Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service Studios in Central London. I'm Tim Franks. We're going to take you in the course of the programme to a groundbreaking project with children in Ukraine and inside one of the major people smuggling rings in France that year-long investigation will bring you in 30 minutes. But we're going to begin in one of, if not the most, dangerously inaccessible places in the world. It's the besiege city of Elfasha in western Darfur in Sudan. It's the last holdout in the region for government security forces. It's surrounded by their foes in the more than two-year-long civil war, the paramilitary rapid support forces.
And for the estimated 300,000 people there, it's, well, let's hear this assessment from the UN's World Food Program. Lenny Kinzli is the WFP spokesperson in Sudan. She spoke to us from Port Sudan. So the situation is absolutely catastrophic. One year since famine was first confirmed in Zamzam camp, which is just outside of Elfasha, we're seeing that the situation is getting worse by the day. While Elfasha is besieged and has been besieged for over a year, we haven't been able to get food supplies in. In the meantime, we're providing digital cash assistance, but prices are skyrocketing and that's just not enough. People are really on the brink of starvation and resorting to extreme measures to survive, eating animal feed, eating food waste.
It's extremely tragic, but as WFP, we have the food, we have the trucks. We just need to be able to get in there and for that we really need unfettered access. Mohammed is an aid worker currently in Elfasha for his safety we aren't using his full name. He shared this voice note from the besiege city yesterday, which we've voiced because of the poor quality of the audio. In Elfasha, it's an extremely dangerous situation. There is a severe famine imposed on the civilians within the city due to an unjust siege led by the rapid support forces for over one year and nine months. Civilians here are forced to eat ambas, the animal feed.
There is a complete lack of medicines and commercial goods in addition to intense artillery shellings and airborne attacks, targeting civilian neighbours and centres for internally safe food. And centres for internally displaced people and safe shelters which are made by governors to protect the internally displaced people. And civilians in public locations and in hospitals and in markets. That was the aid worker Mohammed speaking to us from Elfasha. That city in the whole of western Darfur may have plummed almost to unimaginable deaths, but the disaster extends across so much of Sudan.
The UN's children's agency UNICEF issued its own alarm call today saying that the manutrition was now rife throughout the country with many children reduced in its words to skin and bones. Alex Deval is executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University in the US and especially on Sudan. He's also written a book about famine and the use of forced starvation as an instrument of genocide and war. First, what's he been able to gather about? What's going on in Elfasha? It is very hard to describe and to imagine the first reliable reports of famine are 18 months ago. It was 13 months ago that the UN's integrated food security phase classification system confirmed that there were famine conditions in Elfasha and Zamzam.
People have been living or rather dying under these conditions for more than a year and not just like a food complete breakdown in all essential services and ongoing fighting. We have come to see pictures of what famine is like from Gaza. So just imagine those pictures many times over a period of more than 12 months and you're beginning to get an idea of what the people of Elfasha are suffering. I think I was reading that about 300,000 people are left inside Elfasha in this besiege city. Have you got any sense of just how they do survive? Some food is smuggled in. What I hear is that people are literally eating charcoal, they're eating animal food, they are eating scraps that they can find.
And because there are no journalists there because there is not any humanitarian presence that can actually really document what is going on. We fear that many, many people are dying from hunger on a daily basis. Given how long this has been going on and given that this city is the target of this paramilitary rapid support forces, have you any understanding of how the government security forces are holding out? Well they have been able to get the occasional resupply. And then the siege of course is always the men with guns who starve last. You have to starve the entire civilian population before they go hungry.
And the great fear of the people in Elfasha is that if the city falls, they will be massacred. RSF committed genocidal massacres in the city of El Junaena and West Darfur in the early days of the war and they fear that they will be the next one. So they are literally fighting for their lives. We're talking about one part of this vast country but from Unicef today a warning that the manutrition rates among children are soaring. Do you have a sense of how bad the situation is across the country? The numbers are really shattering. I mean of the 45 million people in Sudan more than half are displaced. More than 8 million are in what the UN considers emergency conditions are further, 1 million also in famine conditions. So all these people are suffering desperate hunger.
