Gaza Market Turns Battlefield; U.S. Sells Israel More Ammo; New Fears About American Jihadis Returning to U.S.
JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, everyone. I'm Jim Sciutto, in again today for Ashleigh Banfield. It is Thursday, July 31st, and welcome to LEGAL VIEW. More Israeli troops, more U.S. ammunition, more war in Gaza causing many more Palestinian casualties. Today, the Israeli defense forces said it is calling up some 16,000 additional reservists. And CNN has learned the Pentagon is shoring up Israeli ammunition reserves all for what the Israeli prime minister now says is just the first phase of the planned demilitarization of Hamas-run Gaza. We'll have much more on all of this in a moment. But first, I want to bring you some pictures that you may find very hard to watch. Yesterday's shelling of a crowded outdoor marketplace in Gaza. The Gaza health ministry says that 17 people were killed there. A photographer from Al-Mansara (ph) news agency was himself badly wounded on the scene. You'll see his camera drop only to be picked up by an assistant who keeps shooting. Have a look at this.</s>SCIUTTO: Just a riveting scene from inside the violence in Gaza. I'm joined now by my CNN colleague, Karl Penhaul. He is in Gaza City. Karl, that was video, that we've just aired for our viewers, of an attack on a market yesterday. Today we're hearing now of people hurt at a U.N. school -- another U.N. school housing Gaza refugees. Can you tell us what happened this time? These seem to be becoming almost a daily event there.</s>KARL PENHAUL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: They do seem to be becoming almost a daily event, Jim, and that really is a reflection of how dirty this war is becoming. What happened this morning, as far as we understand, is that some kind of round landed outside one of the U.N. schools being used as a shelter and caused injuries. It didn't, in fact, fall inside the school, and that is what saved some fatalities. But it all does really go to highlight what the United Nations Relief Agency, the organization running those schools and shelters, is saying, and that is, that there is no longer any safe place, no safe haven anywhere in Gaza. So it's all good and well, the Israeli military trying to warn civilians to move out of the combat zone. But if that means they then go to another area, that then itself becomes engulfed in fighting, it means that the U.N. can no longer cope. And they're saying, in fact, that they're almost near breaking point. There's very little more that they can do to help the people of Gaza stay safe, Jim.</s>SCIUTTO: It also gets to the question, the weapons that the Israelis are using. It's a question we're going to get to shortly. But I want to share with our viewers another video that the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, have just released showing, they say, Hamas rockets being fired from a populated area inside Gaza. We're also hearing that one man was badly hurt on the Israeli side of the border today. So, Karl, as you know, this is the Israeli argument here, that this fire, as we're seeing in this video we're showing now again from the Israeli military, Israelis say is coming from populated areas so that when they fire back, that in effect those Hamas militants are using civilians as, in effect, as human shields. Karl, I wonder if you could comment on that. You're on the ground there. You've witnessed many of these strikes and much of this fighting. What have you seen yourself in terms of the tactics that Hamas uses, you know, if it is true that what the Israelis say is right, that they use, in effect, fire from populated areas on purpose?</s>PENHAUL: Well, I think, of course, Hamas is firing rockets. And this afternoon, maybe an hour and a half ago, we saw another four rockets being fired from south of our position off towards Israel. I think if you look at that Israeli military video that you're referring to -- and it's good that they're putting this out, and, again, they also seem to be taking notice of our pleas to give us better resolution gun cam footage. But if you look at that video, it may not quite be as advertised. If you look at it carefully, it seems that a lot of those rocket firing points come from orchards, small fields, small plots of land. Yes, of course, you do see buildings alongside those plots of land. And possibly, if you look very carefully, maybe one or two of those firing points are from inside a building compound itself. But when you look that there are orchards, when you look at there are fields, that, by Gaza standards, is sprawling countryside. Why do I say that? Because there is not a lot of open area on the Gaza Strip. We're talking about an area that's about the size of metropolitan Las Vegas. And what the Israeli military has done as they come into Gaza, they've set up a buffer zone all around the borders of Gaza and Israel about 1.5 miles deep into Gaza. Now, that has the effect of pushing the militant factions back into the more heavily built-up areas given that the more countryside areas in Gaza are just on that border area. So it's pushing the militants back into the urban areas. And this, of course, has turned into urban warfare, urban guerrilla warfare. We always knew this was the kind of fight that was going on in Gaza. You know, if you look at other instances of urban warfare even in recent history, Fallujah in Iraq could be a good example. If you want to go back right to Way (ph) City in Vietnam. So we know that when you push an enemy deep into a built-up area, then this is the kind of thing that is happening. Describing it as use of human shield or not, I've heard those accusations. I haven't seen, with my own eyes, that kind of evidence. But if somebody is simply referring to the fact that there is a war going on in a heavily built-up area where civilians live, of course, that is the case. Both sides are fighting in the cities and in the towns, Jim.