Israel to allow Jordan and UAE to resume Gaza aid airdrops

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this is the global news podcast from the bbc world service

i'm alex ritson and at 14 hours gmt on friday the 25th of july these are our main stories as the humanitarian crisis in gaza worsens israel has said it will allow jordan and the united arab emirates to resume airdropping humanitarian supplies shortly.

Thailand has evacuated more than 100,000 people from areas near the Cambodian border as the Thai Prime Minister says clashes between the two neighbors could develop into war.

Also in this podcast.

Friday is going to be the evil queen, of course.

And then I have Poison Ivy.

So a little DC for you.

Thousands of science fiction fans are in San Diego in California for this year's International Comic-Con convention.

As we record this podcast, Israel has said it will soon allow Jordan and the United Arab Emirates to resume airdropping humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Israeli officials said Jordan could carry out the first airdrop as early as today.

Several countries and aid groups say Israel's continued and long-running blockade of the Palestinian territory has led to mass starvation.

The main UN agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, says that one in five children is now malnourished in Gaza City, with the situation getting worse every day.

And as the humanitarian crisis worsens, there's increasing uncertainty over the future of ceasefire talks after the US and Israel withdrew their negotiating teams from Qatar.

My El Wawada is the communications officer for medical aid for Palestinians in Deir al-Bullah in central Gaza.

She sent us this message.

Situation is no longer bearable.

Just with one of our partners, we recorded the deaths of four children with severe acute malnutrition in just a few days, and we fear more to come.

We demand the immediate entry of food supplies and a ceasefire, nothing less.

An Israeli government spokesman, David Menser, accused the UN of working hand in glove with Hamas to manipulate the supply of food.

No one wants to see Garza suffering, certainly not people in this country.

It is an outrage that anyone, any ordinary Garza, should suffer.

What's been happening right now is that while we've been facilitating aid every single day, Hamas is the problem.

They loot trucks, they block distribution, they weaponize hunger, and they deliberately endanger their own people.

I put that Israeli claim to our Middle East correspondent, Yoland Nell, in Jerusalem.

This does chime with what we've been hearing regularly from Israeli officials.

Just a day ago, the Israeli military showed journalists' stockpiles of food, other humanitarian aid sitting in distribution points on the Gaza side and was placing again the blame for starvation in Gaza on the UN.

Now, when you put this to the UN, they say first of all they have managed in the past couple of days to collect some of the food aid from just inside Gaza, but they are saying that they have real difficulty coordinating with the Israeli authorities.

There's a lot to go into here but they are talking about bureaucratic problems, logistical, administrative, other operational problems imposed by the Israeli authorities.

You've got the ongoing fighting on the ground.

They're facing things like criminal looting as well, they say.

And when they have their own staff and the people on the ground seeking aid put at grave risk, then they say this is when they also have to stop collecting pick-ups of cargo from crossings controlled by the Israeli authorities.

Both sides blaming each other totally, but it does feel as though food supplies are being weaponised here.

Indeed, and we have accusations regularly made by aid agencies.

I'm looking at a new release just now from the Medecines Frontière accusing Israel of deliberately using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza.

Now, of course, that amounts to a war crime.

It's something that Israel very strongly denies.

But Israel has a responsibility as an occupying power to ensure that there is no harm to civilians and to ensure that food can reach them in wartime.

There is also, though, this accusation, of course, that the international pressure that is now being exerted to end the war may have made Hamas more reluctant to accept concessions in the ceasefire talks that have just broken down.

Israeli officials with close knowledge of the talks said that Hamas really backtracked on some compromises it had previously agreed to, and they point to the group's demand to restore previously used methods of distributing aid inside Gaza, which gave it more control and, as well says, it was able to to loot some of the aid that was coming in, something that the UN has been denying.

the political rights and wrongs of this, the images we're seeing of children starving are just awful.

That's right.

And you've got a situation now where it's patients struggling to survive, but also the healthcare workers looking after them, the aid workers who are trying to be involved in the food distribution process.

And we've been hearing the same sorts of testimony from our own journalists who we are relying on to try to verify things on the ground.

