Four countries boycott Eurovision over Israel's inclusion

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

I'm Celia Hatton, and in the early hours of Friday, the 5th of December, these are our main stories.

Several countries have pulled out of next year's Eurovision song contest after it was confirmed that Israel could participate.

A prominent Palestinian militia leader and Hamas opponent has been killed in Gaza. Members of the U.S.

Congress have reviewed classified video of a strike on an alleged drug boat which killed two shipwrecked men.

Also in this podcast, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo sign a peace deal in Washington and

There are estimates which suggest that there are about 200 people dying every hour globally because of these type of infections. Why a hospital in Britain is telling people not to wash their hands?

We begin with the controversy around one of the world's biggest annual television events, the Eurovision Song Contest.

Four countries have pulled out of next year's competition after organizers decided that Israel will participate, despite calls for it to be excluded because of the war in Gaza.

The boycotters are Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain, which is one of the event's top funders.

Eurovision is a musical extravaganza known for its glitz and glam, but increasingly it's becoming deeply political.

While the competition's slogan is united by music, the dispute over Israel's participation appears to be tearing it apart. Here's Eurovision expert Dean Vulitich.

It's a historic moment for the European Broadcasting Union. This is certainly one of the most serious crises that the organization has ever faced.

Next year, we're going to see the biggest political boycott of Eurovision ever.

The decision by the four broadcasters came after a meeting of the organizer, the EBU, when a majority of its members agreed to tighten public voting rules, but not to hold a vote on Israel's participation, meaning its entry is still welcome next year when the competition turns 70.

Natalia Gorshak is the head of the Slovenian public broadcaster, which decided to pull out.

If we excluded Russia like one week after they attacked Ukraine, I think the same rules should be applied also to Israel. You have two years of complete destruction of one territory.

While Israel has welcomed its continued inclusion, the 1998 Israeli winner, Dana International, denounced the four boycotting broadcasters and said their decision was violent and insulting.

Ilan Zoller is an Israeli journalist focused on Eurovision. I'm very happy because I think Israel should be in Eurovision.
It's important. Israel is one of the best countries of Eurovision.

We're sending big songs almost year after year. Personally, I think there's no place for politics.
Everyone should put politics aside. It's a competition between broadcasters.

And I'm very happy, but I'm a bit sad because my favorite countries are usually the Netherlands and Spain, and they withdraw. So, yeah.

Janat Jalil got more details from our music correspondent, Mark Savage.

Tensions over Israel's participation in the Eurovision Song Contest have been festering for two years now, ever since they responded to the deadly 7th of October Hamas attack by invading Gaza.

And of course, as the death toll has risen, those protests have become more and more vociferous.

Today in Geneva, there was a meeting of all of the Member States who take part in the Eurovision Song Contest, and some of them were pushing for a vote on whether or not Israel would be allowed to participate next year.

Now, in the end, the organisers did not allow that vote to go ahead.

Instead, they pressed for a vote where people would ratify a package of measures that will make the public vote for the Eurovision Song Contest, where people phone and text in slightly tighter to avoid outside influence, to counter accusations that there had been government campaigns to get people to vote for certain acts across Europe.

Tied to that vote was the idea or an agreement that they would not press ahead with a vote on Israel's exclusion.

So when that motion passed, Israel sailed through to next year's contest and immediately four countries pulled out and the speed with which they issued their press releases suggests that they were prepared for this eventuality early on.

That's correct, and that's what they were talking about there.

There was a campaign that was funded by the Israeli government to advertise Israel's entry on YouTube, on social media, and there was even a post on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Instagram account advising people outside of Israel how they could vote for the act.

Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that the scales were tipped in Israel's favour. It was a very popular song going into the contest, but some eyebrows were raised at how big that campaign was.

So how big a crisis is this for the Eurovision Song Contest? Can these divisions be healed?

I think if you look at what the Spanish delegation said going into this meeting today,

it feels like the rift is very, very deep and very wide.

They said they had lost faith in the management of the Eurovision Song contest, that today's meeting should never have been necessary in the first place.

And they look at examples like Russia being kicked out of the contest after it invaded Ukraine and are asking why that hasn't happened in this case. Now, the EBU does have an answer to that.

It says that Russia's state broadcaster had contravened the terms and conditions of its membership.

It was more about following rules and policies than it was about the actions of the Russian government. They say that Israel's broadcaster Can has been compliant with all the rules.

And also, there's a sense in which many countries want to protect press freedom in Israel because CAN is an organisation that has sometimes been at loggerheads with the Netanyahu administration.

