Global News Podcast - Israel launches ground offensive on Gaza City

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

Thousands have fled Gaza City down a single coastal road, to escape a new Israeli assault. They have joined hundreds of thousands who have already left. Meanwhile, UN investigators say Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip. Also, the Hollywood actor and director, Robert Redford, has died aged 89. He starred in classics such as The Sting, The Way We Were, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And setting the record straight on Marie Antoinette - the eighteenth century queen in France who was the victim of gossip and intrigue. The Global News Podcast brings you the breaking news you need to hear, as it happens. Listen for the latest headlines and current affairs from around the world. Politics, economics, climate, business, technology, health – we cover it all with expert analysis and insight. Get the news that matters, delivered twice a day on weekdays and daily at weekends, plus special bonus episodes reacting to urgent breaking stories. Follow or subscribe now and never miss a moment. Get in touch: [e-mail]

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Your idea of banking that's personal happens here. RBC, ideas happen here. This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Celia Hatton, and at 17 hours on Tuesday the 16th of September, these are our main stories. Israel says its troops are moving into the center of Gaza City, which it sees as a stronghold of Hamas. The military operation is taking. place as United Nations investigators have concluded that Israel has carried out genocide in the Gaza Strip. And the Hollywood actor and director Robert Redford has died. He was 89.

Also in this podcast, we hear from one of the thousands of Ukrainian civilians who've been taken prisoner by Russia. They grabbed us and dragged us to the prison and on the way they beat us with rubber batons and sometimes they had let the dog off its leash so that it could bite us. We start in Gaza, where Palestinians have been desperately digging through the rubble of their bombed-out homes, looking for their families, after Israel's relentless bombardment overnight. In the morning, Israel's defense minister, Israel Katz, announced on social media that Gaza is burning. Israeli troops are moving into the center of Gaza city, and it's been.

confirmed that the long-promised full-scale ground invasion to capture Gaza's biggest urban centre is now underway. So far, there have been over 40 confirmed deaths. Many Gazans are missing under mangled concrete. This rescuers said it was really hard to find survivors. Tonight there was heavy bombardment. We took out many, many martyrs and injured, some serious and some minor. The situation was very, very difficult. It was hard to reach places due to shelling quadcopters, missiles, drones, F-16s. The situation was very, very bad. This man's cousin died when a concrete block fell on her.

He said he'd been digging through piles of concrete with his bare hands, as they have no equipment to help them. I don't know what kind of planes, weapons or explosives they are bringing in to kill children here in Gaza. Why? Our children are sleeping in God's safety when they strike them, kill them, and turn them to remains. I got the latest from our Middle East correspondent, Yolan Nell. The Israeli military said that it had hit with its Air Force more than 850 what it called terror targets in the past week and hundreds of what it called terrorists in Gaza City as well,

saying this was part of the effort to degrade Hamas infrastructure and prepare for the deployment of the troops. What we've been hearing from people on the ground is that it was a night of hell. They said this was a massive bombing campaign, really relentless. There was artillery shelling, shelling from the sea, Israeli airstrikes as well. And this has led to thousands more people trying to make their way out of Gaza City and head south. The Israeli military spokesman for Arabic has said that about 40% of Gaza City residents have now left. We haven't got the latest estimate from the UN, but there are these really telling scenes on the coastal road.

It's absolutely jammed with people who are trying to head out, many of them on foot, others in vehicles that are piled up. People have been telling us they don't know where to go. You know, when they try to head to the centre, the south of the Gaza Strip, many people are saying that they don't find places of shelter. So we have this bombardment of Gaza City while in Israel, hostage families. families have been camping outside the Israeli Prime Minister's house. What's their message for Benjamin Netanyahu? So they have said they're going to stay outside the Israeli Prime Minister's residence. While this offensive continues in Gaza, they're demanding that it should be stopped

for the sake of their loved ones, saying that it puts them in danger. It still thought that as many as 20 of the hostages out of 48 held in Gaza by Hamas and Islamic jihad, that they are still alive. And the hostage families, really, they've been putting out statements through the morning, just expressing their despair at the state of events. They say that Benjamin Netanyahu prioritizes his own political future over the well-being of their loved ones. They say he's doing everything to ensure that there is no ceasefire deal to bring back the hostages. Yolah now in Jerusalem. Still with Gaza, the United Nations has made a consequential announcement. U.N. investigators concluded for the first time since the war there began that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians living inside the Gaza Strip.

