60 Minutes - 01/12/2025: The Fires, The FBI Director, The Gaza Policy

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

Bill Whitaker covers the catastrophic Los Angeles fires from the ground and the air. As Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray prepares to step down before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, correspondent Scott Pelley speaks with him for his only broadcast exit interview. Wray, whom Trump nominated in 2017, reflected on his decision to depart early, the Bureau's future, and the threats America faces. Former State Department officials criticize the U.S. handling of the war in Gaza. Officials told Cecilia Vega that U.S. policy runs counter to American values and threatens national security. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Oh, my God. My house is so weird. The FBI director is being forced out by President-elect Trump. Christopher Wray spoke with us about imminent security threats most Americans don't know about and the investigations that made Trump and Biden livid. Investigations have to be driven by the facts and the law, not by the outcome somebody wants it to have. You know, truth is truth, not necessarily what either side wants it to be.

Tonight, meet the veteran State Department officials who quit their jobs over the U.S. government's support of Israel's war in Gaza. You believe that this has put a target on America's back, you've said. A hundred percent. Those are strong words. Yes. I don't say them lightly. I'm Leslie Stahl.

I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. Tonight, Bill Whitaker is covering the historic L.A. wildfires from the air and from the ground,

starting in Altadena, California. The Eaton Fire burst out of the San Gabriel Mountains above Altadena Tuesday night. It has since devoured more than 7,000 homes and structures in this tight-knit, diverse community, making it one of the most savage firestorms in Los Angeles County's history. The death toll is rising. Wildfires are a fact of life here, but nothing prepared people for destruction on this scale. Rows of chimneys now stand like tombstones, towering palm trees like burned matchsticks. We found fire crews still working to contain the inferno and a dazed Calvin

family sifting through the ruins of their homes and their lives. This is unreal. Oh my god. My house is in the inferno. Zaire Calvin and his family have called Altadena home for three generations. I just wonder if anything's left. The rocking chair for the baby. I literally just built all of this.

Calvin, a high school football coach, has lived on this block his whole life. He has seen a number of wildfires flare up in the foothills, but never in his 47 years had he seen anything like the firestorm that swept off the mountain this past Tuesday. And out of nowhere, you see the fire appear across Lake Street, and you can see it going up the mountain on our side within an hour.

For it to move that quickly and that rapidly, and for it to shift paths that fast was insane. Dr. Dean is gone, bro, it's over. His son, Jameer, told us the winds kicked up and power went down across the neighborhood. It was like a hurricane, just fire, no water, but like 80 miles an hour plus. It felt surreal. Was the fire like racing down the hill at that point? Yeah. That's what's scary

about this. It just was shooting. Like a blowtorch? Like a blowtorch. It was literally just shooting off of the mountain. It felt like you're being attacked by a storm. Yeah. As the fire bore down on them, Zaire put his wife, baby, and mother into the car. Jameer grabbed what he could. I'm lucky to even have the little bag of clothes that I have left, but as far as trophies, memories, diplomas, everything else just went up in flames. My mom just said it to me.

She's like, everything's gone? You mean the books that we have? Like, nothing? I'm just like, Mom, it's all gone. All of it. Every memory, all those things are gone. We have whatever's left in our heads to rebuild with. All of it's gone. This fire in Altadena was just one of eight destructive wildfires that lay siege to Los Angeles this past week. With almost no rain for eight months, hillsides and backyards were bone dry, primed to burn. Investigators are still trying to determine how the fires started. But whipped by ferocious Santa Ana winds, those blazes roared down city streets and spread like a deadly virus. No place seemed immune.

Neighborhoods not engulfed in flames were blanketed by smoke and ash. Wealth and status offered no protection. Affluent Pacific Palisades was first to fall. Thousands of structures were destroyed. Thousands of people were forced to flee. The conditions that night were unbearable. It was a devil wind that came out. You know, that extreme Santa Ana wind condition. Anthony Maroney is chief of the L.A. County Fire Department,

one of the officials overseeing the firefight. He told us the devil winds hurled embers far ahead of the fire, like snowfall from hell. Embers like this are transported in the smoke column and pushed downwind. Something as big as this? Or bigger. So this is being blown by the winds way beyond. And thousands of burning embers this size and bigger being transported by that wind

and that smoke column. Chief Maroney says fires normally run uphill. But with these winds, it was pushed downhill into these neighborhoods. And sending these embers blocks, if not miles, ahead. And the embers were being generated not only by the brush on the hillsides, but by the homes that are burning.

