Global News Podcast: Netanyahu: 'We will change the Middle East'

Hello, this is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service with reports and analysis

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I'm Alex Ritzen and in the early hours of Tuesday the 10th of October these are our

main stories. Israel's missiles rain down on the Gaza Strip in retaliation for Saturday's

deadly Hamas attack. The Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Monday's air strikes are just

the beginning while the UN urges restraint. While I recognize Israel's legitimate security

concerns, I also remind Israel that military operations must be conducted in strict accordance

with international humanitarian law. 900 Israelis are now confirmed to have been killed.

Israel's strikes on Gaza are said to have killed almost 700 Palestinians.

Gaza is only 365 square kilometers. We have nowhere to go. There is no place safe for

Gazans. Also in this podcast the search continues for survivors of Afghanistan's deadly earthquake.

A study on equal pay for women through history wins the Nobel Prize for Economics

and how the Kenyan athlete Kelvin Kiptum knocked more than half a minute off the men's marathon

world record. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned his country's response to

the deadly attacks by Hamas gunmen at the weekend will be terrible and will change the Middle East.

This is only the beginning, he said. Later on Monday in an address to the nation, Mr.

Netanyahu called on opposition parties to join a national unity government. He added that Israel

was now engaged in a war to ensure its existence. I call on the opposition leaders to form immediately

an emergency union government without prior conditions, as happened at the start of the

six-day war. Citizens of Israel. And I emphasize that we have only just begun to strike at Hamas.

I said that every place from which Hamas operates will be turned into ruins. It's already happening

today and it will continue happening even more. With the number of dead rising to 900,

Israel has called up 300,000 military reservists and has locked down the Gaza Strip. In Gaza,

funerals have been held for some of the almost 700 Palestinians who've died. In New York,

the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, has been addressing the crisis.

Nothing can justify these acts of terror and the killing, maiming and induction of civilians.

I reiterate my call to immediately seize these attacks and release all hostages.

In the face of these unprecedented attacks, Israeli air strikes have pounded Gaza. While I

recognize Israel's legitimate security concerns, I also remind Israel that military operations must

be conducted in strict accordance with international humanitarian law. Civilians must be respected

and protected at all times. I am deeply distressed by today's announcement that Israel will initiate

a complete siege of the Gaza Strip, relieve an entry of essential supplies into Gaza,

must be facilitated and UN will continue efforts to provide the aid to respond to these needs.

The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, a correspondent in Jerusalem, John Donison,

reports on a day of fast-moving events.

Two days after Hamas' unprecedented cross-border assault, Israel's retaliation appears to be ramping up.

Its military now says it's hit some 2,400 targets within Gaza, with hundreds overnight

and more during the day.

Israel's Defense Minister, Yaev Galan, has ordered what he called a complete siege of Gaza.

He said no food, water or electricity should be allowed in.

We are fighting animals, he said, and are acting accordingly.

Meanwhile, air aid sirens continued to be heard as far away as Jerusalem,

as Palestinian militants fired rockets, some of which were shot down by Israel's iron dome defense

system. Israel says it has now regained control of its communities near Gaza, but it says some

Palestinian militants remain active and it has acknowledged its border is not yet fully secure.

Israeli officials have likened Saturday's assault by Hamas to the September 11 attacks

on the United States, calling it the worst single day in Israel's history.

But speaking to the BBC, Basim Naim, head of International Relations for Hamas,

defended his group's actions.

We have to be free like any people around the world. We want to have our self-determination,

our freedom, our holy places protected and under Palestinian control. We want our prisoners

released, lifting the siege once and finally and totally and immediately.

Hamas will want to use the dozens of hostages it has seized to try to secure some of those demands.

It says four of the hostages have been killed already in Israeli airstrikes.

But there is increased speculation here that Israel is preparing for a ground operation in Gaza

that will use force to try to free those who have been captured.

John Donison, our defense correspondent,

Jonathan Beale is near Israel's border with Gaza, close to where the Hamas gunman came across.

There are shot up and burnt out vehicles all along this road.

These clearly belonging to Israeli civilians who were fleeing, who were caught up in what

essentially was a massacre. Also along the road, the shot up trucks of Hamas fighters,

dead bodies as well lying on the side of the street. And in the distance you can see

plumes of smoke rising just next to the border with Gaza. It is now three days since Hamas

fighters infiltrated across the border. We've just been told there's an air raid,

so we've been told to go into a shelter nearby. And still Israeli forces are clearing up this area.

And there is more to come we know because we have seen troops and tanks.

There's more gunfire there, massing at the border, which looks like preparations

for a potential incursion into Gaza itself.

Jonathan Beale, as you heard in our earlier report, Israel's bombardment of Gaza continues.