The term genocide isn't used lightly. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry says in its report that after examining the actions of Israel and Israeli forces in detail, it's concluded that Israel has carried out actions against Gazans that satisfy four key elements defining genocide. including deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to destroy that group and preventing births. The investigation team leader is the former Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pile, who's spoken to the BBC. We took two years to reach this conclusion. It's easy to proclaim the outcome genocide is happening. We went to the facts first. The facts must tell us that, yes, there's the intention. So the acts were killing and causing bodily harm and mental harm,

destruction of cultural, religious and educational structures and facilities, the siege, starvation, and the blocking of humanitarian aid, destruction of the healthcare system, sexual and gender-based violence, direct targeting of children. So all that's been covered. And that's when we conclude that it's genocide. Israel has rejected the UN report, describing it as distorted and false.

Its ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Daniel Meroon, had this to say about Navi Pili and her team. Three individuals serving as Hamas proxies, notorious for their openly anti-Semitic positions and whose horrific statements about Jews have been condemned worldwide, released today another fake report about Gaza. The report relies entirely on Hamas falsehoods, laundered and repeated by others. Our correspondent Imogen folks is tracking this story for us. She told me the UN report is unusual because it's singled out individuals.

She has named three Israeli leaders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the president, Isaac Herzog, and former Defence Minister Yov Gallant. And what she does there is analyze statements that they made very much at the beginning of the war. It's the language they used to, for example, Gaza will be reduced to rubble and other quite sweeping statements which seemed very less directed at Hamas, which Israel has insisted is its only target, and directed at Gaza as a whole and the Palestinian population as a whole. And Navi Pili described it to me a very interesting way when I interviewed her. What she said was, we looked at those statements. Since then, we have been gathering evidence of how this war is being conducted. Now we're going back and looking at the conduct of the war and those statements.

And this is where we see, yes, the intention from the start hinted at in those statements was indeed to a genocidal intent, to destroy a group. Imogen, what's the significance of this announcement today? We've heard the word genocide being used by various groups since the start of the war, really. I mean, what does it mean that this body has come out with this report today? Well, this is the most senior type of investigative body that the UN can have, a commission of inquiry. We haven't had that many. We've had one for Syria, for example. Navi Pile herself, of course, is a leading international lawyer and human rights expert.

We know that she led the tribunal on Rwanda, so she knows the genocide laws inside out. We know that Israel has firmly rejected suggestions by human rights groups like Amnesty International, human rights watch that genocide is taking place. It have rejected this report as well. But the methodology of a UN commission like this is very, very strict. Everything has to be verified. Everything has to be factually based. It is a significant report.

The world is divided over whether to support Israel or not. Israel has a strong ally in the United States. So whether it will have any effect in reducing the violence, I think that's perhaps doubtful. Image in folks in Geneva. Since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has been taking civilians prisoner. The two countries swap soldiers quite regularly as prisoners of war, but getting the civilians back is more complicated. And many families have had little or no news of their relatives since their detention.

Our Eastern Europe correspondent, Sarah Rainsford, has been to me. meet one man who's just been returned from Russian captivity. A journalist held for over three years with no charge, he's finally back home. Dmitro has barely been off his phone ever since he was released from a Russian prison. The journalist has three and a half years of news to catch up on, but he's also calling the families of all the other Ukrainians he met in captivity. Because for some, it could be their first confirmation that a relative is still alive. Dimitro was brought back to Ukraine in the latest prisoner swap, on a bus together with dozens of painfully thin soldiers.

