Global News Podcast - Israel and Hezbollah exchange fire in the biggest clash in 10 months
Episode Date: August 26, 2024Israel says it carried out a pre-emptive strike in Lebanon. Hezbollah said it retaliated for the death of a top leader. Also: Telegram has condemned the arrest of its founder, and is Mont Blanc gettin...g dangerous?
Transcript
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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.
I'm Valerie Sanderson and in the early hours of Monday the 26th of August,
these are our main stories.
The Lebanese group Hezbollah says it's completed its retaliation against Israel for the assassination of a senior leader after a day that saw hundreds of rockets and drones fired across the border.
Telegram has condemned the arrest in France of its billionaire founder, Pavel Durov, over abuses on the platform.
Also in this podcast, protests take place in Germany against immigration,
after the authorities say a Syrian man arrested following a knife attack
is suspected of belonging to the Islamic State group.
This year, there have been four deaths on Western Europe's highest mountain.
Essentially, Mont Blanc is, in simple terms, melted.
Permafrost is melted, the glaciers are melting and retreating,
and we are seeing more
rockfall, we are seeing more exposed crevasses. So is Mont Blanc becoming more dangerous?
We start in the Middle East, which has seen one of the biggest clashes in more than 10 months of
hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah. In the early hours of Sunday, Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets
and drones. It came after the Israeli military said it had carried out a wave of pre-emptive
strikes in Lebanon to thwart a large-scale missile and drone attack by the group. The
long-standing leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, speaking in a televised address on
Sunday evening, said that a military intelligence and surveillance base
close to Tel Aviv was targeted.
He said it was a delayed response
to last month's assassination by Israel
of a top Hezbollah commander.
We wanted to attack a target
that has links with the assassination of the Hezbollah leader.
We wanted to target Israeli military intelligence or their
air force because these two forces were involved in the assassination. We also wanted this target
to be deep inside Israel. So after careful consideration, we finalized our target to be
the military base in Gililat. Our senior international correspondent,
Arla Garen, is in Tyre in southern Lebanon and has compiled
this report. Hezbollah's leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah addressed his supporters tonight
saying the group might strike again in the future but for now everyone could be at ease
and get on with their lives. Its attack came in the early morning, targeting military bases and barracks in northern Israel.
It said the operation was a success.
Israel said most of the rockets missed their mark.
The Israeli army hit back in southern Lebanon throughout the morning, targeting Hezbollah firing positions.
It was the biggest flare-up here since the conflict began last October. So where are we now?
Hezbollah has retaliated for Israel's assassination of one of its top leaders, Fuad Shakur, in Beirut last month and Israel has carried out a major strike on its enemy.
Both sides have hit hard but stopped short of triggering all-out war. But the situation
remains tense. Israel's foreign minister has said the country does not seek a full-scale war.
Our correspondent Lucy Williamson has sent this report on Sunday
morning's events from Nahariya in northern Israel. By the time the sirens came, northern Israel was
awake. Israeli fighter jets bombing Hezbollah launch sites, the army said, before hundreds
of drones and rockets met Israel's air defences overhead. The fight clearly visible from Yuval's house, six miles from the border.
We felt really large explosions.
We felt like an earthquake.
The whole ground was moving, like my windows were shaking,
the keys in the door, like everything was shaking.
So I went outside to look at it and I just saw the whole sky is bright, bright orange.
And there was an explosion like every three seconds.
Shrapnel from an interceptor missile was caught on camera hitting a patrol boat off the coast of Nehariya,
killing one officer, the army said, and injuring two others.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Hezbollah had planned a much wider attack
and that what happened today was not the final word.
We are determined to do everything to protect our country,
return the residents of the north safely to their homes and continue to uphold a simple rule.
Whoever hurts us, we hurt them.
The limited damage from this assault obscures how dangerous this moment is.
For months, the conflict across this border has been widening.
Now Israel has sent 100 fighter jets to bomb Hezbollah positions
and Hezbollah rockets are flying further south,
testing the tripwires for all-out war.
Orgad's hotel looks out on the hills that mark the Lebanese border.
He thought this morning's assault was the start of a full-blown war.
It's not the normal times, so if a war should come and finish it,
there are no tourists, no businessmen,
no nothing. So we have to start living again. It sounds like you want a war.
If it will finish the situation as it is now, yes.
This border, bristling with weapons, could pull regional and global powers into a war.
A war fuelled by the conflict in Gaza
that even Israel and Hezbollah say they don't want.
Lucy Williamson.
