Global News Podcast - Iran holds state funeral for military leaders killed in Israel conflict

Episode Date: June 29, 2025

A state funeral has been held in Iran for military commanders and nuclear scientists, killed during the 12-day conflict with Israel. Also: Budapest Pride march draws huge crowds in defiance of Orban legal threats.

This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Jackie Leonard and in the early hours of Sunday the 29th of June these are our main stories. Iran has held a major state funeral in Tehran for senior Iranian military commanders and nuclear scientists assassinated by Israel earlier this month. Israel's military says it's killed one of the founding members of Hamas in Gaza and hundreds of thousands of people have defied a ban by the Hungarian government to take part

in an LGBT Pride march in the capital Budapest. Also in this podcast. Now I can send as many messages as I want via a platform like WhatsApp, and the line breaks every single time I enter effectively replace the full stops. The way texting is changing among the generations. Iran's president has thanked Iranians

for attending Saturday's state funeral in Tehran for the top commanders and nuclear scientists assassinated in Israeli strikes earlier this month. Masoud Peseshkian said the voice of our unity reached the world. Moaners dressed in black appeared both grief-stricken and defiant, chanting slogans, waving Iranian flags, and they held portraits of the 60 who were killed. The country's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did not attend the funeral.

His absence is thought to have been due to security concerns. It's reported that tens of thousands of people crowded the streets of Tehran. Our chief international correspondent, Lise Doucette, was watching. She is being allowed to report in Iran on condition that none of her reports are used on the BBC's Persian service. This law from the Iranian authorities applies to all international media agencies operating in Iran. 60 coffins, draped with Iranian flags, move through the streets of Tehran on flatbed trucks,

bearing photographs of the dead, the top soldiers who once commanded Iranian forces, the leading scientists who built the nuclear program and the coffins of their family members also killed by Israeli missiles. The streets are packed around Azadi Square, Freedom Square, filled not just with sadness and sorrow, but also anger and defiance. We keep hearing the old slogans of their revolution, death to America, death to America. America is dead! The students and the leaders of our country are dead! President Trump says he wants to have a peaceful relationship with Iran. Is that possible? You are wrong!

Everyone in this crowd which formed around us replied with an emphatic no. They are the foot soldiers of Iran's government. Many also wave photographs of the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He said to have sheltered in a bunker during Israel's 12-day war amid reports he too could be targeted. He wasn't even seen in public today. The 86-year-old Ayatollah has the final say on where Iran goes next. Will its new commanders ready for another conflict or will its diplomats return to the negotiating table? The US President Donald Trump says he's ready to do a

deal with Iran but is also warned his warplanes could strike Iran's nuclear sites again. Behind this loud defiance, Iran has fateful decisions to make. Lise Doucet in Iran. The Israeli military says it's killed one of the founding members of Hamas in Gaza. A statement from the Israeli Defense Forces said Hakam Mohammed Issa Al-Issa played a key role in the planning of the October the October 7 attacks in 2023. The Hamas-run health ministry says at least 81 people have been killed by Israeli strikes on Gaza in the past 24 hours.

From Jerusalem, Dan Johnson reports. Staff from the Al-Shifa hospital said at least 11 people, including children, were killed in a strike near a stadium sheltering displaced refugees in Gaza City. Fourteen more, including three children and their parents, were reported killed in strikes on an apartment block and tent in the Almawasi area. The Israel Defense Forces released a statement saying it had killed a senior figure in the Hamas military wing, but it's not clear if this incident is linked. Donald Trump said he was hopeful momentum following the Israel-Iran truce could, next week, lead to a deal to bring home the remaining hostages and end military action in Gaza. More than 56,000 Palestinians have been killed since

Israel's army launched strikes 21 months ago in response to the October 7th Hamas attacks. Dan Johnson in Jerusalem. In Syria, fears around sectarian violence continue to mount. Last Sunday, 25 Christians were killed in an attack on the Ma Elias Greek Orthodox Church in Damascus. It was the first attack of this kind against the country's Christian minority in over a century. The government has blamed the jihadist group Islamic State. It hasn't said it was responsible.