Crowds lined the streets with flags and chance of welcome. Tmitro's first phone call was to tell his elderly mum he was home. Eight civilians were freed by Russia this time, which is very rare, because Ukraine doesn't have a pool of people to swap for them. Taking civilian prisoners is against the rules of war. I met Mitro soon after his release at the hospital where he's been getting checks and recuperating. The hardest was not knowing when you'll be allowed back.

You could be freed the next day or stay prison after 10 years. Nobody knows how long it's for. What he told me about captivity itself was chilling. They grabbed us and dragged us to the prison and on the way they beat us with rubber batons, shelving things like, how many people have you killed? And sometimes they had let the dog off its sleep. leash so that it could bite us.

The journalist was never charged with any crime. It's about an hour's drive out of Kiev to Dmitro's family house in the village, just walking through the garden to meet his parents. With its poultry and its pear trees, this village feels peaceful. now. But the back of Dmitro's house has chunks torn out of it by shrapnel. In 2022, the whole area was occupied by Russian troops. Mito's dad, Vassil, remembers how the two men were then captured, bound and blindfolded, and then left in a basement. Vassil was eventually set free, but for months he was terrified Mito had been killed.

He shows me the tiny slip of paper that then arrived from a Russian prison. Just two lines from Tmitro to tell his parents he was alive. Now he's free, his mother, Halina, is overwhelmed. We were crying so much. I'm going to cry now, too, because I can't control my emotions. Dima told me not to cry anymore, but it was. We haven't seen our son for three and a half years. Just down the road from them is baby Yaroslav, and he's never seen his grandfather.

Vladimir was detained by the Russians at the same time as Dmitro and in the same way, but he hasn't come home. Russia is still holding 43 civilian prisoners from just this one area, and across Ukraine, 16,000 civilians. are missing. I ask Vera, Vladimir's wife, how she copes. It's really hard. We smile, yes, but it's really tough, because I had a husband, and now I don't. It's the uncertainty. That's the hardest. She wants the government to do more, but Ukraine can't return Russian soldiers to get back its civilians, because then it fears Moscow would take more people hostage. For Dmitro's parents, the weight is almost over.

He'll be home here to join them soon when he's fit. His mother jokes that she has a long list of jobs for him. In fact, she can barely mention his name without crying. The years of fear and separation have done deep damage here to this family and to thousands. more. The Hollywood actor and director Robert Redford has died at the age of 89. Robert Redford became a huge star with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969. He also went on to direct.

His first film as director, Ordinary People, won four Oscars. Vincent Dowd looks back on Robert Redford's long career. He became a huge star, but he became a huge star. Starting out, Robert Redford played countless small roles in films and on TV. In 1960, the TV western Tate was typical. They took his life away from me. I took theirs away from them. Redford had been born in Santa Monica to a family he later called lower working class. He did not do well educationally. In his late teens, he went to Europe to find himself as a painter.

But he moved back to America, this time to New York. The fact that I wanted to be an artist, that was not an easy sell. You know, I had to make up something. I told everyone I wanted to be an art director. And so somebody said, well, if you want to be an art director, you should have some dramatic training. So that led me to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. I was very shy, and it was very embarrassing to have to do it. His first Broadway role was in 1959, but stardom arrived when Redford was 27 in the Neil Simon play,

barefoot in the park. In demand now as a hugely handsome leading man on screen, he starred in the movie version, opposite Jane Fonda. Is this what life is going to be like for the next 50 years? Paul, I think I'm going to be a lousy wife, but don't be angry with me. I love you very much, and I'm very sexy. As America changed, Robert Redford's screen presence felt modern, sometimes even countercultural. The next film was a big popular hit with Paul Newman. You're a hell of a card player, fella.