There are some towns in northern Israel just across the border from Lebanon
which are largely empty and have been for some months.
But what about those people who stay behind?
Shelley Barkin is an English teacher in the northern Israeli town of Shlomi.
She told the BBC's Owen Bennett-Jones what it's like when the Hezbollah rockets are fired.
There are 8,000 people that live in this little town,
and I think something like 200 have stayed.
Most people were evacuated, worldly.
So why did you stay?
Maybe I'm brave or stupid, I don't know.
But I don't believe in running away from my home.
I have lots of animals and I'm also running a kitchen for hungry soldiers.
Also don't know where would be better for me to go.
I have elder parents nearby.
And it's not easy to just give up your life, get up and move. And most people that move to
hotels were very unhappy. There must be people in southern Lebanon feeling the same way.
Yeah, the people wherever. War was difficult for everyone. And how do you see this going? I mean,
do you think the Israeli government will accept that your towns are uninhabitable for most people,
or do you think the situation will change? Well, we're hoping because there are 60,000
people from the north that are not in their homes. I'm a high school teacher. It's almost
the first of September, and people want to get on with their lives. I don't know.
Whatever Israel decisions are made in Israel, it's actually we have an enemy.
There's always uncertainty, always in Israel.
This so clearly affects your life, the conflict.
I mean, can you see any end to it?
I have lived here over 40 years, and this is the worst situation I've ever seen Israel in.
I don't see an end. I don't see a solution. We don't see a solution. I don't see a solution to people coming back to the north
and it's just a very depressing situation. It's never ending. You think every day it can get worse
and then you wake up in the morning and something else happens.
Shelley Barkin living in the Israeli town of Shlomi on the border of Lebanon.
Mohamed lives on the other side of the border in a small village adjacent to the towns that have been hit in the near daily exchange of fire since October the 8th. He sent us a voice message
about his experience of the strikes on Sunday morning. I live with my wife and kids. We are a family of six.
My wife and kids were woken up by the sound of the strikes.
But being used to this, they asked what's happening.
And I told them it is just Israeli warplanes breaching the sound barrier.
So they went back to sleep.
I find this to be the best way of dealing with what we are facing
and protect the mental well-being of my family and children,
especially that we have no safe place to go to, to hide.
There are no shelters or safe zones.
All we can do is leave it to God and pray for the best.
Mohamed from southern Lebanon.
Telegram says its billionaire founder Pavel Durov is not responsible for abuses on the platform,
insisting the messaging app complies with EU laws.
Mr Durov was arrested on Saturday in Paris and is due to appear in a French court
in connection with a wide range of alleged offences linked to the platform.
Our correspondent Will Vernon told me more about the charges.
We're going on what the French media are saying.
They quote several French law enforcement sources who say
Pavel Dorov was arrested on Saturday evening at an airport near Paris.
He'd arrived there on a private jet from Azerbaijan.
And there was an arrest warrant issued for him,
reportedly in connection with Telegram's failure to moderate illegal content,
cooperate with law enforcement over things like drug trafficking, child sexual content and fraud.
And tell us more about Telegram.
Well, it's one of the most popular apps in the world, almost one billion users.
It's particularly popular in Russia and Ukraine. It's used by both sides in the war,
both by pro-Kremlin state media, military bloggers, but also by Ukrainian officials,
including President Zelensky and ordinary Ukrainians who want to keep up with the course
of the war, fundraise, support the troops. The reason it's controversial is because there's
very little moderation. So when harmful, illegal content
is posted on Telegram, it rarely gets taken down by the app. They have a pretty small team
of moderators compared to other social media companies, according to experts. Western law
enforcement has become increasingly concerned about things like drug trafficking, terrorism,
paedophilia. One German security official said that Telegram
was a medium for radicalisation. And what about reaction to his arrest? We've had Elon Musk
reacting and of course, Russian officials too. Yeah, that's interesting about the Russian
officials, isn't it? Because of course, Pavel Dorova is no friend of the Kremlin. He fled
Russia in 2014 after having quite a public falling out after, according to him, the Russian
security services tried to seize control of his previous project, VK, which was the Russian
version of Facebook. But despite that, Russian officials, including the spokeswoman from the
Russian Foreign Ministry, have been out today saying that Pavel Dorova is a political prisoner.
And several officials have been on state TV saying that this shows the West double standards in terms of freedom of speech and democracy.
And most people will listen to that and think it's quite absurd for Russian officials to lecture anyone about Internet freedoms when we consider that Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, the BBC, all mainstream independent Russian media are blocked in Russia. Will Vernon.