And one of the most terrible tragedies here is that this is completely out of the news and it has been grievously affected by the cuts in USRID so that the appeal that the UN launched, which is already a bare-bone scale back appeal, is only between 15 and 22% funded for this year. Even the minimum aid that the UN wanted to bring in, they are really scraping the barrel. I saw in a piece that you wrote a couple of months ago, Alex, that you said that Sudan is an African problem that needs an Arab solution. Can you explain to me what you meant by that? Yes, Sudan is Chilean and African country. But the key external forces that are backing the warring parties are in the Arab world.
Egypt, especially in Saudi Arabia, are backing the government of Sudan and the United Arab Emirates, though it denies it as clear evidence that it is backing the RSF. And the first step towards a peace deal is getting those three Arab countries to agree to some sort of settlement, either to push forward a peace process or to back off from arming the two sides. There was an attempt by the US government, by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to bring them together in Washington last week, that failed. And sadly, the fallout from that failure is that the patrons on either side are redoubling their efforts and the war is escalating. So the immediate prospects are very dire indeed.
And that was the executive director of the world, peace foundation at Tufts University in Sudan expert, Alex Taval. According to official figures out of Ukraine, more than 70,000 people are missing from the war with Russia. That's left thousands of children desperately waiting for news of their mother or father and unable to move on. Psychologists say these children are some of the most traumatized they've ever worked with. Now for the first time, a leading Ukrainian charity is put on a special summer camp for some of these kids, offering them therapy, fun activities and a safe space. The BBC's Will Vernon was given exclusive access to this pioneering project.
It's just after eight in the morning, and the kids at the camp are being woken up by Ukrainian pop songs and they're emerging from their rooms. Quite blurry eye, actually. This is the camp for the children of Ukraine's missing. 50 of them aged between 7 and 17 with one thing in common. They all have a parent missing in the war. They are leaving like in frozen state because they do not have this point of starting grieving. Vanwey Martyrusian is the chief psychologist of Gen Ukrainian, the charity running this two-week camp. They do not know how to move on. And that makes this type of drama maybe the most difficult to work with. Our mission is to make small steps in order for these children to have some childhood, even in wartime.
早上刚过八点,营地里的孩子们被乌克兰流行歌曲叫醒,正从房间里走出来,眼睛还昏昏沉沉的。这个营地是为乌克兰失踪者的孩子们设立的。有50个年龄在7到17岁之间的孩子,他们有一个共同点,那就是他们都有一个家长在战争中失踪了。他们就像处于冻结的状态,因为他们尚未开始哀悼的过程。Vanwey Martyrusian 是乌克兰 Gen 慈善机构的首席心理学家,该组织正在运营这个为期两周的营地。他们不知道如何前进,这使得这种心理创伤可能是最难处理的。我们的使命是在战争期间,帮助这些孩子哪怕迈出一小步,让他们能够有一些童年的感觉。
Dad was always very good to us. He had a sweet tooth like me and bought me sweets a lot. Nastya's dad disappeared around a year ago. He was serving in the Ukrainian army on the front line. As with all the children at the camp, we spoke to her with a psychologist present. Can you tell me when you last saw your dad? It was in the city of Paltava. We went there for two days because dad was training there. That was the last time I saw him. It was two weeks before he disappeared. I love him very much. And I know he loves me too. And he would do anything to make me happy. So I'm thankful for the good times that we experienced together. I'm glad of that more than I'm sad because I hope we can make new memories with him again.
Has the camp made you feel better? Yes. I think I've started feeling better. I've been having fun with friends and I've been really enjoying it. Gen. Ukrainian has held a number of summer camps for other groups of children. But this is the first camp specifically for those who don't know what happened to their missing parent. Oksana Llebi-Divva is the founder of the charity. Basically we give them their childhood back. Every single day they are waiting for the message from the parents. They spend a lot of time in social media but special channels, Russian channels. One group therapy session is held with the children sitting around a bonfire. They each light a candle to represent their missing loved ones. In the background the gentle slopes of Ukraine's Carpathian mountains smothered in brilliant green forests of spruce and fur.
The children are now sharing their memories of what the war started. It really is incredibly emotional. Kids talking about the first times they heard explosions and how their parents were panicking and they are having to pack up their things and leave. I really am a very powerful person to help these children. Dima is 15 and comes from the Harkiv region. When Russia launched its full scale invasion his dad signed up to fight. Dima last spoke to him in November 2023, the day before he disappeared. The last time he wrote to me was a message on WhatsApp. He sent me a video of the mall drinking tea in the forest and he said, we are having a tea break. Everything is fine. I will call you tomorrow.