When the life-threatening winds started building, Maroney told us he called up extra crews and engines. But the fires grew too big too fast. Demand for water overburdened the system. Water pressure dropped and fire hoses ran dry while the fires raged. We hear that people were complaining that there wasn't enough water or wasn't enough water pressure. Was that a factor? So the water system was stretched.

Metropolitan water systems are not designed to sustain a firefight like this. Your viewers can't expect a municipal water system to supply enough firefighting water to extinguish every one of these houses. That's unrealistic. Did you have enough resources? Did you have enough firefighters? Did you have enough fire engines?

No. And there's not enough fire engines for this. Ordinarily, for one house like this, you might have three or four or five? Three or four fire engines. We think we've lost 8,000 structures so times three fire engines each that requires 26,000 fire engines. I don't think the state of California has 26,000 fire engines. That could be at one place right now. You, your firefighters, your resources, everything. Overwhelmed. Absolutely overwhelmed.

Mother Nature owned us. Owned us those two days. Neighboring Orange County Fire Chief Brian Fennessy has been fighting wildfires for almost five decades. He dispatched hundreds of firefighters to help Chief Maroney and beleaguered crews across L.A. One of the most powerful tools in their arsenal? This fleet of high-tech choppers that can fight fires 24-7, dropping up to 3,000 gallons of water each pass.

But with Santa Ana winds gusting near 100 miles per hour, the choppers were grounded during crucial early hours. The fires that they experienced this week were unstoppable. Unstoppable. Unstoppable. What's it like for you, a firefighter, to have to say words like that? It makes me feel bad, right? I mean, that's not in our nature. I mean, we're fixers. That is the mindset. We're going to put our lives on the line. We're going to give a lot to save a lot. So when you have a fire, like you say, that's unstoppable,

man, that is, it's uncomfortable. It's very uncomfortable. After an uncomfortable 27-hour delay, the choppers were able to get back into the fight when the winds died down. Hop on it. Thank you. Thursday, Chief Fennessy let us join a reconnaissance flight so we could see the destruction from above. Air attack, copter 76 on air tactics. We flew over the fire zones. We have active fire line all the way up towards the communication towers. above. We flew over the fire zones and saw an ashen checkerboard of devastation stretched below us for miles at Pacific Palisades. When we flew over Altadena, where Chief Fennessy grew up, he found it hard to get his bearings. Oh, my goodness. It really wiped it out, man. Oh, wow.

Holy crud. So the Rose Bowl's just down. Yeah. Kind of orient you, kind of see the Rose Bowl from here. I had no idea it extended this far. You can see charred buildings, warehouses. Everything gone. Gone, yeah.

In the early morning hours after the Altadena fire erupted, Chief Fennessey couldn't reach his brother. Although it was out of his jurisdiction, he drove up from Orange County. Here's Tony's house. A little nightmare. When he learned his brother was safe, he went to check on his longtime friend, Tony Goss, and this is what he found. I'm soOSS, I'm so sorry, Tony. Oh, my God, brother. This place was glowing. It was completely hot. There was a gas main over here that was venting, and so it was like a jet engine. It was pretty loud. Tony's still in his pajamas. He looks like a firefighter. His face is, you know, black from all the soot. And he's

walking around, you know, I don't know if you remember this, you walk around kind of talking to yourself. Goss had tried to save his home armed with just a garden hose, but the fire was too fierce. When we met him, he was still in disbelief that he'd been forced to walk away from his family home of more than 60 years. But this was gone. I knew it was time to leave. So I pulled out and all my neighbors were right there. I said, no, it's time. I don't need to die today. Chief Fennessy then went down the road to his brother's house. The block was in flames. He discovered the gas meter at the house next door was surrounded by fire and about to ignite.

And, he said, there was no water. So I needed to cool this down. So Fennessy got creative. I ended up forcing entry through the front door and went through the house, you know, into the kitchen looking for bottled water, anything that I could use. And so I ended up finding a carton of milk and I think there were a couple beers or sodas,

whatever the heck they were, and came out here and really, literally had to kind of go in there under the heat, wet it, and then get out because it was just, this house was just burning. And had to do that a few times till it was done. Bet you've never saved a house with milk before. No. To do nothing means the home's going to be lost.

