Global News Podcast - More than 40,000 killed in Gaza - Hamas

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Hamas says more than 40,000 have been killed in Gaza since the war began ten months ago. Meanwhile new ceasefire talks have begun in Qatar - without Hamas. Also: India's Prime Minister condemns violence against women as anger sweeps the nation over the rape and murder of a doctor in Kolkata, North Korea to open to tourism after five years, Mark Zuckerberg reveals 'Roman' statue of his wife, should we go and live on Mars? And the new theatre and TV trend - age-blind casting.

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. You're listening to the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. We are recording this at 13 hours GMT on Thursday the 15th of August.

Hamas says more than 40,000 Palestinians have now been killed in the war with Israel. New talks have begun in Qatar, but what are the chances of a ceasefire? The Indian prime minister speaks out after widespread anger over the rape and murder of a doctor in Kolkata, and why Mark Zuckerberg's love of ancient Rome led him to commission a statue of his wife. Also in the podcast... If it's true that life evolves wherever it has the right conditions, by going to Mars we're going to find out the truth about this matter, which is something that thinking men and women have wondered about for thousands of years.

The case for a trip to Mars. For more than 10 months, Israel has been carrying out airstrikes and ground attacks in Gaza following the massacre of the 7th of October. 1,200 people died in the Hamas raid on southern Israel, with 251 taken hostage. Since then, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. Israel disputes that figure, but said last month it had killed about 14,000 Palestinian fighters, while it had lost more than 300 of its own soldiers. In a moment, we'll look at the prospects for a ceasefire in Gaza, but first, Barbara Pletusho looks back at the war so far. Under warning, listeners may find some of the details upsetting.

Many, many Palestinians have been doing this over the past 10 months, digging graves. Like Nabil Abu Al-Fahm, burying his family in northern Gaza under a grey cloudy sky. The unjust world grants legitimacy to the Israelis, but not to our children. My children, my daughters, what have they done wrong to end up as corpses and body parts? He's lost his children. Others have lost their parents. This is a shelter for orphans and widows in the southern city of Khan Yunis, people gathering around a water tank to fill their containers. 15-year-old Ali Ashraf Ataghaith is in the crowd.

In December, my family was killed in a strike on our house, he says. His mother, father, brother and two sisters. It took him two months to dig them out of the wreckage of their home. I could see my father under the rubble, but I couldn't extract him at first because he was under two columns of cement and the ceiling would have collapsed. He decomposed in front of my eyes. My mother's body was inside the house, but when I tried to go to see her, I felt smothered and had to leave. Each loss is a raw and individual grief.

Here, mourning the dead after a recent Israeli attack on a school. Israel says it hits civilian infrastructure because Hamas is operating there. Hamas says it isn't. The international community condemns civilian deaths. And the killing goes on. So does the displacement. In Khan Yunis, people constantly on the move to flee a continually shifting front line, navigating dusty streets through ruined neighbourhoods.

This elderly woman looks utterly exhausted. We're tired of this life. By God, we are fed up. Death is better than this. Let the world see our situation and find a solution. Death is a constant presence. Filling a bucket with water on the edge of a graveyard, the only space some families could find to pitch their tents back at the shelter the orphans have been given another chance at life

seven-year-old Manal Judah joins other girls studying the Quran her family was also killed in an Israeli airstrike Another chance at life. Seven-year-old Manal Jouda joins other girls studying the Quran. Her family was also killed in an Israeli airstrike. She wants to become a doctor, she says, with a smile that shows her missing front tooth. A child's hope for the future. But without at least a ceasefire, the future looks as dangerous as the present a report by barbara platt asha so what are the chances of a ceasefire israeli and u.s security officials are holding negotiations in qatar today but hamas isn't taking part. It accuses Israel of adding new conditions to an earlier

American proposal, something Israel denies. I asked our chief international correspondent Lise Doucette whether the talks can lead to a ceasefire and hostage prisoner swap. That is the really, really crucial question now, 10 months into this grievous Gaza war. You began by saying Hamas isn't at the table. Hamas hasn't ever been at the table because it's on the terrorism blacklist, so it can't negotiate directly with the United States. But it has been there indirectly with the Egyptian and Qatari mediators passing messages back and forth. And this time, Hamas is making it clear it's not satisfied with what's on the table again.

So it will not even take part indirectly. Its upset, as you mentioned, is because it believes that Israel has changed the conditions in a deal that had been announced by President Joe Biden in May and that it was described as an Israel plan. Now, Israel disputes that. It says we are just making clarifications. But what about their participation? We understand that Israel has sent a high-level delegation. In the past, Prime Minister Netanyahu has been accused of sending delegations who only have a mandate to listen.