That report from Wilvernan on some of the help that is being offered to some of the children suffering psychologically in Ukraine. This is New South. Coming up in the program as promised a BBC investigation has exposed the French and UK operations of a powerful and violent gang that is taking people or attempting to take people across the English Channel in small boats. The next step is for our undercover reporter to book a place by phone on a small boat.
Hello, I want to leave soon. Tomorrow is good. The price is 1,400 euros. I want to be in Britain. That report coming up in 15 minutes. Our main headline is we have been hearing this our two UN agencies have issued warnings about the hunger crisis in Sudan with the besiege city of Elfasha facing starvation and child malnutrition. Rife across the country. You with news are live from the BBC. I'm Tim Franks.
If you were listening yesterday, you might have heard our interview with the pediatrician and epidemiologist, Philip Landragon, with new research into the health effects of plastic production and pollution on the eve of an international gathering under the auspices of the UN to try to get the best of the world. The UN to try at the sixth time of asking to agree a global treaty on curbing or at least controlling our addiction to plastic. It would be the first such treaty and it could have enormous consequences for us all given how hugely dependent we are on what is for all its myriad downsides.
This extraordinarily useful pliable material and how production of it is forecast only to grow. Every seeing the effort to reach a consistent consensus between almost 200 countries is the United Nations Environment Program. Its director is Inga Anderson. She's been speaking to my new star colleague Sean Lay. Well, it's clear that there are a lot of areas where they are making progress and there are three areas where we still need to roll up our sleeves and get the negotiations clear.
And two of the areas are we have to take a life cycle approach. We have to promote sustainable production and consumption. So the question is just like it was with Paris, how will we measure this? What does it look like? That is what is in the negotiations on the other issue, which deals with chemical additives. Will there be lists? Will they fold it into product design? Will they deal with hazardous chemicals specifically? And if we name a chemical that is in a plastic, how will we deal it with it if it is in other areas in the economy outside the scope of this treaty negotiation?
The third area is finance. Right. You talk about the life cycle of plastics to have 60% of all the plastics that we use single use. I mean that isn't sustainable is it? Incredibly, only 9% is recycled, 17% incinerated, 46% ends up in landfills. A 712 billion dollar plastics industry today is set to at least double by 2050. I just wonder how you can de-incentivize that.
That indeed and so and in fact our numbers say that it will triple by 2060. So the problem continues to grow on a business as usual scenario. Of course we need to step up our game on waste management, but also on where we use it and how. And that is why we need global rules. There will always be a tug of war between producer and consumer and purchaser and so on and so forth. That's part of what negotiations are.
In Grand Ascent Director of the UN Environment Programme, it's been to Sean Lay. Alongside Miss Anderson and Geneva as ever at these huge and highly charged negotiations are a great number of officials from governments, industry lobbyists, pressure groups and scientists. Among those scientists is a veteran of these talks, Bettany Karnie Almroot, professor of eco-toxicology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. What's she hoping for at the end of this?
So ideally we will have a treaty that is effective in achieving the goal that was set out in resolution 514 in 2022, which was to end plastic pollution. And we're understanding plastic pollution very broadly. The resolution itself calls for taking a full life cycle approach, which would, according to science, begin with extraction and production of the feedstock of the raw materials that are used to produce virgin plastics all the way through to use.
And waste and then contamination of the global environment. What are the reasons, I mean you said that you want a robust treaty? Are there any reasons why you think people should be more hopeful this time round? To be effective, the treaty would have to take into consideration a lot of different aspects of plastics. And for a non-expert or a person who hasn't been following these negotiations, plastic seems like an easy thing.
It's bottles, it's bags. But plastics are very complex, both as materials, but also within our societies and we do use them in literally every part of our lives. So this is not an easy problem to solve. As scientists, we're trying to identify all of these things, the drivers of pollution, the sources feed and effects of plastics and potential solutions and all of our work from within my coalition, but also the broader scientific community indicates that measures that are upstream that are early in the plastic life cycle are necessary and the most effective measures that can help us to achieve the goals of the treaty to end-class explosion.
And that would include such measures as addressing production and addressing chemicals and plastics. And these are also two of the most contentious issues in these negotiations. That sounds as if there is a sort of pretty profound philosophical rupture between people like you and those producers, those industry representatives and suppliers.
