Israel launches ground offensive on Gaza City
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 September 2025
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Israeli army embarks on an major ground assault into Gaza City. One resident tells us she can't bear the thought of fleeing again.
The offensive comes on the day a UN commission says Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
Also on the programme: the Hollywood legend Robert Redford has died at the age of 89. We’ll hear from his friend, film producer Lord David Puttnam; and what's changed in Iran three years on from the death of a young Kurdish woman.
(Photo: Displaced Palestinians, fleeing northern Gaza due to an Israeli military operation, move southward after Israeli forces ordered residents of Gaza City to evacuate to the south, in the central Gaza Strip September 16, 2025. Credit: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.3 | Hello and welcome to NewsHour. |
| 0:11.5 | It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service studios in central London. |
| 0:15.4 | I'm Tim Franks. |
| 0:16.9 | Long planned, long talked about. |
| 0:19.5 | It now seems that Israel's major ground offensive into Gaza |
| 0:22.9 | city has begun. Thousands more Palestinians are fleeing. The Israeli Prime Minister, |
| 0:28.3 | Binim and Netanyahu, has said that the target of the operation is, as he puts it, |
| 0:32.9 | Hamas's last major stronghold. The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, in contrast, has called |
| 0:39.6 | the war in Gaza morally, politically and legally intolerable. He was speaking today after a UN |
| 0:47.1 | commission of inquiry had found that Israel has been committing genocide in the enclave. |
| 0:52.5 | We'll have more on that later in the program. |
| 0:55.4 | First, though, let's look at what's happening on the ground. |
| 0:58.6 | Overnight, heavy airstrikes presaged Israeli soldiers, pushing into the outer neighbourhoods of the city. |
| 1:04.8 | Israel Defence Forces reckon that 350,000 residents have fled in recent weeks. |
| 1:10.3 | That number swelled today. More than half a million, though, do still remain in the city. Among them, a Beer Ziyadh barricat, an English lecturer, or at least she used to be when the education system functioned. She's in the Riemal neighbourhood in Gaza City, just to the west and slightly to the south of the city centre. |
| 1:30.7 | What's she been seeing and hearing? |
| 1:33.3 | Bombardment doesn't stop its constant day and night. |
| 1:37.5 | Whenever there is any kind of bombardment, whether in the eastern side, western side of Gaza, |
| 1:43.4 | we hear all of it because this |
| 1:45.1 | neighborhood is considered as the heart of Gaza. And when the Israeli military says we want to invade |
| 1:51.2 | the heart of Gaza, they mean this place. So believe me when I tell you that wherever you are |
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