Yeah. And in this case, yeah, you know, a little bit of milk and a couple beers really saved the day. The houses he fought to save are the only two left standing on the block. The devil winds are forecast to intensify again tomorrow through Wednesday. Evacuation orders have been expanded.

The city remains on edge. These fires are going to be an impact, you know, to the community, families, people, for many, many years to come. This is one of those fires, if not the fire, that they're going to be telling their grandchildren about. This is just rubble. What is this? In the chaos of evacuating his baby and elderly mother to safety,

Zaire Calvin got separated from his sister Evelyn. She lived next door. Everybody's yelling, get out. I'm thinking that she's getting out. And the next day after the storm, I come back and her car is still there. So at that point in my brain, my soul is shaking. He and his cousin found Evelyn's remains in the rubble. Evelyn, why didn't you leave? Zaire's grief is shared. Five Calvin family members lived on this block.

Four lost their houses. But they're trying to hold on to the hope that they can rebuild their beloved community. Everyone's in the same boat. Like, everybody you would depend on, everybody you would go to, they're all homeless also. They just lost everything. They've lost all the memories, all the joy, everything that we've built together in this neighborhood we all lost together. And I hate it. I hate it because I love Altadena.

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the political investigations. But first, given the recent attacks in Las Vegas and New Orleans, we started with perhaps a more urgent question. What is the greatest threat facing the incoming Trump administration? Well, the greatest long-term threat facing our country, in my view, is represented by the People's Republic of China, the Chinese government, which I consider to be the defining threat of our generation. What has the FBI found about Chinese penetration of U.S. cyber and infrastructure? China's cyber program is by far and away the world's largest, bigger than

that of every major nation combined, and has stolen more of Americans' personal and corporate data than that of every nation, big or small combined. But even beyond the cyber theft, there's another part of the Chinese cyber threat that I think has not gotten the attention publicly that it, I think, desperately deserves. And that is Chinese government's pre-positioning on American civilian critical infrastructure to lie in wait on those networks, to be in a position to wreak havoc and can inflict real-world harm at a time and place of their choosing. The Chinese have already insinuated malware into critical American infrastructure. That's correct.

Like what? Things like water treatment plants. We're talking about transportation systems. We're talking about targeting of our energy sector, the electric grid, natural gas pipelines. And recently, we've seen targeting of our telecommunications system. Telecommunications, including intercepts at high levels. They have been listening to the telephone calls of people in the United States government.

Some people, we believe that they have collected their content, the actual communications of those people. Wray wouldn't say it, but we have confirmed China-gathered communications of U.S. national security officials, the Kamala Harris campaign, and Donald Trump himself. It's part of a world of trouble, including the chaos in the Middle East, spawning new threats of terror. There was a guy, a Pakistani citizen, just a few months ago who we worked with our Canadian partners to arrest. This guy was trying to get into the U.S., to get to New York City, to conduct a mass shooting at a Jewish center in Brooklyn.

And in his words, not my words, his words, he wanted to conduct the largest attack in the U.S. since 9-11. So what I would say to the American people is that when you think these things are happening half a world away, it's like that little inscription on your mirror in your car. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. What is the latest on the terrorist in New Orleans? It's pretty clear so far that this is a guy who was radicalized online and who was determined to try to murder as many innocent people as he could in the name

of ISIS. Was he in touch with ISIS directly or just inspired from afar? The investigation is very much ongoing, but what I can say right now is that he appears to have been inspired from afar by ISIS. And it is, in many ways, the most challenging type of terrorist threat we face. You're talking about guys like this who radicalized not in years, but in weeks, and whose method of attack is still very deadly, but fairly crude. And if you think about that old saying about connecting the dots, there are not a lot of dots out there to connect, and there's very little time in which to connect. If it's such a dangerous time, why resign? Well, my decision to retire from the FBI, I have to tell you, was one of the hardest decisions I've

ever had to make. I care deeply, deeply about the FBI, about our mission, and in particular about our people. But, you know, the president-elect had made clear that he intended to make a change, and the law is that that is something he's able to do for any reason or no reason at all. My conclusion was that the thing that was best for the Bureau was to try to do this in an orderly way, to not thrust the FBI deeper into the fray. The fray is all 58-year-old Christopher Wray has known since he was appointed by President Trump. It was 2017. Trump fired FBI Director James Comey as the FBI investigated whether Trump campaign associates schemed with Russia to sway the 2016 election. Wray had deep experience,

