Global News Podcast - Israel announces major expansion of settlements in occupied West Bank

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

Israeli ministers say 22 new Jewish settlements have been approved in the occupied West Bank - the biggest expansion in decades. Also: A US federal court blocks many of President Donald Trump's trade tariffs.

This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Nick Miles and at 13 Hours GMT on Thursday 29 May these are our main stories. Israel has announced a significant new expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank. A US court has overturned most of Donald Trump's global tariffs. A village in Switzerland is taken out by a landslide. Also in this podcast, as polls get set to choose a new president, we look at one of the most contentious issues, abortion. Our country protects the life of everybody. If we have law that criminalises the helping in abortions,

the people who do that should be prosecuted. the helping in abortions. The people who do that should be prosecuted. At the heart of the decades-long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians lies the attempt to create an independent Palestinian state. Could that now be impossible? There are already almost half a million Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Their homes are considered illegal under international law. Now the Israeli government says it is creating 22 new settlements. Defence Minister Israel Katz and the far-right finance minister Bezel El Smotrich are spearheading the plan, a strategic move they say aimed at preventing the creation of an independent Palestinian state. I heard more details about Israel's proposed settlements from Issam Ikrimawi of BBC Arabic in Ramallah.

Various Israeli governments, until this current government, have always said that they were not building new settlements, they were expanding existing ones. And they were talking about the three large blocks in the north, in Ariel, which is in the Nablus area, in the south. And then you have the one in the middle, which is Maaliad, who mean in the Jerusalem area. So they were talking about investment in expanding existing settlements. But what we know now, according to this new plan, that there were going to be new settlements along the Jordan River, the Jordan Valley,

and also in the north west bank in the Nablus, Tobass, that area. But we don't really know all the details about this plan because it was only announced yesterday following a meeting by the Israeli cabinet which approved the proposal for expanding and building new settlements and outposts. proposal for expanding and building new settlements and outposts. Issam, the Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz, has said explicitly this would be a way of trying to prevent the independent Palestinian state becoming a reality. Why might that be the case? Because if you look at the map of the West Bank at the moment, there are Israeli settlements all over the West Bank. And we've seen recently how some extremist settlers have been attacking Palestinian villages, setting fire to crops,

burning cars, attacking houses, blocking roads recently. So basically, you're talking about the West Bank is becoming incontiguous. So the Palestinians always agreed that in order for a Palestinian state to be viable, it has to be contiguous. So by having these settlements all over the West Bank, it means that Palestinian towns and villages will be isolated from each other and they'll be surrounded by Israeli settlements. Now we've seen time and again the United Nations say that settlement building is illegal by Israel. Israel will contest that. What is it that the

Palestinian authorities can do to prevent this, if anything? Nothing much really, apart from trying to lobby some influential capitals in Europe and maybe the American administration. But as you just said, the Palestinians have been complaining and protesting about the settlement enterprise for years. So it's not a new phenomenon. And as far as the so-called peace process is concerned, there hasn't been a big peace process for a very long time. The Israelis, they don't give any signs that they are really interested in reaching a settlement with the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian Authority can barely function because it's been basically weakened. It is very much a weakened Palestinian

Authority and the international community is not really putting any pressure on the Israelis to get them to comply with previous agreements, which previous Israeli governments had signed since Oslo. So we are in a very tricky kind of situation. Issam Ikrimawi in Ramallah. Meanwhile there have been more disturbances at food aid distribution sites in Gaza. Eyewitnesses say people broke through a gate at the joint Israeli US backed warehouse near Rafa and made off with flour and other supplies. It follows similar problems at a UN compound in Gaza earlier in the week.

There several people died in the crush. Well the chaos comes from the desperation for food all across the territory. Rachel Cummings, humanitarian director for Save the Children Gaza, spoke to the BBC from Deir al-Bala, the scene of that warehouse breaking. One Child, yes, sticks out to me where we have an activity where we work with children. It's called a wishing cloud where children wish for something and share that with the group. And recently children have been wishing for bread and that just to me indicates the desperation that they have.

