Netanyahu gives defiant speech to UN

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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Nick Miles, and at 16 Hours GMT on Friday, the 26th of September, these are our main stories.

The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells the UN General Assembly that recognition of Palestine is disgraceful and denied accusations of genocide.

Would a country committing genocide plead with the civilian population it is supposedly targeting to get out of harm's way?

What, did the Nazis ask the Jews to leave, kindly leave, go out?

Delegates in New York discuss a plan for an interim government in Gaza, which could be led by the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

How young Ukrainian soldiers are learning leadership skills at a British university.

Also, in this podcast, more than 200 suspected cyber scammers in Africa are arrested, and a new production of Romeo and Juliet, but with a linguistic twist.

The appearance of Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the UN General Assembly was always going to be one of the most controversial parts of a week of many speeches.

And so it has proved to be.

Many of the delegates in the hall in New York walked out just as the Israeli Premier was about to begin speaking.

Please, order in halt.

Yeah, it was shortly afterwards, Mr.

Netanyahu walked up to the Lectern and spoke for more than half an hour.

It was broadcast not only in the assembly hall, but also tellingly on loudspeakers across parts of Gaza.

Mr.

Netanyahu wrapped up his speech shortly before we recorded this podcast.

Here's a flavour of what he said.

Would a country committing genocide plead with the civilian population it is supposedly targeting to get out of harm's way.

Would we tell them to get out if we want to commit genocide?

We're trying to get them out.

And Hamas is trying to keep them in.

And this charge is so baseless, the comparison to genocide, wholesale slaughter of populations.

What, did the Nazis ask the Jews to leave, kindly leave, go out?

He also said that recognizing a Palestinian state was rewarding terrorism and had a message for Hamas in Gaza: Lay down your arms.

Let my people go.

Free the hostages.

All of them, the whole 48.

Free the hostages now.

Our chief international correspondent Lise Doucet, who's in New York, had this assessment of his speech.

This is very much vintage Netanyahu, known for many years for the kind of hard-hitting speeches that he has made, not just from this podium, but podiums the world over.

Today, he was defiant, almost belligerent, as he stands up to those countries he said were siding with the monsters by recognizing a Palestinian state.

He began by praising Israel for, he said, after the darkest days in its history, October 7, 2023, it had now staged the most stunning military comeback in history, taking on the leadership of the Houthis, of Hezbollah, of Hamas,

helping to bring about a new order in Syria, going through one after another the threat from Iran, talking about how Israel has stood up to all of them.

We're doing your dirty work, he said, telling the world that Israel was on the right side of history.

And again, in the classic Netanyahu form, amplifying his message by the use of visual aids, by cartoons, this time by pop-up questions, even by the announcing that not only was he using the world's top table here at the UN General Assembly, that loudspeakers were broadcasting this to the people still in the Gaza Strip, also going directly with the help of Israeli intelligence into the cell phones of Hamas leaders in order to make it clear that Israel wanted the hostages home.

He wore a QR code on his lapel, which he said everyone should now download so they could see the hostages.

And he actually listed the names of all of the 20 hostages still alive.

Lise

to end the war and for the future of Gaza.

The veteran Palestinian politician Mustafa Baghuti said the Palestinian people would not accept Mr.

Blair taking up this role.

That is absolutely unacceptable and it makes no sense whatsoever because Palestinians don't need another colonial power to rule them.

Palestinians are quite capable of running their own affairs.

Once the war is over, we need to have new elections within a period of no more than one year.

Because Palestinians have the right to choose their leaders freely and democratically, something they didn't have the chance to do for the last 20 years.

Our correspondent in Jerusalem, Yulan Nell, told me about the proposal.

Nothing's being said officially, but there are several reports in the British media, in the Israeli media, where journalists claim to have seen a draft plan.

According to these different reports, Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, would head this temporary administration of the Gaza Strip for a five-year term.

It would be called the Gaza International Transitional Authority.

It would seek a UN mandate to become what's quoted as the supreme political and legal authority for Gaza.

According to these reports, the operations would be modelled on those used in Kosovo and East Timor.

And there's speculation this could be based initially in El Arish in the north Sinai of Egypt, but would eventually move into Gaza once the UN has endorsed a largely Arab peacekeeping force and got that in place.

Now, according to these reports as well, while the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank, would not initially be involved in governance, there is this idea of eventually unifying all of the Palestinian territory, so the West Bank and Gaza Strip, under the Palestinian authority.

So it's said that, unlike previous plans, particularly President Trump's Riviera plan, which was aired back in February and caused international condemnation, this does not apparently involve Palestinians having to leave the Gaza Strip.

Now, Yoland, the history of British involvement in the region is very complicated, as you know.

How would this proposal likely be received by Palestinians and in Israel?

I mean, first of all, Tony Blair is not popular with Palestinians in general.