And the positives and states that are involved in petroleum extraction that make other raw materials for plastics who believe actually it's downstream rather than upstream. In other words, it's to do with better recycling of plastics. How are you going to bridge those two very different approaches? So, the first and second part of the question is, whether or not we can just improve waste management.
So, there are lots and lots of lobbyists there, people with those vested interests you talked about. How much does that ultimately matter given that it will be an agreement that has to be hammered out between nation states? You know, these companies and organizations and industry groups, they don't have a vote in the room today. They don't have a vote in the room, but they are influential.
And we know that these kinds of actors will apply a playbook that we sometimes refer to as the Beak Tobacco Playbook or the Big Oil Playbook, where they use tactics and measures to create doubt or to undermine science or the credibility of individual scientific studies or individual scientists, so that decision makers are not faced with clear, informative data or evidence to inform their decisions. But are rather faced with confusion and doubt.
Supervising this whole treaty negotiation process is the UN Environment Program, UNEP. We've just heard from the director. What sort of job do you think they are doing? I know that the United Nations Environment Program Director is very ambitious, and the resolution that was signed to begin with to negotiate this treaty was very ambitious.
There has been some critique against UNEP with regards to access that industry has been given to these processes. So tell me, are you talked about the sort of these, the presence of these groups? Tell me how you have, if at all, if you have felt this personally. I have, and we've known for decades that industry will use tactics to try to undermine the credibility of individual scientists or to harass and intimidate them, maybe into silence.
And it's been shouting and yelling. I've been photographed. I've been recorded. I've been videotaped. They tried to look at my computer screen and my telephone screen to see who I'm talking to or chatting with or what I'm taking notes on. I've had letters written about me to editors. I've had news letters for business industry associations written about me and my work.
And I know that other scientists have experienced similar or even worse situations. People have been brought before courts because of their research. People have lost their jobs because of industry influence over their employers. I interpret their actions against me as an indication of the fact that I'm saying something that is having impact. And I know that the science that we're talking about here is useful to the negotiators. And that was Betany Karni, our professor of eco toxicology at University of Gothenburg. She was speaking to me from that UN plastics treating negotiations that have just got going in Geneva.
This is news. Welcome back to news app. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and mobile networks are familiar names of wireless communication but there's a fourth contender transforming everything from city water systems to African wildlife conservation. LPWAN or low power, wide area network technology is used when you need to send small amounts of data over long distances using very little power. It's already being used in rural areas to great effect. Now let's do leaf head has this report from Portugal. Up in the mountains of the northern Algarve, close to the Spanish border, the sniffer dogs are being tested.
They've been trained to track links, a species which was facing extinction on the Iberian Peninsula until a captive breeding program began. Pedro Samento is its technical director. And since the last 20 years the population increase from something like one hundred to almost something like three thousand. The dogs track links from their feces but real time tracking has always been important through satellite, radio and mobile phone signals. And now we are using the Laura WAN system which is the most important thing to track links. It's much more chip than using 4G. It can last a long time, several years.
We can track links in very long distances. It's like Wi-Fi over many kilometers but only with small amounts of data, enough for location or a meter reading or to switch something on or off. Low power means long battery life and there's another advantage. We've come up on the hill and this is a very big road that cuts right through the territory of links in this area. And Pedro this has been a place where you've seen a number of the links being killed. Yes at least five links is were killed in this road and two of them are females with cubs.
The links is half-colors. When the links enters a buffer of two hundred meters from the road they send a sign that can also be transmitted to the electronic panels in the road. Telling the drivers drives slowly because there's probably an animal near the road. These smaller, cheaper trackers are also helping animal conservation across Africa but it's just one use of the technology. Rubbish collection is also being streamlined by the technology. We're standing in front of three recycling bins here.
All of these have sensors in them to show when they're full. Yes exactly. They measure the volume inside of the bins and the central side connects or synchronize with the trucks that recollect all these waste. So they optimize the route. Hugo Tome is from Logicalis which provides the technology. Every time that we need to go to make waste recollection to detect a water leak, to measure the water consumption. This consumes time, energy, fuel.