But many in Syria blame the government for a lack of security, as the BBC's Lina Sinjab reports from Damascus. A cry for Christ, a plea for safety. Wherever you walk in the Christian neighbourhoods, it's deserted. People are afraid. Shops are closed, restaurants are closed. And here is a protest by the Christian community. They're being protected by the security forces.

They're holding their cross and chanting for it. Last Sunday's bombing has shaken the community in Syria. Twenty five people died. It's the first time the minority Christian community in the country has suffered an attack like this since the massacre in 1800 which killed thousands. In December last year fighters from Haia Tahrir al-Sham, a Sunni Islamist group once affiliated with al-Qaeda, overthrew the authoritarian government of President Bashar al-Assad. This ended 13 years of devastating civil war but But since then, hundreds of people have died in attacks targeting different religious minorities, Druze, Alawites and now Christians.

The new Syrian authorities said they are determined to bring unity and stability. But the violence continues. We are just getting into the French hospital in a Christian neighborhood. The whole area is manned by security everywhere you go. Everyone is on alert. They are worried about any other attack that could happen. The chief nurse at the French hospital tells me they received dozens of people needing medical attention. I have shrapnel and stitches in my nose and chin.

In my hand, my leg, my other leg is broken. Anjia Wabde is a 23-year-old computer engineering student who is due to graduate in two months. She was attending the Sunday service. I don't want anything. I just want to leave this country. I lived the crisis, the war, the attack with the mortars. I never expected something will happen to me inside a church. Never thought this would happen.

The scenes were very ugly. What happened was awful. It was ugly. Every time I close my eyes, I see someone attacking us in the hospital. There's no safety anymore. The words of the Syrian student, Angie Awadhey, ending that report by Lina Sinjab in Damascus.

Next to Hungary. Thousands of people turned out onto the streets of Damascus. Next to Hungary. Thousands of people turned out onto the streets of the capital Budapest on Saturday to take part in the city's LGBTQ Pride march. Despite warnings of legal consequences from the Prime Minister Viktor Orban, organisers of the event said a record number of people turned up. A law introduced in March targets Pride and similar events, making it an offence to depict or promote homosexuality to anyone under the age of 18. This participant, Esther Rein-Bode, explained why it felt important for her to turn up.

This is about much more than homosexuality. It's about equal LGBTQ plus rights in the first place, but it's much more than that. This is our last chance to stand up for our rights. Our correspondent Nick Thorpe was at the parade in Budapest. It was enormous. I've seen in my nearly 40 years in this city many demonstrations back in the communist time and ever since. It was certainly one of the biggest. There's one estimate of 200,000

people. Certainly the crowd moving from the center of the town over the Elizabeth Bridge over the Danube. That procession took at least three hours and the bridge was packed throughout that time. Very hard to estimate the numbers but in a way it was a because of the pride, the sort of festival nature of the event, it was like a sort of a party for which this Budapest city is famous as a party town for young people in a way the party today spilled over onto the street. And just clarify for us what the legal situation actually is. There is a national law but the city mayor did sanction this parade, didn't he?

That's right. It's a grey legal area really and I think we might see some legal consequences from it. The government passed a law linking the law of assembly, the right to march or walk through the street to assemble to the 2021 child protection law which forbids the depiction or promotion of homosexuality in a place where children might see it or those under 18 might see it. So for the government's point of view, from the Budapest police point of view,

this was a banned march. From the mayor's point of view, it was not banned. He referred to a 2001 law which said that the law on freedom of assembly does not... events organised by city councils, town councils are not covered by that. So he was effectively creating or pointing out, trying to use a legal loophole in order to act as a sort of host or umbrella of this massive event today. And has it all been peaceful? Were there any counter protests? It has been very peaceful. There was a small counter protest. The far-right people occupied one of the bridges which was the original route but then the police in a way helped

the marchers by rerouting the march over a different bridge and around that small group of counter protesters. That was Nick Thorpe in Budapest. A lit cigarette smouldering or dangling from French lips looms large in the popular image of France. But from Sunday, a ban on smoking in public places takes effect in France. It's to protect children from the effects of passive smoking. There is an exemption which some might find surprising – the terraces of cafes. But how far is this ban challenging French perceptions of their own identity?