And Palestinians living in the densely packed territory are now living in fear of their lives,

and facing the consequence of a total siege. Basel Al-Sorani works for a Palestinian advocacy group

and lives in a neighborhood in the southern part of Gaza.

Gaza is only 365 square kilometers. We have nowhere to go. There is no place safe for

Gazans. There is no way to go to Egypt. We can't even go to the supermarket right now. You expect

us to go to Egypt. We're under constant bombing. The only thing we can do is just sit at home and

pray that the next rocket or the next airstrike or the next bomb fired from a tank or from a

warship will not land on our heads. Israel has a duty to protect civilians and put us aside from

its conflict with Hamas. Not all Gaza Strip are Hamas. We are Palestinian civilians. Why should

we pay the price? Rushdie Abu Alouf is the BBC's correspondent in Gaza. The sound of Israeli

fighters are flying overhead and the Israeli airstrikes just hit this area. We had to move from

our office. This is a residential building where I live. It's a very densely populated area. In my

way here I saw many families are leaving this city center to this side of the city. It's in the south

inside of the city. But since then we had about five or six airstrikes. I think Gaza has never seen

this scale of an intensity of Israeli airstrike ever. I have been covering many wars between Hamas

and Israel but this time and this day especially I think it's the biggest ever Israeli airstrike

that targeted Gaza. The most significant airstrike today targeted a market in the middle of

Jabalia refugee camp. Jabalia camp is the biggest camp in Gaza where 120,000 people they live

there. The health ministry said over 40 people died. People were shoving in this area this morning

and an airstrike destroyed the house, injured as many as 100 people. Since yesterday only about 100

people have been killed and the health official is saying they are struggling to cope with the

number of people injured from the Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip. They said we are running

out of medicine. We are running out of fuel to operate the generators that is providing power for

the hospitals. 80% of the people in Gaza they have no power, no internet for the last three days.

BBC's Rushdie Abu Aluf in Gaza. Meanwhile Israel says gunmen who came into its territory from Lebanon

have been killed. For more on that I spoke to our correspondent in Lebanon Lina Sinjab.

At least three members of Hezbollah were killed by raid from the Israelis. The Israelis saying

responding to militants crossing into its territory. We also know that some members of the Al-Quds

brigades of the ongoing of Palestinian Islamic jihad tried to get in saying that it's part of the

attack launched on Israel. We're getting the news bits and bit by bits because it's just happened

in the last few hours. The main focus is what's happening in Gaza but many are worried that this

will expand to more territories and one of them is Lebanon because of Hezbollah's presence and

its history of tension and fights with Israel. But to be clear Israel is shelling Lebanon?

Well they've launched an attack today to stop the militants from crossing into Israel. There were

some rockets firing between both sides yesterday. It stayed at this level, it hasn't escalated further

but it's really a tense time that we need to watch by hour and day by day

to see what's going to happen at this front of the conflict.

Briefly Lina there are many questions about Iran's encouragement for all of this. Any angle on that

that you can see? You know there was a deal that was about to be broken between Saudi Arabia and

Israel and many in the region they don't have interest in this to happen and probably Iran is

one of them. But of course don't forget that you know for the Palestinians they've been under siege,

they've been living under difficult conditions so many are arguing that Hamas wanted to launch this

to put some pressure and change the negotiation terms on the table.

Lina Sinjab, about 100 people are being held hostage by Hamas. On Monday the spokesman for

the armed wing of the militant group said they will start killing the Israelis being held captive

in Gaza if Israel bombs more civilian houses in Gaza without prior warning.

Middle East correspondent Yoland Nel went to Tel Aviv to meet a man who says five members of his

family are missing. She's sending this heart and she's saying that I'm not sure we're going to survive

this. For Edo Dan the horror of Saturday's events played out from early morning on his family's

WhatsApp group. His cousin Hadas who lives in near Oz, a Kibbutz next to Gaza, updated her relatives

as Hamas gunman broke into her home. Hadas did survive, rescued at nightfall but her two children

their father her niece and her 80-year-old mother who lived nearby were all missing.

The main clue about what happened was a disturbing video which surfaced on social media.

It appeared to show errors. Hadas' 12-year-old son being taken by Hamas fighters into Gaza.

Edo says they must be released. Just get them out of this confrontation. It's not for kids,

it's not for other people. I don't think there's any war ethics that were not violated here.

Even war has rules and ethics and limits. More and more stories are coming to light.

The many apparently held include other residents of southern Israeli communities,

party-goers from a dance festival and soldiers captured when Hamas overran military bases.

Their relatives, desperate for information, say they're getting little official help.

International mediators are now said to be trying to negotiate with both sides over those held

captive but with every hour that passes fears grow for their safety.

