Global News Podcast - Israel strikes Syrian military headquarters

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

Israel launches strikes on Syria, including the capital Damascus. Also: at least 20 people killed by crowd surge at US backed food distribution point in Gaza, and pressure grows on Donald Trump to release Epstein files.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. deal ratings and price history. So you know a great deal when you see one. That's cargurus.ca. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Nick Miles and at 13 Hours GMT on Wednesday the 16th of July these are our main stories. Israeli drones have attacked the Syrian military headquarters in Damascus. So why the escalation now? The threat of the Islamic State group in Ethiopia after more than 80 suspected members are arrested there. Twenty more Gazans die in a crash at a food point. We ask why they're so deadly for the people they're supposed to help. Also in this podcast more

companies are training younger employees how to behave in the office. We get reaction. I think maybe they think some of us are a bit erratic, a bit odd, not in a bad way. All the colleagues they're much more funnier than we are. I feel like they have a more hardworking approach to us. We all spend much more time on our phones than they do. Israel has carried out a drone strike in the Syrian capital Damascus. It hit the entrance of the Syrian military headquarters. It comes after several days of fighting in the south of the country between tribal fighters loyal to the Syrian government and a militia from

the Druze minority in which nearly 250 people are reported to have been killed. Gidea Machresh is an Israeli Druze politician and former member of the Israeli Knesset. She says Druze in Syria need protecting. Horrible visuals coming from Syria as we are speaking from our brothers and sisters who are asking anybody, anyone, any organization, any nearby country just to protect them and save them. What started after the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December as a transition mode, a promising

positive signal now is becoming a campaign of terror against minorities. Well, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyanyahu has addressed the concerns of the Druze community in Syria and Israel, as our Middle East regional editor Mike Thompson has been telling me. He's been assuring them that Israel will not leave them to stand alone and be attacked by the forces that he says they are, by the Syrian government forces and by these Bedouin tribes in Soweda. He's also appealed for Druze living in Israel to not cross the border into Syria, that's around the Golden Heights area. Now what's your analysis about why Israel is doing this? Is it specifically, as Mr. Niasniar who says, to protect the Druze

community there with whom many Israelis feel an affinity or is it perhaps to weaken the Syrian government? Well there's no doubt that there are genuine efforts to protect the Druze. Israel has around 150,000 Druze people living in the country so there is that and some of them are members of the Israeli army, they've joined the Israeli forces. But there's perhaps an even bigger thing going on here. Israel is very concerned about the threat. It believes that the Islamist regime in Damascus poses to Israel and has repeatedly said, don't move

forces south of Damascus. Now, Zawada is south of Damascus. And we've seen over the last few days Israeli forces punnelling the security forces, that's the Syrian security forces, sent down to try and bring calm to Zoueda. So it could be, in a way, that the Druze situation, though there is genuine concern for them, maybe is being used as a bit of a shield for the attacks that Israel wants to launch against the Syrian forces to degrade them.

Now it's clearly not in Israel's interest or the international community as a whole for this new Syrian regime to collapse because Islamic State is waiting in some areas of Syria and could make a resurgence if that happens. So it's a tricky situation as to know what to do in terms of reacting to this, isn't it? It is indeed, yes. I mean, it's a real powder keg in Syria because you've not only got the group you mentioned, the Islamic State, but you've also got the Kurdish-led forces there in the northeast. You've got the Turkish-backed militia in the northwest. You've got also

what's believed to be a sad loyalists in the West of the country. And there's been much bloodshed there earlier this year when it was believed by the security forces that they were launching attacks on the Syrian forces. So you can see holding this country together for Ahmed al-Sharah, the president, is a big challenge. And the West is hoping that he can do that because they've relaxed sanctions and they're hoping that the country can have a fresh start after years of violence. That was our Middle East regional editor, Mike Thompson. In recent weeks we've reported almost every day about people in Gaza being shot and killed

mainly by Israeli soldiers at food distribution sites run by the Israeli and US backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Well, Israel says its troops have been forced to open fire when they were threatened by crowds. That is something that many people in Gaza dispute. On Wednesday morning, at least 20 Palestinians were killed at one of the sites at Khan Yunis on this occasion because of a crush rather than gunfire. Yuland Nel is our correspondent in Jerusalem. She told me what had happened.