Now, the figures that came out on Thursday from the Hamaswan Health Ministry in Gaza said that in the last three weeks, at least 48 people, including 20 children, have died of causes related to malnutrition, up from 10 children who died in the previous five months.

And while it's hard to verify the exact causes of deaths when we're not allowed to go into Gaza ourselves, you get this sense that hunger levels are now reaching this tipping point.

And there was a very alarming quote that got my attention from the co-founder of the Med Global charity, who's a pediatrician, warning, this is the beginning of a population death spiral.

Yoland Nell in Jerusalem.

A picture, they say, paints a thousand words.

Pictures of suffering children, perhaps more than most.

The long-lived will have their own catalogue of the most awful.

A small, scared Jewish boy standing beneath a Nazis' submachine gun, perhaps, or a doomed and starving albino child in the breakaway Nigerian state of Biafra in the late 1960s.

Add to to that now the scene in a tiny tent in Gaza, lit like a Caravaggio, the brutally prominent ribs of 18-month-old Mohammed Zachariah's back as he lies in his mother's arms, her face itself a mask of despair.

The man who took that picture is the Palestinian photojournalist Ahmed Al-Arini.

He's been talking to James Menendez about how he came to take it and the emotional cost.

This photo of baby Mohammed Zakariya, I took when he was with his mother.

They have been displaced from their home in the north of Gaza.

So he was with his mother in a tent, which is absolutely bare, bar little oven.

It resembles a tomb, really.

And I took this photo because I wanted to show the rest of the world the extreme hunger that babies and children are suffering from in the Gaza Strip.

So, baby Mohammed, has he not been able to get the treatment he needs?

He received no baby milk, no formula, no vitamins either.

And if you look at the photo closely, you'd find out that he is wearing a plastic bag instead of pampers

because of the lack of any humanitarian aid and the lack of any medicines.

Prices have shot up skyrocketing so nobody in gaza can afford these prices yes i noticed that yes a bin liner instead of a nappy or a diaper i mean i mean you're a professional but how difficult was it to take this picture

so i walked to the tent where baby muhammad was

and seeing the situation as it is and how babies are suffering from extreme hunger, and how emaciated they are.

Of course, I'm a human being, and of course, I get affected.

And filming Baby Muhammad, I did it over a little extended period because I had to pause after each shot and take my breath to be able to continue.

And have you been seeing more and more cases like Mohammed's in the past few days and weeks?

Yes, of course, I have seen several cases like Baby Muhammad.

Also, the other day, I took some photos of a 17-year-old boy who lost 25 kilograms of his weight in one month alone.

People do not find any food in the Gaza Strip.

It's extreme hunger there, if not famine.

And people are fighting for any little bit of aid at the fence where they can risk their their own lives to get anything.

Ahmed Al-Arini, he was talking through a translator to James Menendez.

A victory for justice is how George Abdullah's lawyer has described the decision by French judges to free him, ending a 41-year stint in prison.

Abdullah was jailed in 1987 in connection with the murder of an Israeli and U.S.

diplomats.

He soon became a left-wing symbol for the Palestinian cause.

From Paris, Hugh Schofield reports: Georges Abdullah has been forgotten by most people, but for a section of the French left, he remains a hero, a political prisoner in their view, who should have been released a long time ago, but for pressure on France from the United States.

Born in northern Lebanon, Abdullah ran a small Marxist group, which in the early 1980s targeted Israeli and American officials in response to Israeli actions against Palestinians.

Captured in 1984, Abdullah denied involvement in the murders of the two diplomats, but at his trial he sought to justify them as legitimate acts of resistance.

U.

Schofield

Thailand's acting Prime Minister has warned that fighting with Cambodia could escalate into a war after cross-border clashes broke out on Thursday, displacing more than one hundred and thirty thousand Thais.

Fighting has continued, and the UN Security Council is due to hold an emergency meeting on the crisis on Friday.

The Thai authorities said that at least 15 people had been killed, whilst the figure is one in Cambodia, according to officials there.

Rear Admiral Sura Sant Kongsiri is from the Thai military who spoke after a meeting.

We discussed the issue concerning the condolences that we expressed for the losses suffered by the Thai people due to the attack by the Cambodian military, which began firing at Thai forces yesterday morning.

This compelled the Thai side to respond.

