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Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. Coming to you live from London, I'm Nulah McGarvin.
大家好,欢迎来到BBC World Service的新闻时段。我是Nulah McGarvin,现场直播于伦敦。
Israel declared a complete siege of Gaza after Saturday's attack on Israel by the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Hamas is designated a terror organization by many Western governments including the UK. Israel cut off water, food and also power supplies. Today Gaza's only power station has just run out of fuel. So how are residents now preparing to live in the coming hours and also days as this conflict progresses?
Najla Shawa is a mother of two young girls living in Gaza. This is the fifth day, every day is just like a week of events. So now if we start with this moment, my family, me and my husband and two daughters and also with a woman like she's my aunt and I have 12 friends from another family. They stayed with us because they have no other place to go. Their area is very dangerous. It was hit heavily and they had damages in their homes.
We are cooking together. We are doing things together in our house. There's old glass and all open windows because they're broken. Why are they broken, Najla? We had a building across from our street that was bombed. So the night before last at one something AM, we were like just terrified with like screaming outside and somebody with a microphone saying we need to evacuate and that was about the building across the street. It's a six story building, it's a residential building. So anyway, we were all like just trying to pack our ready bag and just leave. So we immediately went to our cars and we started driving. We were trying to discuss where are we going. It was so hard because I was trying to wake up my kids and like they went out in the street like barefoot. Like I didn't have a second to get them like any kind of slippers or shoes or anything. And it was like total panic. I was terrifying, really terrifying.
We are hearing that the only power station in Gaza has run out of fuel. How are you coping with that? Yes. And Gaza has been without electricity since 15 years. So I mean this is not new to Austria. I mean it's just the severity of it is horrible. Of course we have been on it hour on, hour off electricity for many, many years as long as I remember. And so we have developed like mechanisms to adapt. We have solar panels and we have batteries. So far we are lucky that they're not hit. We are so worried that there would be damage. We managed to have electricity during the day but at night it's only lighting and so far internet and we hope that we don't lose it.
What would you do? I mean are you making plans for if in case those things stop working? Really at an hour it changes so rapidly. Things like here in the past few days. So we are now like we discussed today if we have to evacuate this area where we don't want to go. Do you think about Egypt at all? No, God forbid. I don't want to be a refugee. I don't want to leave Gaza. I will try my best not to go to Egypt. Now maybe I have kids and we have responsibilities and maybe if we are put in that level of situation of course we will do things that we don't believe in and that we don't like.
And your strong feeling about wanting to stay in Gaza as you know there's an expected ground offensive from Israel coming. Explain your feelings to our listener. I have to be honest I mean there are like horrible moments where I think like am I doing a mistake? Why am I putting my kids into this? But it's home. It's where we are. It's where we belong. I would want to travel but to come back I want to travel on a break but I want to make what I have to like to come back to my home. So you're afraid if you leave you will never be able to come back? Of course yes. It's another 48. It's a 1948 is what you're referring to.
You have children I can hear them in the background. Will Zainab speak to us maybe your daughter who's eight? Hi Zainab. Hi. Hi. How are you today? I'm fine. You're fine. I hear you have an important day in a few days. You have a birthday coming up. And you will be what age? Nine. Okay. And what are you going to do? I hope you will be a birthday party anyway. A birthday party so hopes Zainab abet turned nine. She's there with her mother, Najla Shawa. Thanks to both of them who are in Gaza for speaking to us.
And Najla mentioned that she felt like this was another 48. What she's referring to there is when Israel declared independence in 1948 which resulted in 750,000 Palestinians who had lived there fleeing or being expelled from their homes.
Well, today, day five, it's been a fast moving developments that have been taking place in the Gaza-Israel conflict. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the centrist opposition leader Benny Gantz, they have now agreed to form an emergency unity government which will be sworn in tomorrow.
The BBC's John Donneson joined me from Jerusalem to talk through that decision. Well, ever since Saturday, there has been talk of some sort of unity government. They're actually not calling it that for some reason. They're calling it an emergency government.
And I think it's important for a number of reasons. It means that with the opposition now sitting alongside Benjamin Netanyahu, it means that there is a sort of, they can get a broader consensus of public support for this ongoing operation. I think that means that the government will be able to make difficult decisions and feel that it has the backing of the whole of the country. So I think that's important.