Well, what we've been hearing is that there was a crush at this site. At least 20 people have been killed. The local hospital is saying it has seen a number of bodies coming in, people suffocated. And certainly there is a video that the BBC has verified from Nasser Hospital, the local hospital in Hainounis, which shows boys and men, their bodies on the back of a cart with a witness saying that many of these boys had pushed forwards in their effort to get the food handouts at this site and were trapped in an area between two fences. GHF put out a statement saying it was heartbroken by this tragic incident and described a chaotic and dangerous surge. It blamed agitators. It said

there was credible reason to believe that they were people who were armed and Hamas affiliated among the crowd and also blamed a lot of recent misleading social media information which it said had driven crowds to close sites and incited disorder. But it was surprising to have the GHF as our main initial source about these people having been killed at one of its sites because repeatedly when we've asked in the past about deaths close to the sites we've been told that it doesn't know about them and it has really questioned the figures that the UN has put out. It said that since the GHF began its operations in late May it's recorded more than 670 people killed close to its sites. Witnesses

saying most were killed by Israeli forces and we've had the Israeli military saying at one point that it was investigating claims of civilian deaths another 200 people killed close to incoming UN aid convoys as well. Now the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has been criticized a lot, particularly because it only operates in Israeli controlled zones in Gaza. What about the way it is set up? Does that cause specific problems and might have led to these crushes? Well, I mean, when the UN refused to cooperate with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation from its outset, it was saying that this was unethical and also impractical the way it was setting up with just four distribution sites,

whereas previously when the UN had a full operation in Gaza, it had at least 400 distribution sites. Israel and the US say that this method of giving out food bypasses Hamas but what makes the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation so controversial is that it uses these private US security contractors to get aid in and operates exclusively in Israeli military zones. That was Yuland Nel. Dozens of suspected members of the Islamic State Group have been arrested across cities in Ethiopia. That is according to state media there. The reports also say that those arrested had crossed into Ethiopia from the Somali region of Puntland on the tip of the Horn of Africa

and that they had planned terrorist attacks. Our Africa regional editor, Will Ross, has more. Ethiopia has for years deployed troops to neighbouring Somalia to fight the Al-Qaeda-linked planned terrorist attacks. Our Africa regional editor, Will Ross, has more. including the Amhara and Oromia regions. The US military is worried about the growing threat of Islamic State in Africa and in February carried out airstrikes in Somalia's Puntland region. Officials there say IS Somalia has recruited many Ethiopian migrants in the port city of Bosaso whilst they're trying to emigrate to Gulf states. Will Ross reporting. Now, it is not often that there is open public disagreement within the communist government of Cuba. But now the Labour Minister, Marta Fetó, has been forced to resign after saying that people begging in the streets of Havana and other cities were just looking for money to get drunk. President Miguel Díaz-Carnel immediately rejected her comments and said that the vulnerable should not be treated as enemies.

If these are the issues in our society, they are our problems. They are our homeless men or our homeless women. They are our people, our families and our communities who are vulnerable. They are ours and we have to solve them ourselves. Our Americas online editor Vanessa Buschluter told me more about the debate. The Commons were so outrageous that they caused this unusual level of public anger in Cuba. Remember Cuba is a country where anti-government protests are banned by law and where dissent, public dissent, can get you jailed and will get you jailed for lengthy jail terms of more than a decade. I think it was the disparity between what people see every day in the streets.

They see people sleeping in doorways, rummaging through rubbish, hunting for food, going from pharmacy to pharmacy to get even the most basic medication and medicine. So that disparity between that and what the minister said, she said that people were just pretending, they were just dressing up as beggars to elicit some charity and then get drunk. That disparity just was that drop that caused this barrel to overflow.

