Global News Podcast - Israel launches major operation in occupied West Bank

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

At least nine Palestinians have been killed as Israel raids cities in the north of the West Bank. Also: Japan issues an emergency warning as a powerful typhoon approaches, and Paris prepares to host the Paralympics.

Hello, this is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service, with reports and analysis from across the world. The latest news seven days a week. BBC World Service podcasts are supported by advertising. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Thank you. Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Andrew Peach and at 13 Hours GMT on Wednesday 28th August, these are our main stories.

Israel's carrying out a major military operation in the occupied West Bank, targeting at least four Palestinian cities at the same time. As Ukraine's president says the incursion into Russian territory is part of a victory plan, we hear from a resident in the city of Suja in the Russian Kursk region. Japan issues an emergency warning as a powerful typhoon approaches. Also in this podcast, Afghan women defy new Taliban law by posting videos of singing. And more than 4,000 athletes from around the world are in Paris for the start of the Paralympics. We'll start in the Middle East. Since the Hamas attacks on the 7th of October,

the focus of much of the world's media has been on Gaza and the increasingly tense border between Israel and Lebanon. But violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank has also been surging. Hundreds of people have lost their lives and now a major Israeli military operation, the biggest in years, is underway in the north of the occupied West Bank. The assault by land and air began after Israeli soldiers entered refugee camps in the Jordan Valley. At least nine people have been killed. Noor Oda is a former spokeswoman for the Palestinian Authority. Since the early hours of dawn, we've seen a large contingence of Israeli forces raiding and occupying Jenin and Tulkarem, particularly targeting the refugee camps over there, most notably blocking the movement of paramedics and the entry and exit from hospitals,

which was a repeat or a mirroring of the tactics used in Gaza. There's widespread destruction reported in those areas. The IDF has been giving some details of its operation, as our correspondent Yolan Nel told me from Jerusalem. They have confirmed with footage that they carried out an airstrike in Farah urban refugee camp. It's in the north of the Jordan Valley. And there's also been another airstrike on a car near Janin that was overnight. But the Israeli military says in this ongoing major military operation, it is making arrests,

it says it is dismantling explosives and has confiscated a quantity of weapons, releasing pictures, it says, show that. Certainly we've seen in footage shared on social media, Israeli armoured vehicles entering and closing off these different towns and cities. The main focus is Jenin, Tolkarm and Tubas. And the speculation is that this really could go on for several days. Palestinian armed groups have put out defiant statements saying that they're fighting Israeli enforcers as they encounter them. They say they've been using explosives against military bulldozers and that they have been gun battles as well.

At the moment, locals in Jenin have been telling us that it is quieter than it has been, but still this is an ongoing military operation. People are really very afraid to leave their homes. Obviously there's always been disruption in the West Bank, but how big an escalation is this to what's happening there? Yeah, and violence in the West Bank was going on prior to the war in Gaza. In fact, that was really a main focus of the Israeli military, saying it was involved in a wide scale

counterterrorism operation we had near nightly raids before the war. But then violence has just surged further. Since the start of the war, Israel really sort of stepped up action against Palestinian armed groups, particularly Hamas and Islamic Jihad. And at the same time, we've seen these increased vigilante attacks by extremist settlers on Palestinian communities. And the Israeli foreign minister has suggested that the West Bank should become like Gaza so Palestinians can just be told to move when Israel needs them to. What sort of reaction has there been to that? This is really something that's causing alarm, a message that the foreign minister Israel Katz put out

on the social media platform X earlier. He linked what's been happening in the West Bank to Iran, said that Iran was seeking to open up a new front, a new terror network to attack Israel, as he put it, in the West Bank by funding and supporting armed groups there. And he raised the possibility of Palestinian evacuation orders, these sort of temporary evacuation orders, as he described it, as has been done in the Gaza Strip during the war there. Now, a Palestinian official has come out quickly representing the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. His spokesman really accused Israel of trying to escalate the conflict in Gaza

with this action in the West Bank and warning that the results could be, in his words, dire and dangerous. Yola Nel in Jerusalem. Ukrainian officials say Russian bombardments in the past 24 hours or so have killed at least 11 people. Six died on Wednesday in the partially Russian-occupied region of Donetsk, where fighting is at its heaviest. Across the border, Ukraine's military action in Kursk continues.