But also one child wished to be with his mother in paradise because in paradise there is food and water and he was 12 years old and that just smacks of the desperation of children here. Our correspondent in Jerusalem is Yulann Nell and she told us more about the latest warehouse disturbance. Well from what we understand people started gathering at dawn close to one of these distribution sites where there are these armed private contractors working with the Gaza humanitarianitarian Foundation. And they were told to advance apparently a loud speaker speaking to them through an Israeli quadcopter, a drone. And then things were orderly at the beginning, one witness told the BBC, but quite quickly they descended

into chaos with people grabbing these food boxes and inside quantities of flour and pasta for them to take away. Now the Gaza humanitarian foundation has been saying that today it's opened a third distribution point. It has two in Rafah in the very south of the Gaza Strip, has opened one now which is much further to the north in Wadi Gaza which divides the northern part of Gaza from the south. And we've got at the same time the UN trying to continue with its limited deliveries after Israel eased its total blockade,

an 11-week-long blockade on all supplies going into Gaza at the start of last week. So although we have now these two routes with the UN and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation going on, of course the UN has rejected cooperating with the UN and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation going on. Of course, the UN has rejected cooperating with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, saying that it is not neutral, that it breaks humanitarian principles. But the overall picture is that only a trickle of aid is getting into Gaza and people are desperate and people are hungry.

Yalan Nel. Global stock markets have surged after a US court ruled Donald Trump's tariffs are illegal, throwing the president's trade policies into disarray. The case was brought by a number of states, including Oregon. Its attorney general is Dan Rayfield. Tariffs are something that are not just out there in the ether, right?

They are something that we all pay. They get passed down to us as consumers. They get passed down to small businesses, which impact us. Not only that, it impacts the trade relationships that we have here within the state of Oregon. We have products in Oregon. When they get shipped to Canada, they're being pulled off of the shelves.

So these are impacts to all of us, and that really compelled me to really move forward and economists have shown that $3,800 is the increase that average households are going to pay here in Oregon every year. So what did the judge rule and what does it all mean? Simon Jack is our business editor. Usually trade policy and the imposition of tariffs would be a matter for normal lawmaking procedure going through Congress etc. What Donald Trump said that the trade imbalance the US is facing constituted what he called a national emergency and therefore he was going to use executive powers as president to impose these swinging tariffs and you saw that in China, Vietnam, India, many countries suing tariffs of

anywhere between 40 and 145 percent in the case of China. Now what the court ruled was that he was acting illegally because importing tariffs on things like trainers and tea and whatever does not constitute a national emergency and therefore he was overreaching, executive overreach. And so they said you've got 10 days to basically tear down some of these tariffs because you have imposed them illegally. So what will happen now is of course the administration is saying this is a judicial coup, that unelected judges shouldn't interfere with government policy and they've already filed an appeal for that.

But you saw across the world markets begin to go up, they're thinking that bit by bit Donald Trump's bark has proved worse than his bite when it comes to actually imposing these tariffs. And businesses love clarity, don't they? Where they're going to be in six months' time, we still don't know that yet because, as you say, there's going to be an appeal. It's going to be extremely difficult for businesses in this interim period as well. I think that's the biggest issue is the uncertainty. I've spoken to American business leaders, business leaders around the EU, and they say, look, we're in a situation, I can't plan anything. I can't open a factory, I can't make an acquisition because I don't know what my cost of goods sold is going to

be from one day to the next. So I think that is the most corrosive part of it. But of course, not only can he appeal this decision, there are other methods to try and impose these tariffs. There are different sections of the law which he could try and invoke. So I could say a lot of us fumbling in the dark at the moment, but what will be interesting to see is whether other countries feel that some of the leverage that Donald Trump had over them has been slightly weakened. Simon Jack. Well, let's stay with another Washington story

because Elon Musk has announced that he's leaving the Trump administration after four months leading the cost-cutting task force known as Doge. In a post on his social media platform X, Mr. Musk said his scheduled time as a special government employee had come to an end. Quite a bland explanation, but is there more to the story? I asked our reporter Peter Goffin. Mr Musk is officially a special government employee and that designation only allows him to work 130 days in a single year. So the official line here is his time just expired.