And the president clearly felt that you could not deny what was happening in Cuba. People are struggling to survive. And looking at the broader issue, I mean, the government's social contract was that nobody would be left behind, nobody would get very rich, but nobody would have to scavenge for food. Is that breaking down in modern-day Cuba? It is breaking down and the words, the unusual rebuke by the president of a senior minister who has been in power for quite a long time is very unusual and he spoke of counterproductive utterance by the minister and the fact that she was forced to resign is also a very unusual development in Cuba. But the president also spoke of a breakdown in value.

So he did still apportion some blame to the Cuban populace, which of course will be unpopular with those who heard those remarks, although in public most praised him for his speedy intervention, although of course speedy by Cuban standards, 48 hours later, is not speedy by standards of other governments. Vanessa Buschlukter. Coming up, we ask Steven Spielberg's daughter if she feels any pressure following in her movie director's father's footsteps. I'm not trying to copy him or be him.

I think I'm trying to find my own voice in this industry. And I haven't even really made a splash yet. Like this is just the first one. So there's many more to come. Six years after he was found dead in a prison cell, seemingly having taken his own life, the activities of the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein continue to make headlines. The crimes he committed and who he may have been associated with at the time

are the subject of intense media and political attention in America. Now the Trump administration is coming under growing pressure to release documents relating to Epstein. The president has faced a rare backlash from some allies, including the House of Representative Speaker Mike Johnson, after trying to draw a line under the case. I don't understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody. It's pretty boring stuff. It's sordid, but it's boring. Really only pretty bad people, including fake news, want to keep something like that going. But credible information, I would say let them have it.

With his assessment, our North America correspondent Peter Beaux spoke to Justin Webb. Mike Johnson is a key ally of President Trump, and he has now said that he thinks that the Justice Department should make public all of the documents related to Jeffrey Epstein and this really does break with Donald Trump's number of statements that he's made about this over recent weeks and this all really revolves around the most recent statement from the Justice Department just last week said that there was no list of Jeffrey Epstein clients that would be made public, nor would there be further disclosures

about the case. And that statement explicitly contradicted what the Attorney General Pam Bondi had said earlier in the year during an interview to Fox News when she said that Jeffrey Epstein's client list was sitting on her desk right now to review, which suggested that it may well be made public at some point in the future. And Mike Johnson has said that she needs to come forward to explain that statement. And it really matters, doesn't it? I mean, it really matters politically to the Trump base, in a way that various other things that have happened or maybe hasn't lived up to expectations haven't mattered?

It was a promise of Donald Trump during the campaign and this is what is at the heart of the discontent by many on the conservative right of the Republican Party. Many Democrats, of course, are calling for the release of this information as well, but it is significant within the Republicans, especially now that we have Mike Johnson saying what he's said. And these Republicans feel as if to some extent I think they've been betrayed that information that they thought would be forthcoming on an issue that they feel is important that hasn't been made public. And that's why they are insisting on I think continuing with these calls, putting pressure on the

President, putting pressure on the Attorney General, especially to about turn and to release as much information that they have available. And just a brief thought on why, what is it that they think is being held back potentially? It is the potential that there are some big names, potentially from both political parties, on this purported client list of Jeffrey Epstein. The question over whether he was blackmailing powerful figures and remember that he died in jail, he committed suicide, that was the official verdict on his death, he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges involving underage girls and of course none of the evidence

that prosecutors will have gathered and would have been continuing to gather ever saw the light of day. And that is what many people want to hear about. Whatever evidence had been gathered against Jeffrey Epstein, they believe should be made public because if there were significant figures involved, that potentially they should be brought to justice as well.

