QUESTION: While troops on the ground ready for an invasion any day, today the U.S. showing its support with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Tel Aviv.
- SECRETARY BLINKEN: The United States stands with Israel and with its people – today, tomorrow, every day.
QUESTION: The Secretary telling us the State Department is now arranging flights to evacuate Americans out of Israel.
- SECRETARY BLINKEN: There are a lot of people who are here for the holidays, visiting family, visiting friends. At any given time, there may be as many as 100,000 Americans in Israel who are visiting and eventually want to go home.
QUESTION: The death toll rising, the grim task of recovering bodies continues. And CBS News has learned that on Saturday, Hamas militants breached the border wall in 29 different spots.
- QUESTION: I just wonder because as one of the President’s closest advisors – the Secretary of State – it has been suggested that Hamas is communicating now in different ways that cannot be picked up by even the best intelligence. Is that something that American intelligence is aware of, talking about so that Americans stay safe?
- SECRETARY BLINKEN: We have an extraordinarily vigilant Intelligence Community that is working every single minute of every single day…I think as Israelis go back and look at what happened here, it may well be not that they didn’t have something but that they didn’t interpret it in what proved to be the right way.
Official news published at https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-with-norah-odonnell-of-cbs-evening-news-2/
