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CNN This Morning
Israel-Hezbollah Conflict Accelerating In Lebanon; Today: Biden To Address U.N. General Assembly; Hurricane Watch In Effect For Parts Of Florida. Aired 5-5:30a ET
Aired September 24, 2024 - 05:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[05:00:43]
KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: It's Tuesday, September 24th.
Right now on CNN THIS MORNING:
Trading blows. Hezbollah fires back one day after the deadliest day of Israeli strikes in Lebanon in nearly 20 years.
A final address. President Biden looks to cement his foreign policy legacy in one last speech before the U.N.'s general assembly.
And --
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DONALD TRUMP, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT & 2024 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: These guys actually want these people in our country. It's not even believable.
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HUNT: Descending on the Commonwealth, Donald Trump pushes his promise for mass deportations in the must-win state of Pennsylvania.
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HUNT: All right. It is 5:00 a.m. on the East Coast. A live look at Capitol Hill here in Washington, D.C. on this Tuesday morning.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Kasie Hunt. It's great to be with you this Tuesday, just six weeks out from election day.
But we begin with the U.S. desperately trying to keep the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah from escalating into an all-out regional war.
Hezbollah firing a barrage of rockets from Lebanon into Israel overnight, targeting the northern port city of Haifa attacks coming one day after Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon killed nearly 500 people, including dozens of women and children and wounded 1,600 others, making it the deadliest day of Israeli strikes in Lebanon in nearly two decades. The moment of one of those airstrikes caught on camera as a journalist
prepared to go live on the air.
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HUNT: Oh, my gosh.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, not ruling out a ground offensive into Lebanon.
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BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER: I would like to clarify Israel's policy. We are not waiting for threat. We are ahead of it, everywhere in every arena anytime. We're eliminating seniors, eliminating commanders, eliminating rockets, and counting. Those who tried to hurt us, we will hurt them gravely.
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HUNT: The president of Iran, which was Hezbollah's most influential backer, just sat down for an exclusive interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria. He is suggesting Muslim nations may need to join forces against the Israelis.
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MASOUD PEZESHKIAN, IRANIAN PRESIDENT (through translator): Hezbollah by herself cannot stand against the country that is armed to the teeth and has access to weapon systems that are far superior to anything else. Now, if there is a need, Islamic countries must convene meeting in order to formulate a reaction to what is occurring. Hezbollah cannot stand alone against the country that is being defended and supported and supplied by Western countries, European countries, and the United States of America.
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HUNT: All right. Let's bring in CNN global affairs analyst Kim Dozier with more on this.
Kim, good morning to you.
Help us understand at this hour what the scale of this escalation has been as its now morning, the sun has risen in that part of the world hold, and this is continuing again today and what the risk is for further escalation.
KIM DOZIER, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Look, Israel has been preparing for this for several weeks and then signaled the weekend before those walkie-talkie and pager attacks that Israel has not claimed, but and blamed on Tel Aviv that it was expanding its war goals to not just eliminating Hamas in Gaza, but also allowing some 62,000 Israelis who've been displaced from northern Israel to return to their homes. School season right now and people are still in shelters because of
Hezbollah's constant barrages on northern Israel. So those were the war aims. And what the Israeli military is saying, its doing right now is using airstrikes to take out rocket positions and missile supplies that would be aimed at the south.
[05:05:09]
But in a press conference today, Israeli officials would not be drawn on whether this would also include some sort of land incursion or invasion. I think we're likely to see at least raids because these rockets and missiles that they're talking about, Israeli officials have briefed for a long time, for a couple of years now to reporters that they're dug into Lebanese villages and towns into civilian areas that's why I think you're also seeing such as civilian flight out of those areas right now.
HUNT: Kim what would accomplishing the mission look like for Israel in -- on this Lebanon -- on this front with Lebanon. I mean, is it taking control of certain amount of territory that would be a buffer zone for northern Israel. Is it something else? They're clearly taking a not-insignificant risk, opening up another front and risking escalation across the region.
DOZIER: Well, they're certainly can't take all of the Hezbollah fighters off the board. There are an estimated 60,000 and Hezbollah claims its up to 100,000, including reservists of armed trained troops that could attack Israel, but what it could do is degrade the large numbers up to 150,000 rockets and missiles that Israel believes are in placed in those various northern villages pointed south.
