Global News Podcast - Hamas releases the bodies of four Israelis

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

Hamas releases the bodies of four Israeli hostages who'd been held in Gaza. Also: the scammers working under duress in Myanmar

This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Paul Moss and at 1400 GMT on Thursday the 20th of February these are our main stories. Hamas has released the bodies of four Israelis. We look at what this means for the ongoing peace process. What chance of improved relations between Ukraine and the US as President Zelensky prepares to meet America's special envoy. How fog could be used as a source of water for parched cities? Also in this podcast, the former head of Spanish football is found guilty over kissing the

player Jenny Hemoso without consent. And many of those carrying out phone and email scams are themselves working under duress. We take a look. You will literally have anywhere from hundreds to thousands of people packed into these centres and they will be held in extremely harsh conditions, particularly if they are not able to meet the goals that are set to them by their captors. It was a macabre display. This morning amidst the bombed out ruins of Khan Yunis in Gaza, four black coffins were laid out on a specially constructed stage. Inside were the bodies of Israelis, ready to be returned as part of the ongoing peace deal. And behind these

coffins was a large caricature of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu depicted as Dracula with blood dripping from his fangs. The poster made a claim about how the hostages had died. The war criminal Netanyahu and his Nazi army killed them, it said, with missiles from Zionist warplanes. As we record this podcast the identities of the bodies haven't yet been confirmed. But it's thought they include 84-year-old Odette Lifshitz, a veteran journalist and peace activist, but also two children from the Bebas family kidnapped from their home near the Gaza border on October 7th, along with their mother Sheree. The previous release of living hostages has prompted celebrations in Israel, but today's handover has predictably been a very different affair, as I was told by Natalie Blenford,

a journalist who lives in Tel Aviv. Today the national mood is very muted, very, very sad. It's become a sort of macabre routine on a Saturday. You wake up, you switch on the news and you watch the hostages being released. But today, dead bodies in black coffins, but still in the middle of a propaganda ceremony, it's absolutely not what people were hoping for. And President Herzog just recently said, agony, pain, there are no words, in a message where he asked for forgiveness for the four slain Israeli hostages.

And I think that does accurately sum up the mood. Agony, pain. There are no words. People are very, very distressed. You mentioned the what you call propaganda effort of having these four coffins on the stage in Gaza. Have I got this right that this wasn't actually shown much on Israeli television? Yes, that's correct. So there was a sort of decision taken not to broadcast this because as the bodies have not been formally identified by Israel, we didn't quite know, the authorities here didn't know what they were receiving. We've been told there were four bodies, but actually there was no proof of who was inside. And because in the Jewish religion, there are various rituals that are followed when somebody dies to do with the

sanctification of human life and the soul and the spirit, there are sort of procedures that are followed. And I think it was thought that it would be inappropriate to show a handover ceremony where there wasn't the presence of the religious aspect to sanctify the people involved. So I think the decision was made not to show it. And also they knew that Hamas would claim it was Israel's fault and have propaganda banners and as such. So yeah, it wasn't shown on TV. There were ways to see it online, but not on national television. In any conflict, people do want the bodies of the dead returned to them. But I guess what you said about the particular rituals of the Jewish faith mean that

there was particular emphasis on getting these bodies returned, seen as crucial part of the peace process? Yes, there's an emphasis here on returning all hostages, the living for rehabilitation and the dead for a dignified burial. That is what the families want and there have been other bodies taken out of Gaza. The IDF have rescued some hostages who sadly had died and they brought them back. But because this was part of the deal, it's been orchestrated in a sort of different way. And I think there is a set, there will be a sense of closure for the families who receive back their

loved ones, but of course it's not the result they were hoping for. And the rest of the afternoon is going to be quite stressful because the bodies are now at a forensic institute called Abu Kabir in Tel Aviv, or they're certainly on their way there, and there will be several hours where they are undergoing forensic assessment and then we will know who was inside. So at the moment it's still not clear. And so it's just a terrible sense of loss, but also unknowing and it's extremely confusing for the families who all want their loved ones home, ideally alive. Natalie Blendford, you heard her there mentioning the reaction of Israel's President Isaac Herzog.