It says it now controls 100 Russian settlements. The BBC has been speaking to a resident of the small Russian town of Suja, now occupied by Ukraine. We'll call her Irina. She's now moved to Kursk city, which is a hundred kilometers away to stay with family members. She says they were given no warning that Ukrainian troops were about to enter the town, despite Moscow saying it had sent buses to move people to safety. I'm a beautician. I have many clients and none of the people I know have received any help with evacuation.

We are all in Kursk, in a rented studio flat which we share between the five of us. We are grateful that we found a place to live. But now the problem is we don't have the means to pay for it. All of my work was left in Suja. I have no equipment, no materials, nor a car to move around. My husband lost income too. He had a small shop in town. All his stock remains there.

All we have is debt. And how is the situation in Kursk now? Do you feel relatively safe? Kursk is also being shelled, and this makes us anxious. Those who lived in Kursk moved away deeper in Russia, replaced by those who came from Suja. And do you have any communication with Suja? There is no reach. Could you imagine how it smells there now? Rotting food in fridges, abandoned animals. Our relatives had 30 pigs and they had to leave them all. If only we were given a couple of hours to evacuate or at least a green corridor.

And who should have given you this warning? From what I understand, Russia did not know about any impending incursion. But everyone else knew. I work with women, many of whom have relatives in Ukraine, and they told me that something was going on in Sumy across the border. The Ukrainians brought in heavy machinery, people noticed some movements, evacuations were taking place. Why we, the regular people, knew that something was brooding across in Sumy, but nobody else did? You blame the Russian security forces then?

Certainly, but they probably couldn't expect that there would be an incursion. There was a lot of shelling during the last two years, but the border was never crossed. You told me earlier that in the last two years, the whole of Sudja helped the Russian soldiers in defense against Ukraine. My husband helped the soldiers so much without asking the Russian soldiers in defense against Ukraine. My husband helped the soldiers so much without asking for anything else in return, so that our boys could defend us. He was giving them gloves, mouse traps, for when they were stuck in the trenches. We are ordinary people. Nothing depends on us.

Do you think we want these deaths? All we want is peace, because if the fighting continues, Suja will disappear. Someone we're calling Irina, who's fled the Russian town of Suja, talking to my colleague Natalia Golsheva-Dais. The Olympics may be over. There will be more sporting action in Paris, though, with the 17th Paralympic Games, the opening ceremony taking place on Wednesday evening. More than 4,000 athletes from all over the world and a team of refugees will compete during the next couple of weeks. Here's our sports reporter, Manny Jasmy. Two and a half weeks after the Olympics, Paris is back in competition mode.

All the Paralympic sports will use Olympic venues. The beach volleyball sandpit at the Eiffel Tower has been levelled and covered by an artificial pitch for the blind football. It's expected the record attendance of a blind football match of 5,000 will be broken, but fans there and at the blind-specific sport of goalball will have to stay quiet throughout play so the players can hear the ball. France are aiming to win 20 gold medals and finish in the top eight of the medals table for the first time in 32 years. One of their

biggest hopes is wheelchair tennis player Stéphane Houdet. He's already won three Paralympic gold medals and 24 Grand Slam titles. I hope we're being seen seriously as athletes and not as disabled people. Even before the end of the Olympics, the Paralympics were touched by controversy through the presence of the first openly transgender athlete. 50-year-old Italian visually impaired sprinter Valentina Petrillo will run in the 100 and 200 metres. Some of her rivals say that living as a man for 44 years before transitioning has given her an unfair physiological advantage. Petrillo says that sport should teach the value of inclusion and she should be allowed to express herself in her own gender. The president of the International Paralympic Committee, Andrew Parsons,