And there was a fear that if they were kicked out of the contest, then that would mean there would be a cut in funding, tighter controls over its output. Mark Savage.

Let's turn to the latest from Gaza, where a prominent Palestinian militia leader who opposed Hamas has been killed.

Yasser Abu Shabab was a Bedouin tribal chief who led a group operating in Israeli-controlled territory near the southern city of Rafah. Hamas had accused him of collaborating with Israel.

He'd been one of several men jostling for power as the region prepares for the second phase of the U.S. ceasefire plan.

His militia, the popular forces, said he was shot while trying to resolve a family dispute.

But Venisha Mingus, a journalist with the Times of London, who recently interviewed Yasser Abu Shabaab, says there are reports that he may have been assassinated.

Yasser Abu Shabaab was a 35-year-old smuggler from Rafah in southern Gaza, who at the start of the war in Gaza was in a Hamas prison on drug trafficking charges.

So quite an unlikely figure to end up leading a militia. However, in May last year, he emerged as leader of what he called the popular forces.

He declared the group to be an anti-Hamas militia working towards a terrorism-free future for the Strip.

But it is worth noting he never really had the support of Gazan's civilians, even though many are anti-Hamas, as he's seen as a collaborator with Israel.

Now, when I interviewed him, he denied this, although it is clear he's been working with Israel as he has been operating under their areas of control.

And he said that he was funded and supported by powerful members of the Tarabin tribe, who are a Bedouin tribe which stretch from Egypt to the UAE.

And he said they provided the weapons and the money to keep their group going. So a lot is left to be verified regarding the circumstances of his death.

However, I spoke with Israeli sources today who have coordinated with him and they said it is indeed true he has been killed.

I believe the most likely theory is that his group was infiltrated by Hamas who then used their access to attack the group and capture members of his group.

We know that his death occurred in the area under his control in Rafah which is beyond the yellow line so it's in an area controlled by the Israelis.

So that makes this quite significant as he was Hamas's number one target and was assassinated within the Israeli area of control.

And this definitely undermines their image of dominance and leaves the other anti-Hamas militias within their area fearing that the Israelis cannot protect them. Venetia Mingus.

To elsewhere in the Gaza Strip, now Gaza City in the north, where Palestinians have begun initial work, despite a lack of construction materials, on restoring two cultural heritage sites destroyed by Israel during the war.

The hope is that ultimately they can rebuild the Great Omari Mosque, the oldest oldest mosque in the territory, and the historic Pasha's Palace.

International journalists are not allowed to report freely inside Gaza, so Yulan Nell is following their progress from Jerusalem.

With pickaxes and wheelbarrows, dozens of Palestinian workers are clearing rubble from the ruins of the medieval Great Omari Mosque in Gaza City.

Its distinctive octagonal minaret is now just a broken stump. The Israeli military says it bombed what it called a tunnel shaft and terror tunnel during the war against Hamas.

Since the Gaza ceasefire, work's begun to clear and sort the stones.

But Israel isn't yet allowing building materials to enter Gaza, and that limits what can be done, says Hosni Amasloum, an engineer from Rawak, a local cultural heritage organization.

The challenges we face are, first of all, scarcity of resources, iron, and construction materials.

Then we're using primitive tools and being very careful because the stones here are 12 or 1300 years old.

Nearby in the old city, another Palestinian team is taking away buckets of rubble from what's left of the Pasha's palace, exposing the mosaic floor. Gaza's history stretches back some 5,000 years.

The palace was originally an historic fort, where it said Napoleon stayed in 1799.

The Israeli military told me it had no information about why it targeted this site in the war. Dr.
Hamouda Adakta, who's in charge of the clean-up, says Palestinians care deeply about their heritage.

We are dealing with a building that expresses the identity and memory of the Palestinian people. We are determined to preserve what's left of this important landmark.

UNESCO has verified damage to 145 religious, historic, and cultural sites since the start of the war, including Roman cemeteries, the ruins of early churches, and an ancient Greek port.

It will be a long time before any meaningful restoration can take place. But the start of work marks a step forwards.

Yoland now.

To the US now, where the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing sustained political pressure. Much of it centers around his involvement in a September attack on what the U.S.

says was a drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean. After the initial hit on the boat, two survivors, left clinging to wreckage, were killed in a follow-on strike.
The White House has already said Mr.

Hagseth authorized the attacks, but did not give the order to kill. To clarify exactly what happened, the man in command of the operation, Admiral Frank Bradley, has shown a select group of U.S.

lawmakers an unedited video of the incident. Admiral Bradley has also backed up the Trump administration's account, saying that he was the one who ordered the second strike on the boat.