The first batch of Mpox vaccines are set to finally reach Africa in the coming days,
weeks after they were made available in other parts of the world.
A new deadly strain has been spreading rapidly across the region, with the largest outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
10,000 doses are being delivered this week,
a long way off the 10
million needed, according to Africa's Centre for Disease Control. I heard more from our Africa
regional editor, Richard Kugoy. The new strain is called CLID-1b. It's highly transmissible,
detected faster in eastern DRC in September last year, where the disease is endemic and has since spread beyond DRC
to the rest of East Africa and parts of West Africa.
According to the Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention,
we have about 18,000 cases that have been confirmed so far,
and more than 500 people have died as a result of infection.
So what we are seeing right now is that there's a lot of
surveillance across different parts of the continent. There's increased diagnoses and
a creation of awareness, especially just among the general population, just to be aware about
this outbreak. And yet the first batch of vaccines are only set to reach Africa in the coming days. Why has there been such a delay?
You know, African countries or low income countries cannot procure some of these vaccines
directly. So they have to go through drug manufacturers. And so that's really been
the challenge. And of course, you'd also have the World Health Organization that needs to give or
grant these emergency approvals.
So what we saw is that in 2022, when we had an outbreak in North America and parts of Europe,
there was deployment of some of these vaccines, but that has not been shared, you know,
equitably to the rest of the continent.
So what African countries have been doing is just reaching out to countries that had been previously affected,
requesting for donations.
So far, we've seen countries like the US and Japan indicating that they will be donating,
you know, thousands of vaccines. But basically, the continent at the moment to deal with this
outbreak needs about 10 million doses. So sort of like a drop in the ocean.
So is there a sense of anger, perhaps, among the health authorities that Africa
is once again being left behind the rest of the world? Absolutely. I was just listening to one
expert from South Africa and how the continent also still lags behind, you know, having been
through the COVID pandemic. According to her, this is quite outrageous. There has been that
expression. So it feels like the continent is largely being not given the prominence or the attention that it deserves.
So sort of like the Western part of the world seems to be selfish or, you know, looking after itself.
And just Africa being left on its own to deal with this.
So there's a sense of not being treated fairly.
And, you know, there's no equity when it
comes especially to dealing with public health emergencies. Richard Kugoy. Still to come.
He probably is the most legendary figure in baseball, the best player on the best and still
the most storied team, the New York Yankees.
And his baseball jersey sells for $24 million at auction.
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The issue of immigration has resurfaced in Germany following Friday's fatal knife attack
at a street festival in the city of Solingen. Three people were killed and eight others were
injured.
The German authorities say they believe the man they've arrested,
a Syrian national, is a member of the Islamic State group.
While Solingen's residents lined the streets with flowers and candles,
the youth wing of the far-right AFD party staged a protest.
Solingen's representative in the Bundestag, the SDP's Ingo Schäfer, has called for unity.
We will not allow ourselves to be divided. We will not allow the extremist parties to make this their own. This is an awful catastrophe. My appeal would be to let us in Zerlingen finish
our mourning and allow us time to remember the deceased.
In an online statement, Friedrich Merz, Germany's opposition leader, said enough is enough,
declaring the country should stop admitting further refugees from Syria and Afghanistan.
Freelance journalist Tanit Koch used to work as a communications advisor for Mr Merz's party,
the centre-right Christian Democratic Union.
Friedrich Merz, the chairman of the CDU, offered to Bundeskanzler Scholz, the chancellor who's
going to arrive in Solingen tomorrow to speak to Tims, and he offered a cross-party effort to
finally get some decisions and implement policies to improve the situation. The thing is,
what you have to understand about that, the perpetrator, he entered the EU via Bulgaria,
and it would have been absolutely within all EU regulations to send him back to Bulgaria.
But the German administration didn't manage to. They tried to detain him once, didn't manage,
and then a deadline passed and he was entitled to stay in Germany unless he would have been sent to Syria. And because in the coalition, been done law-wise, legally, to modernise
the German asylum system and the immigration system to cope with a still increasing number
of irregular immigrants and sometimes with results as we've seen on Friday in Soling. Tanit Koch. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022,
more than 400 museums, churches and monuments have been destroyed or damaged during the conflict.
But despite the loss of so many buildings and so much devastation,
interest in Ukrainian culture is booming, as Vitaly Shevchenko reports.
