Heavy fighting at the Thailand / Cambodia border
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 December 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Thai military said there were clashes in five border provinces, and three of its soldiers had been killed since hostilities resumed. Cambodia says Thai attacks have killed seven civilians. We explain why this has happened.
Also on the programme: in Australia, the law banning children under 16 years from social media has come into effect - one of the most dramatic moves so far by a government against the tech companies that own the platforms. And the revolutionary new cancer treatment, which uses DNA editing, to save the lives of patients with previously incurable blood cancers.
(Picture: Thai soldiers on patrol at the border with Cambodia. Credit: Reuters)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.3 | Hello there and welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service. I'm Sean Lay. Coming up later in the programme, |
| 0:15.7 | no social media accounts for children under 16. That's a world first, which has just come into effect in |
| 0:21.7 | Australia. And could it be a world record? More than 2,000 golden retrievers gather in a park |
| 0:28.9 | in Buenos Aires. But first, it's been as dramatic as it's been unexpected, the re-erruption of one |
| 0:35.3 | of the wars in the making that US President Trump hoped he |
| 0:38.4 | helped to prevent. Cambodia and Thailand are both blaming the other side for starting the exchange |
| 0:43.9 | of fire on the 800-kilometer-long border between them. Although there have been fatalities, |
| 0:49.2 | the most dramatic impact has been the mass movement of thousands of civilians on both sides away from the border. |
| 0:56.2 | Reports circulating in some media suggest there may be a fresh ceasefire coming into force later. |
| 1:01.0 | Stay with us for more on that. But first, Sweeney-Lee, Southeast Asia Bureau Chief at the New York Times, |
| 1:07.0 | is one of the few international journalists at the border. From Buriram province on the Thai side, she told me what she'd seen. |
| 1:14.0 | I'm here in Bururram where they've transformed this motor racing circuit |
| 1:18.9 | into an evacuation centre, and they had actually never dismantled the tents |
| 1:24.0 | that they placed up in July. |
| 1:26.4 | What I found when I got there were thousands of people |
| 1:29.7 | huddled under blankets, it's really striking. I found no sense of anger or desperation among the |
| 1:36.6 | people. The mood is very different from other conflict zones that I've reported in. I found actually a |
| 1:43.4 | sense of resilience, but mostly a sense of |
| 1:46.6 | helplessness amongst the people, that this was, that they were at the center of this intractable |
| 1:51.6 | conflict. I spoke with a woman who came with her two-year-old son and her 74-year-old mother, |
| 1:57.4 | and she said that they are all just used to living this way. And she spoke about |
... |
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