This one has power to negotiate. But the Israeli delegation is known to be divided. It's now in the open. It's almost a mutiny within the Israeli armed forces who are saying the time has come to do a deal. We've done what we can militarily. We need to bring our hostages home. So the big question hanging over these talks is, is Prime Minister Netanyahu and Yahya Sinwar, now the hardline leader of Hamas, ready to make a deal? The pressure is unprecedented on both sides as well. The Americans are exerting pressure on Prime Minister Netanyahu.

The people of Gaza are exerting pressure on Yahya Sinwar. They have two days. Everyone is watching. Our chief international correspondent, Lise Doucette. India is today marking the anniversary of its independence, but celebrations have been overshadowed by continuing anger over the rape and murder of a trainee doctor at a state-run hospital last week. Almost a week of angry demonstrations culminated in a reclaim-the-night march by tens of thousands of women in Kolkata in West Bengal.

We want justice! We want justice! We want justice! We women feel that at night our city is not safe and we want the freedom. And for a long time we have suffered this insecurity where we couldn't roam the streets at night, we couldn't go anywhere, even if there was some kind of emergency. We couldn't leave our homes, we had to stay inside. Because of this insecurity, this fear of men outside who could potentially harm us all. And a lot of women in different parts of the state who've also come out of their homes and they're spending the night outside.

Now, as a woman, I travel by public transport every day. I get harassed each and every day. But we have normalized this. We think that it is normal to get harassed because it will happen. We are born as a biological woman in this country and this will happen in our country. But I think it's enough is enough. Now it's time to like rise out in protest, rise in rage, because this cannot go on. Women on the Reclaim the Night march on Wednesday night on the eve of independence

celebrations. Well, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi used his Independence Day speech to condemn the violence against women. There is anger over atrocities against our mothers and sisters. There is anger in the nation about that. Crimes against women should be quickly investigated. Monstrous behaviour against women should be quickly and severely punished. This is essential for creating deterrence and confidence in society. Our correspondent in Delhi, Divya Arya, told me more about Mr Modi's intervention. It's very important coming from him and from on that significant day from the pedestal at the Red Fort. But he has been earlier criticised for

keeping mum on other heinous sexual violence crimes. Most recently, from the northeastern state of Manipur, where you might recall two women were paraded naked after a mob raped them. And many point to that dichotomy and say that when a crime happens in a state which is run by his party's government, he keeps mum. But when it is run by an opposition party government, he comes out to condemn it. The other thing that he spoke about is that the media should highlight the death penalty and that the accused should be punished once found guilty by the death penalty, which Indian laws provide for, for heinous crimes of sexual violence. And there is a condemnation of the death penalty

as a punishment from various women's groups themselves in India. And they argue that despite the death penalty being in the books now for 12 years, it has not been a deterrence and heinous crimes continue to be committed. Yeah, what do they want to be done? This was all supposed to change what more than 10 years ago with that horrific gang rape of a young woman on a bus in Delhi. Exactly. That's what brought the change in the laws and the death penalty was introduced. But even then, there wasn't one opinion about bringing it. Instead, women's groups at that time and even now talk about sensitization of young people in schools, in colleges, a change in the way women are looked at in society, the way they are still looked at as second class citizens and their honor, you know, as, by raping them. They can be dismissed, they can be put down

away from public spaces, which is what happened in this case. It was a working woman who was resting in the hospital after a long shift when she was brutally attacked. Yeah, what do people in India make of the fact that this could happen in a hospital? Well, it has led to widespread protests, not just in the city where it happened, but in hospitals across the country. Work came to a standstill in many public hospitals. There's been widespread condemnation on social media as well. But it's almost cyclical when I look at it as a woman journalist who's been reporting on sexual crimes for more than a decade now,

where this outrage happens when one heinous crime comes to light. But then people go back to their lives in business as usual. And long-lasting change has been really slow, driven also by the lack of faith in the police and judiciary in terms of talking openly and accessing justice for sexual crimes. Divya Arya in Delhi. Japan is no stranger to seismic activity, but last week it announced its first

ever mega earthquake alert. The Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, even cancelled a planned trip to Central Asia to lead the government's response. There are fears that if a mega quake struck, it could trigger a 10-metre high tsunami and kill more than 300,000 people. But in the past few hours, the warning has been lifted. Why? And what prompted the alert in the first place? I spoke to Shaima Khalil in Tokyo. This advisory was issued last week after a 7.1 earthquake hit southwestern Japan around the Miyazaki Prefecture.