says that transgender rules in para-sport are too vague, so she's welcome to compete. The sport movement has to, guided by science, come up with better answers for transgender athletes. So we need to, based on science, have a better and probably a united answer. Because it's the reality of the world, They deserve an answer which cannot be, well, this week you can compete, maybe in the future you cannot compete. For the moment, World Parathletics rules allow her to compete, so she will be welcomed as any other athlete. During the games, the Paralympic Village will host the largest gathering of disabled people in the world. It's 100% accessible according to the International Paralympic Committee. The living

areas don't have steps, the bathrooms have plenty of space for manoeuvre, and the all-important electrical sockets are 45 centimetres above the floor, within reach, regardless of disability. 50,000 people are expected to attend the opening ceremony on the Place de la Concorde and Champs-Élysées. The head of the Paralympic organising committee, Tony Estanguet, says that it will be a daring ceremony that disrupts and shakes up the clichés and prejudices about disability. With more competitors from more nations than ever before and 80% of tickets already sold, the Paralympics have a chance to showcase what disabled people can do

and leave the negative portrayals and assumptions about disability in the shadows. Estonia's crime rate is so low its jails are only half full. So the Baltic nation is now considering whether it should rent out some of those empty cells to other countries. It wouldn't be the first time this has happened. The Netherlands and Kosovo have rented out space in their jails. Estonia's Justice Minister Lisa Bacosta is hoping she can persuade her colleagues to back the idea, which she says could raise 30 million euros a year. Going back to 1990s, after we regained our independence, the rate of criminality was quite high. So we literally put the criminals to the prison. It improved the situation quite quickly. And now we are in the

situation that we have new, wonderful, very secure modern prisons, but only half of the place is filled. So the obvious solution for that would be that we raise our export. So we would look towards NATO countries, our good companions, and discuss what would be the best secure solution for both of the countries. When the prison time is up to the end, the prisoners will return to the original country. To build the schools and hospitals, we need actually investments to Estonia. Renting out these places is one of the possibilities to get the money. And when we are now looking to the statistics in Europe or in the wider region, we actually see that the criminality rates are raising. They are raising in most of the countries.

And we assume that that would hit Estonia as well. So it might be that we need these places ourselves in, like, say, seven years. Because all our prisons are very modern, very new ones. So it's no reason to knock them down. Estonia's Justice Minister Lisa Bacosta. Still to come, we'll check out the new Barbie phone, which can't get online. This phone comes without social media. And because we've seen this surge in actually young people wanting to have a digital detox,

this is actually delivering on what they're demanding right now. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Global News, AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free.

Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. Pope Francis has condemned efforts to repel migrants and block their routes, calling them a grave sin. During his weekly general audience, he strongly criticised those who don't help migrant boats or who abandon refugees in the desert,

saying migration policy worldwide should be based on justice and brotherhood. As record numbers of young Africans risk their lives trying to get to the Spanish Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa, this week Spain's Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, is visiting Senegal, Mauritania and The Gambia for talks on the issue. Victoria Uwanhunda has been talking to our reporter Kededyatu Sise who's been looking into this new route and talking to migrants and their loved ones. Most of these migrants use the route from West Africa to the Canary Islands

and it's linked to, first of all, more border control in most European countries, considering that they have toughened their migration policies. And so West African migrants have increasingly chosen the Calgary Islands route because it requires less hassle in the sense that they would need to cross the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean if they choose the Mediterranean alternatives. It appears to be an option that would potentially result in more success. You've been speaking to people who've taken this journey as well as their family members. What kind of stories have they shared with you? You know, I think it's important to emphasize that these are people who actually really love their countries from what they've told me. They just want to leave, but it's a bit more complex. I spoke to a Senegalese lady whose name is Amina. Her son was sadly found dead on a boat in the Dominican Republic earlier this

month. It came as a shock because he was initially working in Mauritania. Let's hear what she says. He had mentioned to travel for a long time, but he never mentioned he was planning to take a boat. I asked him where he was planning to go and he said Morocco. But a week after his departure, we still hadn't heard from him. Every single day I would ask myself, where is he? We found out he had died on social media.