Elisabeth Levy is a co-founder of the French news magazine Coseurs. Sean Lay asked her how she's feeling about the ban. Hungry is not enough. And I feel it's very stupid. And it's mainly, it's not a matter of public health. It is a matter of Freedom a matter of kind of moral values, but it's not moral values for me And and you know, you know selling the French writer He wrote that one day all the pleasures left to the poor will be forbidden one day all the pleasures left to the poor will be forbidden. And that's it. That's the point where we are now.

You can't drive fast because it's very bad for planet. You can't drive at all, actually. You are not allowed to come into Paris with your old car. You can't have rich food, you can't have this, you can't have that, and you can't have sex, eventually. This is, you know, a kind of puritanism for poor. What do you say though to the survey evidence which suggests 62 percent, six out of ten of French people now support a ban on smoking in public?

French people don't love freedom. They don't like freedom enough. They don't care. If you give them their retirement pension, they don't care about freedom. I understand that it's not permitted to smoke inside closed places. It's normal because smokers used to be very tough. They didn't care. So you're saying you think this is unnecessary? In the streets, what's the matter? On the beach, in the streets? It's something that people, certainly foreigners, associate with French identity.

And I was just having a look through at some of the reporting on this band's proposal. We have the British writer James Tidmarsh saying in The Spectators that cigarette haze in restaurants and even cinemas was once as much a part of Paris as zinc countertops and surly waiters. Yes, smoking a cigarette is part of a passage from childless to adult. In the real life, we are very docile. The biggest strength and the biggest weakness of France is to tell herself a lot of stories. We think we love liberty, we think we are

the country of liberty, you know, but collectively we accept very easily a lot of restrictions, a lot of restraints on our freedoms. Elisabeth Lévy, co-founder of the French magazine Cosaure. Still to come... We're in the bathroom now and let's just say it's fragrant in here because the toilet hasn't still to come because the toilet hasn't been flushed all day but this is the dirtiest water that I can get access to a BBC health correspondent on the search for a special type of virus that attacks the superbark bacteria Warnings for severe heat are in place for much of Europe, with temperatures rising into

the mid-40s in the coming days. In Rome, it reached 37 degrees on Saturday, while parts of Spain could get as high as 47 next week. We'll hear from people in Rome and Madrid shortly. First though, tech professional Bastien in Paris, which has been sweltering in the heat. Recently, the days have been hectic. It's been super hot. But what is quite funny is that we've seen more and more people come to the office because we have aircon. And like in Paris, it's not super common to have an aircon in your flat. It's been pretty weird because people have embraced the heat quite easily, even though we are Parisians and we like to complain about the weather.

But at the end, we're just in the terrace drinking beer and spirits. Yesterday I was by the sand and I've never seen that many people. I feel very sorry for the tourists that I know are in this city, trying to see things like the Colosseum and the Forum and trying to walk around in this extreme heat. As for us, my daughter is pressing me to take her on a little excursion to a beach nearby Rome. And we're planning to wait until the late afternoon when the sun should be past its peak so that as we're out there, it'll be getting cooler and cooler and we'll enjoy

the sea breeze and eat ice cream and try to think that in general, we're lucky to be somewhere where we're near the beach. On Monday, we are starting work on MatCool. Maybe you know, it's an amazing festival here in Spain with amazing music but I have a big problem. I am worried for my colleagues and me because the weather here is crazy. Honestly I don't know what clothes I can use on Monday to feel fresh. Please if you visit us come to the beach or to the swimming pool and with a fan on your back. Ada there in Madrid and before her we heard from Amy Casmin, a correspondent for the