He issued a statement in response to the release of the bodies. We voiced it up and you can hear him striking a notably apologetic tone. On behalf of the State of Israel, I bow my head and ask for forgiveness. Forgiveness for not protecting you on that terrible day, forgiveness for not bringing you home safely. May their memory be a blessing." Those words inevitably raise the question of how soon the other hostages might be returned to Israel, those both living and dead. And that in turn depends on the course of the ongoing peace deal. By now Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were supposed to be discussing the second

phase of the agreement, but those discussions haven't even started. Indeed, some wonder whether they ever will. There are plenty of Israeli politicians who instead want to resume the bombing of Gaza along with further ground-based attacks. And according to our correspondent in Jerusalem, Sebastian Asher, those voices may be emboldened by the scenes Israelis have just witnessed. There are people, politicians to the right, particularly in the government, who on each one of these hostage handovers, but particularly today, particularly the moment when three of them emerged in really bad condition, have said that this is proof of what they've been arguing all along, that there should be a resumption of a war on Gaza until Hamas is

entirely wiped out. So this will further fuel that. But on the other side, you have the emotional wave of feeling from the hostage families first, and then many, many hundreds of thousands of people across Israel who feel their pain most strongly above all else, who will say that this is a sign that these hostage handovers must continue, that nothing must get in the way. We're coming near the end of the first phase. That ends next week. The talks on phase two haven't yet started. In that phase, all the remaining hostages alive and dead are due to be released. And the pressure from the hostage families, and as I say, I think probably from the majority of people in Israel

on the government, is not to do anything that would make the possibility of that happening one that won't happen, that they don't want anything to stand in the way. So the pressure on the government to engage with phase two to ensure that those hostages are released, I think that will build as well. Sebastian Asher, as we record this podcast, Ukraine's President Zelensky is due to sit down with the US envoy, Keith Kellogg. One can only wonder what the atmosphere will be as the meeting takes place after Mr. Kellogg's boss Donald Trump called Mr. Zelensky a dictator. And while the talk is a piece, Ukrainians fear it's Vladimir Putin who will effectively

decide the shape of any deal to end the war, even if Mr. Trump insists he's the one calling the shots. Of course, that leaves the question of what Russians think of Donald Trump and his promises. Our Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg, traveled to the city of Tver, 160 kilometers northwest of Moscow, to ask whether Russians believe that the US president, Donald Trump, really will help to stop the fighting.

Driving into Tver, the first thing I notice are the soldiers, or rather the pictures of them. They're everywhere, on billboards, the sides of buildings, at bus stops. Portraits with the words, hero of Russia, and posters of troops with Kalashnikov rifles, encouraging the public to love, defend and have pride in the motherland. In other words, to sign up and go and fight in Ukraine. But the front line is hundreds of miles away. And so even after three years of war, there are many people here, like Mikhail, a teacher, who find it easy not to think about the fighting.

Just look around. The cars are passing by and all the shops are open and no shelves are falling from anywhere. We are not panicking, we are not hearing any sirens wail. We do not, like, head straight, not to mention run towards any, like, evacuation points. We are just talking. But Anna thinks about the war. I don't want to run towards any evacuation points. We are just talking. But Anna thinks about the war. She tells me she knows a lot of people who went off to fight and who have never come back.

Larisa says she is for the special military operation and would herself volunteer. Clearly, she hasn't so far. She says she wants Ukraine's capitulation. The police turn up, and they want an explanation. What is a team from the BBC doing in this city? How long will you be here? We show them our documents, everything's in order, but they question our driver. They look inside our car and they ask me to make a statement.