His only desire was to make a living and support his family. My heart was broken. You know, your body is found in the Dominican Republic and you had left off from Senegal. I just did a Google search and it's 5,900 kilometers we're talking about. But what are the West African authorities, leaders doing to stop this? Many of them have promised that they would create jobs, that they would reduce the prices of food staples, or that they would ensure that economic growth would take place. And from what local immigration experts have told me,

it seems that young people are not willing to wait, potentially for years or decades, so that they would see the results of all those efforts. They feel like their only option is to leave. Kennedy R2C say reporting. The latest move against women by the Taliban government of Afghanistan is about their faces, body and voices. A new law tells them how they must cover up if they're outside and bans women from speaking in public. Some Afghan women have responded by posting videos of themselves singing. The words include,

you've imprisoned me inside the house for the crime of being a woman. Fawzia Kufi is one of Afghanistan's most prominent female politicians in exile. My colleague Michelle Hussain asked what she thought of the new law. It's not to surprise of any woman in Afghanistan because already since the Taliban returned, gradually they have issued 85 edicts to erase a woman from any kind of public sphere, education, work. And the last thing women could, and I laugh because it's a tragic laugh. The last thing

they wanted to do is to ban women from speaking in public. Now you can imagine if a woman is with no male companion, if she doesn't have a husband, if she doesn't have a brother, if she doesn't have a father, and she wants to go out to just buy grocery and get a taxi. How can she talk? A woman from Kabul the other day was telling me that she actually waited for half an hour to convince a taxi driver to charge her double to take her from one place to the other because the taxi driver was scared. So unfortunately, this is the last nail in the coffin of women rights in Afghanistan that the Taliban did. Does it mean that essentially women will be confined in the home because, as you say, this affects getting anywhere, shopping, like all sorts of activities that were technically still available. Yes, women could still go out to do their, you know, basic staffs, including visiting friends,

families, you know, shopping, and some actually were working in, you know, discreetly in some NGOs or, you know, private companies, discreetly they were still trying their way to work, despite, you know, the shrinking space for them. But after this law, and if they start enforcing, which in some provinces they have, the Department of Vice and Virtue started enforcing, it is actually basically controlling any move by women.

And what is surprising to me is that in a country where, according to the UN report, more than 90% of the population is on the poverty line, why is the Taliban only saying that by enforcing further and further restrictions on women that they can protect Islam? And why is Afghanistan different from the rest of Muslim world? In fact, actually, they are the one creating Islamophobia. And I think it's time for the Muslim countries, especially Muslim women around the world, to start, you know, challenging these narratives of misrepresentation of Islam by Taliban. What makes the women of Afghanistan different from other Muslim women? It's just the patriarchy and the Taliban fear of women getting power

and the Taliban losing power. Fazia Koufi, one of Afghanistan's most prominent female politicians in exile, talking to Michelle Hussain. Japan has issued an emergency warning as a powerful typhoon approaches the southwest of the country. The carmaker Toyota has suspended all production. Around 800,000 people have been moved to safety from their homes. Our Asia-Pacific editor, Mickey Bristow, is following developments. We're talking about Typhoon Shanshan, which is currently sitting menacingly off the southern coast of Japan.

That's going to move northwards in the next couple of hours, make landfall and then veer northeastwards. And over the next few days, at its current trajectory, it looks as though it's going to cross the whole of the Japanese landmass. The Japanese are saying this is a very strong storm indeed with winds gusting at more than 200 kilometres an hour. That's powerful enough to tear down a house. So you get some kind of idea of the strength of this storm. Of course, there's going to be torrential rain as well, so there's potential for flooding. People along rivers, as you mentioned there,

some people have already been evacuated and in coastal areas where they're going to be tidal surges. So at the moment, this storm hasn't hit, but Japan is bracing itself. It's a very densely populated country, which makes dealing with this kind of situation even more difficult. Indeed. Japan's also, though, used to dealing with natural disasters, including typhoons of this size. And if you look at some of the preparations that have already taken place, it just indicates that air travel has also been suspended already in some areas, particularly the southwest of the country. Bullet trains are running normally at the moment, but over the coming days, as this strong typhoon makes its way across Japan,

those could be stopped. The authorities are warning people not to drive if it's windy. People have been evacuated. Factories are closing down. Postal delivery services have already been suspended. So this is a country used to dealing with natural disasters like this and is already prepared. At the moment, we're not quite sure the course of this typhoon.