I know, because I'm a hell of a card player. And I can't even spot how you're cheating. We seem to be a little short and brotherly love around here. If you're with him, you better get yourselves out of here. Come, I wasn't cheating. I wasn't cheating. You can die. For that matter, you can both die.

After Butch Cassidy came work as varied as The Sting, again with Paul Newman and the spy drama Three Days of the Condor. This is a major. This is Joe Turner. What is your designation? Condor. Section 9, Department 17, the section's been hit. Everybody is dead. Liberal of opinion and deeply into politics, Redford was the thinking person's film star,

such as in Watergate drama or the president's men. He played a journalist. This is Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. About that $25,000 check deposited in the bank account of one of the Watergate burglars, Mr. Bernard Barker, the check has your name on it. How do you think your check got into the bank? account of Watergate Burger. The film, all the president's men, you know, is not a political film. It's really more about reporting, investigative reporting, how it works.

This incredible detective story, how the clues and how these people stumbled into half of it. In 1980, he fulfilled an ambition to direct. Ordinary People earned him an Oscar nomination as Best Director. And the winner is Robert Redford. Redford directed eight more feature films. In the early 80s, he started the Sundance Institute to encourage independent filmmaking. The annual Sundance Festival became a big influence on the movie industry.

I could see the way the industry was moving in 1980, that it was likely that we were going to be maybe abrogating that space that was given over to more diverse fair. But to me, the more of the humanistic side of cinema is always what's interested me where the really great stories are to be told. That was the objective, didn't know it was. going to work. When in 2018 he made the old man and the gun, he said it would be his last

outing as a film star. Playing an aging bank robber, there was an echo of Butch Cassidy. Let's take this place. Let's say it was a bank. Got to feel right. The timing has to feel right. And when it does feel right, you make your move. So you walk right up and you say, ma'am, this is a robbery. From a background far from privileged, a combination of looks, talent, and ambivalry. And made Robert Redford one of the most admired and influential figures in American cinema. I wonder where I'm going. I just thinking myself as that little kid I was. So is he proud of you? That little boy? Oh, he's getting closer every day.

A tribute to Robert Redford, the actor and director turned activist who's died at the age of 89. Later, popular target of rumor and gossip in the... 18th century, we'll hear about the real Marie Antoinette. She's a complex woman, and I welcome the occasion for us all to see a much more human individual than the sort of cardboard cutout, which we've often been told about. We started this podcast with news from Gaza, and we'll now turn to the other Palestinian territory, the occupied West Bank, where there's been an upsurge and tension between Palestinians and Israeli settlers. Palestinian filmmaker and journalist Basil Adra, who won an Oscar for the documentary No Other Land,

said Israeli soldiers had raided his home while he was in hospital. It happened after Israeli settlers had first attacked his village. Basil later told us what happened. The raid happened after the soldiers attacked us on our land. I was together with my brothers, my cousins. Settlers brought their sheep to destroy our olive trees, and we tried to push them out, call them the police to come and to arrest them.

More settlers came with raffles, with sticks, they attacked us. And then the army came, blocked the village. We were able to have only one ballisticine ambulance, and they forced them to wait for half an hour before hospitalizing my cousin and one of my brothers. The other brother, we have to take him to the hospital with a private car. When I was in the hospital, soldiers raided my village. They invade my home where my wife, together with my nine-month-old daughter,

the soldiers searched the phone of my wife, search the house, the activist space that it's under my house. And then my parents' home, when the soldiers forced my wife to open her phone and they called me from it. I didn't hear exactly what they want because it was in hospital It was a bad connection And they moved around

To the neighbors They searched their home To another activist's houses In the village were raided And the village were blocked By a metal gate for a few hours No one was allowed to go in or out And next day

My lawyer reached out to the Israeli police As they are like The ones should be aware of what's happening and why the army raided my home. And they said that I'm not wanted. There's nothing against me. There has been an increase in tension, an increase in settler attacks

and increased criticism of the Israeli authorities' response since the conflict in Gaza began. Do you know whether they were targeting your home, your family specifically, whether they got your wife to call you because of who you are in the prominent position that you have? All Palestinians are target for the... occupation, all