It's also important because you will know that the current Israeli government up until tomorrow is probably the most right-wing and conservative in Israel's history. But it is also one of the most inexperienced and you certainly can't say that about Benny Gantz. He was a former army chief of staff. He was in charge of the army during the war in 2014 in Gaza. He's no moderate when it comes to taking action in Gaza. But he is certainly someone with military experience.
Interesting there though. Briefly, John, did it feel to the governments, do you think, that the people were not going to do the same page when it came to military action? Well look, you'll know that Israel has been an incredibly divided country over all sorts of issues in the last year or so, particularly the issue of judicial reform.
I think the Israeli opinion is united in the need to take action in Gaza, but there was also considerable anger that it was allowed to happen in the first place. Now, I think as I say, it will be a broader consensus of people behind the government.
And let me turn to what we know about the latest military operations. Well we do feel that we're getting closer to that much expected ground operation. We had a statement from the Israeli Defense Forces today saying that forces had been moved to the border with Gaza, including 300,000 reservists, and they were getting ready for their mission which had been given to them by the government. So we don't know when it's going to happen, but everyone is expecting it to happen.
John Donelson there and he talked about it, they've been ready with the mission, but we don't really know what that mission may be. We do know that senior Israeli officials say Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that carried out the attack on Israel at the weekend must be eradicated.
Shah Shank Josie is a defense editor at The Economist and has been thinking about potential scenarios for a ground offensive. He wrote about a potential shallow incursion or a deeper invasion and I asked him to explain what they would look like.
Shah Shank Josie是《经济学人》的国防编辑,一直在思考可能的地面攻势情景。他写了一篇关于浅度入侵或更深层次侵略的文章,于是我请他解释一下它们会是什么样子。
Well in 2014, the last major war in Gaza, we saw a pretty shallow incursion because the focus for the Israel Defense Forces, the IDF, was in rooting out, identifying and rooting out the tunnels used by Hamas. So they didn't go very far in and they tried to avoid entering major cities in Gaza and engaging in the very messy urban warfare that would result.
Compare that to 2009, Operation Cast led to the ground invasion component of that. When the IDF went far deeper in and they did engage in urban warfare, it was again a very costly operation, a very messy operation. A lot of Palestinian lost their lives and a reasonable number of Israeli soldiers lost their lives.
But I think what's important to note is both of those were actually fairly limited in relative terms. I think they were about two weeks each, not much longer than that. They certainly didn't engage in months of occupation and they did damage to Hamas but of course Hamas didn't get destroyed. It was able to bounce back in various ways.
What you're now seeing being discussed in Israel among leaders is something much more sweeping, something much more far reaching, maybe months long and ultimately aimed at destroying Hamas. It isn't clear to me that that can be done without reoccupying the Gaza Strip, which Israel left back in 2005. But whatever happens, I think it's going to be bigger than either of those past two operations.
So with that, on that point of destroying Hamas, do you think they might occupy again? It seems very unlikely to me if you mean a permanent reoccupation in the sense that Israel occupies large tracts of the West Bank or the way that it occupied Gaza before 2005 on a permanent basis. Not least because it would require a huge number of troops to stay there permanently. Let's not forget Israel's relatively small country.
It's armed forces depend on mobilized conscripts who are pulled out of their civilian jobs. As you said right now, your previous guest, 360,000 of them. And that's a huge number to pull out of the civilian economy. The country can't really sustain that. They would suffer steady losses, a drip drip drip of deaths, which would have a really profound effect on the Israeli political psyche. And on top of all of that, the Gaza Strip is not the only source of concern, as you've been discussing on your show. Northern Israel is very looking very restive with Hezbollah sending infiltrators across with fear of drone attacks, rockets coming from Syria, the West Bank itself is also looking fairly unstable.