Many of the sophisticated missiles, however, they're supplied by Iran so Hezbollah has been hesitant to use them. Some of them cruise missiles that can reportedly reach every major populated area in Israel are supposed to be Iran strategic defense. In case Iran gets threatened or hit by Israel or the U.S. or anyone else in future. So Hezbollah has its hands tied, its got all of this weaponry stored in southern Lebanon some of it ready to go, and some of it deeply embedded underground and that is a target for Israel.
I think the fact that some of it is deeply embedded underground means were going to see at least Israeli raids, if not a full ground incursion to dismantle and displaced a lot of it.
HUNT: Kim, how soon would you anticipate any of this may happen?
DOZIER: We could see it in a matter of days. Normally, as we saw with the operation in Gaza, it was a number of air strikes softening up the territory, taking out a lot of the potential opposition before troops moved in on the ground and then they started doing it sort of piecemeal patchwork quite patchwork. That is perhaps what we could be seeing unfolding in Lebanon.
HUNT: All right. Kim Dozier getting us started this morning -- Kim, thanks very much for your reporting. I really appreciate it. And coming up ahead here on CNN this morning, the presidential race,
Kamala Harris, weighing a visit to the southern border in a pivotal sun belt state as she tries to close the gap with Donald Trump on immigration.
Plus, Donald Trumps direct pitch to women in Pennsylvania as he trails the vice president among that key demographic.
And with his final months in office coming to a close, President Biden tries to secure his legacy on the world stage. We'll give one last speech before the U.N.
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JOE BIEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I'm the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world. We'll keep NATO stronger, and I'll make it more powerful and more united than anytime in all of our history.
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[05:13:14]
HUNT: All right. Welcome back.
Today, President Biden is to address the U.N. General Assembly, his final time as president with just months left in office. Biden is looking to solidify his legacy on the world stage. But in these final months as commander in chief, he's also confronting increasingly complex geopolitical challenges, one most notably the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and also in Ukraine. They both will be front and center at the United Nations just this week.
Also set to address the U.N. in New York this week is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. While here in the U.S., Zelenskyy is expected to outline a victory plan to President Biden and other allies.
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VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY, UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT: It's not a negotiation with Russian, no. It's felt like I said, it's breach to diplomatic way how to stop the war. The breach in the plan of victory, or victorious plan is strengthening of Ukraine, Ukrainian army and Ukrainian people. Only in the strong position we can push, we can push Putin to stop the war diplomatic way.
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HUNT: All right. Joining us now, CNN international anchor Max Foster.
Max, good morning to you. Always wonderful to see you. What do you think we are going to hear from President Biden today? An interesting that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is doing an interview like the one that he did there with a major American anchor for a morning show, it seems very clearly aimed at a broad swath of the American public.
MAX FOSTER, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Well, it's an opportunity to secure his foreign policy legacy, isn't it? Because the last time he'll appear there on that big stage, the green stone stage and his, you know, his tenure has been dominated by major foreign policy issues, most notably Ukraine. And then obviously going into the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel's response to the war between Hamas and Israel.
[05:15:11]
And now, we're moving into the conflict as well between Israel and Lebanon. So it's been a big part of his watch, but nothings resolved. So I imagine what hell try to do is set out his vision for how those can be resolved whilst protecting the rule of law and democracy. So he's really looking ahead to the next presidency in a way, and the groundwork that he's set up towards a peace deal, for example, in the Middle East and winning the war in Ukraine against Russia.
HUNT: Well, Max, I cant help but think back to when we were covering a previous gathering of western leaders in Italy and it produced one of those moments that preceded Biden announcing he was dropping out of the presidential race here in the U.S. There were conflicting accounts of what was going on, but the video showed him kind of walking away.
And I remember we talked quite a bit at that time, about how we were really seeing perhaps the end of an era unfold before our eyes, perhaps it is the conclusion of the post-war era in which, American and western political dominance sort of created a lasting peace to the point that in the 1990s, people were writing about the end of history in some ways, this address by President Biden, who is now leaving the world stage.
I mean, he, he -- I don't want to say in voluntarily it was his decision but in some ways it seems to be a punctuation mark on all of these broader trends that we've been looking at.
FOSTER: Yeah. So I mean, we have got the situation where you know, you had U.S. dominance on the world stage and you've us was well policeman. That's being challenged now, most notably by Russia but with the support and alliances effectively with North Korea and Iran. And in the background, China, it's really China that has the card to play here.
