'A battle for the soul of Israel'
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 September 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On the 700th day of the war in Gaza Fania Oz-Salzberger, an Israeli historian and daughter of the writer Amos Oz, speaks to us about the prospects for peace with the Palestinians.
Also in the programme: the British prime minister loses his deputy, leading to a sweeping reshuffle of the government; and David Bowie's unlikely ambition to write a musical about 18th century London.
(Photo: Three-year-old Ibrahim Mohammed Ahmad, the only survivor of his family with his grandmother, at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Gaza Strip, 03 September 2025.Credit: Mohammed Saber /EPA/Shutterstock)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to News Air from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:07.2 | We're coming to you live from London. |
| 0:09.0 | I'm James Menendez. |
| 0:10.4 | And later on in the program, we'll be heading to Haiti, |
| 0:13.1 | where children displaced by the gang violence there |
| 0:16.5 | have been making musical instruments out of all bottles. |
| 0:23.8 | They love it. They love it. And they end up dancing and singing themselves. It's really fun. |
| 0:31.6 | More about a different side of Haiti coming up later on. |
| 0:36.1 | Today marks 700 days since Israel launched its assault on Hamas in Gaza |
| 0:40.8 | in response to the group's murderous attacks of October the 7th, 2023. Those killed about 1,200 |
| 0:47.7 | Israelis and saw a further 251 people taken hostage. Forty-eight of those are still in Gaza. And yet instead of winding down, |
| 0:56.1 | Israel's offensive is once again gaining in intensity, with a major operation against Gaza's |
| 1:01.3 | main population centre, Gaza City, home to about a million people. The aim says the military |
| 1:06.8 | to recover the remaining hostages and wipe out Hamas completely. |
| 1:13.9 | The price paid by Palestinians is a very heavy one. |
| 1:16.8 | Recent figures from a classified Israeli military database suggested that well over 40,000 civilians had been killed since the start of the war. |
| 1:22.2 | Much of Gaza lies in ruins. |
| 1:24.7 | That, the failure to recover the remaining hostages |
| 1:27.1 | and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's |
| 1:29.2 | apparent reluctance to bring the water an end, has led to regular protests in Israel, some of them |
| 1:34.3 | very big, and a wider sense among many Israelis that democracy is in peril, and perhaps even |
| 1:40.5 | the state's moral core. Well, that's certainly the view of the Israeli historian, Fania Oz Salzberger, |
... |
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