So to my mind, an occupation just isn't a very serious possibility, although you can never say never, I suppose, given the circumstances. Your article does say that brutal urban warfare awaits the Israeli army in Gaza. But as I was reading that, we know that there's over 100 hostages in Gaza whereabouts unknown exactly. So how do you see that playing out? It's a very difficult situation because these hostages will be, not all of whom will be alive, I suspect, but they will be dispersed across Gaza. Many of them held underground in tunnels. Hamas, don't forget, has about 500 kilometers of tunnels inside Gaza. That's a huge number of underground spaces in which Israel's superiority in the air and its fantastic drones and surveillance systems cannot penetrate very easily. So can it really locate and reliably find all these people? I think that's extremely unlikely. They may try to use special forces to find groups of them, to rescue them, to attack them. But Hamas will, of course, be prepared for that possibility. So I think on balance, Israel's political leadership will be saying, although it's going to be a political catastrophe, if we lose hundreds of hostages, including many Americans, many foreigners, ultimately, we think we actually have to be able to root out Hamas because the alternative will be a deal.
Well, in the past few minutes, Benjamin Netanyahu has officially announced the formation of the emergency government. He appeared alongside Benny Gantz, formerly in opposition as we were hearing, now part of the new administration. And Mr Netanyahu said Israel was now on the attack and that every member of Hamas is a dead man.
You're listening to NewsHour from the BBC World Service.
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Coming up on NewsHour, an undercover investigation by the BBC has exposed a blackmail scam using instant loan apps to entrap and humiliate people across Asia, Africa and Latin America. In 2021, Humi Sinha from Mumbai borrowed money from instant loan apps. Within days, it had turned into a trap. One of my colleagues, he said, this is what I got on WhatsApp. This scam has had photoshopped Humi's face onto a porn image and sent it to every contact on her phone.
Our main newsroom headline this hour, diplomatic pressure is growing for a humanitarian corridor to get essential supplies into Gaza and civilians out. That's after five days of Israeli bombardment and siege. Israel's Prime Minister and the main opposition leader have set aside their differences to form an emergency government, as you've been hearing, to prosecute the war against Hamas. This is Nulam Agar from the BBC in London.
In a country as small as Israel, everyone knows someone who's been called up for reserve duty, as hundreds of thousands have, and a very high number knows someone who's lost a friend or a relative to the massacres carried out on Saturday by Hamas. But for some in Israel, it's all much closer, particularly in those communities nearer to the violence.
New Zaruss Tim Franks has been in Jerusalem this week. Today, he headed towards the city of Ashkelon in the south, just eight kilometers from Gaza. This is his report.
You get a sense of the absolutely massive numbers of people who have already been called up from reserve duty for the possibility, the probability of a ground invasion in Gaza by just – we've just stopped at the side of this very busy, very fast road because, unusually, on both sides of the carriage way, even on the central reservation, there are cars parked, dozens of them, one after the other, jam-packed in together.
And this is where reservists have hurriedly come in order to deploy, in order to stand by at bases. And although it's quite difficult to get the reservists themselves to talk to you, I can see that there's a man over there who's just brought some supplies for his daughter. So I'm just going to go and see if I can speak to him as he hands over a box of stuff to her with her rifle swung over his shoulder. She is here in the base already. We just bring her stuff now. Bring her some supplies. Supplies that she will need for the weeks to come or months to come.
And I'm going back to the north now to see what's happening in the border with this balla now. Yeah, because there are reports of things they're heating up in the north. But another fighter jet screaming overhead and they're coming past very, very regularly.
What do you feel about the fact that your daughter is likely to be part of a very big operation now? I mean, let's talk about a ground invasion of Gaza. What do you think of that? In one side, we are very worrying about what's going to happen. But we know there's no other way to deal with the animals on the other side. The jihad have to pay a terrible, terrible price. And it's this war will be a symbol to all jihads all over the world. If you attack us, you will pay for it. And it doesn't matter how much time it will take, we have to do it now.
I've been to Ashlong quite a few times. I've never seen it this quiet. Almost all the shops and cafes have shut quite a few. There are two just right here. The shop front has just been blown out. There's a slump of blue, white glass that's been hastily swept up. These are not normal times. There's a quiet. There's also a twitchiness, not just about rockets. Last night, two Palestinian gunmen were reported to be roaming the streets. That alert didn't subside until after midnight.