</s>SCIUTTO: As you say, Karl, that's the new place that we see war in cities, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Thank you for that analysis, the kind you can only hear from someone who's right in the middle of it on the ground. We appreciate it from Karl Penhaul. I want to talk more now about Israelis' ready supply of U.S. ammunition with our CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr, also CNN military analyst and retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Rick Francona. Because, Barbara, as you know, and as Colonel Francona knows, you know, this ammunition question gets right to the question of Israeli tactics because, you know, is the U.S. supplying weapons that help Israel fight this war in an urban area and increases the danger of civilian casualties because I know, as you noted, Barbara, many of these weapons are not, in fact, precision-guided weapons. Can you explain to our viewers, you know, that distinction?</s>BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, sure. I mean, the U.S. regularly, and with the full authority of Congress, sells munitions to Israel all the time for their legitimate self-defense. That is the legal standard for selling weapons and ammunition to Israel. The country's right to defend itself. What we're seeing now is that continuing flow of ammunition to Israel over the last couple of weeks. And, in fact, just yesterday, an announcement that more munitions were on the way, including 120- millimeter tank rounds, even more illumination rounds, those illuminations rounds we see over Gaza lighting up the sky at night so more strikes can be called in. But the question of civilian casualties, these weapons, nothing is all that precise in war. That's the reality of it. But these are not satellite-guided weapons. They're not guided to a particular target. By all accounts, there's no Israeli intelligence on the ground at the sites where they hit guiding them in. They are tank, artillery, mortars firing from some distance away, firing into the populated areas that Karl was talking about. And that's the real challenge for Israel. They are firing right into the middle of civilian populations. That's their challenge right now.</s>SCIUTTO: Colonel, if I can ask you, you're a former intelligence officer. You've been involved in making targeting decisions, I'm sure. When Israel says they're doing everything to avoid civilian casualties, but at the same time using, as Barbara described, non- precision weapons, tank shells, mortar shells, many of which the U.S. is resupplying, is Israel, in fact, doing everything it can?</s>RICK FRANCONA, MILITARY ANALYST: Well, they're doing everything they can with the resources they have. If you're going to use artillery mortars and these unguided weapons, you're going to have civilian casualties, especially, as Karl points out, there's just no open space there. So any time you drop these kinds of high-explosive weapons into a confined space, you're going to have collateral damage. It's just the way it is.</s>SCIUTTO: But don't you - don't you, colonel, have more collateral damage if you're using non-precision weapons? You would have less presumably if it was a guided munition as opposed to a shell, you know, that lands and covers a large area with its explosive radius.</s>FRANCONA: Right. Exactly. And so if you're looking at airstrikes, you can guide those. And they -- airstrikes are actually planned a lot more in advance than what we're seeing on the ground. And once you introduce ground troops, they're going to be using artillery mortars, tank rounds, and they're not going to have the time to do the research that we would like them to do. What happens -- and I think has happened in the market exchange yesterday, the Israelis were taking incoming fire. They used their counterbattery radar to tell them where those rounds are coming from, and they send outgoing rounds right back at that location. Unfortunately, they're not as precise as they need to be. So you're going to encompass an area around your target. And that's where we get all of these civilian casualties. Now, how do you stop that? You can tell the Israelis not to respond, but that's not going to happen because the Israelis believe their soldiers in the field have to have the ability to respond immediately because, as you know, the Palestinians use the old shoot and scoot. They're going to launch their mortars and they're going to be out of there. So if you don't take immediate action, you lose the opportunity to get back at them.</s>SCIUTTO: Yes, a sad fact of urban warfare, but certainly part of a debate that's going to continue. Thanks very much to Barbara Starr, former Lieutenant Colonel Rick Francona. Now to our other top story of the day, the deadly Ebola epidemic. Two Americans infected with the virus may be brought back to the United States. How do you keep them safe and their plane crew from catching the disease? We're going to take a look at that right after this break.