Clarissa Ward has covered her fair share of global conflicts. This one’s different.
The CNN chief international correspondent is reporting minutes from the Israel-Gaza border when a barrage of rockets suddenly flew past her and her team and into Gaza.
Ward ducked for cover, and when CNN News Central co-anchor John Berman formally checked in with her, she responded, “we just have had a massive barrage of rockets come in here not too far from us, so we have had to take shelter here by the roadside, we are just about five minutes away.”
She added, “we can hear now a lot of jets in the sky, we can also hear the Iron Dome intercepting a number of those rockets as they were whizzing overhead and making impact in that direction; not too far from here. We came to this location because this was ground zero for this entire operation of carnage. Hamas militants came on a pickup truck, this was the first place where they breached that border wall and they basically drove down this strip just spraying lead wherever they went…”
Ward and her crew then got the “all-clear,” moved out of the ditch to a different position. Ward was given the all-clear to stand, and she finished her report on how Hamas militants came through the area to conduct their assault.
“Forgive me, it’s a little difficult crouched in a ditch to know exactly what’s going on,” she continued. “Multiple casualties along this area. you can probably see the scale of the damage that was done to these vehicles, a lot of them just blew up with the force of the ammunition they were taking and they’re just now toga way the actual pickup truck that was carrying those Hamas fighters, and met with some resistance.”
.@clarissaward reports from just minutes away from the Israel-Gaza border in the aftermath of a fresh barrage of rockets: pic.twitter.com/BPV7RP9K5o
— CNN International PR (@cnnipr) October 9, 2023
Ward isn’t the only U.S. TV news correspondent ducking for cover today. Longtime NBC News foreign correspondent Richard Engel was doing a hit for Morning Joe from Sderot, Israel, when he was shown crouching down for cover in light of the incoming mortar and possibly rocket fire towards Gaza.
“This is considered an active combat zone even though we are still inside Israeli territory,” he said.
Engel added there are new reports that Hamas is sending more fighters into Israel through breaches in the border fencing. “There are roughly 30 breaches, according to a senior Israeli official, and most of them, 90% have been plugged up,” he said.
.@RichardEngel and the NBC News crew takes cover from mortar fire in Israel near Gaza.
Richard and the team are safe. pic.twitter.com/VBkI5taJee— MSNBC (@MSNBC) October 9, 2023