Busy Hallivir is the CEO of the Ashkelon municipality. He's swapped his high-tech background for a high-vis jacket. We're standing under an apartment building, which is, I mean, the sea pretty significant damage on the, what is it, the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth floor. Were the people inside okay? Yes, yes. Actually, the people were inside were on the shelter while it happened. That's a question of flak because we have a lot of people that actually were heated and have a lot of severe damages. Few of them were killed and of course there are a lot of wounded people. So, in this time it was a lot of question of flak. We are speaking about a lot of missiles in just three or four days, close to 1,000 missiles. We're heated to just to Ashkelon. Together with what happened and the way Hamas actually attacked us, it's totally different. So there is the fear, the stress, because we might see terrorists in our streets, so it's a totally different story.
Up in that apartment building that Ezi Alavia was talking about, well, on the sixth floor, the apartment which took the direct hit, there's little left, just a mess of rubble and glass and metal. Two floors down, that's where the Elie family, Mother Rima, father, Izzik, daughter, shall live, live. They've been hoping to move. Next week they brought a new place with a shelter, a little way away, packed up their place. But now the sale is off, the buyers have pulled out. They don't want to buy an apartment with its windows blown out.
The Elie family are, well, they're beside themselves, really. It feels like we lost the ground under our frets. It feels like we don't have any feel of security. We don't know what will happen next. Everything here is ruined, and also the mental damage that we received that we got is bleeding our hearts.
Do you know the people who lived in the apartment that took the direct hit? We know the people who lived after for many, many years. We live here for many years, but we were supposed to move, as you see, but now because of the damage, the contract that will let us to live here, it's canceled because it's too damaged. Everything stops. Okay. So that's extra stress for you. And you can't now move. And then we'll move. And then we'll move. And then we'll move. And then we'll move. And then we'll move. And then we'll move. And then we'll move. We don't have a shelter in our house because it's an old building. So this is the reason we want to move, but now we cannot.
We were just heading out on the road to Jerusalem and a lot sounded. So we've taken cover. We're lying prone on the ground and the very loud bangs you can hear. It's actually outgoing. It's the Iron Dome anti-missile system that's firing. So so far it seems. Well, there has been incoming. Otherwise they wouldn't be firing. They don't waste their missile system, but there's no sound of anything that is landed nearby.
Well, after several aborted starts because Air Raid Sirens kept on sounding and we kept on having to take cover, we did make it back to Jerusalem. And that's where I'm speaking to you from. Jerusalem Bureau and it turned out actually that I'd got it wrong that some rockets in Gaza had evaded Israel's missile defense smashed into an apartment and a medical center in Ashkelon. Some people were injured. It's a weird routine in that town, but I guess that's the point. People there, people across Israel are saying this just has to stop. Israel is Tim Franks in Jerusalem.
And before that, the southern city of Ashkelon will continue our coverage right here on NewsHour. Also, we have updates on our live page and on the BBC News app. Stay with us if you can.
This is the story of one of fashion's dark secrets. This was me being carefully manipulated. Being lied to, tricked and traded like a commodity. Investigating allegations that would take me into a world of money, sex and power. This is World of Secrets. The Avocronby Guys Search for World of Secrets, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
Welcome back to NewsHour. In a few minutes, we'll discuss how the Arab states in the region are responding to Hamas's attack in Israel and Israeli military actions in Gaza. But first, we're going to spend some time hearing about what's happening in Afghanistan. There was another powerful earthquake last night following one that killed more than a thousand people at the weekend. Its resident from Badgeese and neighboring province to Harat described what happened to him.
We felt the last earthquake three times. But today, this new earthquake was even more severe. No one was hurt because everyone was sleeping outside at night, out of fear. In our region, the mountains have slipped and the roads have been blocked. And because of this, the people have been harmed. No helpers arrived here. We've been forgotten.
How would a zombie of the BBC's Afghan service has been giving more details to my colleague, James Menendez? The latest earthquake happened early in the morning, local time, at around 5am, when most of the people were sleeping. But luckily, there aren't many casualties this time. People were scared. They usually don't sleep in their bedrooms. They sleep outside, intense mostly because there were so many aftershocks after the first major earthquake. Almost every day, there are aftershocks. But today's earthquake or aftershock was stronger than the previous days. More houses were damaged or destroyed in this latest earthquake, but luckily the casualties are not that many. The people who live in that part of Afghanistan are very poor. They mostly rely on farming and livestock. So in addition to property damage and casualties, much of their livestock was also killed.