But there has been speculation all along since Mr Trump's inauguration that Mr Musk would have to sever ties with the president to save his own business interests, because Mr. Musk's public approval rating has been plummeting this year. Mr. Trump is a divisive figure around the world, especially after those across-the-board tariffs. Doge itself cut thousands and thousands

of public sector jobs in the US, and people who were angry about this boycotted Tesla, protested outside dealerships and as a result sales fell, stocks fell and Tesla investors warned Mr Musk that they would continue to fall as long as he was involved in politics. Now during those 130 or so days he had quite an impact as head of those didn't he? Yeah it was a tremendous impact on those basic operations of the US government. He was brought in, as we said, to cut public spending,

and his philosophy in that role is probably best demonstrated by the moment that Argentinian President Javier Millet presented him with a chainsaw at a conservative conference in February. This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw! Now that's a pretty obvious metaphor, but probably an apt one. Mr. Musk did take a chainsaw to the federal government. He cut more than a quarter of a million government jobs, often quite clumsily. For example, he slashed and then had to reinstate the Ebola prevention program. But he also fundamentally altered the chain of command at the White House because it appeared he had inserted himself between the president and the cabinet.

And he was making key decisions about spending and, by extension, government policy that you really wouldn't expect from an outsider like him. Now, he's gone, he was head of DOJ, but DOJ continues, doesn't it? Yeah, in Mr. Musk's leaving note on Axe, he said Doge's mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government. But look, we've seen that Doge can also clash with the broader goals of the Trump administration. Mr. Musk reportedly had arguments with senior cabinet members who tried to protect their departments from his cuts.

And just this week, he told an interviewer he was disappointed by Mr. Trump's signature domestic legislation, that so-called big, beautiful bill. Mr. Musk said that because it will increase spending and increase the federal deficit, it undermines the work of Doge. So yes, Doge may very well continue, but will Doge still have the same almost unilateral authority to push through radical cuts without Musk at the helm? Probably not. And no matter who takes over now, they will not have the same influence as the richest man in the world.

Peter Goffin. China has accused the United States of discrimination after Washington announced it was cracking down on visas for Chinese students studying at American universities. The Trump administration has tightened restrictions on all international students in recent weeks, telling its embassies to suspend visa appointments as it expands social media vetting for applicants. This has cast doubt on the futures of thousands of people, including this Chinese national, who has an offer to attend the University of North Carolina this coming school year.

It's pretty absurd. It doesn't seem like something that could happen now. The visa process hasn't even started yet. And the timeline is already quite tight since the school year begins in early August. Now with this situation and not knowing how long it will last, I'm pretty worried. With more on China's reaction to the student visa clampdown, here's our Beijing correspondent Laura Bicker.

The foreign ministry here in Beijing has described the move by the United States to revoke the visas of Chinese students as discriminatory and based on the pretext of ideology and national security. The Foreign Ministry spokesperson went on to say that this move would damage the reputation of the United States in the international community. There are a few things that are very unclear about what the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced. He has said that the visas of those close to the Communist Party will be revoked. However, there are around 100 million members of the Communist Party here in China.

How close does a family member have to be to have their visa revoked is one question many people are asking. There are also around 280,000 Chinese students currently studying in the United States. Will they be in fear of having their visas revoked even if they already have them in place? Laura Bicker, a sea of mud, rock and ice has practically wiped a small village in southern Switzerland off the face of the map. Just a few houses in the community of Blatton, which had been home to about 300 people, were left standing, surrounded by flattened trees and debris. There were clear signs that the glacier above the village was unstable, so people

there had already been evacuated. But the authorities say one person is missing. Swiss communities in the Alps are really worried that glacier collapses will become more frequent amidst concern over how climate change affects permafrost. Dr Simon Cook is a lecturer in environmental science. Permafrost is like this sort of icy glue that partly holds together some of these valley slopes in these high mountain regions and as that warms it becomes softer and is not able to hold up the mountain sides as well. That landslide has then landed on top of the glacier