Yoland Nel. Now do you have questions about the crisis in the Middle East? Here's my colleague

Jackie Leonard. Hello. The fast-moving events in Israel and Gaza have prompted many of you to

get in touch with your questions. How did we get here? What's at the root of the conflict?

What are both sides saying? What role does the rest of the world have to play?

And what happens next? We hope to answer as many of your questions as possible in a special

global news podcast coming soon. As ever, send us an email or voice message

to globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. Thank you.

Robert F. Kennedy, the nephew of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy, has announced he's

running as an independent in next year's US presidential election. He had initially been

challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic Party's 2024 nomination. He launched his campaign at an

event in Philadelphia. A number of members of the Kennedy family, one of America's most well-known

political dynasties, have criticized his views and his decision to run. From Washington,

here's our correspondent, Gary O'Donoghue. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is something of an enigma.

For years, he was a respected environmental lawyer, but with his turn into politics,

he's pursued an eclectic populist agenda sprinkled with a mix of anti-vaccination rhetoric

and conspiracy theories. Despite dropping out of the race for the Democratic nomination

and running as an independent, polls have suggested he could take votes from both Republicans and

Democrats in the presidential election. And in a tight race, that could be significant.

He's also reasonably well-funded, which makes his pitch a potentially disrupting factor for the

two main parties. Third-party candidates don't win presidential elections in America,

but they can influence the outcome. Think Ralph Nader in 2000 and Ross Perot in 1992.

Gary O'Donoghue in Washington. The search is still going on in Afghanistan for survivors of

Saturday's earthquake, which left over a thousand people dead. Philippe Kropf works for the World

Food Program in Kabul. Several villages seem to have been completely flattened. Other villages

have had severe damage and the families who have stayed close to the villages, they are spending

a second night outside. It is already fairly cold, winter is coming, and repeated aftershocks have

also been reported. From what the colleagues in the field are telling us, the people they're meeting,

they're terrified, they're hungry, and they're desperate for assistance.

It's the third night that people are spending their nights outside in the streets and boulevards

and parks with families and children. So people are very scared and they're scared of stronger

tremors. Today at least five tremors, one of them was very strong felt, and that's why people are

very scared. The casualty figures, UNS still says more than 1,000 people have been killed, but

over 500 people, according to UN, are still missing. More than 11,000 people are affected

in Herod province. The earthquake happened on Saturday at 11 a.m., which is the first day of

the week in Afghanistan, and most men were outside, and women and children, they were inside. That's

why most of the victims, most of the people who are under the rubble, they are children and women,

and over 9,000 homes are destroyed, especially in villages, in a few villages that completely

they're flattened and destroyed. And rescue efforts after earthquakes are always difficult,

but there are so many other factors here, aren't there? Yeah, especially in the case of Afghanistan,

it's tricky because after the parliament took over Afghanistan, and they put restrictions

on women working for UN and other injuries. Most of the injuries, they shut down their

operation in Afghanistan, and they had the force to leave the country. It takes time for the A2

to go to the affected areas. Mainly in the past two, three days, local people, they were trying to

remove their loved ones from under the rubble with bare hands and travel. The survivors, obviously,

they are in need of food, drinking water, medicine, clothes, and tents. They're in urgent need of

temporary shelter. Ali Arian. Here in Britain, lawyers for the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman,

have told the Supreme Court that Rwanda can be trusted to treat humanely any asylum seekers sent

there under the government's plan. In the opening submissions of a three-day hearing, lawyers said

the Court of Appeal had been wrong to block the plan and urged the court to let the scheme go ahead.

Our home and legal correspondent Dominic Cassiani reports.

This 16-month legal battle comes down to whether or not Rwanda has passed strict legal tests,

that it would protect genuine refugees and not send them back to countries where they could

be treated inhumanely. Sir James EDKC, the government's lead barrister, told the Supreme

Court's five justices that there was every reason to conclude the plan would work because there was

both a reputational and financial incentive for Rwanda to comply. The scheme was so detailed,

there was even a clear plan to independently monitor what happens to each migrant.

Whatever debate there may have been, or may not have been, about Rwanda's conduct or record in

the past, is we submit at best peripherally relevant. This is a new context with a new set of

detailed arrangements that have been committed to by Rwanda and the UK in significant part with

those concerns in mind. This afternoon lawyers for the migrants said Suella Braverman had no

answer to evidence that Rwanda was an authoritarian one-party state and the cause of appeal had

been entitled to block the scheme because the country's asylum system was arbitrary and unfair.

The hearing is expected to last until Wednesday with a judgment to come later.

Dominic Cassiani, the winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Economics is the American

economic historian Claudia Golden for her work on women's employment and pay. The 77-year-old

academic currently teaches labour market history at Harvard University. She's only the third woman

to get this award and the first not to share it with male colleagues. After receiving the news,

Professor Golden was asked to sum up her research to the press.

