Global News Podcast - Tyre in southern Lebanon 'feels like a warzone'

Episode Date: October 1, 2024

Israel's ground invasion in Lebanon continues. Also: scientists warn it may be too late to save many of Switzerland's glaciers; and the play with no rehearsal or director.

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. Life and death were two very realistic co-existing possibilities in my life. I didn't even think I'd make it to like my 16th birthday, to be honest. I grew up being scared of who I was. Any one of us at any time can be affected by mental health and addictions. Just taking that first step makes a big difference.

It's the hardest step. But CAMH was there from the beginning. Everyone deserves better mental health care. To hear more stories of recovery, visit camh.ca. 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. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Nick Miles and at 13 Hours GMT on Tuesday the 1st of October, these are our main stories. Israeli troops are continuing their ground operation against Hezbollah. They've urged residents of villages in southern Lebanon to leave their homes. We assess the impact on civilians and get analysis from our security

correspondent. Also in this podcast, we look at the growing risk of famine spreading in Sudan as the civil war grinds on and experimental drama at its best, a play with no rehearsal or director. You stand on a stage, empty stage, there's nothing on it except for you. The audience are watching you. Somebody comes on, hands you a brown envelope, they leave, You open it, take out the script and you start to perform the contents. It was very late on Monday night when Israeli troops crossed the northern border into Lebanon in what officials are saying will be a limited and targeted operation to dismantle Hezbollah. Our senior international correspondent Orla Guer, sent this report from southern Lebanon.

Here there's been a massive strike. Trees have been ripped out of the ground. Cars have been flipped over. There are one, two, three here on the side of the road. And if we cross over, there is an enormous crater. A building has been ripped out of the ground here, completely destroyed. And now Israeli forces are on the ground in the south, starting a ground war. We're in Tyre now and the city is extremely empty.

We're passing very few cars, very few people. We have seen ambulances on the road, but there are a lot of boarded up shops, a lot of broken glass, and this city certainly feels like a war zone. The Lebanese authorities say 1,000 people have already been killed by Israel's aerial bombardments over the last couple of weeks. Up to a million have been displaced. Many are living on the streets and people are still trying to get out of villages close to the border with Israel. But head spokesperson for the Israel Defence Force, Daniel Hagari, says the priority of these assaults is not to endanger civilians. It's to make sure an attack on Israel,

like the one by Hamas on October the 7th, is never able to happen again. Hezbollah is the world's largest non-state army, and southern Lebanon is swarming with Hezbollah terrorists and weapons. If the state of Lebanon and the world can't push Hezbollah away from our border, we have no choice but to do it ourselves. Yolande Nel is our correspondent in Jerusalem. Well, there have been a couple of briefings already today by the Israeli military after it announced in a short statement that it had begun this ground incursion overnight. Really, it's been stressing very much that what's happening is limited in terms of its scope.

We've been hearing already from the Israeli military how the ultimate goal is to destroy the infrastructure that Hezbollah has built up along the Israel-Lebanon border over the past 20 years, things like tunnels and military bunkers. They say this poses a real threat to the residents of northern Israel, and they're trying to make conditions safe for them to go back to their homes because many have left over the past nearly one year now of cross-border fighting that has gone on in parallel to the war in Gaza. Israel also wants Hezbollah to be pushed away from the border in line with the UN Security Council resolution that ended the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah

war. That would mean Hezbollah withdrawing to about 30 kilometers away from the border in line with the Litani River. And after earlier rocket attacks, which reached central Israel, Hezbollah showing that it still does have firepower. It had some longer range rockets that it launched towards central Israel, says it was targeting the Mossad intelligence headquarters. Those rockets were mostly intercepted. One of them did come down very close to an Israeli motorway. You could see a big fire there. And since then, we've had the Israeli military introducing changes to what it calls the Home Front Command. And that will mean restrictions for many more