I have to note everything down, the officer says. Suddenly a camera team from state television appears and starts filming us. We were just passing and spotted you, the reporter says. Where have you been so far? What have people been telling you? As you see, we have a free country, freedom of speech, no one gets in your way, do they? Well, I reply, apart from you and the police next to our car, eventually we're allowed to go. This little incident is no real surprise. Three years of war have fueled suspicion of the West

here. But might that change? After all, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are busy revamping U.S.-Russia relations. So what do people in Tver make of President Trump? Valya tells me that with all the talk of a possible Trump-Putin summit, she hopes for a positive result and that the fighting will end soon. But Mikhail, the teacher, isn't optimistic. Trump hasn't got any plan, unfortunately. He is an improviser. He doesn't know what he's going to do. My sympathies are with him.

But speaking about this particular episode, we are all in the dark, and Trump is in the dark himself. And yet, by the end of my trip to Tver, I can't help feeling that for much of the time, Russians too are in the dark about the war, about Ukraine and about the future. People express hopes, yes, but avoid predictions. Is this a sign of fatalism? Partly, but there's also here a deep sense of resignation, that the most important questions, like war and peace,

will be decided way above the heads of the people. Steve Rosenberg there. People don't usually have anything good to say about fog. It limits visibility and often comes with other unpleasant weather. But scientists now think that fog could be used as a source of water. The water could be extracted from fog and provided to cities which lack enough to drink. It's been tried in Chile with an experiment to use fog water for a

city on the edge of the Atacama desert. Our science correspondent Victoria Gill explained how it works. Fog water harvesting is what it sounds like, capturing water from clouds of fog. It's already in use and has been for decades, but on a small scale, mainly in rural settings. And it's actually really simple. You hang a fine mesh, usually a plastic mesh sheet, between two poles. The moisture laden fog cloud passes through the mesh, droplets of water form on it, and you collect that, pipe it away and store it. One of the biggest fog harvesting schemes is in Morocco, but it's also in use in coastal Peru, Mexico and Chile, where you get these big Pacific sea fogs that move onto the land.

And that's where a group of researchers have been looking at scaling it up in Chile. They say that large-scale fog harvesting could provide some of the driest cities in the world with drinking water. And they've demonstrated this in a study that's based on Alto Ospicio. That's a city of almost 150,000 people on the edge of the Atacama desert. Now, Alto Ospicio is a particularly special case when it comes to the need for water. It's in a very dry region, less than five millimeters of rain per year fall on average in that area, and many urban areas in northern Chile, including Alto Ospicio, get most of their water from underground aquifers, and there's a lot of demand on those aquifers, not just from cities but from

industry and mining too. So this research team that's led by scientists at Universidad Mayor in Santiago has carried out tests of fog harvesting systems and combined their results with satellite images and weather forecasting in Alto Ospicio. And what they've come up with is exactly where you should place large-scale fog harvesting setups and how much water they could be expected to collect on average every day in the city. The research has worked out that with 17,000 square meters of fog harvesting mesh erected in large areas in foggy hot spots around this desert city, which there is plenty of room for around Alto Espicio, you could provide enough drinking water for all of the urban slums in the city. They're now also working on a fog map of the entirety of Chile because they say that in places

with the right conditions, particularly where you have mountains that meet the ocean, we should be harvesting from the clouds to provide much needed clean water for people who need it. Victoria Gill. Still to come... Her new life is to be reefed off the coast of Florida. But to prepare for that, Okaloosa County will take the ship from the pier and take her down the east coast, tow her around the tip of Florida to Mobile, Alabama. The ocean liner destined to become an underwater reef.

an underwater reef. It's rare that you get such an iconic image from football that takes place off the pitch, but that must be said of the moment when Luis Rubiales held the head of his Spanish star player Jenny Hemoso, planting a kiss on her lips after her team prepared to lift the World Cup in 2023. She consented, Mr Robiales insisted, but that plea does not seem to have been accepted by the court. He's been ordered to pay a substantial fine. The BBC's Guy Hedgeco is in Madrid from where he's been following the case.