Financial Times in Rome. British police are looking at video of a performance by the controversial rap group Kneecap at the Glastonbury Music Festival in England. During the Incendiary set on Saturday, the trio led the audience in chants against the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who had said that the group shouldn't be allowed to play at the festival. A member of Kneecap has been charged with a terror offence which he denies. He's accused of displaying a Hezbollah flag at a concert last year. The Iranian-backed group in Lebanon is banned in the UK. Our culture editor Katie Rasel reports from Glastonbury. The Belfast rap trio Niqlaq performed a gig the Prime Minister had said shouldn't go ahead

and thanked the festival organisers for not bowing to pressure. The BBC decided not to show the set live. The Palestinian flags in the crowd, testament to the strength of feeling the band vocalises about the conflict in Gaza. Makara's back in court for a shrunk up terrorism charge. Niqab also pushed back on the charge against one of them, stage name Makara.

Whatever politicians outside Glastonbury may say, Niqab also pushed back on the charge against one of them, stage name Makara. Whatever politicians outside Glastonbury may say, this huge crowd for the best part of an hour have backed the band. They've chanted with them in support of Palestine. They've chanted with them against the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. It's been deliberately provocative of course, but this crowd are fully behind Niqab. I think free speech is vital and I think it's very dangerous not to have it. All the listeners stay out of that sort of thing. I'm so glad that Glastonbury just went for it and didn't listen to them.

The amount of people here, obviously there's so much support for them. It wasn't the only controversial set. A rap duo, Bob Villain, advocated violence and death to the Israeli Defence Force. That was streamed live. The Culture violence and death to the Israeli Defence Force. That was streamed live. The Culture Secretary has spoken to the BBC Director General. Katie Russell. Now, we've all heard the headlines about the growing problems of superbugs that are

making infections harder and in some cases impossible to treat. But there's now growing research into a possible microbial saviour, a type of virus that attacks the superbug bacteria. In fact it eats them and it's called a phage. Our health correspondent James Gallagher has been taking part in a project to find some of these viruses and learn more about them. And he's gone beyond the call of duty in his quest. I'm in the bottom of my garden, I've got my collection kit with me and what it is is just a series of plastic vials really and I need to go find some of the dirtiest water I can because that's where the phage will be hiding. I'm going to start with a pond in a

bucket I've got at the end of the garden so in we go. Oh that's looking mucky. So that's via one done. I need to go get a few more of these. So I'm gonna go look at the juices in the bottom of my worm composting bin. Might go for a walk around town, see what I can find. But then I've got to do something really quite disgusting. So let's get on with it. Right, we're in the bathroom now.

And let's just say it's fragrant in here because the toilet hasn't been flushed all day, but this is the dirtiest water that I can get access to. So I need to collect another sample from in here, wash my hands thoroughly and then package this all off and get it to the lab. Well, I've come now to the University of Southampton where they're analysing my sample so let's go inside and see what's in there. Hi James I'm Michelle Lin I am a PhD student nice to have you. I know thank you so much for

inviting me in and for analysing my samples can we have a look? Come with me so do you see these tubes? I do. Recognise them? No because these look clean but I recognise the labels. That's correct because they were a bit dirty when I received it. And then following filtering I then grew it with the bacteria and this is a step called enrichment. So you're feeding the phage their preferred food, bacteria? Exactly, exactly. How do you know if once you've got those samples there's actually something useful in there? Ah, good question and that's my next step actually. So here...