所有这些都配有传感器,以显示何时装满。是的,正是如此。它们可以测量垃圾桶内部的容量,并与负责收集垃圾的卡车连接或同步,从而优化收集路线。Hugo Tome 来自提供这项技术的Logicalis公司。每次我们需要进行垃圾回收、检测漏水、测量用水量时,都会消耗时间、能源和燃料。
So if we have a way to recollect all these metrics, all these telemetry to a central point, of course that we can provide better service for the community, better service for the municipality itself and better service for the environment. Hugo Tomeyesh ending that report by Alistair Leithead and you can hear more of what Alistair discovered on Business Daily, where if you get your BBC podcasts. You're with NewsHour.
It's live from the BBC World Service in London. I'm Tim Franks. Controlling unauthorized immigration is a huge issue for many countries, a political priority for governments. In Britain, the governing Labour Party came to power, promising to exert a firm grip and yet figures just out show that more than 25,000 migrants have this year arrived in the United Kingdom via small boats crossing the Channel from France.
And that is a record number, up or miss a half, on the same point last year. Today, a new pilot scheme agreed by the British and French government, same to reducing that number, came into force, the idea being that some of those arriving in the UK on small boats will be detained and sent back to France in return for an equal number of migrants seeking asylum in a more official manner. But a BBC investigation has laid bare just how difficult it will be as the British government has loudly promised to smash the gangs.
The investigation has been led by our France correspondent Andrew Harding who came into the NewsHour studio to tell me about it. We have been digging into one specific gang to try and understand its operations. It's financing the ways it's evolved and managed to evade the French police. And the British police, as it turned out, because our investigation, as you'll hear in a minute, took us all the way to Birmingham in the UK where some of the payments were made. Now the French police say in their defence, they're actually stopping about 70% of all these boats, these inflatable boats, before they get onto the beaches or in the water. But these gangs, as we'll hear now, are very good at adapting.
At Birmingham's New Street station, the culmination of a year long investigation. Excuse me, sir, we're from BBC News. We know you are linked to a people smuggling gang that's responsible for at least a dozen deaths. It was in April last year that we first encountered one particular smuggling gang. They were battling French police on a beach near Calais. Five people died in the chaos that followed, including a seven-year-old girl. Since then, we've been tracking this gang across Europe. We know who you are. You're a smuggler.
Confronting one of the gang's leaders in Luxembourg, he quickly vanished. In France, we've now learned more about the gang's operations, as they've changed names and phone numbers. They're one of only a handful of gangs that control the actual small boat crossings themselves, carving up the coastal launch sites between them. From our contacts, we hear reports of the gang's violence on land and confirmation that it's linked to at least seven more deaths at sea, so 12 in all. The next step is for our undercover reporter to book a place by phone on a small boat. Hello, I want to leave soon. Tomorrow is good. The price is 1,400 euros. I want to be in Britain.
The smuggler's name is Abdullah. In charge of logistics in France, a key role. He agrees the money can be paid in Britain, specifically in Birmingham. He wants it to happen fast. So we set up a meeting in Birmingham with Abdullah's contact there. We arranged for another colleague to hand over the cash at New Street Station. A young bearded man arrives as we record secretly. I have the money with me, 900 pounds, right? So that's it. He's taking the money and left the station. Now, you may well be asking why we would pay money to criminals.
We believe it is the only way that we can gain access to the gang and expose its network, not at least its network here in the UK. At which point we need to return to France to our main undercover reporter, who is now ready to begin his journey with the gang. He heads to the forest where the smuggler Abdullah has his camp. There are often stabbing and gun fights here between rival gangs, but our smuggler seems relaxed. If the weather is good, we will leave on Tuesday. We need to move early to avoid the police. It's a cat-and-mouse game with them.
Two days later, it's time to set off for the coast. Abdullah is scorching a big crowd south. First by train then bus, then into the woods south of the Boulogne. Our undercover colleagues slips away at this moment and we take over following the group openly now. We are hiding now in the forest with a group of about 30 migrants. Everyone is just lying down here on the forest floor waiting until dark. Try not to make a noise. There are police around here hunting for this group. Although I'm not sure what they would do if when they found them, they're not going to stop them or arrest them, but they try to locate them so they can prevent a launch tomorrow.
The police finally find them, but don't intervene. Instead, we learn, early the following morning, that they found the smuggler's inflatable boat nearby and destroyed it. That's happening a lot now. Quietly, people collect their belongings and trudge away to wait for another chance to cross. Days later, we'll call Abdullah by phone and challenge him. He denies being a smuggler and hangs up. But before that, we return to Birmingham's New Street Station. We've told the gang we have more people wanting to pay for a small boat crossing. They send someone new to collect the cash.
