Anderson Cooper faced a scary scenario live on air.
The CNN correspondent was broadcasting from Tel Aviv, Israel, alongside reporters Clarissa Ward and Jeremy Diamond around 3 a.m. local time on June 23 when an alarm went off indicating a possible incoming missile attack.
As Ward told cameras, “I should just say that we're now hearing an alert.”
At which time Cooper pulled out his phone, noting, “These are the alerts that go out on all of our phones when you’re in Israel.”
“It's a 10-minute warning of incoming missiles, or something incoming from Iran,” he continued. “So now the location we're in has a verbal alarm telling people to go down into bomb shelter. So we have about a 10-minute window to get down into a bomb shelter, and we'll continue to try to broadcast from that that bomb shelter.”
After swapping microphones the trio begin to head inside and down into a protected area.
“You can hear sirens going off,” Cooper continued as they moved. “This is from the hotel. They're wanting all the hotel guests to go down. This is the first time today that we have had an alarm like this.”
As the team headed to the building’s shelter, they did temporarily lose signal—during which time senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes stepped in from Washington, D.C.—before the broadcast returned.
The team could be seen safely heading into a shelter behind orange, wrought-iron gates while Cooper noted, “It is a luxury to have a 10-minute warning, obviously, in a situation like this.”
As an on-the-ground correspondent, Cooper is not unfamiliar with risk.
Last October, the 58-year-old was struck in the head by an object during a live broadcast from Florida while reporting on Hurricane Milton.
“If you look at the ground—whoa!” Cooper said before being interrupted by an object flying into the shot and hitting him in the head. “That wasn’t good. We’ll probably go inside shortly.”
Two months later, the correspondent revealed what exactly the object had been.
“I got hit by something, which I gotta say, I thought I had accomplished some things in my career, I thought that I had gotten some things of note or memorable things,” Cooper said during a December appearance The Late Show With Stephen Colbert with Andy Cohen. ““There were more articles where like the headline was ‘Anderson Cooper gets hit in the head by debris. It was a piece of Styrofoam.”
He continued, “I just want to point out and none of these hundreds of articles said it was Styrofoam.”