The clash was unexpected, and we were unfortunately unable to warn the public in advance.

And therefore we would like to issue a warning to civilians on both sides who remain in the border areas to evacuate from the combat zones to reduce or prevent collateral damage.

Our correspondent Jonathan Head is on the Thai-Cambodia border.

Both sides, of course, when it comes to the clash that started yesterday, that was an exchange of fire between two groups of soldiers.

Those aren't uncommon.

And in this one sense, it doesn't really matter who fired first.

It's almost pointless.

They confronted each other and they were bound to shoot.

The difference yesterday was that Thailand had expelled the Cambodian ambassador the night before and that was over landmines, the second incident where they said landmines had been laid by the Cambodians and had badly injured one of their soldiers.

I think that really heightened things and the Cambodian armed forces decided yesterday after this clash to react with using multi-launched rockets which are very inaccurate and very destructive and that really shocked the Thais.

There was also artillery.

Now the Thais have been firing artillery back in fact throughout today as well as yesterday we heard the constant boom of artillery as it goes one way or the other but the rockets really were but you know they caused a lot of destruction they killed quite a lot of people on the Thai side and that's really poisoned the mood.

Cambodia doesn't give any details really of what it suffered on its side.

It just talks generally about Thai aggression, unprovoked and premeditated.

And so you don't get the sense that there was, we knew the Thai Air Force bombed Cambodian military positions yesterday, but it did not, you know, it doesn't appear to have hit many civilians.

We only know of one civilian who's been killed.

But the rhetoric on both sides is very indignant, very angry, does not sound at all like there's any real room for compromise or diplomacy at this stage.

Jonathan, you're on the border.

Is your sense that there is a likelihood this could spill into a larger war?

I think it's a possibility, simply because there are now so many heavily armed soldiers who are hyped up.

You know, we've heard three Thai soldiers have have been killed today, we presume in artillery exchanges.

The possibility that they have more exchanges of fire like yesterday's is quite high.

But it takes the two governments to want to do that, and I cannot believe either government wants that.

These are two governments struggling with faltering economies.

Both of them are unpopular.

Some people argue that's the very reason that this conflict took off, that it almost suits them as a distraction.

And it's just got overheated and very difficult to settle.

The nationalist feeling on both sides has been really whipped up.

But I think, in the broader sense, this region has, ever since the end of the Cold War, prided itself on the fact that they do manage to solve their differences peacefully.

They focus on economic development.

And I think there'll be an awful lot of pressure from their neighbours, and they're all members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, to sort this out within days.

I would think we'll see some kind of diplomacy.

Jonathan Head on Thailand's border with Cambodia.

Still to come in this podcast.

At some point when they're working, a real a real squirrel will pop across and they'll go, oh, well, I know what to do in this situation.

I carry on guiding and I reach my objective.

The remote controlled squirrel helping train guide dogs.

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Comic-Con 2025 is kicking off in San Diego.

It's the world's largest fan convention celebrating comic books, sci-fi and geek culture with fans gathering to meet creators, experts and each other.

It brings over $180 million into the city and is often the occasion for the announcement of new films, games and TV shows.

Here are some of those who are there to enjoy the convention.

Since I'm from Colorado, I kind of have to travel to see my friends.

So this is my West Coast group that I get to see everyone.

These fandoms have brought me my closest friends as adults, and especially in the online space, it's like it doesn't matter where anyone's at

because we can communicate all the time.

And then, when you get something like this, it's so special because it's like, okay, we're all setting aside time in our adult schedules to come do this thing and see each other.

So, tomorrow on Teffiti for Moana,

yes, it's a little hot, but it'll do.

Friday is gonna be the Evil Queen, of course.

And then I have Poison Ivy.

So a little DC for you.

Yeah.

KJ Matthews is a Los Angeles-based entertainment news journalist.

She told us what's expected.

This is the largest convention, especially for all the Comic-Cons that happen around the world, but the largest one in San Diego, California.

This year, you can expect George Lucas, Mr.

Star Wars himself, the creator of Star Wars.

This will be his first time appearing at Comic-Con.

Can you believe believe that?

He's going to be discussing the opening of his new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art based in Los Angeles, which is supposed to open sometime early next year in 2026.