Yale Law, a Justice Department official on 9-11, and years in private practice. But Trump soured on Ray after the FBI investigated the alleged plot to overthrow the 2020 election. Our job as investigators at the FBI is to follow the facts wherever they lead, no matter who likes it. And I add that last part because one of the things that I've seen over my seven and a half years as FBI director is that people often claim to be very interested in independence and objectivity until independence and objectivity lead to an outcome they don't like. You know, truth is truth, not necessarily what either side wants it to be. And ultimately, all we can do at the FBI is make sure that we stay focused on doing the work in the right way, following our rules and not letting

preferences, partisan or otherwise, drive or taint the approach. And were those the rules followed in starting the investigations against the president-elect? We tried very hard to make sure that we've stayed faithful to those principles and those rules in every investigation that I can think of that's been occurring on my watch. Trump is also livid about the FBI search in 2022 for classified files at his home. A Trump lawyer certified that all classified papers had been returned to the government, but the FBI said later it found 72 documents marked top secret or secret, at least one about U.S. military strength. I want to be careful not to discuss too many of the specifics of an investigation, but what I can

tell you is that part of the FBI's job is to safeguard classified information. And when we learn that information, classified material, is not being properly stored, we have a duty to act. And I can tell you that in investigations like this one, a search warrant is not, and here was not, anybody's first choice. We always try to pursue, invariably try to pursue, the least intrusive means, first trying to get the information back voluntarily, then with a subpoena. And only if, after all that, we learn that the agents haven't

been given all of the classified material, and in fact, those efforts have been frustrated, even obstructed, then our agents are left with no choice but to go to a federal judge, make a probable cause showing, and get a search warrant. And that's what happened here. What influence did the Biden White House have on any of these Trump investigations? I haven't had any interaction with the Biden White House about investigations into the former president. Anybody at the FBI?

Not to my knowledge. Wray's FBI also investigated President Biden for keeping classified documents and separately investigated Biden's son, Hunter, who was convicted on gun and tax charges. Biden pardoned his son last month calling the investigation raw politics. But you're being criticized by a Democratic president and a Republican president. What

does that tell you? This is a hard job. You're inevitably going to make different people angry, often very powerful people. But part of the essence of the rule of law is to make sure that facts and the law and proper predication drive investigations, not who's in power, not who wants it to be so or not so. Christopher Wray oversaw the largest case in FBI history, the attack on the Capitol in 2021. President-elect Trump has vowed to pardon many of the 1,500 people who were charged. I do think it's important to step back and remember that we're talking about hundreds of people who are convicted, most of them pled guilty, of serious federal crimes. Heck, I think 170 or so of them pled guilty to assaulting law enforcement, dozens of them with dangerous or deadly weapons.

And there's a whole bunch that were convicted of seditious conspiracy. We had a case in Tennessee just a couple months ago where a jury convicted a January 6th defendant who had actually doubled down on his crimes by putting together a kill list to murder FBI agents. Now, where I come from, violence against law enforcement, threats against law enforcement, is serious business and totally unacceptable. Trump is nominating for FBI Director Kash Patel, who must still be confirmed by the Senate. Patel served in national security roles in Trump's first administration. This is Patel outside the 2024 Republican National Convention. And Donald Trump is a warrior titan.

He demolishes government gangsters. He demolishes the deep state. He wrecks the fake news and destroys the radicalized form of government. That is only something that a warrior titan can do. In 2022, Patel wrote a children's book in which an all-seeing wizard named Cash protects King Donald. In 2023, Patel wrote an adult book naming officials he considers corrupt. He calls you a government gangster. Are you concerned that they would turn the FBI on you? You know, I'm not going to weigh in on specific people or their rhetoric.

From where I sit, facts and the law drive investigations, not politics or partisan preferences. The president-elect weighed in, too, writing that Wray's resignation was a great day for America. illegally raided my home without cause and said that Ray had done everything to interfere with the success and future of America. He's saying that Christopher Ray is corrupt, out to sabotage the country. Listen, I'm accustomed to people expressing all sorts of opinions about me, just like about everything else. I can tell you that I have been my whole life, my whole adult life, a conservative Republican. More importantly, a strict, by-the-book law enforcement professional. I do take very seriously attacks against our people in the FBI. And I will tell you that the FBI that I see every single day is 38,000 career law enforcement professionals.