He's bearded, young and quick to run and I walk up to him. Excuse me, sir. We're from BBC News. You're Kurdish. Yes, we know you're linked to a people smuggling gang that's responsible for at least a dozen deaths in the channel. He sprints outside and vanishes the way this gang always seems to do. A sign of the challenges facing the authorities on both sides of the channel as they try to smash the gangs. That report from Andrew Harding, who's still here in the news studio with me, Andrew was a very graphic account of, I mean, I guess obviously the peril that these migrants have put in when they're when they agree to be trafficked in this way, but also just how tough it is for the authorities to catch up with these people. It is difficult. The French police are making progress. The British authorities are not simply trying to smash the gangs. There are many other ways they're trying to persuade people not to come to make it more difficult and so on.
But the bottom line is that this year the numbers so far are beating all records before 25,000 already have crossed and that number increasing by hundreds a day, particularly when the weather of course is good. And that was the BBC's France correspondent Andrew Harding. And if you want to see more of Andrew's investigation, do head to our website, BBC.com forward slash news. Israel's Prime Minister Binny Minnetanyahu has met his chief of staff to discuss options for expanding the war in Gaza amid reports at Mr Netanyahu's keen to see the Israeli army seize and control the entire enclave speaking to troops today. This is what the Prime Minister had to say. It is still necessary to complete the defeat of the enemy in Gaza to release all our hostages and to ensure that Gaza will no longer pose a threat to Israel. We are not giving up on any of these tasks.
And yet there's also been wide reporting inside Israel that the head of the Israel Defense Forces has warned the Prime Minister that an attempt to occupy Gaza fully would be a grave mistake. Ansel Feffer is Israel correspondent for the Economist. These plans have been reported widely in the Israeli media. Are they likely to be formalized later this week? We've had days and days of briefings of plans that Prime Minister Netanyahu is said to be in support of a pushing. But there hasn't been, as you said, a formal announcement. And there hasn't been a formal cabinet meeting for three weeks, a security cabinet meeting for three weeks now, which is the forum, which would decide on such a move. And now that meeting has been postponed to Thursday.
I'm not saying that this means an assailant in the out is bluffing, but there does seem to be at least an element of posturing here. There could be a number of reasons for that. It could be because he's just trying to keep the far right path is in this coalition happy with the idea that that another offensive is in the offing. It could be in the hope of perhaps of pressuring Hamas to somewhat be more flexible with its conditions in the now almost block almost dead dead ended negotiations for a ceasefire. And it could be that he is just examining various plans and also trying to show the IDF generals who's the boss. And in terms of again the reporting and I'm sure you're sort of hearing these things through your sources that the IDF chief of staff is saying this, this route would be, would be madness.
What do you make of all that? Because I mean the IDF, the new IDF chief of staff is, I mean, he's, he's no, I mean, he's got a reputation being pretty hard line himself. Well, he's, you know, he's a tough graph speaking a tank officer like like many of his colleagues and the previous IDF chief of staff was also. One of these tough generals and these, these are not, you know, they're not lacking in any, in any of that, but they are also at the same time looking at what the Army is capable of doing. They know the generals know that after 22 months the IDF is exhausted. It's, it's soldiers, both it's regular soldiers and it's its a reservists have been at war now for 22 months, not just in Gaza, but also in other, on other fronts.
In Lebanon, Syria, there was the war very recently with Iran as well and they don't think that they currently have the capacity to take over the entire Gaza. But they don't think even if they, even if they did that would be a good idea, they understand that Hamas can always melt away into its tunnels beneath the civilians of Gaza. And they're also very concerned that such an offensive could jeopardize the lives of the remaining Israeli hostages who have now been in Gaza for 670 days.
In terms of the noises that are coming out of Washington, what, what, what do you make of either the interest or maybe the lack of pressure there? Well, it's very difficult to judge from anything you hear from Donald Trump or his team because there's so many contradictory quotes both of the record and also the stuff that Donald Trump has been saying whenever a camera is pointed at him and so on asks about Gaza because you'll hear both Trump's belief that there is a there is a famine and hunger in Gaza and that's very badly wants to end that.