I think it was eight years that he spent as the envoy for the Quartet, the Middle East peace envoy, representing the UN, the US, the EU, and Russia.

Many Palestinians see him as having impeded efforts to gain statehood.

And of course, across the region, he is remembered for his involvement in the US-led invasion of Iraq back in 2003.

But that said, he is close to important powers in the Arab Gulf, the United Arab Emirates, in particular, as well as those who are close to President Trump, such as Jared Kushner, his son-in-law.

Yulan Nell.

While nations at the UN General Assembly discuss the future of Gaza, the present situation on the ground is continuing to deteriorate for many Palestinians.

Israel is pushing ahead with its air and ground offensive in Gaza City in the north of the Strip, which it describes as the last stronghold of Hamas.

Thousands of the city's residents have fled to the south, but many others have decided to stay.

One of them is Ahmed Kamal Junina, an assistant professor at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza.

He described the situation there to my colleague James Copnell.

Yesterday I was at a mobile hospital hospital in Gaza City accompanying my nephew who was shot in the neck and he's now in the ICU.

I really saw firsthand how overwhelmed the hospitals are.

They're lacking even the basics to treat patients.

Families wait desperately outside the hospital and they know that even critical cases may not receive the care they need and one of them is my nephew.

I'm really sorry to hear about your nephew and also just listening to you, almost the matter-of-fact way you said that.

It's almost as if you expect people to be shot almost every day.

Is that how it feels?

It is how it feels.

When I say the sense is that no area is truly safe, even when you are at home,

you are not safe.

You might be shot, you might receive an injury, you might be killed.

That's why it is always expected.

It is not an unexpected thing.

It feels that if you decide to head south, you are deciding to go on a journey of uncertainty and fear.

Displacement has become a real cycle because families flee from one area only to find the next one as dangerous.

Many families I know and I've talked to, they have been displaced five or even six times or even more.

I mean, I am in Gaza City.

I'm in the central Gaza city.

Honestly, the city has been largely depopulated recently, but I can say hundreds of thousands remain.

We can hear lots of banging in the background.

Is that something to be concerned about?

It's not something to be concerned about.

This is someone banging.

He's breaking wood for cooking fire.

And this is the norm.

People are like breaking their furniture, their doors of their homes, in order to use it for firewood.

Ahmed Kamal Janina describing life in Gaza City.

Although there's no sign of an end to the conflict in Ukraine, thoughts have begun to turn to what the future holds for the country.

A small group of serving soldiers and veterans have spent a week at a school in central England being taught leadership skills with the expectation that they can use them in the continued fight against Russia and to rebuild the country when the war ends.

Phil Mackey has been to meet some of them.

Maria Chek survived one of the fiercest battles of the war.

She was among the Ukrainian troops who held out for three months in the Azov-Star steelworks in her home city of Mariupol in 2022.

Most of her comrades were killed.

Two female soldiers, my sisters

in arms, died and I don't know really, I don't know how I survived

because I was actually closer to this explosion than they were but in the war sometimes strange things happened.

After they surrendered Maria became a prisoner of war.

I was tortured, I was humiliated and lack of food, lack of water sometimes.

And we also had to stand since 6 a.m.

till 22 p.m., just stand or go around a very small cage.

So

we couldn't sit for sure, lie down.

And it was really difficult because all this, we had all girls had this lympho problems, you know, some kind of diseases, terrible diseases.

It was really hell because no medical help.

Where people bounce in and out of working in industry and working in the military.

Now she's being taught new skills at the Warwick Business School

alongside other men and women who bear the scars of battle, mental and physical.

Everybody understand how important to develop Ukraine after that.

Danilo Shinhelski wears a beard to make himself look older.

Now 22, he saw action as a teenager and fought in battles in Kherson, Kharkiv and Bakhmut.

He was wounded and invalided out of the army.

My injury is like Russian bullets

go to my shoulder, so one of the nerves

in my hand

don't work.

Did you lose many friends?

Yep, yep.

And I think now all my friends from the army

they like die or they quit the army because they endures and because there's some like family reason.

He's part of a generation of veterans who still want to serve their country in civilian life.

In this university, I want to improve my leadership skills to help our army better.

My duty didn't end, and even now we have work with Russia, and I understand how important to help our military.

As she and the others prepared to head back, Maria remained like them, as determined as ever.

I strongly believe that Ukraine will win this war, that democracy will win, and that we will

become a really strong and powerful country in the future.

And then we will have the problems with all these people who will will need something, some new hope, some new

aim in life.

And I think I could be maybe one of those persons who can inspire them.

Maria Czech, ending that report by Phil Mackey.

A Berlin civil court has ruled that the far-right alternative for Germany party will have to vacate its national headquarters in Berlin next year after a dispute with the owner.