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surpassed 70,000 people. The war has led to charges of genocide against Israel and has been fueled by American weapons and billions of taxpayer dollars. Tonight, you will see graphic images from inside Gaza. You will also hear from State Department officials who quit their jobs and their concerns about how far Washington is willing to go to support an ally who they say has conducted a war that runs counter to American values and threatens national security. This is the scene filmed in May by CBS News in Gaza. Children on top of rubble, playing with ammunition casings. The same casings used to prop up these tent cities.

A close look reveals where they come from. Printed on the side, USA, DOD for Department of Defense. Across this now decimated 25-mile-long strip of land, America's stamp is everywhere. What is happening in Gaza would not be able to happen without U.S. arms. That's without a doubt. Hala Rarit was an American diplomat who spent nearly two decades posted in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where she worked on human rights and counterterrorism. She was stationed in Dubai on October 7th, where part of her job was to monitor Arab press and social media to document how America's role in the war was perceived in the Middle East.

We've obtained daily reports Rarit sent to senior leadership in Washington containing gruesome images and her warnings. I would show the complicity that was indisputable. Fragments of U.S. bombs next to massacres of mostly children, and that's the devastation. It's been overwhelmingly children. When you tried to speak out,

vocalize what you saw happening in Gaza, you feel like you were told to shut up. Yes. I would show images of children that were starved to death. In one incident, I was basically berated, don't put that image in there. We don't want to see it. We don't want to see that the children are starving to death.

Who told you that? A colleague. A superior? Yeah. I was told the contrary by others. Keep them in. We need to see it. Three months into the war, Rarit says she was told her reports were no longer needed. She resigned last April. After October 7th, President Biden became the first U.S. leader to visit Israel during wartime, reiterating America's unwavering support. DONALD TRUMP, President of the United States, I come to Israel with a single message. You're not alone.

AMNA NAWAZ, The U.S. has sent $18 billion in American military assistance to Israel since the war began, largely in the form of taxpayer-funded weapons. Most of the bombs come from America, most of the technology comes from America, and all of the fighter jets, all of Israel's fixed-wing fleet, comes from America. Josh Paul spent 11 years as a director in the State Department's Bureau of Political Military Affairs,

one of the officials in charge of signing off on major weapons deals to U.S. allies. There is a linkage between every single bomb that is dropped in Gaza and the U.S. because every single bomb that is dropped is dropped from an American-made plane. These Israeli airstrikes, you could say, are made in America. They are. Ten days after the October 7th attacks, Paul became the first person in the Biden administration to publicly resign in protest. After October 7th, there was no space for debate or discussion.

I was part of email chains where there were very clear directions saying, here are the latest requests from Israel. These need to be approved by 3 p.m. Expedited. Correct. Where were these orders to greenlight weapons transfers coming from? How high up did this go? This came from the president, from the secretary, and from those around them.

There are people who might argue that this isn't a time for debate, particularly in those immediate days in the aftermath of October 7th. I would argue exactly the opposite. I think the moment of October 7th was a moment of incredible worldwide solidarity with Israel. And had Israel leveraged that moment to press for a real, just, and lasting peace, I think we would be in a very different place now in which Israel would not be facing this increasing isolation around the world and in which its hostages would be free. Among the weapons Israel requested from the United States, 2,000-pound bombs, one of the most powerful in the U.S. arsenal,

typically used to destroy large targets like weapons depots. Nearly three weeks after the October 7th attacks, the Israeli military posted a video on social media of an airstrike in Gaza City, saying it targeted a Hamas tunnel. More than 100 people were also killed, including 81 women and children, according to Air Wars, a British non-profit that monitors civilian harm in conflict. This is what the neighborhood looked like before the strike. And this is the aftermath. Several sources we spoke to say Israel likely used multiple 2,000-pound American bombs. Two months later, President Biden warned that Israel was losing support

for what he called indiscriminate bombing. Last May, he halted a shipment of the 2,000-pound bombs. The Israelis were using those bombs in some instances to target one or two individuals in densely packed areas. And in enough instances, we saw that was in question how Israel was using it, and those weapons were suspended. Andrew Miller was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs. He resigned last June, not in protest, but because he said he wanted to spend more time with his family. Miller has since become the highest-ranking Biden administration official to go public with his concerns about

the U.S. role in the war. Did the U.S. ever say to Israel, we support you, but these are our red lines. We are not going to support certain things. There were conversations from the earliest days about U.S. desires and expectations for what Israel would do, but they weren't defined as a redline. The United States has supplied billions of dollars in weapons to Israel. You're saying the government did that without setting any red lines as to how those weapons would be used? I'm unaware of any red lines being imposed beyond the normal language about complying with international law, international humanitarian law, the law of armed conflict.