It seems that it was the same magnitude as the one on Saturday 6.3 and almost exactly the same place just outside Herat. Does anyone know how many people have lost their homes in this series of earthquakes and aftershocks? Because of houses were destroyed and the problem is that most of the houses in rural areas of Afghanistan are made of mud bricks. When there is an earthquake, so they just collapse. The entire villages were completely perished. It doesn't give people a lot of time to escape. So those people who are inside their homes, they were mostly women and children because men usually go outside for farming or work.
It took a while for the authorities and aid agencies to find survivors and provide medical care. So that was another reason that the death toll went up and the reports we are getting say that well according to the Taliban government officials, 2,500 people died. Around 4,000 are injured. But the union agencies have been telling us that 1,300 people died and around 500 people are missing presumably dead and they are still looking for survivors because their still body is buried under the rubble.
Thanks very much to Dawood Azami from the BBC's Afghan Service speaking to my colleague James Menendez. Here listening to news are from the BBC. I'm Nula McGarvren. Let us return to our top story. There are concerns about the situation in the north of Israel, which borders Lebanon. Israel says it has reinforced that area after trading fire with the powerful armed Lebanese group Hezbollah, who like Hamas are an ally of Iran. BBC's Anna Foster is in the north of Israel and I asked her what's been happening at the Lebanon-Israel border.
非常感谢BBC阿富汗服务的Dawood Azami与我的同事James Menendez的对话。这里收听的是BBC的新闻播报。我是Nula McGarvren。让我们回到我们的头条新闻。人们对以色列北部与黎巴嫩接壤地区的局势表示担忧。以色列表示在与黎巴嫩强大武装组织真主党交火后已加强了该地区的军事部署,真主党和哈马斯一样是伊朗的盟友。BBC的 Anna Foster 在以色列北部,我问她黎巴嫩和以色列边境发生了什么。
Well over the last few days there have been a series of, I say small escalations and I mean small in comparison to what has been happening in the south of Israel. But yesterday there was an incident where Hezbollah militants actually managed to get across the border. A small group of men, they came over and they fired weapons and I was in a village today actually very close to that.
One of the locals was showing me a video that he'd filmed on his mobile phone. You could hear the sound of gunfire echoing just around the border. And now in that particular confrontation there were several members of the Israel Defense Forces, the army who were killed, including one of them who was very senior. He was a deputy battalion commander up here in the north of Israel.
And then again this morning there was an anti-tank missile that came from Lebanon into Israel and Israeli fighter jet which then responded over the border. And even just in the last few hours, well I've been here, we were driving along. There was a sudden sounding of sirens so we took cover in a shelter with a sort of local group of, they have almost their own armed protectors because they do fear Hezbollah infiltrations and have done long before the events of the last few days. So each village, each small community tends to have its own armed group that sort of bans together to protect people in that situation.
There had been rumours that there was some sort of new aerial infiltration from Lebanon, a lot of panic, a lot of rumour. The Israel Defense Forces, they checked the area out, they've been putting flares up in the sky. They confirmed that it was a false alarm that nobody had actually managed to breach the border but it shows you the real nervousness, the real anxiety particularly about events on this northern border and how that could really change the face of this conflict if things were to step up here.
And that is my next question and in our last minute, just how important is it to curtail a spread off that violence to the north? Well I think if you look even beyond the borders here, if you look at the US for example and how hard they are trying to prevent any kind of escalation because this would really be the start of something that would move across the Middle East and would have international implications as well. So I think if you look at the messages that are coming from the international community, they really don't want to see a large-scale conflict with Lebanon becoming involved. I'm not sure Hezbollah really wants that either but the question is how much does it need to be seen to be standing with its allies in Hamas but it is, Nila, it's a dangerous moment and I think the anxiety, the nervousness will continue to be felt because there is so much uncertainty going on really from north to south of this country at the moment.