I asked him how he thought the verdict would be greeted. I think we can expect perhaps a divided response to this because on the one hand Mr. Roubialis has been found guilty of sexual assault but the judge has only given given him a fine he hasn't given him the jail sentence that the prosecutor was calling for a one-year jail sentence he has to pay an 11,000 euro fine he has to stay away from Jenny and Mosso at least 200 meters away from Jenny and Mosso for at least 200 meters away from Genia and Mosso for the next year. We don't know what the response is going to be, but I think that there will certainly be people who are unhappy with it because they feel it's too harsh. There will be

other people who feel that the 11,000 euro fine is not enough, but this is a case which has kept Spain absolutely captivated for months now. There were other charges faced by Luis Rubiales and others with him that they had attempted to coerce Jenny Hemosa into dropping the allegation that the kiss was forced on her. Do we know what's happened about those allegations? Yes. Mr Rubiales and the other three co-defendants who were accused of coercion have all been absolved of that charge. So although Mr. Rubiales has been found guilty of sexual assault, he's not been found guilty of coercion. And that was a very serious charge because the prosecutor was

calling for Mr. Rubiales and each of the others facing that charge to be given jail sentences of one and a half years. So they have been absolved of that charge but Mr Rubiales is facing this charge. He has been found guilty of the charge of sexual assault. Briefly Guy, when this happened it was considered to have cast a sort of pall over the world of Spanish football and over that victory by the women's team. Is it still something that's haunting Spanish football or have people moved on from there? I think when you talk to people in women's football they do want to move on from this and you know when it happened it really did cast a shadow over the celebrations of the World Cup win

in 2023. There is a feeling that this court case could be the end of the saga which has sort of dragged on and on for a year and a half, that the legal phase of all of this could be the end of the saga which has sort of dragged on and on for a year and a half that the legal phase of all of this could be the end of it and it will be time to move on after this. Guy Hitchco introducing public spending cuts is rarely a way for any government to endear itself to voters. Certainly that applies to Indonesia where the new president is trying to trim his country's budget but seems to have provoked widespread anger along the way with protesters once again on Thursday taking to the streets. Rory Gallimore has this report. At 4pm each day it's made clear to civil servants in the capital Jakarta that it's time to go home.

The lights go out and the whir of the air conditioning falls silent. Some workers have complained of having to finish projects at dimly lit desks in eerily empty offices. Other cuts have targeted travel expenses, the use of lifts in buildings, even stationary supplies. They're all part of a drive to fund President Prabowo Subianto's ambitious campaign pledges. Danto's ambitious campaign pledges. He came to office four months ago, promising an era of a golden Indonesia. Now protests are spreading under a separate banner, Dark Indonesia. The demonstrators, led by students, say this push for austerity is damaging. They have a wide range of complaints about what they see as government incompetence,

but have been particularly angered by the president's free meal programme. The multi-billion dollar initiative is meant to tackle malnutrition in children and pregnant women. Critics agree it's a worthwhile goal, but argue it's not being done properly and vital funds are being taken away from health and education departments. Recent opinion polls show Mr Prabowo remains popular among many Indonesians. Some surveys put his approval rating at nearly 80%, suggesting many share his vision of a bright future, even if it means turning off the lights.

Rory Gallimore, it's very possible that you will at some point have received a phone call, a text or an email, offering you perhaps a special deal on some purchase or maybe a financial service. Either way, the approach is a scam. If you were unfortunate enough to forfeit, you might find your bank account emptied or at the very least your phone or computer hacked. What you may not realise is that many of the people carrying out these scams are working under duress, many of them in South East Asia, many of them from China originally. The United Nations High Commission for Human Rights has been investigating this crime. The chief of its Myanmar team, James Roadhaver, described what they discovered.