Israelis going as far south as Tel Aviv, Israeli civilians here in Jerusalem as well, being told that they will not be able to go to beaches. There will be these heavy restrictions on public gatherings in the coming days. And this is at the time of the Jewish New Year holiday. Yolanda, for more analysis of the Jewish New Year holiday. Yolande Nelm, for more analysis of the Israeli operation, I spoke to our security correspondent, Frank Gardner. The Israelis are saying openly that they have conducted what they call limited targeted operations inside Lebanon, aimed at villages and sites where they believe Hezbollah has got weapons that are targeting Israeli

citizens on their side of the border. I think it's fair to assume that from what the Israelis have said, that there have already been a number of special forces raids in the last few days prior to this. But this is a form of invasion, whatever term you want to call it, incursion invasion. It's relatively easy for them to go into Lebanon. It's going to be a lot harder for them to come out. I'm not saying it's impossible, but they got stuck in Lebanon for 18 years from 1982 to 2000. And then in 2006, they fought a 34 day war that ended inconclusively. And that was supposed to end with a UN resolution that Hezbollah was going to stay 30 kilometers north of the border. They didn't, which is why they're in the situation

they are now with Hezbollah, with this massive armory that they've got of missiles, a small amount of which they've been lobbing across the border at Israeli citizens. And Israel has decided they're going to clear this out once and for all. It may be quite a tough fight. It may be easier than people are predicting because Hezbollah is very damaged in the last two weeks. They've lost pretty much all their leadership. Their communications are sabotaged. A lot of their weapons dumps have been hit,

and they are clearly infiltrated by Israeli spies on the ground. That said, they've still got thousands of fighters. Israel says it wants to push Hezbollah back beyond the Latani River, 30 kilometres or so, into Lebanon. But given the fact that Hezbollah still has some quite long-range missiles, even if it does that, Israel, then there's a possibility that it won't be safe for Israelis in the north of the country to go back to their homes.

The big fear that Israel and its citizens in the north of the country to go back to their homes? The big fear that Israel and its citizens in the north have is that Hezbollah may have been planning to do a repeat of what Hamas did on October 7th, that horrific, barbaric raid into southern Israel where they mutilated and abused some of the people that they caught and kidnapped and, of course, murdered about 1,200 people and took 250 people across the border, which then resulted in the horrific 11-month campaign that Israel has had in Gaza that's killed over 41,000 Palestinians. The majority of them appear to have been civilians, but they have dismantled

Hamas there. So their fear is that Hezbollah would find a gap in the border, burst through in the north and do the same thing. So they're determined this time to push Hezbollah out of south Lebanon and beyond rocket range. It's a bit of a mystery why Hezbollah have not yet deployed their long-range missiles, which if they deployed all of them at the same time or enough of them, it could probably overwhelm Israel's air defences. They haven't done that. And it's possible there's a bit of restraint coming from Iran, which clearly fears that it doesn't want to get into a fight with Israel that it would probably lose. Frank Gardner. And as we're recording this podcast, the Israeli military has said in a news conference that it's destroyed multiple Hezbollah tunnels and arms caches, and that it

had evidence that Hezbollah was planning another October the 7th star massacre, which this operation would prevent. We'll have more details in our later podcasts. And staying with matters relating to the Middle East. Hello, I'm Jackie Leonard, and we'll be recording a special episode of the Global News podcast to mark one year since Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza. We'll be putting your questions to our correspondents who've been covering the Middle East for the past 12 months.

Please send us your questions, ideally a voice note by email, Thanks, Jackie. Coming up. Glaciers remember the warming that has happened in the last few decades, and they haven't responded to it fully. So even if we stop global warming today, more than half of the ice will disappear. Scientists warn it may be too late to save many of Switzerland's glaciers. Life and death were two very realistic coexisting possibilities in my life.

I didn't even think I'd make it to like my 16th birthday, to be honest. I grew up being scared of who I was. Any one of us at any time can be affected by mental health and addictions. Just taking that first step makes a big difference. It's the hardest step. But CAMH was there from the beginning. Everyone deserves better mental health care. To hear more stories of recovery, visit CAMH.ca.