That's Stefania, a song by the Ukrainian band Kalush Orchestra. Its victory in the 2022 Eurovision contest is symbolic of the surge in interest in Ukrainian culture after the start
of the Russian invasion. This interest comes at a heavy, bloody price.
Hundreds of cultural sites in Ukraine have been damaged or destroyed. Among them is the museum
of the 18th century philosopher Hryhoriy Skvoroda in Kharkiv region. Here's its deputy director,
Nastya Ishchenko. The roof was completely blown off. The walls were burned and only Skvorda's statue survived.
It's a miracle that it did.
In areas occupied by Russia, Ukrainian museums are facing another problem, plunder.
For instance, in the final days of the occupation of Kherson,
whole truckloads of artworks and historical artefacts were taken by Russians.
In all, more than 400 cultural sites in Ukraine have been damaged or destroyed
since the start of the war in 2022.
They include churches,
culturally significant buildings,
museums, monuments and libraries.
Ukraine's acting culture minister,
Rostislav Karandeyev,
believes that Russia is deliberately
targeting Ukrainian culture and heritage.
The spiritual and historical components are one of the key. that Russia is deliberately targeting Ukrainian culture and heritage.
The spiritual and historical components are key,
and that's why Russia's attack not just militarily targets in critical infrastructure, but also anything that allows Ukrainians
to speak of their own identity and statehood.
But this destruction has also sparked a hunger for Ukrainian culture.
One Ukrainian newspaper, DEN, even speaks of a Ukrainian cultural boom
generating new acts and performers.
Damage to Ukraine's art and heritage goes deeper than just bricks and mortar.
But culture also helps heal the wounds caused by war.
Vitaly Shevchenko.
Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in Western Europe
and attracts adventurous tourists.
During the winter, most ski down and in summer, climb up.
But this year, there have been four deaths on Mont Blanc in less than a week.
So, why are so many people losing their lives?
Owen Bennett-Jones spoke to Kenton Coole, who's climbed Mount Everest 18 times and is a mountain
guide in the Alps. Many of the mountains across the Alps, not just Mont Blanc, are suffering
from global warming. We are experiencing summer upon summer ever-increasing temperatures.
So the Sierra Isiserm a couple of weeks ago was above 5,000 meters.
That's above the summit of Mont Blanc.
So essentially Mont Blanc is, in simple terms, melted.
And what this means is the permafrost is melting,
the glaciers are melting and retreating,
and we are seeing more rockfall.
We are seeing more exposed crevasses.
And the way that we as mountain guides have to approach these mountains are changing.
But not everybody in the general public understands that.
Yeah, I mean, if you go to the French Alps, it really is unmistakable, isn't it?
Each year, the snow goes, what, 50 feet higher up the mountain or more than that?
Glacial retreat is beyond shocking.
It is accelerating year upon year.
It brings different dangers that we weren't experiencing 10, 15 years ago.
And we have to change our approaches to do things.
We climb less on snow and ice these days and more on rocky ridges.
And that brings its own dangers.
Mont Blanc looks quite easy. it looks easier than it is anyway and it must be partly that there are just
so many people who actually just don't really know what they're doing. Well there is that and we get
that with all honeypot mountains to a certain extent and these mountains do attract people
because they are iconic you know obviously Mont Blanc, highest peak in Western Europe. And it is comparatively easy to climb if you have a modicum of common sense and experience.
And not everybody has a depth of experience. And avoidable accidents happen on these mountains
all the time. What sort of mistakes do you see them make?
I was climbing the Mount Horn only last Thursday. There were actually lovely people climbing the Mount Horn. They had
no rope when they reached almost
the top of the Mount Horn where they both managed
to lose a crampon.
I mean, how? I will never quite
fully understand. They were
there teaching around on snow and ice
without crampons on, without a rope.
Not only are
they in danger, but they
are endangering other groups on the mountain as
well because if they were to slip off and fall and hit a guided party chances are they're going
to kill the guided party as well these are the sorts of things that we are constantly seeing
people that don't have the experience are going up in bad weather going up perhaps ill-equipped
going up too late in the day there's's a whole catalogue of mistakes that are being made by inexperienced climbers.
You've been doing this for how long, this guiding?
I've been guiding the European Alps for 20 years or so
and been guiding in the Himalayas for about 25 years.
What's your greatest pleasure in doing this?
I mean, my USP is climbing Everest.
I've climbed Everest 18 times.
And when you get to the summit of a peak like Everest
or the Matterhorn,
to see the joy and wonderment in your client
and to help your client climb to the summit
of something which perhaps they wouldn't be able
to achieve without your help
is something very, very special.