I work on long-term change in economic history, in particular the evolution of

women's economic role and where we are today and the fact that there has been an enormous change

and yet there are still large differences between women and men in terms of what they do,

how they're remunerated and so on and the question is why is this the case and that's what the work

is about. Our business reporter Lucy Hooker told me more about her work. What she did was she went

back over 200 years looking at women's employment in the United States, whether they were working,

what kind of work they were doing and how much they were earning and that's not as straightforward

as it sounds because before about 1940 the census would mostly just ask men those kinds of questions.

There weren't any records really for women's employment so she had to do a lot of work just

to try and get the basic information together but she did manage to chart those changes and she

showed that in the 1800s as industrialization came along and work moved out of the home and

into factories women started to work less before that they had worked quite a lot and then in the

1900s as the service economy grew women were pulled back into work like hospitality, hairdressing,

teaching. So what conclusions has she drawn from that? Essentially that there hasn't been a steady

linear progress towards closing the gap between men's occupations and women's and earnings. She did

say that things like the arrival of the contraceptive pill allowing women to plan their pregnancies more

easily made a difference and that access to higher education helped women's earnings but

that there are still obstacles so in more recent years she said it was the choices that women were

making around which career to follow and what kind of education to pursue that left women earning less

and interestingly she said more recent years in higher income countries mostly the gap is down

now simply to the impact of having a child which takes the woman out of the workplace temporarily

and hits her earnings. Professor Goldin herself doesn't recommend certain paths for governments

to take but she does try to tell us why we still have such a discrepancy between what women earn

and what men earn so that if you understand the sickness then you can pick the right medicine.

Lucy Hooker now a story of an astonishing human feat the Kenyan runner Kelvin Kiptum broke the

men's marathon world record in Chicago on Sunday winning in two hours and 35 seconds to beat his

compatriot Elliot Kipchogay's previous mark by more than 30 seconds and he was quite close to

running a marathon under two hours which looks like a target that might soon be broken. Ed Caesar

is the author of two hours the quest to run the impossible marathon. He spoke to Nula McGovern

about the significance of the achievement. It's a pretty astonishing feat of athleticism. I have

been privileged to watch a lot of very very fast marathons in the last few years and he smashed

the world record. It's worth thinking about at home how fast it is. Most treadmills at local

gyms don't go as fast as he ran two hours. Really? So it is really unimaginable for most people just

how quickly this guy is going and when you see him finishing the race he's finishing at a sprint

then you know the knees are pumping you know he looks like he's flying. I mean it's just incredible.

So this was beating Kipchogay's previous mark by more than 30 seconds. What does it take to

make that leap? He was wearing some incredible shoes you know shoe technologies come on massively in

the last few years. You know Elliot Kipchogay himself was the beneficiary of very new technology

from Nike when he started breaking these records in 2017-2019 and then laterally. But the shoes I

remember the controversy over the vapor fly and that right is it possible to differentiate exactly

how much technology is at play and how much the human body is? What you see is that the world

record is falling very very quickly. I mean I think Elliot Kipchogay was a kind of generational

athlete and maybe Calvin Kipchum is as well. Even in cases before we've had athletes who we think

will never see the lack of them again the world record hasn't fallen quite as quickly as it's

fallen in the last five or six years. So you do feel like the shoes are you know really helping

these amazing athletes to go quicker. You know it's very hard to say what is in the body and what

is in the shoes and also what is in the mind. It's very hard to disambiguate all of these different

factors. We're also talking about Kenyans here. Why in particular do you feel they are excelling

in this particular field? It's this extraordinary mixture particularly in this one part of Kenya

on the western escargot of the Rift Valley where a lot of the Kalanjin tribe live. Their history is

lowland and they moved up to the islands a few generations ago and so they're getting all this

physiological benefit from living high. Since they started winning medals in the 60s this has

become a thing that they know that they're good at and that is a kind of self-perpetuating process.

It's also a pretty poor region and you know there are financial rewards on offer for the best

runners. So this is seen as a way out physiologically. This doesn't work done on you know whether

walking and running barefoot to school as children is strengthening those parts of the

body you know the lower parts of the leg and so on but I think it's this kind of magical

combination of the right conditions, certain physiological factors, culture and this great

desire to break out. Ed Caesar the author of Two Hours the quest to run the impossible marathon.

And that's all from us for now but there'll 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

and a reminder that we're taking questions on the Israel Gaza crisis. The address is global

podcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on x at Global NewsPod. This edition was mixed by Chris

Kuzaris and the producer was Emma Joseph. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Alex Ritzen until next time

goodbye.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.