Palestinian life at risk. Yes, they target more the loud voices, voices that speak up against the occupation. Activists like me, like the journalists in Gaza who have been precisely targeted and murdered by Israeli soldiers. They try to

go more after like journalists, activists because they want to do crimes and they don't want anybody to speak about. And July 28 they killed our beloved brother. and amazing activist out of Hadalene from the village nearby. And since then, Israeli settlers committed like four bloody attacks against us,

including they attacked kids, elderly people, women, men, they torture homes and cars. Palestinian filmmaker and journalist Basil Adra, speaking to Rob Young. Israel's military said soldiers went to the village after Palestinians had thrown rocks injuring two Israeli civilians. It said its forces were still there, searching the area and questioning people. Now to Argentina, where the president has announced plans to water down his radical economic policies. He's promised to relax his austerity measures and increase spending on pensions, health, and education. The policy shift comes after Javier Miele's party suffered a resounding

defeat in an important local election earlier this month. In a TV-adourable, he said that the worst is over, but added that it was important to continue with his economic shock therapy. If we add our planned reforms, we could see sustained annual growth of 7 or 8%. To put that in perspective, growing at these rates would mean that in 10 years would resemble high-income countries. In 20 years, we'd be among the richest nations in the world, and in 30 years would be on the podium of global powers. But not everyone shares President Miele's optimism in Argentina's future.

To explain why, Stuart Clarkson spoke with the BBC's Katie Silver. They have been widespread cuts and indeed protests across the country at some of his austerity measures. I mean, some are very positive when it comes to Malay. They say that he's been very beneficial for the economy. He's seen inflation go down. It was triple digits. Now they're forecasting or hoping for just over 10% next year. So in some ways, there are some people who are very supportive, but many are not. So there have been widespread protests, particularly, for example, from the healthcare sector. I have contacts and colleagues in Buenos Aires who have talked about, for example,

the sheer numbers of doctors that are taking to the streets, the huge cuts that that sectors have faced, along with as well, for example, public sector workers. And of course, he came to office with that chainsaw promising to drastically cut government. spending and that is something that we have seen well and truly during this time and I even received an email from somebody saying please mention the homeless because apparently there has also been a huge increase in homelessness as well in the country since he took office so he's saying the worst is over what's actually going to change how might affect people's lives daily so they say

now that they're still going to be the libertarian party says now that it's still going to be pursuing a a solid fiscal program so basically saying that by all accounts they are going to to guarantee a fiscal balance. They call it a rule of fiscal stability and say that if there's any chance that they're going into fiscal deficit, they will cut spending again. But for now, they say that they're going to

guarantee a fiscal balance and hike funds, particularly when it comes to things like healthcare, education and pensions. Three of the sectors that have been really cut during this time, the government said that they're going to allocate about 85% of the government budget to that in the coming year. Now, the US technology company,

The alphabet, which owns Google, has announced a $7 billion investment in artificial intelligence in the UK. The money is being used to open a new data center and to fund further research into AI and its possible economic benefits. That's all good news for Britain, but other countries are struggling to attract similar investment in this rapidly developing sector. Right now, for example, 90% of the world's data centers are owned by U.S. and Chinese firms. What are other countries doing to keep up? It's something Hannah Moline has been looking into. This is an intermediate place where you just clean your shoes here in order to give the dirt off. Nicholas Volovic is a computer science professor at the National University of Cordoba in Argentina.

He is running what counts as one of his country's most advanced AI computing hubs from a converted room at the university. A stark difference from the infrastructure you might find 5,000 kilometres away in the US. Let's enter, but the noise will be unbearable. Nicholas has been repurposing a lot of old computer equipment to run the site. We are always trying to push the budget. We use very old servers that were from 2012. And we reproposed them adding GPUs.

