NBC’s Engel Reports Some of Israel’s Airstrike Warnings to Gaza Residents ‘Ineffective’ With Power and Services Cut Off

NBC News’s chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, laid out in stark detail the struggles of everyday citizens living in Gaza as Israeli airstrikes continue to pound the strip during an appearance on MSNBC on Thursday. Engel discussed the challenges Israel faces in limiting civilian casualties as well as the daunting task of retrieving the estimated 150 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.

“Well, we are hearing a lot of strikes that are going into the Gaza Strip. So this is Israel’s ongoing air campaign, which it says is designed to destroy Hamas, destroy Hamas’s infrastructure before a potential ground assault,” Engel began, noting from his position near the Gaza border that he could hear airstrikes.

“We’ve also been seeing the buildup of troops for a ground assault. We don’t know when it will start. That is a state secret,” he said, adding:

They will want to keep that information to themselves until the very last moment. But preparations do seem to be underway. Troops are coming into this area. Heavy equipment is coming into this area. They are digging in. The Israeli defense minister has already said that they will go in and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, says that this campaign will be devastating, that every Hamas member is a dead man.

So the Israelis are making it very clear that they want to go in at the time of their choosing. They’re getting ready for it and that they want this to be decisive.

The people in Gaza are increasingly in a dire situation that the food and water supplies have been cut. They are under attack. It is difficult for Hamas, but it is also difficult for the 2 million people who live there. We’ve been speaking to people inside Gaza, and I can tell you it’s increasingly hard to talk to them because if there’s no power, there’s no way to charge your phones. There’s no way to get out information. And they say that they feel they feel trapped and under attack.

The situation for the hostages is also incredibly dire because as Israeli troops or if and when Israeli troops do go in, it will be dangerous for those soldiers. It will be dangerous for the civilians in Gaza because they’re going to go in with tanks. When you start firing tanks in a built-up urban area, you will inevitably cause a tremendous amount of damage. And of course, it will be dangerous for the hostages themselves being held by Hamas as human shields.

Engel was then asked to expand on the challenges posed by the dense urban environment in Gaza.

“So the Israeli military says that it is warning people before any strike on an apartment building or a building of any kind telling people to leave,” Engel reported, adding:

But the way that they generally warn them is by sending them a text message, sending them a message over social media. But if you don’t have internet and you don’t have power and you don’t have a cell phone that’s working anymore, those messages are ineffective. They’re not getting to you.

The other method that Israel uses, and this is one that they’ve used in the in the past, is they will fire on a building with a very small munition, something that doesn’t doesn’t cause a lot of damage, but makes a lot of noise, alerts the people that something bigger is coming. They should get out immediately and then the building is struck. That’s what people in Gaza are waiting for, a text, if they still have power or that knock on the roof, that gives them a little bit of time to get out of the to get out of the building. But then where do they go? They can’t leave the Gaza Strip. That means they can just go down to the street. Then their building is destroyed. And then where are they going to go?

“There have been very disturbing images coming out already, even before this ground invasion, of it was it looked like a motionless child. I don’t know if it was alive or dead, but certainly a child and in a very terrible condition,” Engle continued, adding:

We saw images earlier today of a doctor holding a baby, live baby, and he said that the parents had been killed and he was making an appeal to other Palestinians to find relatives to come and take this child so that — the fighting in Gaza will be tough. Living in Gaza is extraordinarily tough. You said that it’s densely crowded. It is immensely crowded, not the entire Gaza Strip. There are cities in Gaza. Gaza City is the most densely populated part of the Gaza Strip. And we’re talking about that much more densely populated than Manhattan, more densely populated than Tokyo. People living in tiny lanes packed together, large families in small apartments.

So far, the death toll in Gaza is said to be above 1,400 people, while the death toll in Israel from Hamas’s attack has risen to 1,300 people, mostly civilians.

Watch the full clip above via MSNBC.