China wants to play a bigger role on the international stage. And I think that's going to be the ongoing debate now as the Chinese economy grows and particularly if the next president wants to step back from the world stage and creates a gap really for that to happen.
So there are these fundamental lines in geopolitics really forming here and President Biden has seen his role as an international policeman. Let's see if the next president does the same. I think the view in the past has always been all see that Donald Trump would step back from that position, will wait to see how he treated if he wins.
Kamala Harris should expect to play things in a similar vein to Present Biden, of course.
HUNT: Indeed, we will.
All right. Max Foster, thank you very much. As always, my friend, I appreciate it.
All right. Still to come here after the break, Republicans looking to Democrats to help keep the government open despite mounting Republican criticism.
Other members of the GOP taking measures into their own hands. We're going have that more in your morning roundup.
Plus, "New York Times" reporting this morning, the vice president is set to visit the southern border as immigration remains a top issue for voters in this election.
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[05:22:57]
HUNT: All right, 22 minutes past the hour. Here's your morning roundup.
The suspect who plan to shoot Donald Trump at his golf course in West Palm beach wrote a letter months earlier describing his plan as a, quote, assassination attempt. At a hearing on Monday, a judge ordered Ryan Wesley Routh to remain detained pending further proceedings.
Boeing is now bumping up its offer to end a strike by 33,000 workers. The offer includes a 30 percent raise over the next four years, but union leaders say there will not be an immediate vote on the deal. The strike is now in its second week, it has brought production of commercial jets at the company to a near standstill.
Today, House Republicans look to bypass growing rejection in their own ranks of the three-month government spending bill present and to by House Speaker Johnson, a procedural floor move would rely on Democrats to help pass the legislation and avoid a government shutdown. They will need a two-thirds majority pretty to get it done.
All right. A hurricane watch now in effect for parts of Florida, the southwest coast, preparing for the arrival of the storm system currently over the Caribbean. It is expected to become a major hurricane in the coming days.
Let's get straight to our meteorologist, the weatherman, Derek Van Dam, to help us understand it.
Derek, good morning.
DEREK VAN DAM, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Good morning, Kasie. As expected we now have hurricane watches posted for parts of the western coastline of Florida that is into the Gulf of Mexico, is its a storm system approaches here in the coming days.
And I want you to see this. So this is new with the 5:00 a.m. update from the national hurricane center, that shading of pink that's a hurricane watch from basically Indian pass near Apalachicola southward into Inglewood. This does include Tampa Bay.
And the reason we have these watches extending so far south, including seen a storm surge watches as because we anticipate the storm to grow in size as it approaches the Florida peninsula on Thursday and Friday.
So it will push up a lot of water. It will bring the heavy rain band. And of course, the storm surge threat along with it, which by the way, within the big bend of Florida could reach between ten to 15 feet above normally high dry ground.
[05:25:08]
We will anticipate up to nine feet of storm surge potential in and around Tampa Bay as well. So the storm still looking to shovel kind of disorganized in the western Caribbean. It's known as a potential tropical cyclone because we anticipate this to become a tropical storm and depression here within the coming hours.
And you can see the storm intensifying into what is a major category three hurricane by Thursday afternoon before making landfall Thursday evening. One thing to note, this storm will be racing northward at this stage. So its impacts will be felt inland as well, even though it will be a weakening storm system, wind and heavy rain and the potential for tornadoes exists across south central for Georgia, come Friday morning.
Here's the differences between the computer models. One slightly stronger than the other. One things for sure, again, this will have an expanding wind field, storm surge and flash flood threat along the east coast or west coast of Florida.
And then look at this wide swath of rain that will move its way inland. I'm looking at Atlanta into Charlotte potential here for over a half a foot of rain. We're looking out for the potential for flash flood threat, not to mention the potential for knocking over trees and power lines as well. So we could have some power failures for this area.
BURNETT: All right. A busy week ahead for you, Derek. Thank you very much for that.
All right. Still ahead here on CNN this morning, Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon step coming up attacks along Israel's northern border. Were going to bring you the latest from the fighting and how the U.S. is responding to the possibility of a wider Middle East war.
Plus, "The New York Times" reporting this morning that the vice president will head to the southern border this week as Trump continues to promise mass deportations at his rallies.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: I'll say it now, you have to get them the hell out. You have to get them out. I'm sorry.
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