But also you hear him very belligerent on Hamas and you don't hear him really criticizing it and the outside to judge anything and as we know Donald Trump is not known for his consistency. And that was an actual fetha, Israel correspondent for the economist, the listening to news app from the BBC. You with news app live from the BBC and it just over two hours the people of Hiroshima in Japan will mark the moment exactly 80 years ago when an American B-29 bomber called Inola Gay dropped an atomic bomb in the city.
It was an act that changed the course of history speeding the end of the Second World War and revealing our new capacity to destroy the planet. More than 200,000 people died from the effects of that bomb and a second dropped over Nagasaki three days later. Many of those who did survive have dedicated their lives to ridding the world of nuclear weapons, sparing future generations from the horrors they'd seen.
My colleague James Kmarasami has been speaking to one of those campaigning survivors, 93-year-old Setsuko Therlo who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 as a leading member of the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons. Setsuko Nakamura, as she was then, was a 13-year-old living in Hiroshima when the bomb was detonated. She began with her memories of that fateful day.
I saw the blue issue flashed outside the window and then the sensation of flying up and floating up in the air. I obviously lost consciousness at that point. When I began the consciousness I found myself in a total darkness and silence too. I couldn't move my body so I knew I was trapped there and I was to die there. But I remained so serene. And then you started to hear a few voices around you. They were praying for God, for help and calling mothers for the help.
And then all of a sudden some strong hands touched my shoulder, the strong voice, male voice and don't give up. Don't give up. Keep moving. Keep kicking. I'm trying to help you. You see the sun rays coming through that crack and once you're free you crawl toward it and that's what I did. You never found out who the man was who'd essentially pushed you to safety. No, but his voice is ringing in my ears even today.
There were quite a few girls up there in the rubble and they are the ones who were just burned to death alive. But my best friend who had the same name as my managed to survive and she came back to school and spoke to us about the last minutes before most of them just died. And she told us the girls couldn't see their faces are all messed up but they could hear each other.
And the masked teacher who would supervise in them said of the girls if you can come close to me, let's sing songs together. They said they wanted to sing him nearer to the my God. That's what they sang until they collapse and died. This story just breaks my heart. And it makes you reflect on your own fate, does it? The fact you were lucky, luckier than them at least.
Well, I hesitate to use the word lucky. I just managed to survive. And this kind of thing was happening all over the city, thousands of people just disappear in a second. That was the immediate horror. Then there was the longer term problems that weren't immediately visible, I guess. Some survivor said the life in the aftermath was so difficult, some wished they were dead.
Everybody became homeless, no food. And because we happened to be in the city, we were contaminated by some poison. So people feared to be close to us. We knew nothing about radiation effects on human body. But you obviously had direct experience with your family, your sister and her child who didn't live for much of her. We tried to nurse them, but what can we do?
There was no medication, no food. They were begging for water constantly. And both of them died. What happened, the soldier came, they threw the dead bodies into the hole, poured the gasoline through the lighted match. They kept turning the body at the so-called cremation. Hey, stomach is not burned yet. The brain need to be burned some more. And that kind of very crudely marked. There was no dignity. They were treated like animals. I couldn't even have tears. What kind of human being am I? My dear sister and her four-year child died.
How do people behave in the ultimate condition like that? Very night we sat on the top of the hill and watched all night the entire city burn. And if I responded to everything I was witnessing, I couldn't have survived. You survived and have flourished. And you've had another response to what you experienced, which is to become an advocate for the abolition of nuclear weapons. That's been your other response. Yes, I got the scholarship in the summer of 1954. I came to the United States. That's the very time the United States tested the strongest hydrogen bomb.
That's a lot more powerful, destructive than the atomic bomb. And they dropped it on the people of Marshall Island in the Pacific. The people there started suffering the same symptoms as we did. And you decided it was important to speak out about that. I told them the United States should stop developing more and killing people and destroying the environment. Now I just wanted to end with you, the 13-year-old you clearly you could never have imagined what direction your life would take.
Having experienced something like that, how can you pretend that we don't know the issue? And astronomical amount of money is being used for building up the arms. Well, Mr. Trump urged every member of the NATO raise the military spending up to 5% or something. And Japan is not the member of NATO, but it too is prepared to raise up. That's insanity in my view. You are an incredibly powerful advocate. I would imagine you will continue doing this as long as you can. Your last breath.
What a remarkable witness. It's Suca Ferlo and she was speaking to my colleague, James Camarassani. From all of us on News Air. Thanks very much for your company.