And while the damage from the tremor itself was limited, the problem was that it hit the western edge of what is known as the Nankai trough. It's a highly seismic area, stretches all the way from the edge of Kyushu in the southwest, all the way to the Kanto region in central Japan. Very, very densely populated, hence the unprecedented advisory. And while the authorities said that the chance was higher than usual, they did not say that it would happen at a particular moment in time. Essentially, earthquakes are very difficult to predict. So throughout this week, thousands of people across 29 prefectures on the Pacific coast were told, remain hypervigilant, test evacuation routes.

And this is where you got a mix of confusion and concern, because on one hand, they weren't being told to evacuate. On the other, they were saying there was a higher than usual chance of this mega earthquake happening. And mind you, this has been a fear for many, many years, this Nankai trough megaquake. Yeah. And so why has the alert been called off now? Has the danger gone away? Well, the danger is never really gone away. This has been predicted for the next 30 years or so. And historically speaking, Nankai mega earthquakes happened between 100 and 150 years, and the last one was 80 years ago. So for a very long time, many Japanese people were warned about the big one. The difference is that this was the first time that this advisory was issued. Japan Meteorological Agency said that as of Wednesday, they had not detected any seismic activity indicating changes of concern. And today, they came out and said the same thing, that there was no major seismic activity that has been observed or confirmed in the Nankai trough. So they lifted the advisory.

Now, a few days ago, we saw warnings against people panic buying. Might this lead to a rethink of how these warnings are issued? Yes, there was panic buying, major cancellations around the area. And I think that it's a very difficult balance that on one hand, the authorities want to make sure that people are hypervigilant. But also when we speak to people, they said that they were a bit confused and didn't know what to make of it. Shai Mahalil in Tokyo.

Earlier this week, scientists said vast amounts of water could be trapped deep within the crust of Mars, raising the possibility of life on the planet. If water is present, it would be easier to one day set up a human settlement there. So should we be redoubling our efforts to get to the red planet? Robert Zubrin is president of the Mars Society and author of a new book on the subject. There's a number of reasons why we should go to Mars, and I would summarise them as being for the science, for the challenge and for the future. The science is to let us know the truth about the potential prevalence and diversity of life in the universe.

The early Mars was a twin for the early Earth. If it's true that life evolves wherever it has the right conditions, it should have evolved there, but it may or may not have evolved in the same kind of way. So it's by going to Mars, we're going to find out the truth about this matter, which is something that thinking men and women have wondered about for thousands of years. Then there's the challenge. I think that civilizations are like individuals. We grow, we challenge ourselves, we stagnate, we don't. A group of countries that take on this challenge of humans to Mars would inspire their youth, just like the Apollo program did.

We would get millions of young scientists, engineers, doctors, medical researchers, inventors, technological entrepreneurs. These are the kinds of people that drive society forward. And then finally, there's the future. It will soon be possible for people to go to Mars. And then the question is, what will we create once we are there? Will they be like these dystopias that you see in science fiction movies, tyrannies? Not a chance, because no one would emigrate to such colonies.

I also believe that they will have a high degree of community, because they must. You're going to need a high degree of social solidarity for a community to survive and prosper in this kind of environment. People are going to have to work together. I think we could have people on Mars within 10 years. If Kamala Harris is elected president, she's got eight years in front of her, and here we have Starship reaching orbit. If she turns to her advisors and says, here's this character who wants to send people to Mars, he's got the ship. If we got together with him

and made all the other stuff that's needed, could we have people on Mars by the end of my second term? The answer is going to be yes. We need once again to astonish the world with what free people can do. We need to prove to the world that freedom is the world's future. And I think we can.

Mars fan, Robert Zubrin. And still to come on the Global News Podcast, fancy going on holiday in North Korea while the Hermit Kingdom may be opening up to visitors. Since the Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was driven from office last week, there have been numerous reports of violence against the country's Hindu minority. Videos of homes being burnt, temples vandalised and people being killed have gone viral on social media.

But some have suggested the claims of religious violence are being distorted. Our South Asia correspondent Samira Hussain has been to investigate. I'm just watching a social media video that has been shared thousands of times and it shows a building that is engulfed in flames. Because it's nighttime, the oranges and reds look even more prominent. The caption on this video is saying that this is anti-Hindu violence that's happening in Bangladesh since the fall of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. But I think there might be more to the story. We're about to drive two hours after our short plane ride from Dhaka

and we're going to a small village in the northeast of the country. That's where we'll find the building from that video. Apparently, it was a school for kids with disabilities. Hey, everybody, get in. Okay, let's go. And now we're here, and I'm looking at it, and there's absolutely nothing left of the school except the cement foundation and a few beams.