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. As Sudan's civil war continues, the country is facing one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters. Up to 150,000 people are believed to have died over the last year and a half, with millions more displaced. Guns have been the cause of many of the deaths, but it's hunger that's the real killer. Across vast areas, people are struggling to get enough to eat, and that includes some of the most developed parts of the country as well. Barbara Pledasche sent this report from Omdurman, just across the River Nile from the capital Khartoum. Hunger stalks Sudan. The youngest are its weakest prey.

A doctor helps this thin little child in a hospital ward in Port Sudan. So full of malnourished babies, their mothers have to share beds. Sudan has long seen malnutrition caused by poverty. But the civil war is causing famine in parts of the country. When did your child get sick? Sami Amusa tells me her two-year-old daughter has been sick for a month. But she also has other crises to deal with. Three of her four children are deaf.

That's why she fled the war zone in the capital city. They felt the impact of the bombing and shelling, but they didn't know what was going on and they got really scared, she says. A few days later, I travelled there to Omdurman, which is part of the capital, and I visited another malnutrition ward. My name is Ahmed Khojaly. That's the general medical director of Albuluk Hospital. It's a pediatric specialized hospital, the single hospital that has been working here.

So you have just expanded this ward? Yeah, we've expanded this ward in the previous two days. How many times have you expanded during the war? This ward, the malnutrition ward, has been expanded four times. Here, the children can get treatment, but most of the worst cases are in conflict zones hardest to reach. Both warring parties have blocked aid. That's eased a bit, not enough.

It's really quite overwhelming to walk in here because there's one long room filled with beds, two women per bed, all of them with emaciated children, and then there are a number of rooms off this one. You walk in and you see the same thing. So the sheer numbers, the sheer volume of hunger and suffering really, really hits you here. Elsewhere in Omdurman, the hunt for food begins early. A local charity is about to serve breakfast. We're at a community kitchen here in Omdurman

where around 3,000 people are fed twice a week and they've been waiting outside since early in the morning with their buckets. Najee Abdullah is one of the men in line. I come here in hope of getting food for my children, he tells me. Then I'll go and look for whatever work I can get to earn some money to buy bread for them. The first group of people who've come to pick up their food, which is a fool, it's made of fava beans, these are the disabled people. We saw one man being led, he was blind, a number of men walking slowly with canes. So they get to be at the front of the line.

Each person gets two scoops of beans ladled out of large vats and a plastic bag of bread. There is bread and other food in the shops here, but soaring prices mean they can't afford it. Barbara Pledusher in Sudan. The first strike by American dock workers in almost half a century has shut down ports across the east and gulf coasts of the United States. The walkout by 45,000 members of the International Longshoremen's Association is over pay and also automation, as the union's president, Harold J. Daggett, explained.

Who's going to support their families? Machines? Machines don't have families. You've got to draw the line. These companies that work in the maritime business come from overseas, not where it belongs to America. They want to come into America and build fully automated terminals and get rid of American jobs, good paying jobs. They want to get rid of them. I heard more from our business correspondent, Katie Silver. It's a conflict between the International Longshoremen's Association, which is the union representing the workers, and the U.S. Maritime Alliance, which represents shipping firms, port associations, as well as the operators of marine terminals. And I guess there's two major sticking points.

One of them is wages, the other is automation. So when it comes to pay, workers are unhappy with the current contract. It spanned the pandemic when dock workers stayed on the job, enduring months of soaring inflation. Of course, shipping firms saw their profits soar during the pandemic. And then when it comes to automation, the union boss has been warning dock workers that their jobs could be replaced by machines. The union, as a result, is calling for significant pay increases and has warned of a wider strike of its members, saying that it could be up to about 85,000 different workers. So that's really the crux of the issue, this inability to really find a compromise. What's the federal government's position on this? And could the workers be forced back to work? They could be. There is a clause for that. The federal government has the power to suspend the strike for 80 days. It's called a cooling off period, basically forcing workers back to the job whilst negotiations continue. It has been