and caused it to collapse. Our Switzerland correspondent Imogen Fuchs has been telling me how dramatic the images are of the collapse. A colleague of mine at Swiss TV, he was more than a kilometre away when he took those pictures and still had to run as this landslide approached him. The entire valley filled with dust. I should tell you the remaining houses that you mentioned there in your introduction are now also gone because we've had a wave of flood water caused by

the river in the valley being blocked by the debris, other villages now being evacuated. I mean, I can't underestimate the wave of shock that has gone across this country, really the worst case scenario. You get natural hazards in the mountains, obviously, but the violence and suddenness of this has really shocked people. I know I said in the introduction that one person is missing but everybody else it seems was evacuated in time and that is testament to the work of geologists and others who are monitoring all these potentially unstable sites. That's right I mean the village of Blatton is not even the first to be evacuated.

There's another one on the other side of the country, Brientz, which has been evacuated for two years now because the mountain above it is slipping down. People are allowed back occasionally to go into their houses and check everything's fine, but this is a tragedy for mountain communities because often these are family homes that their parents, grandparents, great great grandparents have lived in and now in Blatt and they have lost everything and people fear in other villages too that they could lose everything. And as we heard in that clip earlier on from the environmental scientist Switzerland is particularly vulnerable because of

its geography and also climate change, isn't it? Well that's right. I mean the glaciers are a warning bell for climate change because they're very sensitive to it and their melt is accelerating. So more disasters like this are predicted. The problem is with Bl platen, although they moved people out, nobody could predict just how violent, how huge that slide was going to be. And I think it's the magnitude of it, which has been a real wake up call for people across the Alps today. Imagine folks, still to come in this podcast. We want to look at older cancers, older tumors in different species and also in the past looking at very old specimens because they can give us information on what we have now.

How the key to treating cancer could lie in the 70 million year old fossilised remains of a dinosaur. The second round of Poland's presidential election is this Sunday and it's not the economy or the ongoing war in Ukraine that's exercising voters. The most contentious issue is that of abortion. The BBC's Kristina Volk hears now about the debate in the country and from a woman who has had a termination in Poland, which has some of the strictest abortion laws in Europe. A warning. Some people might find this content upsetting. You have to ask them what the reason is. What is the legal reason? What suspicions? The footage was recorded by a doctor with a hidden camera and shows Joanna covering her face with her hands while being interrogated by officers.

She says they searched her flat, took her to the hospital and took her laptop from her. They then moved her to an examination room, making her strip down and performed a rectal exam. I felt pure fear. I felt that I can't let them touch me because I will basically fall apart. We are not using Joanna's last name. Her personal details were published by the police, and it was her who had to bear the backlash.

I became the face of abortion in a Catholic country. So the wave of hate was crazy. Poland has one of the strictest abortion laws in Europe. On top of that, many doctors and hospitals deny women even legal abortion care. In 2020, Poland has seen its biggest protest in decades, after a decision to almost totally ban abortions. The abortion law in Poland is widely criticized by international human rights organizations. Amnesty International found that around 80% of those surveyed were in favor of better

access to abortion. But there is still strong opposition. Anna again. There has been this sort of an activation of the anti-choice movements and voices that are very, very loud voices. There are especially conservative and religious groups in Poland that oppose abortions. Katarina Gizak is from the prominent conservative legal group, Ordo. Apart from our moral views, our constitution says that our country protects the life of everybody, which means that even for the child who has not been born yet, if we have law that criminalizes the helping in abortions, the people who do that should be prosecuted.

Around the election, abortion is a topic that's highly debated, with candidates on opposing sides of the issue. Although voters disagree on the law, many I spoke to say the election is vital for the future of abortion regulations in Poland. Joanna's abortion did not break any laws. Like so many other women in Poland, she had ordered her pills online. Joanna's abortion did not break any laws. Like so many other women in Poland, she had ordered her pills online. I ordered from Women Help Women that sends pills to countries where the access to abortion is limited. She continues to speak out about what happened to her, although she says her views aren't very optimistic.