Everything else is just charred. Much of the rubble has been swept up and put in small piles. You can find bits of the school's existence. The back of a burnt-out textbook, some other scraps of paper. The post on social media said that this was evidence of anti-Hindu violence. But the man who actually started the school, he said that that's not the case at all. What do you think now when you read this? What do you think?

I showed the video to the Ahsanul Haq Manik. He's seen the footage for the first time. And is aghast at the captions. He says it has nothing to do with religion. It's false. My nephew called from Dhaka to say that your stuff is being used in the name of Hindus. He is Muslim, and he believes the fire was politically motivated because he is a member of the Avami League, the party of the now-ousted prime minister.

This is not a case of anti-Hindu violence, but it doesn't mean that that's not happening. There are reports of violence against minorities, a case of anti-Hindu violence. But it doesn't mean that that's not happening. There are reports of violence against minorities. But it is the scale of which they are happening that's being called into question. Even a local group representing minorities is pulling back their report, claiming there have been more than 200 incidents of violence against them.

They believe that number will come down drastically. We are Hindu! We are Hindu! We are Hindu! We are Hindu! They believe that number will come down drastically. But the consequences of misinformation are real. Thousands of Hindus are protesting, fearing for their safety in their own country. This is an unstable time for Bangladesh. Religious tensions could become yet another potential fault line as the country makes a monumental shift towards democracy. That report from Bangladesh by Samira Hussain. Now if you fancy a holiday somewhere unusual, what about North Korea? The secretive nation is said to be opening up for

international tourism by the end of the year. The details from our Asia business reporter Pierre Antoine Denis. If you do go there, you will only for now be able to go to one city and know that is not Pyongyang. That is the city of Sanjion, this mountainous, completely rebuilt resort that is at the base of the country's highest and most sacred mountain, Baekdu. That is very, very important for Kim Jong-un and for the North Korean family because this is where the father of Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il, is reported to be born. So Kim Jong-un poured huge resources in this resort to create ski slopes, villas, hotels that he desperately needs to be filled right now. And also what we know for the North Korean economy, it is important

because in 2019, there was a record number of Chinese tourists. Around 300,000 foreign tourists came, mainly Chinese. That was reported to bring to North Korean economy around $100 million. But of course, as the countries reopen their borders, there will be real question marks surrounding Western tourists. Around 5,000 Western tourists were coming each year. But when we look at the travel advisories, they all say the same thing. Do not travel to North Korea at all under any circumstances. The BBC's Pierre-Antoine Denis. Latinos make up 20% of the US population and make a distinctive

contribution to the nation's music scene. But tracks by Latino musicians make up only 5% of recordings in the National Registry at the Library of Congress. That's something that Joaquin Castro, a Democratic congressman from Texas, wants to change. He's just launched his annual call for members of the public to suggest Latino songs that should be included in the registry. Congressman Castro spoke to the BBC about his campaign. I think it's important to celebrate the contributions of Latinos to American culture. You have a group that's about 20% now of the American population. And yet, over the years, our contributions in film and music and different sectors of American life really have not been heralded or acknowledged. And so this is one way, a small way, to kind of fill in

what I think has been a cultural black hole for the Latino community. I think we've seen it not only from Latinos, but others throughout the years in the United States, where you had very talented Latino or Latina musicians or film actors who felt like they had to disown their identity, in other words, change their name and how they present themselves in order to get hired. So I think it's important just to raise people's awareness that there is this challenge, that the Latino story and Latino contributions have been often overlooked,

but then also the incredible participation of Latinos, but also a lot of non-Latinos, in making suggestions every year on which artists and songs and albums should be included. And then finally, the work in actually getting some of the songs that we've submitted inducted into the National Recording Registry has been very special. And we've been able to get about four songs so far in the last three years. You know, we were able to get Irene Cara's song. Folks probably remember seeing the movie Flashdance and that thematic song, What a Feeling. That was Irene Cara, who was Latina.