Our North America correspondent Peter Bowes. The Thai King has revoked appointments and awards for 81 Buddhist monks as part of a widening sex scandal. A woman is accused of having sex and then blackmailing a number of monks. Our Asia Pacific editor Mickey Bristo reports. The suspect at the centre of this case was arrested on Tuesday. When they raided the 35-year-old's home, police found 80,000 compromising photos and videos. They were apparently used to extort money from a group of monks who'd had sex with her. She's believed to have received nearly $12 million. It's not clear

how the 81 monks were involved, but the King's notice said the scandal had caused emotional and spiritual distress to the Buddhist faithful in Thailand. Mickey Bristow. Now you may well at some point in your life have been told by a parent or a boss to bring the best version of yourself to work. Well the problem is that that may vary depending on what generation you're from. In the United States there's a growing trend for companies to train younger workers how to behave. It's specifically aimed at Gen Zers, people between the ages of 16 and 28. Now I can sense many people probably from that age group listening to this and fuming. We asked some Gen Z people here in the UK what

they made of it. All the colleagues get on well with me and we communicate well. I think maybe they think some of us are a bit erratic, a bit odd, not in a bad way. There's kind of a stereotype with Gen Z being lazy and not being able to work but I just go in and do my best every day and people like me there. Different ages, everyone helping out. All the colleagues, they're much more funnier than we are. I feel like they have a more hardworking approach towards we all spend much more time on our phones than they do.

I wouldn't say that they think about me based on me being Gen Z or not. I don't know if they take me as seriously just yet because I've not progressed in my career as much, but that's still definitely a point to the fact that I'm young and I have new ideas. Kim Brooks is a New York based employment specialist. She's been working with many Gen Z employees and gave us her take on this new trend. There are two unique things to Gen Z, which are not generalizations. Number one, you have most people who

are coming into the workplace having only experienced remote work, whether it was remote school and then remote work, or just having had the majority of their career be remote work that they came into their first job as a remote position. I think that is unique to a particular generation. And so therefore, not necessarily a generalization because just about time and the pandemic. I do think there's a problem in general with stereotypes where not everybody fixed the

mold. But if you're trying to build a program for new employees or people in the workplace to help them achieve their career goals and be successful as being on the younger side of their employment. I think then building programs that do take into account some stereotypes in order to help them navigate that is a good thing. I think what we've learned though is maybe people more mature in their careers being able to recognize when though your work-life balance, your priority of your own work-life balance is actually causing somebody else's work-life balance to be particularly off and having the respect

for the fact that you are part of a team maybe isn't there. Your self-importance is valuable, sure, but being able to also recognize when that is impacting those around you and that they're having to compensate, I think, is something that is missing. I mean, we all think that in our personal lives, there's value in talking through how to handle situations. I think considering it in that same way for the workplace is actually really smart, right?

It gets you to think about more than just yourself and how to be successful in your career. And if you can have an etiquette coach that can help you through that, I think that's a fantastic idea. Kim Brooks. The Song of Wade is a long-lost gem of English literature written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century. It was only rediscovered about a hundred years ago and there's only one surviving fragment of it. It had long been thought to be a mythical monster monster-filled epic, but a study just published gives a dramatic reinterpretation, seeing the Song of Wade

as a romantic story based on chivalry. This is because some of the words could have been misread for over a century. Professor Seb Falk, an expert on the history of science in the Middle Ages at the University of Cambridge, is the co-author of the research. He told us first about Wade. Jason Valewood Wade is a legendary hero. He's incredibly well known throughout the Middle Ages. Chaucer talks about him. Mallory talks about him. And for a long time, it was thought that he was a hero who battled monsters a bit like Beowulf. There's been a sense among many people that he was, but actually very little is known about him because this lost treasure of English literature was forgotten about for hundreds of years and Chaucer talks about him, but there's no sense exactly of who he was. By looking at the sermon that talks about Wade

from the 13th century, we looked at how a preacher talked about Wade and cited him as an example of pop culture, basically appealing to his audience with a motif with a story that everybody knew, that everybody understood, and therefore we could see how it was a chivalric story rather than something about demons and monsters. The scholars who first examined this text in the 1890s were expecting, I think, to find monsters. They were steeped in this Teutonic mythology and they saw the word that looked a lot like elves and that made sense to