So we added stuff like that to get a new life to the computer. It was the only way to get something related to AI working. Nicola struggles to get access to funding in Argentina to develop AI technology, despite the president Javei Emile, bringing an incentive to try and attract big tech companies to invest there. It's a theme replicated in many parts of the world. lack of investment and infrastructure, holding countries back from developing

homegrown artificial intelligence businesses. It's 3.30am in Nairobi, Kenya's capital. And whilst most of the country is sleeping, software engineers are heading into Carla's offices, an AI startup, developing artificial intelligence software for businesses around the world. They too don't have local data centres to power their businesses, so they have to use compute power from other parts of the world,

which often means an early wake-up call. You have to find a time when not everybody is hogging the resources, which is surely like 4 a.m., 5 a.m., because then Kenya has not worked up, Europe has not working up. The US is sleeping, yeah? So the only person you're accompanying with is China and India. Shika Gatow is the CEO of Carla. And what I love about the engineers is they found where to host their workloads

such that it processes faster. Because, you know, the further it is, the slow it is. Sometimes they leave it overnight to run so that when Americans are going to sleep, they're able to run their work before Europe wakes up, you're able to run their work. Carla, like many other companies, has to rely on the US and China for its compute power.

But as other parts of the world race to compete, will that trend change? Politically developments in the last couple of months certainly made people more concerned and more worried about having full control of their infrastructure. Exoscale is a European cloud company. Mateus Newbauer is the CEO. They certainly want to avoid that someone has access to data,

that they should not have access to. And this is where more and more businesses are turning to sovereign cloud providers from Europe. Whilst the future of artificial intelligence is uncertain, what we do know is the industry has big economic potential. So the race to dominate in it is only going to get more competitive. Here in the UK, the first exhibition dedicated to the life, of the 18th century French queen, Marie Antoinette, is opening in London at the Victorian Albert Museum. Marie Antoinette was the subject of accusations and rumor in her time. Her high spending

was blamed for France's financial crisis and gossip swirled around her during her short life. She was married at the age of 14 and crowned queen at 18. She was executed at the guillotine when she was just 37. Anna Foster asked Katrina Seth, a professor of French literature at the University of Oxford, to tell us more about her. She's a very modern figure in many ways because public opinion attacked her quite often for things for which she wasn't responsible. And whilst she was careless and naive, she certainly wasn't the monster she was made into by some contemporary press outlets. There were horrible caricatures against her, for instance, and pornographic texts and so on.

What kind of woman was she? Let's set the record straight because you have spent so long studying her and her life and her legacy. Tell us more about her. I think she's somebody who's very conscious of her duty. She's brought up by a very Catholic mother, Maria Teresa, the

Empress of Austria. And she believes that she has a function in life, which is to represent an important family on earth and to bring up the child who is going to be the future king of France. And everything she does, she does with that idea in mind.

She's generous with her friends, too generous often, doesn't see that she's been taken advantage of. She's a bit of a negligent adolescent, but then weren't we all and doesn't necessarily care if she doesn't be about what people think. She's someone who in many ways would have liked to have lived a much more discreet life than the one she had where she was thrust into the spotlight very often. And it feels almost reductive to talk about her things when we're talking about her as a woman,

but actually seeing her things together really paints a picture of her. Yes, it's very moving because you discover that Marie Antoinette is like a lot of us in that she has passions, there are things which interests her. The exhibition is very good, obviously, on the fashion side. She's such a style icon. And yet she's also a human being writing very moving. letters, for instance, when she's in captivity. So she's a complex woman, and I welcome the

occasion for us all to see a much more human individual, probably, than the sort of cardboard cutout, which we've often been told about. Oxford University's Katrana Seth on the real Mary Antoinette. 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 Global Podcast at BBC.co.uk. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag Global NewsPod.

This edition was mixed by Derek Clark, and the producer was Ed Horton. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Celia Hatton. Until next time, goodbye.