One petri dish? Yes. Within this petri dish grows bacteria that has caused recurrent urinary tract infection in patient. So this has come from a real patient, the sample. The way to see that the phage has infected the bacteria is that you get these zones where the bacteria is not growing, and that's because they've been killed by the phage. So we know the phage collected from the toilet sample

can successfully kill bacteria that are causing a recurrent infection in patients in a hospital like 20 minutes away. As crazy as it sounds, yes. It's amazing. Yes. That report by James Gallagher. Now it was a wedding as divisive as it was opulent.

The Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and TV presenter Lauren Sanchez tied the knot on Friday in San Giorgio Maggiore, a small island just off Venice. But the celebrations didn't end there. The event attracted not just the couple's A-list friends but also a variety of protesters, from locals fighting over tourism to climate change activists. Our correspondent in Venice, Sarah Rainsford, told us more about Saturday's proceedings. Well this is the last big gala event and it is taking place slightly out of the city centre because of those protests as you mentioned. So it's taking place at somewhere called

Arsenault. It was meant to be much closer to the centre but it's still going to be, I'm sure, very glitzy, very glamorous. We know that there are some 200 or so A-list celebrities in town but to be honest it's pretty hard to spot them. You know, I think there was a lot of concerns ahead of this event, certainly by protesters, that this massive, lavish wedding was going to close down Venice and make it impossible for normal people here to get around. That hasn't really happened, but certainly a lot of famous people

in town and lots of crowds of people who've been trying to catch a glimpse of them. I think a few have seen the couple themselves stepping into water taxes and making their way around the city and a couple have spotted the likes of Bill Gates or Ivanka Trump and the Kardashians have been very visible too so yeah, celebrity events, lots of glitz still to come I think. And this event did bring a lot of people to Venice, However protesters might object, is it good for the city? Well that's a big question and we've just actually come from a protest here,

the biggest protest so far in these three days. Hundreds of people marching through the streets, chanting Jeff Bezos out of the lagoon. They don't want him here and they've been very loud about it. They've had all sorts of creative kinds of protests, inflatable Jeff Bezos is thrown into the canal. There've been banners up, there have been protest groups making a message heard, projecting their messages onto buildings here.

But this is the biggest one today, as I say, marching through the city centre. They have been promising to throw themselves into the canal, along with some inflatable crocodiles for some reason, to try to block the guests from getting to the main venues. But they've called that off and it was all pretty orthodox, pretty peaceful. But definitely, I think, you know, the things they are concerned about do reflect the reality here, which is that this is a very, very fragile city on the water, which is suffering from over-tourism.

Too many people coming here, putting a strain on the city, and, of course, climate change is doing the same. And the protesters arguing that all of these famous people on private jets flying into this city are not helping climate change one jot, and that is part of the reason why Venice itself, this gorgeous city, is actually sinking. Sarah Rainsford in Venice. Around the world many towns and cities struggle to cope with large numbers of stray animals.

In Mexico one organisation has found a way to tackle this issue by using tourism. Caravana Canina in Oaxaca runs guided walks that help socialize stray dogs so they can find new homes while also raising money to pay for their care. The BBC's Maddie Drury joined five tourists and five excited dogs for a trip to the forests of the Sierra Norte region. Welcome everyone to Oaxaca. I'm Caitlin and I am originally from Atlanta, Georgia, but I've been living in Oaxaca now for six years. That's Caitlin Garcia-Ajern, who co-founded the rescue centre five years ago and is leading

the hike. So we started Caravanacanina really just doing a spay and neuter campaign with vets in my garage with some of the street dogs that were in the neighbourhood and then in that area I would find dogs that had tumours or dogs that had machete wounds. Caitlin started taking the dogs into her home and slowly built a team of animal lovers who were willing to treat and train the dogs so they'd be suitable for adoption. Of course all of this costs money which is where tourists come in. We already take the dogs hiking anyways for fun for the dogs. It's great for them, it's great for