them in this context. But what we did was look at it in the context of the sermon and try and understand how the preacher appealed to his audience in a sermon on humility by using this quotation and then building on it. And he goes on immediately after quoting this to talk about how people behave like animals, how people debase themselves. So people who are gluttonous behave like pigs, people who are greedy and rapacious behave like wolves. And by taking the lines in that context, we were able to see what the poem really meant to people. And it really tells us an awful lot about the place of this poem in medieval culture, which was so popular for hundreds and hundreds of

years. Chaucer talks about it in this story of Troilus and Crisada, where Pandarus uses this story as a kind of romantic hook. And equally, we see the preacher using it a little bit like a vicar trying to be hip today, quoting from popular culture. Professor Seb Falk. It's always a tough task to step out of the shadows of a successful parent, especially in the entertainment industry. It's something the daughter of Steven Spielberg, one of Hollywood's most venerated filmmakers, is about to embark upon. venerated filmmakers is about to embark upon. Destrie Allen Spielberg, whose 28, has made her feature film debut with a post-apocalyptic horror picture called Please Don't Feed the Children.

Tom Brook was at the launch in New York. The Village East Cinema in New York was a venue chosen for the unveiling of the horror film Please Don't Feed the Children. Attendees were greeted by the screams of a woman hired for the evening to shock people to prepare them for the horror film that lay ahead. No! Steven Spielberg's daughter, Destry Allen Spielberg, was the evening's key attraction. She's directed short films before but this was her first full-length

feature. She told me how the picture unfolds. It's a post-apocalyptic thriller horror that follows orphan children after a viral outbreak that killed adults, but kids were immune. And these kids are on a journey to find a better life across the border. And on their way, they stumble upon a house with a woman who offers to help them. Then they slowly find out that she's harboring a very dark secret.

Oh my god! I thought I saw a ghost. That woman is played with great skill by British actor Michelle Dockery. The orphan children encounter a nightmare under her character's supervision. Destrie Spielberg thinks her picture has a resonance at a time when many young people in America feel alienated. I believe that the youth right now have a really strong voice and I believe that the older generations are trying to silence us and there's a lot of little tidbits in that that I think are relevant for what's happening today, especially in this country.

So I asked Destrie Spielberg what role her famous father, Steven Spielberg, had in getting her first feature film off the ground. Did it help that she was the daughter of one of the most celebrated directors in Hollywood? It did not. It definitely helped open doors, but it did not necessarily mean that I could walk through the doors. So that was on me and the team that got the movie made. I'm not trying to copy him or be him. I think I'm trying to find my own voice in this industry, and I haven't even really made a splash yet. Like, this is just the first one, so there's many more to come. Destry Alan Spielberg definitely has a lot to live up to. This summer, America is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the hugely successful blockbuster Jaws,

which her father, Steven Spielberg, directed when he was only 26 years old, two years younger than Destry is now. She draws a lot of inspiration from what her father achieved in bringing George to the screen. Are you kidding? It's amazing, but also that movie had so many problems with the production. It's inspiring that he was able to get through those issues. And like every indie filmmaker, that's

kind of the beauty of making movies, is it's a challenge. And it's really rewarding when you push through all the challenges. Some American critics were a little mean-spirited in their assessment of Destrie Spielberg's debut feature. It's not going to be a classic for the ages, but the film does show promise. People in the past have levelled the charge of nepotism at this filmmaker, but after watching her film and my brief encounter with her, I got the impression that Destrie Alan

Spielberg is trying to build a filmmaking career on her own terms, not by relying on her father. Say me again. And on that creepy note, that is 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

globalnewspot. This edition was mixed by Pat Sissons and the producers were Vanessa Heaney and Alfie Habersham. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Nick Miles and until next time, goodbye.