So he's going to be there.

And you know, over the years, you've probably seen all the pictures of people that show up in various Star Wars characters throughout the years.

So I am sure when he makes his appearance and he walks through the hall and walks on stage, you'll have a long line of people.

Of course, you're also going to have the the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

They've been coming over the years.

So it's not their first time coming to the San Diego Comic-Con, but they'll be at the convention for the first time in nearly a decade.

I went years ago, my very first time, and I loved it.

You know, there's all these people that line up, I feel like at the crack of dawn with all their costumes on and their cosplay.

And it's fun.

It really is fun to see them.

You know, they're all dressed in sky-fi and fantasy and superheroes and anime.

So the thing I like about San Diego Comic-Con is that you get the true fans.

The people that buy these tickets, that pay for the hotels, that fly in to San Diego, it's because they're the biggest fans.

And that's exciting to see.

KJ Matthews.

Over the past couple of days, we've been hearing from Haiti in the Caribbean, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

The security situation in the capital, Port-au-Prince, has deteriorated.

90% of the territory is now controlled by gangs.

We've been reporting reporting on a particularly harsh situation for women, with cases of sexual violence tripling in the last four years.

William O'Neill is the United Nations designated expert on the human rights situation in Haiti.

He spoke to the BBC's James Menendez.

So is the situation there getting worse?

It's getting worse, yes, yes.

These numbers are always difficult in any country to get.

There's fear of reporting, shame, and all those things.

But the UN human rights team has put in a very good monitoring and reporting system over the last several months, and they do show a serious increase in sexual violence.

And it's also the nature we've seen that what has become the predominant form of sexual violence now in Haiti are collective rapes, gang rapes.

And as your reporter also showed, the victims are very young, but what also is shocking is the perpetrators are also quite young.

At least half the gang members in Haiti are minors.

And this is something new and terrifying.

Is it also that many women and girls are more vulnerable because of the level of displacement in the city and the country?

Absolutely.

Oh, the displacement, which is also driven by gang violence, makes vulnerable people even more vulnerable.

So

there are terrifying statistics of the number of women in displacement sites or who are displaced that have also been victims of sexual violence.

So it's just a cocktail that's leading to this really horrific situation.

The U.S., I mean, over history has seen Haiti as being in its backyard.

It's often stepped in at various points, but it is now pulling aid as part of those wider cuts to foreign aid.

Is it abandoning Haiti in your view?

I hope not.

I really hope they're not abandoning Haiti, but I have to say the cuts in aid have had a devastating impact on what was already a very weak system or capacity to help the survivors of sexual violence, in particular collective rapes.

These are very complicated situations where women need psychosocial help, medical help, shelter, earning income.

Where do they go later?

Dangerous to return to where they came from.

So cuts

of that magnitude are really, really devastating.

And also, I have to mention that most of the weapons and bullets that the gangs use to have this kind of power, to commit these awful crimes, come from the United States.

So it's incumbent on the United States to do much more to stop the weapons and bullets and to sanction more of the oligarchs and politicians who are also linked to the gangs.

However terrible the symptoms, it is of course important to treat the disease.

What do you think can be done to loosen the grip of the gangs?

And I mean, this is the big question, provide some semblance of governance in Haiti?

Yes, well, that's it.

And it's all about security.

And so the Haitian National Police need a lot of help.

There aren't enough of them.

They don't have what they need to succeed against the gangs.

The Kenyan-led multinational force needs also to be strengthened.

They don't have enough of anything, people, vehicles, helicopters.

And then, as I just mentioned, on the other side of it, we have to stop the flow of weapons and bullets to the gangs, which enable them to have such power.

That was William O'Neill, the United Nations designated expert on the humanitarian situation in Haiti.

As the Ukraine-Russia conflict drags on, any kind of ceasefire seems far off.

But one thing the two countries do agree on is the exchange of prisoners of war.

Almost 7,000 Ukrainians and thousands of Russian troops have been able to go home.

Our correspondent in Kyiv, Charlotte Gallagher, has met a Ukrainian Marine who was held in a Russian camp for three years.

The moment Maxim and his family waited years for, a reunion they feared might never happen.

His home village came out and cheered for his return, lining the road and holding Ukrainian flags.