After the briefing, a visibly upset Democrat congressman, Jim Himes, told the media that he was horrified by what he'd seen.

What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I've seen in my time in public service.

You have two individuals in clear distress, without any means of locomotion with a destroyed vessel

who were killed by the United States.

But the Republican senator Tom Cotton, who also watched the footage, said he'd seen nothing illegal and called them righteous strikes.

He also gave perhaps the most detailed description yet of what appears to have happened.

I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs, bound for the United States, back over so they could stay in the fight, and potentially, given all the context we heard, of other narco-terrorist boats in the area coming to their aid to recover their cargo and recover those narco-terrorists.

So what exactly did lawmakers see and hear in this briefing? Our North America correspondent is Peter Bose.

This was a closed-door meeting for members of Congress from both the House of Representatives and the Senate, high-ranking members from the relevant committees, so the Arms Services Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, they were shown classified unedited video footage of the strikes, which happened on September the 2nd.

This is the strike that involved the two survivors attempting to climb back onto the boat.

And the briefing included a review of the boat's condition, the presence of drugs, the threat assessment that is said to have justified this continued military action.

And the members were able to ask questions about the timeline, the legality, and the operational decisions that were made during this incident.

So, are we closer to clearing up the confusion about what happened with this strike in September and who ordered it? Well, that appears to have been the main purpose of the briefing.

The lawmakers heard from Admiral Frank Bradley, who explained his reasoning for ordering the second strike.

And he said that he acted within his authority, that he made the decision, not the Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth. We know from an interview that Mr.

Hegseth gave a couple of days ago that he claims to have watched the first strike live, presumably by remote video, but he said he didn't see the survivors and was informed afterwards that the Admiral chose to sink the boat and eliminate the threat.

Can you tell us more about what Admiral Bradley said? Did he give any reason for the second strike?

Admiral Bradley and the White House, indeed, say the strikes were lawful because the survivors were still considered a legitimate target. So that gets to the crux of his reasoning.

But some lawmakers, particularly Democrats, who are very concerned about the rules of engagement as they've been explained to them during this briefing. Aaron Powell,

Peter, what's the bigger picture then when it comes to future US strikes? Not long ago, we heard about another US attack on a boat. What are the details on that? And what does it tell us?

Aaron Powell, Prince. Well, yes, the U.S.
military has conducted, they say, another of these deadly strikes on an alleged drug-smuggling boat, killing four.

We don't have many more details on that just yet. But, of course, the September 2nd incident was the first of a long series of these kinds of strikes that have killed more than 80 people so far.

So, there are no signs that this is going to end.

However, interestingly, a couple of days ago, during a cabinet meeting, President Trump said that there were now very few boats traveling on the water, including fishing boats and other vessels, which is a claim where he is suggesting that there is evidence that these strikes have drastically reduced this maritime activity and have therefore justified the action.

Peter Bose.

Still to come in this podcast, The Mysteries of a Medieval Pandemic. They have this coincidence that the only region they import their grain from happens to be infected already by plague.

Why a volcano may be to blame for the spread of Black Death.

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A peace deal's been signed between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The ceremony in Washington was presided over by the U.S.

President Donald Trump, whose administration helped broker the agreement.

The compact we're signing today, which will be known as the Washington Accords, everybody sort of like that name, formalizes the terms agreed to in June, including a permanent ceasefire, the disarmament of non-state forces, provisions for refugees to return to their homes, and justice and accountability for those who have committed illegal atrocities.

This could mark a turning point for the two African countries, which have been at odds for decades.

Tensions spiked earlier this year when the armed rebel group, the M23, believed to be backed by Rwanda, seized Goma, a city in the DRC.

But at the signing, Rwandan President Paul Kagame and DRC President Felix Chisakedi sounded cautiously hopeful the fighting would stop.

It's up to us in Africa, working with our partners to consolidate and expand this peace.

There will be ups and downs

on the road ahead.

There is no doubt about it.

Rwanda,

I know,

will not be found wanting.

I want to believe that this day marks the beginning of a new path, a demanding path, certainly difficult, but a path where peace is no longer just a wish, but a goal.

The Democratic Republic of Congo will fully play its part with dignity, with awareness and consistency, and with the support of its partners.

We remain vigilant, but not pessimistic, clear-eyed, but resolutely optimistic.

The deal negotiated by the Trump administration includes economic incentives for both Rwanda and the DRC, and plans for U.S. companies to mine some of the DRC's valuable minerals.