What's the message the U.S. has sent to the Netanyahu government? I believe the message that Prime Minister Netanyahu received is that he was the one in the driver's seat and he was controlling this and U.S. support was going to be there, and he could take it for granted. The push is if the U.S. stops supplying these weapons to its ally, that our own adversaries would not only go after that ally, it would make the region significantly less safe. There is a danger that if the U.S. was not providing support to Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran would see that as an opportunity to go after Israel. However, we could have said we are taking this step because we believe this class of weapons is being used inappropriately. But if you use this moment to accelerate your attacks against Israel, then we are going to immediately lift our prohibition. In May, the State Department issued a report saying it is reasonable to assess that Israel

may have used American weapons in violation of international law. But it also said it could not definitively connect American weapons to specific cases. Andrew Miller said the investigation relied heavily on Israel for answers. It is difficult to acquire that information in an active combat zone, but I would also say we didn't exactly work very hard to try to acquire the information. Does Israel get the benefit of the doubt from the United States when other allies might not? Yes, I think it's fair to say Israel does get the benefit of the doubt. There is a deference to Israeli accounts of what's taking place. U.S. law prohibits military assistance from being sent to countries that restrict American aid like food and medicine.

Experts who track aid, including from multiple international organizations and the State Department itself, have found that Israel has continually blocked aid to the people of Gaza. We asked Brett McGurk, White House coordinator for the Middle East and one of President Biden's closest advisors, for an interview. He declined our request. But a senior White House official told us that government lawyers have not determined that Israel has violated the laws of armed conflict and therefore American weapons have continued to flow. The official said Hamas could end the war by returning the hostages. The belief here in the White House is that cutting off weapons would lead

to an even longer, deadlier conflict, and that it is America's military support and diplomacy that has prevented a wider war in the Middle East. But the director of the FBI told Congress the war in Gaza has raised the threat of a terror attack at home. We've seen the threat from foreign terrorists rise to a whole other level after October 7th. The acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Brett Holmgren, told 60 Minutes that anti-American sentiment driven by the war in Gaza is at a level not seen since the Iraq war, and that groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS are recruiting on that sentiment, issuing the most specific calls for attacks on America in years. The level of anger throughout the Arab world, and I'll say beyond the Arab world, is palpable. Protests began erupting in the Arab world, which I was also documenting, with people burning American flags. This is very significant because we worked so hard after the war on terror to strengthen ties with the Arab world.

You believe that this has put a target on America's back, you've said. 100%. Those are strong words. Yes. I don't say them lightly. And I say it as someone that myself has survived two terrorist attacks. My first assignment was in the U.S. Embassy in Yemen. I survived a mortar attack. I say it as someone who has worked intensely on these issues and has intensely monitored the region for two decades.

Multiple diplomats we spoke with say the U.S. policy on Gaza has led to widespread dissent at the State Department. A rarely used method of sending cables to the Secretary of State, created during the Vietnam War so employees could voice objection, has received a record number of submissions over Gaza. Thirteen officials, including from the State Department, White House, and Army, have publicly resigned in protest. What was the final straw that led you to resign? I'll point out one moment that broke me.

I used to put a lot of images of the children after they were killed. But this one, um, sorry. It still haunts you. Yeah. One Pan-Arab channel one day did a report on a little girl that had been killed in an airstrike, but they put a picture of the little girl when she was alive. She has her princess dress, and she's in the picture waving her wand with a huge, beautiful smile.

And, you know, I saw my child in that child. Her name was Sana Alfara. She is one of thousands of children killed so far in Gaza. How does this end? When Israel says it's over, absent intervention from the United States or for someone else to compel or to force a decision, it ends when Netanyahu says it's over.

Now, the last minute of 60 Minutes. In the shadow of Hollywood, a disaster is unfolding that would rival anything you've seen on the big screen. Deadly wildfires destroying thousands of homes in Los Angeles County. If you've ever imagined the end of the world, it probably looked like this. And for many, it is the end of the world, as they've known it. Everything they worked for, everything they owned, reduced to ashes. But in this tragedy, we have also seen images that give us hope and pride and gratitude. Neighbors helping neighbors. Heroes willing to walk through fire for strangers. The worst of nature bringing out the best of humankind. I'm Scott Pelley for 60 Minutes. Good night.