Well let's pick up on some of the issues raised by Anna Foster there including the fears of a spillover of the conflict to the wider region. Among the many meetings that were taking place today, the Foreign Ministers of the Arab League met and they released a statement that said that they affirm on the importance of resuming the peace process but who has influenced when it comes to speaking to Hamas or indeed Israel?
Jawad Al-Anani was Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Jordan and I began by asking how concerned Arab countries were by the tension on Israel's border with Lebanon. We are concerned simply because we are trying to contain the current events and the opening of a new border is going to intensify things and we don't know who is going to stand behind whom and if this could start as a proxy war but then it could become direct war. So at these crazy times no one can actually predict with precision what might evolve if this exchange of fire continues as hot and as high tension as it is. But who do you think can neutralize what is happening on the Lebanon border? Iran has to begin by asking the question who is instigating that and what is left? Now the finger of accusation is directed at Iran and probably some people are explaining that to say that it might be Russia behind that. So if you have this Russia, Iran and Hezbollah triad responsible for these events I think that extremely worries us.
The Arab League Foreign Ministers also meeting today in a statement they said they were meeting to stop the Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip. Obviously a strong language there. But do you think that Arab League Foreign Ministers are able to make the situation calmer? Well the Arab League if it really puts its efforts together it will produce some results because many countries will have to heed that. So when they use the Arab League use the terms Israeli aggression that is how every Arab group thinks it is.
Let me turn to some specific issues of these days. Do you believe Hamas would be open to releasing certain hostages such as women and children, maybe foreign nationals or indeed allowing the hostages access to humanitarian aid or corridors? If I were them I would bargain this way exactly. I would start by offering to release their country nationals. The Americans are making big fuss of it if you watch CNN and other American media. They are making a big issue out of the 10 or 9 Americans who are hostages.
The second one is that I would probably release third country like people like from Thailand and workers from Thailand who are working there. This is in the first round. The first second round of release is Israeli civilians, women and children and families in exchange for something. In exchange for what? Well the first one will be in exchange for opening the corridors to allow humanitarian aid to go into Gaza. The second one is to open the passages and resupply Gaza with fuel, with oil and other necessities that only come from Israel. And the third one is to exchange prisoners for the Israeli soldiers. Release Palestinian prisoners who are held in Israeli jails.
Let me stay with the humanitarian corridor as you mentioned. We need to turn to Egypt for a moment. Really first do you think Egypt can be persuaded to allow people to leave Gaza through its border? I don't think so. I think they have already made the statement that they were not open. You don't think they can be persuaded by any of the other Arab nations? No, no Arab nation would put any pressure on Egypt to do that. This would start as a humanitarian gesture then it would make it a factor of Jewish.
In your experience which Arab nation do you think would have the most leverage speaking to Hamas and which would have the most leverage speaking to Israel? If Qatar is and the Turks put their hands together then they can influence Hamas plus Egypt of course. Egypt, Qatar and Turkey. Of course Jordan does have some influence. Jordan can help in this matter but we also believe that these are the three most influential countries and if the Israelis show any flexibility on negotiating or allowing those parties to intermediate and conduct to Hamas they will accept that. They will accept that role and Saudi Arabia right now which has been sought as the prize of normalization with Israel but now the Saudi government has decided to seize all negotiations or normalization with Israel. So in a way we have to look at that and the second thing is that we need to put a plan that is discussed with bigger nations, with nations who will have some leverage with the Israeli government. I am talking basically about the United States and all the UK. So in a way if the two put their heads together we can produce something meaningful and workable. That is Juhad Al-Anani the former Foreign Minister of Jordan.
I want to turn to the United States next. You might remember those tumultuous days last week in the US House of Representatives where former Speaker and Republican Kevin McCarthy was ousted but there has been a development now. Republicans have nominated Steve Scalise to be the Chamber's next speaker but it is not a done deal by Annie Stretch but who is Steve Scalise? Well Julia Manchester is National Politics Reporter for the Hill. Steve Scalise has been a part of Republican leadership in the House for quite some time now. He made national and in some cases international headlines back in 2017 when he was practicing with a congressional baseball team and was shot by a pro Bernie Sanders supporter. So that is something he has been known for in the past and he is also a congressman from Louisiana. So he has certainly been in the news before. He has been very integral to Republican leadership. A staunch ally of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy but like you said this is not a done deal. Scalise may have gotten the right number of Republican votes to get the Republican nomination for Speaker but now he has got to get the whole chamber and many Republicans aren't sure if they want to necessarily support him.