us to be in the forest and then combining that with tourism creates this opportunity for us to fundraise for the project. We are in the forest on the walk and the dogs are running in and out of us through our legs going a bit crazy for the first 15 minutes. I get chatting to Leila Kadri. She is a fosterer with the organisation and introduces us to one of the dogs. So Zora has been with me the longest. So it took about six months to get her healthy and also to a point where she could comfortably socialise. She's very emotionally in tune, she's very elegant but she's also quite goofy. So she's wonderful and she's kind of like

the big sister and keeps all the other puppies in line, which is nice. It's clear the tourists are getting as much out of the hike as the dogs. I get chatting to one of them, Maria del Carmen Reyes, who lives in the US but grew up in Mexico. It's amazing that these dogs were all street dogs per se or rescues because they are more well behaved than some of our domesticated pets at home. They're intuitive, they listen and it's wonderful to see that they get to be a part of nature.

After a fun but tiring walk under the warmth of the sun, I have another chat with founder Caitlin. You have helped hundreds of dogs but there are millions on the streets. Is this just a drop in the ocean? You know there are certainly moments when it feels like there's so much more work to do. What's the point? And then I think you have these case by case relationships with animals and with the humans caring for them and that makes it all worth it.

That report by Maddie Drury in Oaxaca. Now whether it's on WhatsApp, Facebook or Instagram, much of our day-to-day communication these days happens by way of texting. Some of us even like to sprinkle in a few emojis for good measure. But not all forms of communication are created equal. While texting is often quicker, a lot can be lost in translation. Did you know that putting a full stop at the end of a text can be perceived as passive aggressive by younger

generations? Sophia Smith-Gaylor, a journalist and author who creates content around language, told my colleague Caroline Wyatt, why a message today might carry more meaning than you think. It's all because communication styles and the technology that carries them has changed significantly. In the past, if you think about the era in which we had to text, we'd have to pay credit on our phones.

I can remember as a teenager running out of credit and not being able to text my friends anymore, that those unique spaces were precious and we'd probably put everything we wanted into one message. Now, I can send as many messages as I want via a platform like WhatsApp and the line breaks every single time I enter effectively replace the full stops. It's clearer to see where a message begins and ends without traditional punctuation. So that is why they're more absent frankly in platforms like WhatsApp and instant messaging

as it's evolved. And it can come across as passive aggressive to people who are not familiar with the older way of communicating. I had no idea about that. So what else should we in Gen X or above know about punctuation? I mean, are dashes hostile? Do commas suggest I'm irritated? And what happens with exclamation marks?

No, I think another traditionally sort of millennial and upwards punctuation form is the ellipses. You won't find Gen Z typically doing an ellipses or dot dot dot as often as older generations will. I think the biggest anxiety currently around hyphens or dashes, frankly, has nothing to do with coming across as aggressive, per se, on communications, but coming across as if chat GPT or an LLM might have been responsible for writing it instead. I think that would be a greater anxiety for very digitally literate generations at the moment. The main thing to just bear in mind is that most communication carries so many nonverbal cues. That's in the way that I'm speaking to you right now, that listeners can hear me with my tone of voice as it's shifting, they can tell my mood. If we were face to face, you'd be capturing

my hand gestures and my face as well. When you're texting someone, you miss out on all of those things. That's another reason why emoji and out so popular, because it gives us a chance to have that little bit of nonverbal communication that always clarifies meaning. You're a young millennial, that means age between 29 and 44. Is there anything else that your generation has brought to texting? A lot of us will do voice notes, a lot of us may be sending video to each other. It's all becoming a lot more multimodal, multi-textual, lots more at play. Sophia Smith-Gaylor speaking to Caroline Wyatt.

And that's it from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News podcast later. If you'd like to comment on this edition or the topics covered in it, do please send us an email. The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk and we won't take offense if you use a full stop you can also find us on x at bbc world service just use the hashtag global news pod this edition was mixed by chris murphy the producers were liam mccheffrey and paul day our editor is carron martin i'm jackie lennard and until next time goodbye