But will it secure a lasting peace? A question for our Africa correspondent, Shingon Yoka.

Many people who have been following this conflict for over the last 30 years agree that it is an important step. The United Nations, for example, has said that it's an opportunity to turn the page.

Many would say that the escalation that had happened at the start of the year when the rebel forces, the M23,

had taken over vast swathes of the eastern part of the country and they were threatening to move on Kinshasa in

really statements that would have destabilized the country as a whole, that when the U.S. stepped in to offer this mediation role, that that halted the progression of the M23.

But what we've seen over the last week or so is that just days before this peace agreement is signed between the two leaders, that

there have been trading insults on both sides in the sense that the Congolese army has accused the M23 of taking over certain villages and the M23 has accused the Congolese government of bombing, of carrying out air raids and trying to sabotage this peace deal.

Over the last 30 years or so of this conflict, there have been many, many attempts at mediation, at dialogue.

There's been military intervention by the African countries, the regional countries that surround both countries as well as the African Union. And all of those deals have fallen apart.

I think there is optimism in the sense that many are hoping that President Trump might be able to exert pressure by threatening sanctions on the leaders if they do fail to adhere to these commitments.

But I think it's also important to note that this peace deal is being signed by the Congolese government as well as the Rwandan government, whereas the M23 is neither of those, even though it's backed by Rwanda.

So, you know, the main fighting force in the eastern part of the country is not party to this peace deal.

There's a separate parallel process that's being mediated by the Qatari government, but it's a very kind of haphazard approach to peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Shingai Nyoka.

Here in the UK, a public inquiry has found the Russian leader Vladimir Putin bears moral responsibility for the poisoning death of a British woman near the city of Salisbury in 2018.

Don Sturgis died from exposure to the chemical Novochok, which had been used by Russian agents targeting the former spy, Sergei Skripal.

He and his daughter Yulia fell seriously ill, but survived the attack.

The UK's Prime Minister, Serkier Starmer, said the report was a grave reminder of the Kremlin's reckless aggression and disregard for innocent lives.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has rejected the findings, calling them tasteless fairy tales. The BBC's Tom Simons told Janat Jalil more about the case.

Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal had picked up the Novichok which had been smeared on the door handle of their house in Salisbury.

They had been taken ill in the town centre, and quickly, within a few days, it became clear it wasn't the use of a nerve agent.

And then, fast forward, some months later, and I think the months are quite interesting because what happens is the three GRU officers have a fake bottle of perfume that they've carried this Novichok around in.

They have dumped it somewhere in Salisbury, and it's been picked up by Charlie Rowley, who's the partner of Dawn Sturgis.

He appears to have kept it for some months and then given it to her as a present. And she rubbed it on herself and

on her wrist and then probably smelt it as well and was taken ill and

very, very quickly was unsavable despite the care that she was given by. And it was praised in this report.

So you have this awful incident where a normal 44-year-old English woman is caught up in a global espionage plot. And that is quite an astounding thing to even say out loud.

And it later emerged that the Novichok in this perfume bottle could have potentially killed thousands of people. So tell us what this report has found today.
What is it saying today?

It has said that, contrary to what has been claimed in some places, that this is some kind of fake attack, perhaps carried out by the British to make Russia look bad, no evidence of that.

That it was carried out by these three GRU intelligence officers, as the Metropolitan Police found. That they would not have done this without it being signed off by superior officers.

That they did it fairly recklessly, almost without trying to not be caught.

I mean, they didn't hide their faces on CCTV or anything like that, and therefore it was clear this was an attempt to shock everybody about what Russia could do, and that none of that would have happened without the knowledge of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.

And so the blame, the moral blame for this, is laid firmly at his feet by the inquiry chairman.

And the big question for a lot of people will be: what lessons can be learnt to prevent another such attack? Because it isn't the first time that there's been a nerve agent poisoning in Britain.

Well, so I think it's fair to say, given that we'd had the Livonyenko poisoning, the Russian journalist poisoned with radioactive material some years before in the UK, that this was sort of on the radar of the intelligence services.

But Sergei Skripel felt that he was safe. And I think that appears to have had quite a big play in this.

He felt that he'd been pardoned effectively by the Russians because they'd allowed him to leave the country as part of a spy swap.

What perhaps hadn't been taken seriously enough was that he was working with British intelligence, briefing them on what he knew about the Russians.

And the Russians had said, as a famous quote from Vladimir Putin, where he says that traitors will choke on the pieces of silver that they've swallowed, that there was an anger there.