And what would it be that might stand in the way we knew with Kevin McCarthy it was about the government shutdown it was about dealing with Democrats? Well with Steve Scalise it's a very it's a similar a trape de or a similar suspicion I guess that some hardcore conservative Republicans have about Steve Scalise.
Steve Scalise himself is very conservative and very much an ally to conservatives but the question there is whether he would do the same sort of deal making tactic that Kevin McCarthy would do and sort of tell people what they want to hear at the moment and then turn around and you know make a deal with Democrats like Kevin McCarthy did last weekend.
So the way this math essentially is supposed to work out is this goes directly to the House floor. Steve Scalise will go up against Hakeem Jeffries the minority leader for the House Democrats. Now theoretically this should be a shoe in for Steve Scalise because Republicans control that majority of the House of Representatives but because there are a number of conservatives that are against Steve Scalise are unsure about him it's not a done deal for him.
Is there anything he can say to try and bring them around I do understand he was speaking to the press earlier today? Yes yes you know look he has a very strong whip operation and I'm not sure if this is used in UK parliamentary politics but here whip is someone who essentially literally whips boats together and we know that Steve Scalise has served as the House of Republican Whip in the past so he has a lot of relationships with staff and other members of Congress so that will be going on probably starting now going into you know the hours and days before whenever a vote happens so he'll be making a lot of phone calls and trying to convince these Republicans that he has their back that he will you know fight for conservative principles.
One of the other thing he has on the side here though is the stakes are a little different this time first of all the United States could experience the government shutdown next month if Congress is not passed the continuing resolution on this they can't do that without a speaker number two there's the ongoing war in Israel and although the US is certainly sending age Israel any additional aid or support that they'd want to send may have to go through the House of Representatives and can't do it without a speaker.
Thanks so much to National Politics reporter Julia Manchester from The Hill just returning to our top story which is the conflict in Gaza and Israel we've been speaking about a lot of diplomatic activity that has been taking place I'm seeing around state media is reporting that around President Ibrahim Raisi and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Bahamud bin Salman have been speaking and they have been discussing the Israeli Palestinian conflict so we'll keep bringing you more details as we get them.
Our reminder of our top story this hour diplomatic pressure is growing for a humanitarian corridor to get essential supplies into Gaza and civilians out that's after five days of Israeli bombardment and siege. Najla a mother of two young girls in Gaza told us what life is like there. We had a building across from our street that was bombed somebody with a microphone saying we need to evacuate it was so hard because I was trying to wake up my kids I and like they went out on the street like barefoot like I didn't have a second to get them like any kind of slippers or shoes or anything and it was like a total panic I was terrifying really terrifying.
Other headlines from our newsroom right now. NATO member states have promised additional military support to Ukraine to help to get it through another winter of war with Russia and announced the biggest city in the Brazilian Amazon is suffering an air quality emergency because of fires in the rainforest. This is doolubagarvern with news hour live from the BBC in London.
An undercover investigation by the BBC has exposed a blackmail scam using instant loan apps to entrap and humiliate people across Asia Africa and Latin America promising easy money loan apps cameras collect personal data from customers phones and then use that information to threaten or shame people into repayment. Poonam Agarwal reports.
In 2021, Humi Sinha from Mumbai borrowed money from instant loan apps. She was facing a family crisis and the cash seemed like a life line. Within days it had turned into a trap. One of my colleagues and accountant called me and said, Poonam, coming to the office for a moment, he said, this is what I got on Vatsa. When he showed me those photos I blacked out. This scam has had photoshopped Poonam's face onto a porn image and sent it to every contact on her phone. I don't know how many nights I have had without sleep.