employed before. George W. Bush did it back in 2002. And we have heard from the US Chamber of Commerce calling on President Biden to do so, saying that it's unconscionable to allow a contract dispute to inflict such a shock on the country's economy and, of course, the world's largest economy. It does put the Democrats, though, in a difficult position. Of course, President Biden has been very pro-union, has been a great advocate of employees exercising their rights. And so, as a result, he said that he's not going to intervene, but it does certainly make it very tricky just weeks away from this presidential election. Indeed. In the meantime, with ports being shut down, what kind of an impact

could it have on trade within the US and globally? Well, JP Morgan is estimating that it could cost the US economy in the order of about $5 billion. And Oxford Economics is saying that around about 100,000 people could find themselves temporarily out of work. That's, of course, the shipping industry, but also the knock-on effect on other industries. For example, you know, all the companies that employ a just-in- time approach to acquiring their supplies, and all of a sudden they don't have things that they need. We're going to see the strikes halt a wide range of goods and services, time-sensitive imports like food likely to be hit first, bananas and chocolate, top of the list.

But the ports also involved a huge amount of agricultural exports as well as imports. Other sectors affected, raw materials, pharmaceuticals, clothes, toys, you name it, so many goods go through these eastern Gulf ports. Katie Silver. A new report on the state of Switzerland's glaciers has revealed that they're continuing to shrink fast and that it is now too late to save many of them. The research

by the Swiss Academy of Sciences says the rapid reduction of ice caps as a result of climate change cannot be reversed regardless of efforts to limit global warming. And what's happening in Switzerland is being repeated across the world. Matthias Hus is the report's lead author. He spoke to our Geneva correspondent, Imogen Fuchs. We had the perfect winter for glaciers. There was much more snow than usual, and we were hoping for finally a year without further losses. That's the thing. I mean, I was out skiing this last winter, and I was thinking, this should be good for the losses. That's the thing. I mean, I was out skiing this last winter and I was thinking this should be good for the glaciers. And you're saying it made no real difference. Well, it made a difference in the sense that it avoided another extreme year, as we had in 2022 and three, when there was little snow in winter and a warm summer. This time we had a lot of snow in winter, which has mitigated some of the losses. But still, the summer was very warm and July and August were among the hottest ever.

The disappearance of small glaciers just continues. This might sound like a silly question, but why do we actually need glaciers? They are an important water reservoir at high mountains, and they deliver the water exactly when we need it, in hot and dry summer days, when there is not much water available otherwise. And as long as the glaciers are there, they melt, and they provide this water, and they provide a lot of water, not only in the Swiss valleys, but far beyond, down the Rhône, down the Rhine River. And if we lose the glaciers completely, we might run into troubles in future drought periods. So what's the prognosis now? It's quite simple. If we don't do anything,

all glaciers in the Alps will disappear by 2100. But we already do something. So we are on a good track, even though it's not fast enough. So CO2 emissions are not reduced at the rate that would be needed to actually save the glaciers of the Alps. And even if we do, if we achieve this goal of net zero by 2050, we can't save all of the glaciers of the Alps. The biggest ones, about one third of the total ice volume can be saved, but for the rest, it's already too late. So two thirds of the ice is already on the edge

of extinction. Yes, indeed. Two thirds can't be saved because glaciers, they have a memory. So they remember the warming that has happened in the last few decades and they haven't responded to it fully. So even if we stop global warming today, more than half of the ice will disappear. Matthias Hus. Now imagine acting in a play in which there is no chance to rehearse, no director, and you only ever perform your role once. That is what awaits actors who take to the stage in White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, written by the Iranian playwright Nassim Solomanpour. Since its premiere in 2011, the play has been translated into more than 30 different languages and performed over 3,000 times by some of the biggest names in theatre and film. Nick Mohamed is the first actor to take on

the challenge in a new production that starts in London on Tuesday. Juliet Stevenson did it back in 2012. It's very, very surreal. I mean, I loved it. I really loved it. It certainly is only for actors who are happy to leave their comfort zones, that's for sure. Did you really know nothing about it before you opened that envelope? No, absolutely nothing. I mean, you stand on a stage, empty stage, there's nothing on it except for you. The audience are watching you. Somebody comes on, hands you a brown envelope, they leave, you open it, take out the script, and you start to perform the contents. And obviously, I can't tell you the contents, because the whole point is that you have no idea. But I mean, I think the beauty of it is that it's completely unique.