And despite the fact that Sergei Skripol did not want to be put in a safe house, to be given a fake name, all that sort of thing, Perhaps there wasn't enough done to make sure that he was safe and that this couldn't happen.

Tom Simons.

How does a local outbreak of disease morph into a global pandemic? It's a difficult and sometimes controversial question to answer, as we learned from COVID-19.

But researchers hope that understanding illnesses of the past can help us with the outbreaks of the future.

And new evidence suggests that one of the deadliest pandemics in world history, the Black Death, spread spread in part because of a volcanic eruption. Our science correspondent Helen Briggs reports.

The Black Death is regarded as one of the largest human disasters in history, killing more than half the population in parts of Europe in the mid-14th century.

Scholars have pored over the question of how the bacterial disease, spread by rats and their fleas, was carried from its heartland in Central Asia to Europe.

Now climatic clues preserved in Tree Ring suggest a volcanic eruption might have been part of the picture.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge say volcanic activity caused a shock downturn in temperatures which triggered crop failure.

To avert famine, Italian city-states were forced to import grain from north of the Black Sea, and with that came plague carrying fleas.

Dr Martin Bork from Germany's Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe helped piece together the clues.

We have the volcano, which we don't know where it is, somewhere in the tropics, but it has a major climate impact. And then we have the famine building up and the reaction of that Italian city-states.

But they have this coincidence that the only region they import their grain from in this situation happens to be infected already by plague.

And that's how it spreads very fast and very efficiently into Italy and probably beyond. Maybe also explaining how the Black Death arrived to England.

The experts say this perfect storm of climate change, famine and trade offers a reminder of how, in a globalized and warmer world, diseases can emerge and spread. Helen Briggs.
Let's stay with health.

Imagine going to a hospital bathroom and realizing it doesn't have any sinks where you can wash your hands.

This is what it's like in parts of one UK hospital, and it's actually a strategy to fight bacteria.

In what's thought to be the first experiment of its kind here, a hospital in England has removed nearly all the sinks from its intensive care unit to minimize water-borne contamination.

It's now believed that hospital sinks, drains, and waste pipes can sometimes cling on to dangerous bacteria.

Hand washing, when it's not done to a high standard, may be causing infections rather than preventing them. Dr.

Manjula Mehta is a microbiologist who led this initiative at Wexhim Park Hospital in Slough. She spoke to my colleague Evan Davis.

What we are understanding increasingly from scientific evidence that's being gathered around the world is that antimicrobial resistance or bugs that are resistant to all known antibiotics, which we are now able to track, is that these bugs are being transmitted from hospital wastewater systems to patients and the threat is so great that there are estimates which suggest that there are about 200 people dying every hour globally because of these type of infections and a majority of those are due to what we call gram-negative bacteria that are residing in our hospital drains.

Right. So when I wash my hands at a sink, I might be getting the infection on my hands rather than washing it off.
Is that the problem?

What's happening is because of the way sinks have been designed and there's a numerous factors like what the velocity of water is you can imagine when you turn a tap on there's always going to be droplets of water that lands on your clothes for example or on the surfaces surrounding the sink so when this happens it's not just the water that's landing on those surfaces or on your hands it's also that the bacteria that are there on the sink surface itself or in the sink plug hole which can carry various types of really antibiotic resistant bacteria that we often encounter in hospitals.

I get the argument. I mean, it's splashing out of the sink onto you rather than washing off you, into the drains in the sink, and then you spread it on patients or among hospital staff.

But this should be a question as to whether this non-washing is a better strategy than washing. This should be a question that has an empirical answer.

We should just know very quickly, do we have evidence as to what's going on?

For many years now, the WHO standard for hand decontamination has been that alcohol hand sanitizers are the gold standard. And we've known this for quite some time.

And we know that hand hygiene itself, you know, when you think of hand washing, it's done effectively at best at about 30% of times.

You know, it takes at least 20 seconds to wash your hands effectively and then dry them properly. In a busy hospital environment, you can imagine how difficult this can be.

We have tried numerous different types of hand disinfectants that are hydrating to the skin and the staff themselves who have led this project have come out and said that this is much better on their skin than hand washing itself.

And we've tried, in fact, every other strategy to control this. And many hospitals around the world have, you know, to decontaminate things,

but nothing essentially has worked so far. Dr.
Manjula Meada speaking to Evan Davis.

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 produced by Peter Goffin. It was mixed by Zabihula Karouch.
The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Celia Hatton.
Until next time, goodbye.

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