Humi had fallen victim to a scam that is inflicting misery across Asia, Africa and Latin America. It is simple and ruthless. You get a message saying you have been approved for an instant loan, you then download the app, accept the conditions and the money is yours. Some of these apps are malicious, extracting all your personal information, ID cards, photos, contacts. That's when the extortion begins. They called my baby my daughter, abused her, sent her my nude photographs. I tried to take my life. I did not do it because I have a child.
The BBC has found that at least 60 people across India have killed themselves after being abused or threatened by call center agents working for loan apps. To expose how this scam works we filmed secretly inside a call center just outside Delhi. This is called Flex Corporation which recovers money for loan apps. Most calls are polite but if you don't pay the tone changes. Behave, I'll break your face. Do you think that we just have your number? We know everything about you, every single detail. You can't even imagine how badly we abuse people's blood comes out of their ears.
Asa loan used similar tactics to recover money from Bhumi. We found that it was run by an Indian man called Parshuram Thakwai. Last year after a series of suicides linked to his call center, Indian police charged Thakwai with extortion and abetment of suicide. He is on the run. But we found that Thakwai had links to a whole network of companies. Some controlled from Hong Kong by a Chinese businessman called Li Xiang. Posing as investors we set up a meeting with Li Xiang. In this secret recording, Li Xiang explains how his companies harvest the contacts of Indians and exploit them to recover loans. We access his call records and capture a lot of his information. Basically it's like he is naked in front of us. We know everything about him.
Thakwai used extortion and fear to recover money. And at least some of it ended up in Li Xiang's bank accounts. Li Xiang denies wrongdoing. He told us he complies with all laws, has never run predatory loan apps and does not collect or use customer contact information. As-an-loon, Thakwai and Calflex Corporation did not respond to a request for comment. Poonam Agarwal reporting.
Last month samples of an asteroid were parachuted into the Utah desert. That canister, so carefully retrieved from the surface of the asteroid Bennu, has been opened up and scientists have revealed what was inside. They say a quarter of the 250 grams of the rock and dust contained carbon and also water, crucial elements in the evolution of earth and fundamental to life itself. I got to speak to Green Abenit.
She is a software engineer at the Osiris Rex. That's the US mission which collected the material from Bennu. And I asked her just how excited she was on a scale of one to ten about seeing these samples. Oh gosh, that's really hard to keep in that scale. This has been a long-awaited event. A lot of us have been on the mission for many, many years. Some people even decades. I've been on the mission since before the spacecraft launched. So it's been really incredible to see the sample capsule open and the samples revealed after all this work and all this time. So for those that haven't seen it, what do the samples look like? Oh well, they're essentially black rocks, which is great because that's exactly what we were expecting. So these samples are really, really, really high in carbon. Carbon is what's left over after you barbecue, when you burn wood.
What is the use of knowing what's in an asteroid? Gosh, there's a lot of reasons to understand asteroids better. One of the driving goals of our mission is to really understand the origins of the solar system and also the origins of life on Earth. And so I said that Bennu is a carbon-rich asteroid. We also know that it has water in its molecules. And so this is really important because there's a theory that the way that life began on Earth is by an asteroid similar to Bennu hitting the Earth early in its formation. And so by studying an asteroid like Bennu, we can actually shed a lot more light on that theory. It's also really important for a security aspect. Micro asteroids hit the Earth every single day. And also there's a potential for larger asteroids hit. So really understanding the physical properties of an asteroid and understanding how they might respond to any mitigation strategies.
How busy do you think Bennu will keep you and for how long? The final phase of the OSIRIS-REx mission is this sample analysis portion. And it's going to last for the next two years. And we have about 230 different scientists all over the world. And they're going to be studying these particles simultaneously.
You're looking for hypotheses to be confirmed? Or are you looking to find something completely new? It's a combination. One thing that we are able to do with this mission that's really special is we're able to take the scientific data that we have collected at different phases of the mission and compare it to what I like to describe as higher resolution data. Before launch, we had telescope data from Earth looking at the asteroid. When we got to the asteroid, we were able to take closer data, closer remotely-sensed data, and compare that to what we thought we knew before and kind of improve that science. Now we're going to be able to do that again.
We're going to be able to take these samples in the laboratory, learn a whole bunch of new stuff about the sample and the asteroid, but actually look back at what we thought we knew before and kind of improve that science as well.