What a feeling In believing And we heard from Congressman Joaquin Castro there. Now, it is certainly a striking tribute. The Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has had a 2.1-metre silver and blue statue of his wife installed in what looks like his garden. He said he was honouring, quote,

the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife. There's been a mixed reaction to the statue itself, but what should we make of the Metaboss's obsession with ancient Rome? Michael Scott is a professor of classics. There's nothing unique, particularly about the Roman world, of men making statues of their wives. But I think what's attracting Zuccavoto to this idea is that he's a public devotee of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. He's named one of his children August, and it was in the reign of the first emperor Augustus and his wife, Livia Drusilla,

that we really start to see portraits and statues of mortal women being regularly depicted in Roman art around all sorts of public places. And they were the power couple of their day that symbolised the essence of the Roman Empire and the new Roman world they were bringing into being. And there are over 80 statues of Augustus' wife, Livia, surviving through to us today. And that's the tradition, I think, that Zuckerberg's picking up on here. Although it's a very different time, you know, in terms of how this now looks,

a man making a statue or commissioning a statue of his wife, for some it hasn't landed well. Can you understand why? Yes, I think I completely understand that. Within the Roman tradition, this was about symbolising the couple who were at the head of the Roman state as the essence of everything that was embodied in the Roman state. So this wasn't husband and wife, this was everything that you wanted your republic in the Roman case, your nation to be. So I can quite easily understand why that kind of thing might not go down very well today at all. But to be honest, if Zucca continues in the tradition of Augustus, we might see more of this. So Olivia was given on her birthday, an entire altar altar of peace that's one of the most beautiful monuments to survive from the Roman world, all sculpted in marble, and then a massive portico, a massive sort of colonnade that was 115 metres long a couple of years later.

So this could be the tip of the iceberg. Classics professor Michael Scott talking to Emma Barnett. Finally, should older actors be cast in roles traditionally played by much younger performers? Well, apparently this is a new trend in the world of theatre and screen, one notable example being the casting of 74-year-old Geraldine James in the role of Rosalind in Shakespeare's As You Like It, a character generally considered a teenager and normally played by a 20-something. So do older actors bring an extra something to a role? Director Sean Mathias thinks so. He wants cast an 82-year-old Sir Ian McKellen

to play Hamlet. To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles? Rebecca Kesby spoke to Sean Mathias and he explained that casting. I felt he would speak the complicated ideas and the complicated verse as well as anyone could on the planet because he's done so much Shakespeare. But also I think that Hamlet, although he's 20 in years, when we meet him in the course of the play, he's a much older, darker person. Everything we learn about Hamlet from the text is that prior to his father's death,

he's a light, a brilliant person loves a theater loves parties loves life but when we meet him in the course of the play he's dark he's he becomes burdened with this dark psychology about why has this happened and what is the meaning of life and the meaning of life is something you spend your whole life trying to find out. Yeah. And so I thought, well, an 80-year-old might know the meaning of life better than a 20-year-old. Well, absolutely. I mean, I guess older actors have got so much more life experience to draw on, haven't they? But can they really channel, and be honest about this, can they really channel the naivety or the sort of youthful passions or the teenage angst that you might get from a younger actor? Well, if you ask Dr. Freud that, he would say yes. The whole point about it is we carry

everyone inside of us. We carry all of it inside of us. The simple answer is that Shakespeare, in our country where we feel we own him, has been open to a myriad of interpretations to do with setting, age, location, politics, gender, everything. But, I mean, if you're going to ask a man to play a woman, which we've done forever and a day, we've done it in pantomime. Did it in Shakespeare's time too. Didn't it? Well, that's the biggest point, isn't it? If you're going to ask anyone to play something that they're not,

you're asking them to engage in the act of imagination. And if you talk about the imagination, you have to bring in the abstract. And you're allowed to interpret anything in its own way, in its own colour. Listen, the most interesting thing I think about this conversation, it's not about what I did with Ian McKellen. I think the most interesting thing about this is why are we ageist? Why are we not able to understand what growing older is? Why are we not able to make older people more inclusive?

We don't have a great attitude towards age. And do you think, Sean, that that is changing? Because certainly when you think of older female actors, that's been a complaint for decades that, you know, post 45, you just can't get play Rosalind? But I think it is changing because I think everything is changing. We've had to change the way we look at race. We've had to change the way we look at gender. We've had to change the way we look at male-female politics. So why shouldn't we change the way we look at age? We have to do that. And of course, for many of our global audience, people will know Sir Ian McKellen as playing Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, where I think he was supposed to be about 7,000 years old. Well, there you are, you see. He's a wizard.

So what age is a wizard? I think we shouldn't get hung up on age. I think we should sort of be a little bit more relaxed about what age is. And be kind, much kinder to people who are growing older and look after each other. Director Sean Mathias. And that is all from us for now, but the Global News Podcast will be back very soon. This edition was mixed by Charlotte Hardroy-Torzimska and produced by Vanessa Heaney. Our editors, Karen Martin. I'm Oliver Conway. Until next time, goodbye. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts.

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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.