Matthew Moore is political correspondent at Deutsche Velle.

This is kind of an extraordinary sideshow, if you like.

And it began on the election night in February, where the AFD basically took over this office building that they have, which is on a kind of run-down, really tired business estate on the outskirts of Berlin.

And they took it over.

I remember going that night, and it was like Fort Knox.

There was police that had locked down the streets and the building.

And the landlord of the building has said that this is where the AFD has violated the terms of their contract by having a party in the courtyard, by projecting the AFD logo on the building and taking over essentially the building, which meant that other tenants couldn't get access.

And so he wanted to kick them out.

There are reports that he would like to sell the building, and having the AFD as a tenant doesn't make it very attractive to suitable buyers.

So this has been playing out in a civil court over the last few weeks and months with accusations that the AFD is squatting the building.

And eventually today we have the result that the AFD will have to find a new building in Berlin next year, a year earlier earlier than they'd hoped.

Matthew Moore of Deutsche Velle.

Still to come in the Global News podcast.

The theatre translating Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet into Welsh.

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Authorities across Africa have arrested more than 200 suspected cyber scammers.

The operation targeted criminal networks extracting money from victims in romance scams and in so-called sextortion, where victims are blackmailed using explicit imagery.

Our West Africa correspondent, Ijoma Endokwe in Nigeria, told me about the scammers.

This operation involved 14 countries across Africa.

So we're talking countries like Senegal and Ghana, South Africa participated in the operation, as well as countries like Kenya and Uganda.

And it was essentially a crackdown on cyber criminals who were operating across Africa using digital platforms like social media to find and manipulate and financially defraud their victims.

So some of the feedback that Interpol has been getting from African countries is that there are some specific cyber threats that they're concerned about.

So they focused on some of those threats, namely romance scams is one of them.

And that's when criminals develop relationships online with their victims with the the sole purpose of extracting money from them.

They also targeted the perpetrators of what's known as sextortion.

And that's when these cyber criminals, they develop relations with people online and they're able to get sexually explicit content from them, which they then use to blackmail them.

This operation resulted in 260 arrests across those 14 participating countries.

And Indepelle said they were able to identify more than 1,400 victims linked to these scams.

And they calculated that these victims had incurred losses of an estimated 2.8 million US dollars.

So it seems very unlikely that those victims are going to get their money back.

There was a success story cited as part of this report.

One of the countries that were highlighted was Ghana, and they were actually able to recover $70,000 of hundreds of thousands of dollars of financial losses.

Africa generally is experiencing this sharp rise in digital crime.

And this is largely fueled by this unprecedented growth and development in the digital technology sector.

And with this huge growth, it brings a wide variety of cyber threats that many of these countries aren't quite ready, you know, they aren't quite equipped to deal with at this moment.

And so, Interpol, they've been collecting data from these countries to find ways to support them so they can do more operations of these kinds, more collaborations to support their law enforcement efforts, because cybercrime accounts for more than 30% of all crime in eastern and western Africa.

So it's a huge problem in these two regions.

Ijoma in Dolque reporting there.

We often hear about how former colonial powers are, in some cases, and rather belatedly, returning works of art they plundered and took back home in previous centuries.

But now the Netherlands has begun what can perhaps be called fossil diplomacy with a former colony.

It plans to unconditionally return more than 28,000 petrified remains from a collection to Indonesia.

Our correspondent in The Hague, Anna Holigan, reports.

This collection is a valuable resource that contributes to the scientific understanding of human evolutionary history.

Notable items include a skull cap, a molar tooth, and a femur thigh bone attributed to a Homo erectus, a hominin that's considered a link between apes and humans.

They were excavated in Indonesia in the late 19th century by a Dutchman, the anatomist and geologist Eugene Dubois.

The Colonial Collections Committee, set up to investigate the origins of cultural artefacts in Dutch institutions, found these fossils had spiritual and economic value for local people and believes they were coerced into revealing fossil sites.

The committee found these culturally significant objects were probably removed against the will of the local Indonesian people, resulting in an act of injustice against them.

This is the sixth time the Netherlands has returned objects based on the advice of the Colonial Collections Committee, reflecting the extent to which the Dutch government is now confronting the legacy of colonialism.

Indonesia has, of course, welcomed the decision, describing it as a step towards redressing historical wrongs.

And the fossils are expected to be rehoused in Jakarta's National Museum, where they will be accessible both for research and for the Indonesian public.

Ana Holigen in the Netherlands.

India's Russian-built MiG-21 fighter jets, the country's first supersonic fighter jets, have finally been retired.

Crowds watched as the planes made their farewell flights.

Well, in their heyday, India operated nearly 900 of these planes, but they were prone to crashing and became known as flying coffins.

Our global affairs reporter, Ambratan Ettarajan, told me how important the planes were.