It might veer off, so some of the worst effects might not happen. But if it does, we're going to be talking about Typhoon Shanshan for the next couple of days. Mickey Bristow reporting. Now to New York, where the US Open Tennis Championships are underway. On Tuesday, history was made on the hard court with Britain's Dan Evans beating the Russian player Karen Khachanov in the tournament's longest ever match. But how long was it? Here's our tennis correspondent, Russell Fuller.

Five hours and 35 minutes. So the match started at lunchtime. It finished in the early evening. Court Six has probably never seen anything like it in its life at the US Open. And it was Dan Evans who'd won just four matches on the ATP Tour and in Grand Slams all season, who somehow outlasted Karen Hachanov in that final set, having been four love down. And it looked as if Hachanov had taken his legs at that point but Evans found the second wind and managed to win 6-4 in what is the longest match in US Open history by nine minutes breaking a record that was set 32 years ago. Both of them looked shattered for probably the last hour and a half of the match but the crowd absolutely loved it. There are growing calls from parents and campaigners around the world

to limit the amount of time children spend on smartphones or even ban them from using the devices completely. Today in the UK, a new and very pink Barbie-branded phone is being launched. As our technology editor Zoe Clyman explains, it's not a smartphone. In fact, it's one designed to help young people stay away from social media. Barbie, a 65-year-old brand which was given a new lease of life last summer when the star-studded film hit cinemas, is back again. This time, it's in the form of a flip phone made by the mobile phone company HMD, the same budget brand behind Nokia. It's a feature phone, also sometimes called a dumb phone,

meaning there's no access to social media and it can only perform basic functions like texting and calling. As concerns about the pressures of digital life on young people grows, HMD hopes devices like this might prove popular with children and indeed adults looking for a digital detox. I asked the firm whether the phone would live up to expectations among young people as it tries to compete with smartphones. Lars Silberbauer is its chief marketing officer. We are very clear when we say, like, this phone comes without social media. And because we've seen this surge in actually young people

wanting to have a digital detox, no, this is actually delivering on what they're demanding right now. I think when we are talking about Barbie, that's also like there's a lot of good values with Barbie. It convinces the parents about like, yes, you believe in the brand. I made this my phone for one day and it certainly was an effective digital detox because there really isn't a lot you can do on it. You can get online, but it's impossible to read. There's no app store, no front-facing camera and only one game. And while you can text, the Barbie phone doesn't recognise the default message setting that's on plenty of smartphones.

So you might not get any replies. While this will undoubtedly appeal to some parents, there are industry experts who question its broader appeal. Ben Wood is chief analyst at CCS Insight. So perhaps in that kind of 7 to 10-year-old before you go to secondary school and there's an expectation that smartphones are almost a birthright, that's an opportunity.

However, the grim reality is when I talk to people who've got smartphones and explain to them the implications of giving up their smartphone for something much more basic, it's a pretty tough sell. Yeah, I already have TikTok. We decided to put the phone to the test with its key target audience. So I'd like if there was things like Google and you could take pictures and more games. I probably wouldn't use a phone like that

because it doesn't have all the apps that I usually like to use. Personally, something that I'm really worried about for my daughter, in terms of introducing children to using a phone with restricted kind of access to social media, I'd get on board with that. HMD says it would welcome apps like WhatsApp on board with Barbie. But WhatsApp says not all operating systems work with its service. For now, texting and calling is going to have to be Kenoff.

Our technology editor Zoe Kleinman reporting. And that's all from us for now. There'll be a new edition of Global News to download later. If you'd like to comment on this edition and the stories we included, drop us an email globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk or on X you'll find us as at global news pod this edition was mixed by craig king of the producer was tracy gordon the editor is karen martin i'm andrew peach thanks for listening and until next time goodbye if you're hearing this you're probably already listening to bbc's award-winning news podcasts Thank you. to comedy, to true crime, all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership.

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