Before every election, abortion is used as a bargain token and it's something we never receive. My story became very loud and public, but stories like this still happen. I'm more hoping for erasing this element of social stigma, less in like real changes of the law. That report was by the BBC's Christina Volk. Next to a tale straight out of Jurassic Park, it seems, a decade-long study suggests that the key to treating cancer could lie in the fossilised remains of a 70 million-year-old dinosaur. Well, the research was carried out here in the UK at remains of a 70 million year old dinosaur. The research was carried out here in the UK at Anglia Ruskin University and Imperial College London. One of the authors

was Dr Bianca Stella Cereza. She told Johnny Diamond it started with the discovery of a tumour in the jaw of a prehistoric duck-billed plant-eating marsh lizard. When we saw these new fossils with the tumour we thought, wow, that's very interesting because if you want to understand why something goes wrong, for example in the human body, you want to go back and see what is that, it's always been there. So if there's something that always keeps coming up, maybe some changes in a protein or some dynamics that are always there. That means those dynamics are very important, maybe something we can target, could be a good clinical

target. So we want to look at older cancers, older tumours in different species and also in the past looking at the very old specimens because they can give us information on what we have now. Are you looking at the evolution of the cancer? And here you've got a fantastic early example of it. Absolutely. So currently, technology is not exactly there to look exactly about what happens inside the cells inside the dinosaur tumour because right now we don't just have the technology yet, but in the future we will be able to. So what we found is that when we drilled into this tumour, this benign tumour of the jaw of this dinosaur, which is very

similar to a tumour we humans have as well, we saw actually that we could find some soft tissue inside. So the fossil is not just bone, as many people think, when you go on the beach and you see a fossil, but actually we can see something inside. And in the future, we'll be able to see these proteins inside and understand how similar or different they are from the same protein found in the tumour of the humans. DNA is something that degrades over time, but proteins actually can stay for much, much, much longer. So if you think technology how it evolves, like until a few years ago, we didn't know we could look at the DNA of Neanderthals, for example. But now we know about Neanderthals and we know the changes in their gene are affecting our health now.

So we could probably in the future do the same with the proteins comparing this fossilised specimen with what we have now. Biancastella cheresa. Now to be a good scientific researcher you have to be vigorous and diligent. It also seems it helps if you have the patience to literally watch paint dry as superbug fighting academics at the University of Nottingham in England have been finding out. Just in Green reports. Dr Felicity de Kogan and her PhD student Madeleine Burrow carried out hours of research to formulate a new antimicrobial paint. The solution contains the disinfectant chlorhexidine

and it's been found to be effective against bacteria that are usually resistant to the disinfectant on its own. Many hours were spent watching the paint time cure to see if the ingredients worked. Dr. de Kogan says it was a test of her colleagues' patience. When you do a science PhD you spend a lot of time doing something quite repetitive, whether that's pipetting solutions, watching paint dry and it's something that you just learn to have an appreciation of and I wouldn't want to take that away from her.

For the paint watcher herself, Madeleine Barrow, it was time well spent and could have many applications after further testing. You've got things like train stations, a lot of public areas where there's a lot of people that pass through, touching surfaces, shopping areas, handrails, bathroom, in particular toilets and bathroom surfaces are very, very contaminated. The project is a partnership between the university and the company Indestructible Paint. The idea stemmed from the coronavirus pandemic with the aim of killing Covid-19 on surfaces. Although it's taken a number of years to develop and is still in its early stages,

if it gets regulatory approval, the paint could be used in medical and public spaces to prevent the spread of diseases. Justine Green, before we go, a listener Olivia Roberts has been in touch with us about our report on our previous episode about a Peruvian farmer who fought a legal case against the German energy company RWE. Our reporter wrongly referred to the company as GWE during his discussion with our presenter. The company involved was, as I say, RWE and we're happy to correct this error. And that's all from us for now, but there will 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.bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag globalnewspod. This edition was mixed by Holly Smith and the producers were Stephanie Tillotson and Siobhan Lihi. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Nick Miles and until next time, goodbye.