Maxim was a 22-year-old Marine when he was taken in Mariupol.

His small unit was encircled by Russian troops at Azovstyl steelworks in the city.

Maxim had already been hit by shrapnel.

He still has the photos of his bloodied and broken helmet.

Faced with certain death, Maxim's commander decided to surrender.

We surrendered as a group because we felt that it was safer.

I felt helpless.

It was a terrible feeling.

It was the start of his three-year nightmare in Russian captivity.

When we arrived, they beat us with hands, sticks, and belts, anything they had.

We heard one guy being beaten unconscious.

And then they woke him up and beat him again.

He then went silent, and we think he must have died.

In April, Maxim was finally released as part of a prisoner of war exchange.

His experiences in captivity stay with him.

To be honest, I have really bad dreams, and sometimes I wake up screaming.

Sorry, my ear is whistling from my head injury.

He's now at a rehabilitation centre with other prisoners of war, men scarred by their experiences.

It's in the middle of a forest.

It used to be a place where families went on holiday.

There's still a child's climbing frame in the garden.

It couldn't be more different to the Russian camp.

There's yoga at 4pm, Maxim smiles.

More prisoner swaps were one of the few things Russia and Ukraine managed to agree at this week's peace talks.

It wasn't a ceasefire breakthrough.

But for people like Maxim and his family, those swaps swaps are a second chance at life and a glimmer of hope in a bitter and brutal war.

Charlotte Gallagher in Kyiv.

Dogs can easily be distracted when out for a walk, particularly if they like to chase other animals.

Guide dogs need to resist that natural urge so they can keep their blind or partially sighted owners safe.

There are about twenty thousand registered guide dogs around the world.

Training them takes time, patience, and sometimes a little bit of innovation.

In one centre here in the UK, they've come up with a new technique using remote-controlled squirrel cars to teach the puppies to ignore such distractions.

Dog behaviour expert Dr.

Karen Brady told us more.

There is a really serious reason for doing it.

We find that, as you can imagine, the majority of dogs, when they see something small and fluffy, run, they want to chase it.

It's their natural instincts.

But for a guide dog, this simply can't happen.

They need to safely be able to guide their guide dog owner from A to B without being distracted.

And training around real-life squirrels, as you can imagine, is very difficult and unpredictable.

Whereas having one that we can control in the form of a toy squirrel tied to a remote controlled car makes it easy for us to set our dogs up for success in these situations.

It does work, and we have to build it up really slowly and then translate it into real life.

So we start off very gradually.

We teach our dogs in a controlled environment to do their guiding work while we initially drive the car very slowly in the distance and then build it up.

So it is whizzing around all over the place.

Then we take that little squirrel car out on the road and drive it out on the pavements, out of the bushes while the dogs are working.

And eventually at some point when they're working, a real squirrel will pop across and they'll go, oh, well, I know what to do in this situation.

I carry on guiding and I reach my objective.

We have lots of techniques that we use.

We use stuffed dogs in cases.

We do have a stuffed cat that meows and purrs to help our dogs get used to cats in real life as as well.

It could be anything that moves quickly.

We're talking bikes, e-scooters, anything like that that might move quite quickly that we need our dogs to get used to and just be okay with and not be distracted by when they're working.

Dr.

Karen Brady of the Guide Dogs Charity, and on the BBC website, you can find a video of how the squirrel car is being used to train a couple of aspirational guide dogs.

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.

The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.

You can also find us on X at BBC World Service.

Use the hashtag globalnewspod.

This edition was mixed by Darcy Obery and the producers were Carla Conti and Muzaffar Shakir.

The editor is Karen Martin.

I'm Alex Ritz and until next time, goodbye.

This is Larry Flick, owner of the Floor Store.

Labor Day is the last sale of the summer, but this one is our biggest sale of the year.

Now through September 2nd, get up to 50% off store-wide on carpet, hardwood, laminate, waterproof flooring, and much more.

Plus two years interest-free financing, and we pay your sales tax.

The Floor Stores Labor Day sale.

Don't let the sun set on this one.

Go to floorstores.com to find the nearest of our 10 showrooms from Santa Rosa to San Jose.

The Floor Store, your area flooring authority.