You will literally have anywhere from hundreds to thousands of people packed into these centres and they will be held in extremely harsh conditions, particularly if they are not able to meet the goals that are set to them by their captors. We have many reports of individuals being beaten, being subjected to sexual exploitation, even electrocuted in some cases. Thursday saw hundreds of people brought out of Myanmar, where they'd been forced to work in one of the many scam centers there.

They were taken across the border to Thailand, where an initial batch were immediately flown home. As our correspondent in Bangkok, Jonathan Head, told me. The first 100 went off this morning in two chartered Chinese airliners. So they're all Chinese and the Thais have made a somewhat unusual decision to let the Chinese repatriate them straight from Thailand. Some Thai politicians have criticised this saying, you know, we need to assess what they got through Thailand illegally to get to these places, why aren't we questioning them? So it's 50 people per airliner, 100 policemen, so two Chinese police officers for each Chinese person.

That gives you a sense about how China views these people. Now, I mean, despite what human rights activists say, there are some appalling abuses that go on. Quite a lot of people who go to these scam centers do go voluntarily and work there voluntarily and China is saying they will do an assessment when they get them back to China and work out who was trafficked, who's a victim and who went voluntarily. If they did, they will be prosecuted in China. From what we know, the vast majority do get prosecuted in China. They do not get treated as victims. There's another two aircraft, I think three in total have gone now, and one last one is due to go, so that'll be 200 today. We're expecting a total of at least 600 over the next three days. These

are all people who have been handed over by the armed groups that control the territory on the Myanmar side of the border and who have done, effectively done deals with the scammers. They make money from this to let them operate there. And because of the pressure they've been put under in the last few weeks by Thailand and by China, they're now handing them over in large numbers. The ones who are Chinese are being sent straight back to China. And Jonathan, why is it that South East Asia in general has become such a focus for these scam centres? I mean, I know there are large numbers of them in Cambodia as well. Essentially, it's because law enforcement is very weak, bribery is common. It's very easy for the scammers to find space to operate in this region. China is extremely strict about clamping down,

gambling is not legal there, and it has an extremely effective surveillance state. Anybody who's been found to have committed a crime in the past will be constantly monitored. They may not be able to function at all, you know, their bank accounts can be shut down. It's much easier for them to operate in this region. Obviously when you get to Myanmar, we're talking about operating in contested war zones, in areas where there's no economy to speak of. They found that's the easiest place of all. All they need to do is do a deal with whoever the local warlord is, or sometimes in the past, it was the Myanmar military, when they control these areas and they're allowed to do pretty much whatever they like.

That is changing. China is determined to try and impose some kind of order and shut this down. I'm not convinced they'll be able to stamp it out completely, such as the state of lawlessness here. Jonathan Head. Once upon a time, the SS United States was a world record holding ocean liner, the fastest to cross the Atlantic back in 1951. But now the ship's beginning a very different kind of voyage, heading towards the Florida coast, where it will be deliberately sunk.

The idea is for it to become the world's largest artificial reef, part of a $10 million project, which aims to support marine life and attract divers and fishermen. Warren Jones is on the board of directors for the SS United States Conservancy. He spoke about these plans for the future and also about the ship's distinguished history. She carried four US presidents, over a million passengers, diplomats. She really was an ambassador to the world for the United States. American servicemen and service women

traveled on her to Europe and back. I was lucky to be aboard her in 1961, just a wee lad of eight years old, and crossed to Europe, and a year later came back on the SS United States and it was an unforgettable experience. Her new life is to be reefed off the coast of Florida, but to prepare for that, Okaloosa County will take the ship from the pier today and take her down the East Coast tow her around the tip of Florida to Mobile, Alabama. And there the remediation process will start to remove any hazardous materials

that might remain on board to remove our lead paint and prepare for the reefing about a year from now. Warren Jones. And that's all from us for now, but there'll be a new edition of the Global News podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email. The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag globalnewspod. This edition was mixed by Ben Martin and the producer was Terry Egan.

The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Paul Moss. Until next time, goodbye.