For me, it's a bit of a dream job to be in the Himalayas, the Alps, very special. For me, it's a bit
of a dream job to be in the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes or wherever it may be. Kenton Cool,
expert mountain climber and guide. Over the weekend, the Notting Hill Carnival has been
taking place here in London for the 56th year. More than two million people are expected to
attend the three-day event. The three-mile-long parade that takes place celebrates Caribbean culture,
a mix of calypso, steel bands and sound systems.
But if you've ever seen pictures from Carnival,
it's the array of colourful costumes that catch the eye.
For more than 50 years, a group of artists and families in the Halsden district of London
have been designing Carnival clothing. And our reporter, Aminata Kamara has been to meet them. Wow this is amazing. I need the music now.
That's the magic of carnival. Every single one of these costumes comes with a story and a message and a heritage
that goes on to tell the story of a time or a moment or a person.
My name is Clary and you're at Mahogany Carnival
and we've been here for a very long time and you're in the heart of Halston.
Mahogany is a family of families who love and make carnival for the whole community
and we've been doing it for a very, very long time.
So we have a style and we are embedded in our community here in Harleston.
So we do things for Diwali and Eid and other things as well.
So we are a world company encompassing all the different members of our community.
This year's theme is called Diaspora and it's a cry for peace a diaspora you know you've come
from your origin and you move to somewhere else and you're taking your culture with you and that
becomes your home and the carnival then is very much a part of the african diaspora caribbean
diaspora here in here in the uk hello can you remind me of your name and what you're doing?
It's Hubon, Hubon Condo.
All of the structures that you see in terms of all the fabrics and the colours and everything,
they're attached to the body somehow.
And that attachment is basically what I'm working on at the moment.
It's very much about that freedom,
that celebration of the emancipation of slavery.
And it's an opportunity where we can take the streets,
roam the streets for the day.
My name is Leticia. I am here obviously designing the costume Exodus. I've created all these faces, drawn them, painted them. All of these drawings represent somebody from the Windrush,
World War. My name is's Trinity My name's Nayara
How many costumes are you actually making?
It's a lot, like maybe above 60
What tends to be your favourite part of the whole process?
When the costumes are on the road
and you see like there's a part at Carnival
where there's a big hill
and you can see all the costumes and all the colours
I like when you see like the little kids
happy to see their costume
and just the smiles on their faces makes you feel like you've done something good.
How do you think it's kind of stayed so consistent
and been one of the rich pillars of Carnival for all these years?
Well, I think that Carnival is a force.
It's our right, it's our culture,
and it is really relevant, relevant to the community,
relevant to the political situation, relevant to the world situation. And I think that is part of
the power, that it really very much is a language, a visual language.
And finally, a jersey worn by the man considered to be the best baseball player ever,
Babe Ruth, has been sold for $24 million.
It makes it the most expensive item of sporting memorabilia ever to sell at auction.
The New York Yankees player won the World Series seven times
and wore the jersey during the 1932 World Series against the Chicago Cubs.
That's more than 90 years ago. So why does Babe Ruth remain such a big name in baseball now?
Well, Bill Shakin covers baseball and sports business for the LA Times.
He probably is the most legendary figure in baseball. He was the predominant personality during the first
half of the 20th century at a time that baseball was really the national sport and the only
major sport in the United States. And he was the best player on the best and still the most
storied team, the New York Yankees. The major distinction that Babe Ruth had, and I want to, I guess,
separate this into two. One is he started hitting home runs at a rate nobody else had ever seen.
His records for home runs stood for decades. All of a sudden, you could go to the baseball game
and see a guy hit a ball all the way out of the stadium. The other distinction was that although generally in
baseball, you are either a hitter or a pitcher, he did both and he did both pretty well. But after
two years of doing both, he said, you know, I'm a pretty good hitter. I'm going to stick with that.
And nobody has ever done that until now. If you watch Major League Baseball, you see Shohei Otani from Japan and now
playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He hits and he pitches. He does both at an elite level. He's
done it for longer than Babe Ruth ever did. So now we have the question of, for all the people
that have saying Babe Ruth delivered unprecedented performances, he did in his day, but Shohei
has done close to everything Babe Ruth has done. And of course, he's still in the middle of his
career. Bill Shakin. And that's it 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,
send us an email. The address is
globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X at Global News Pod. This edition was mixed
by Darren Garrett. The producer was Marion Straughan. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm
Valerie Sanderson. Until next time, bye-bye. Thank you. The Global Story.