It's an iconic plane in the Indian Air Force, and they had nearly 900 of them at one point in the 80s, nearly two-thirds of it India's Air Force.

And people or pilots or the former Air Force pilots have very nostalgic things to say about this because this was the first supersonic fighter that India could get in the 1960s, flying twice the speed of sound, Mach 2.

So it became very popular and I've seen them in Air Force bases in India, on air shows as well.

Very deafening sound, you know, it's like terrifying sound.

And this also played a very key role in India's war against Pakistan in 1971.

It was used to bomb targets inside Pakistan as well as in East Pakistan.

So it remained as a big mainstay of the Indian air force, very iconic plane, MiG-21.

But as you say, it was also

crashing at a very, very high rate.

We're talking about 480 crashes.

That was up to 2012.

And more than 170 pilots were killed, also people on the ground, more than 40 of them.

So it is prone to accidents and also it was an aging.

Imagine the 1960s, it is the Soviet era aircraft, even though Russia made lots of changes, upgrades, but still there were issues, many blamed on technical error or even pilot error.

So that's why it was called as flying coffee.

And I remember in the mid-90s when I was covering an air show talking to the defense minister officials, they were discussing about retiring it and bringing an Indian version.

But it has come 30 years later.

And so what is the new version?

Now, India is developing its own aircraft, light combat aircraft, Thejes named.

So, they are already in service, a few of them.

So, they want to inject these India domestically made fighter jets.

In fact, the Indian government made an order of $7 billion worth of planes a day before with the Industrial Aeronautical Limited or the Indian government agencies, so that they will replace.

But, you know, beyond MiG-21, India's air force has grown bigger than with the MiG-29s Sukhois and recently they also acquired Rafael Jaguar flights and so they have a variety of planes but people will still remember MiG-21 the speed at which it's going and deafening sound an iconic plane amber sanitarajan

what do you get if you introduce welsh into the famous story of those star-crossed lovers well audiences are about to find out as theatre kymri takes on tour its new version of romeo Romeo and Juliet.

The Capulets will speak English, the Montagues Welsh.

Romeo and Juliet themselves will skip between the two by the end of the play.

It promises a new way of illustrating the divisions of family and, of course, the unity of love.

Gwyneth Lewis is a former national poet of Wales who herself translated The Tempest into Welsh.

My colleague Johnny Diamond asked her about the process of translating the bard.

It's a fiendishly difficult task, but immensely enjoyable if you're a poet like me.

So I knew the plays.

I'm not daunted by Shakespearean language, but you still have to work hard to understand his metaphor because

his images are so complex.

It was just a deep, deep delight like playing in a sand pit for a poet can we talk about meter was that was that a was that a challenge keeping the rhythm of the language as you switched it from one language to another well it is but I mean this is what I'm uh this is my delight so what seems difficult to somebody else is just pure pleasure it's like a crossword puzzle for somebody who's a a crossword puzzle fiend there is a hitch though Shakespeare in the plays is mainly an iambic pentameter.

That means, it basically means

five units of tum.

So it goes ti tum, ti tum, ti tum ti tum ti tum.

Welsh on the other hand is accented in the opposite way.

So it tends to go tum ti tum ti tum.

So, but all you have to do is clip off one half of the

unit and it works perfectly well.

One of the things I've been learning about in a rather rapid learning curve about Welsh this morning is a sort of older version of Welsh alongside modern Welsh.

So, did you use both when you are translating Shakespeare from English?

Well, you would use the full spectrum of the language available to you, but I would never choose something obscure that sounded poetic over something contemporary that made sense, that made it easier for the audience.

I think accessibility is key.

For example, The Tempest, you could translate it into a damestal, which is the strict equivalent of Tempest, but I chose A Starm, which is a translation of the storm, just to make it crystal clear.

Before we part, I have to ask you: is there a little bit of the tempest in Welsh that you can share with us?

Well, yes,

of course, one of the most famous bits is the Ariel's song,

Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies, of his bones are coral made, Those are pearls that were his eyes.

I mean gorgeous lines quoted by TS Eliot in the Wasteland, but here's what it turned out to be in Welsh Anader Maidad, Currell Luiskirnor, Denaberl Sebielagad, My Pobell Ven Sithenguiwa and Transnewid Valamor, Nidrengi on Trindrasor, Canni Kneel, my Moor of Arunyon, Ding Dong, and so on and so forth.

So I'm very pleased with that.

I think I got the feel of the movement of the verse there, which is the deep joy of Shakespeare.

He's so athletic in his language.

Gwyneth Lewis.

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 BBC World Service use the hashtag global newspod.

This edition was mixed by Volodymyr Muzetchka, produced by Isabella Jewell.

The editor is Karen Martin.

I'm Nick Mars, and until next time, goodbye.

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