Reuters World News - Israel’s Hamas targets, Ukraine war fatigue and Biden gets aggressive

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

A truce between Israel and Hamas has been extended – but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says their plan is still to wipe out the militant group. Who are the main targets? Ukraine’s struggle to bolster its military as war fatigue sets in. Plus, why President Joe Biden’s economic campaign message is stalling and being switched to more aggressive attacks on Donald Trump. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, more hostages are expected to be released as the truce in Gaza is extended. The three militant leaders at the center of Israel's war on Hamas. A darkening mood in Ukraine poses a recruitment challenge for the war effort. And with Bidenomics flopping with voters, the Biden campaign pivots to a more aggressive stance. It's Tuesday, November 28th. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes every weekday. I'm Kim Vinal in London. And I'm Jonah Green in New York. The truce in Gaza is stretching into a fifth day. The White House and Qatari negotiators

say Hamas and Israel have agreed to a 48-hour extension to the pause, which was originally set to run out today. More releases of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners are expected. So what happens next? Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to resume fighting Hamas when the ceasefire ends. And sources have told Reuters that Israel's offensive in Gaza is unlikely to end before three top Hamas commanders are among the dead. Samya Nakul is Reuters' global foreign policy editor. So Samia, who are these three commanders that Israel is targeting?

The first one is Yahyazir. He's the head of Hamas in Gaza. He has been in Israeli jail for 22 years. He was released in 2011 as part of a prisoner swap. And the second one is Muhammad Dave. He's the mastermind of the October 7 attack against Israel. He's in charge of Al-Qasan Brigade, which is the military wing of Hamas. And the third one is Marwan Issa.

He's the second incumbent for Muhammad Dave. The three form the military. military council of Hamas. How far has Israel got in its military campaign at this point? Israel has taken the northern side of Gaza, and they are in control there. They said they destroy 400 tunnels, but they haven't been inside Gaza City yet. Once you get into the city, then into the tunnels, it's like a city under a city. And this is where the Hamas command is believed to be based.

And they're going to be street-to-street battles. they're going to be tunnel-to-tunnel battles, and they have a lot to go. It will be a long and costly war for Israel until they finish the operation. If Israel does remove Hamas's top leadership, how likely is it that will mean the end of Hamas? You know, throughout history, Israel has killed many Hamas leaders. They killed the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. They killed a previous leader of Hamas, Abdulaziz, Zanthisi. It didn't stop Hamas.

Hamas is an ideology. They have many leaders. You know, you kill many others who spring up. North Korea says its new spy satellite has taken photos of the White House and the Pentagon. U.S. ambassador, Linda Thomas Greenfield, criticized the satellite's launch and the United Nations. This reckless, unlawful behavior

threatens all of the DPRK's neighbors and all member states. There was no notification of this action. North Korea's ambassador said the satellite was launched to protect against the US. Rescuers have successfully drilled through debris to reach dozens of workers trapped for 17 days

in a collapsed tunnel in the Indian Himalayas. The men are set to be pulled out one by one from the three-mile tunnel. A Russian court has extended the detention of Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who's awaiting trial on espionage charges. Gershkovich, who denied the charges, will remain in custody until January 30th.

On markets, Chinese fast-fashioned giant, Sheen has filed to go public. Carmel Crimmons is here to tell us more. So, Carmel, this could be one of the biggest IPOs in years, right? Yeah, so Shien has confidentially filed to go public in the US. That means it can keep its listing documents private for a while. Sources of Tolvorders that the company hasn't determined the size of the deal or the valuation, but it could launch its share sale sometime next year.

Now, Cheyenne is obviously famous for those $5 skirts and those $9 jeans, but it was valued at more than $60 billion in a May fundraising round. Its IPO will be a big test of investor appetite for new listings. Three of the four big IPOs recently have disappointed. The prospect of a long, drawn-out war with Russia is darkening the mood in Ukraine. The families of some soldiers have even held protests demanding to know when their loved ones can finally come home. Their campaign reflects the difficult choices facing military bosses as they try to maintain the flow of recruits. Tom Baumforth is in Kiev.

Tom, you spoke to one woman whose husband enlisted back in March of 2022, and he's still deployed. So what can you tell us about her and families like hers? She's called Antonina Danilovich. She's basically protesting, like, dozens of other women like her, about the fact that they don't know when their husbands or their fathers or their brothers are going to be coming home from the front. She says their two children are basically growing up without a father, and she wants her husband to come home.

And she thinks that other men in the country should be mobilized. so that the burden of the war is shared between them. So what can the government do? The problem is actually that this is just one of many, many problems that exist in mobilization. I mean, replacing all of the soldiers like Antonina's husband would be a huge undertaking for the military. We're probably talking about many tens of thousands of soldiers, so you'd have to recruit, train, and equip them all. It's obvious that there are no longer long queues of men at recruitment centers waiting to enlist like there were last year. There've also been a series of corruption scandals, recruitment centers, you know, videos from

to time to times circulated on social media showing draft officers using kind of violence against people to try and forcibly mobilize them. So I think all of these things contributed to a greater reluctance of people to want to be mobilized. Essentially, at the moment, Ukraine is kind of currently in the process of reforming its mobilization program to address all of these problems. The mobilization age starts at 27. So there are currently, I think, discussions to bring that age down, which would obviously free up more people. And they're also talking about closing other loopholes in legislation.

Like, for instance, the authorities have concluded that basically people are using higher education en masse as a way to dodge the draft. And so now one of the mobilisation reforms that is being considered is a way to remove that loophole. There are many ways to evade mobilisation, but I mean some people have been paying. large sums of money to corrupt officials, to give them fake documents, allowing them to get out of the country. Some people have been physically trying to flee across the river to safety in, for instance, the border between Ukraine and Romania. When the 2024 presidential campaign first began to heat up, President Joe Biden tried to focus on his own achievements rather than blast his likely opponent. You'd often hear the phrase, Bidenomics.

Guess what? Bidenomics is working. Today, the U.S. has the highest economic growth rate leading the world economy since the pandemic, the highest in the world. But that good news approach is not working. The latest Reuters Ipsos poll showed a tight race with Donald Trump leading Biden by two points. And so a more aggressive pivot is underway, says our White House editor, Heather Timmons. So, Heather, first, why is Biden's good news plan, aka Bidenomics, not sticking? The thing that we've seen is that even though inflation is down and things like the price of gas is down,

U.S. voters and people that we've polled are just still unhappy or uneasy about the state of the economy and what happens next. And Bidenomics has become sort of a focal point, the word itself, the phrase itself, focal point for Republicans to make fun of Biden. And so people have been begging Biden, strategists have been begging him to just take the focus off that. Like, let's talk about what they consider the elephant in the room, which is his likely opponent. And so then what is the strategy now? How does team Biden plan on hitting Trump? You can sort of see the messaging start to be rolled out in some of the fundraising events that he's had.

And these are often events in private homes. And so, you know, he'll speak much more freely then. And he started to say things about Trump saying that he uses language that you've heard in Nazi Germany. He is saying that Trump himself is singularly responsible for women losing abortion rights. He is saying that Trump is determined to destroy American democracy. And what we're going to see from the Biden campaign, and particularly, you know, after the new year, is that they are specifically going to zero in on certain Trump policies, what he plans to do with immigration. Some of the things that he has been talking about on sort of protectionist taxes, the idea that there could be some sort of federal abortion laws.

In a statement to Reuters, Trump's campaign team said Biden's effort to attack the former president won't work. That's it for today's episode of Reuters World News. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show. To make sure you know what's going on in the world, listen in for 10 minutes every weekday. And don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast player or download the Reuters app.