCHEZ: Gloria Pazmino, thank you so much for that reporting.

So Russia has launched its largest aerial attacks on Ukraine since the start of the war, leading President Donald Trump to say Russia's leader is, quote, crazy. The latest on the Kremlin's reaction to that statement and more ahead on CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

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