There's nothing like it in the world. In a way, you've got an excuse, because they know that you haven't rehearsed or prepared, so you can more or less have the freedom to do anything and not feel too judged. Now, Juliet, I can see Nick Mohamed. I can't see you, but I can see him, and he's looking ever so slightly nervous, Nick.

Are you, Nick? Well, yeah, I've actually done one of Nassim's plays before, which is sort of similar in principle. So I did Echo at the Royal Court in the summer, which is similar in that you don't have any preparation beforehand. You very much get the script just before you go on stage. From what I understand, because obviously they deliberately tell you not to do any research on the show,

definitely don't go and see a production of it or read any reviews of it or anything like that. From what I understand, I think Echo was a little bit more tech heavy and indeed we actually had technical difficulties during that show because in fact Nassim was streamed live during that and I didn't know whether it was live or pre-recorded until I was on stage. It was very strange, but there is something incredibly thrilling about it. Now we can't tell him too much, Juliet, can we?

But I read that there is one instruction you all get if you're going to act in this play, which is to prepare an ostrich impersonation. I never had that preparation. I just found myself having to do certain impersonations that I'd certainly not prepared. I mean, I would say, Nick, just be ready to do things on stage that you've never dreamed of doing and will almost certainly never do again. It was funny when that email came through,

they send an email to every actor doing it 48 hours before their performance. And yeah, on the top, that top line is prepare an ostrich impression. And I remember just saying to my wife, I was like, I wonder if I do I need to act like a bird or is it just the noise of an ostrich? Do I need to Google it? Do I need to? So, yeah, there's a lot of things running through my head. I wouldn't take it too seriously. I mean, I think the point is that when people are watching a play, when an audience is watching a play, you know, the sort of make-believe is this is all happening for the first time,

even though the show may have been running for six months. And that's the strain for actors is to go out there every single night, you know, and pretend it's never happened before. But with White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, it genuinely hasn't ever happened before. It really is happening for the first time. And so the actor and the audience, you're at one, they're in the same place. You know, I think he wrote it as a sort of metaphor for life, which you can't prepare for or rehearse. And, you know, we live our lives sight unseen, not knowing what's going to happen next. The Iranian playwright Nazim Suleimanpour

says that he's writing not about his own country, but about a social phenomenon which is obedience. Are you the actor meant to be obedient, Juliet? Is that the point? Yeah, I mean, I think because you're given instructions during it. That's all I can say. During it, some of the time you're given instructions. And I think for the audience, what must be fun is watching how you interpret those instructions and to what extent you're obedient

or to what extent you're not. Because after all, he's a political dissident it's satire really nick how on earth do you spend the day preparing do you lie in a dark room now no i think i think i think deliberately don't prepare actually i've been told to not even get to the theater until 6 45 so there's nothing you can do to prepare throw away all vanity and throw away all dignity and then you'll have fun. Sounds very scary indeed. That was Juliet Stevenson and Nick Muhammad speaking to Nick Robinson. And that's all from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later.

If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email. The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X at Global News Pod. This edition was produced by Judy Frankel and mixed by Chris Kouzaris. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Nick Miles. Until next time. Goodbye. Life and death were two very realistic coexisting possibilities in my life. I didn't even think I'd make it to like my 16th birthday, to be honest. I grew up being scared of who I was. Any one of us at any time can be affected by mental health and addictions. Just taking that first step makes a big difference. It's the hardest step.

But CAMH was there from the beginning. Everyone deserves better mental health care. To hear more stories of recovery, visit CAMH.ca. 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.