McDonald's is buying back its Israeli restaurants as it faces global boycotts.

Good morning. I'm Leanna Byrne and you're listening to the Marketplace Morning Report

and we're live from the BBC World Service. Now when McDonald's Israeli franchisee gave

out free meals to soldiers there it sparked a boycott in many countries across the

world. Now the fast food chain says it plans to buy back all

its 225 restaurants in Israel. The BBC's Nick Marsh is on the story and Nick is

this ultimately a response to the boycotts?

It is, Leanna, yeah, exactly.

You can really see now the implications

spiraling in a business sense.

I think really the key to understanding what's going on is understanding how

McDonald's operates. So most McDonald's around the world they're actually franchises

so they're run by independent businesses, operators who use the McDonald's brand and the product,

but for the most part they're actually free to kind of operate as they wish.

So in Israel, in this specific case, all McDonald's

are run or were run by a local business called Alonya. Now after the Hamas attacks on the 7th of October, McDonald started giving out thousands

of free meals to Israeli soldiers and security forces. Now that prompted a backlash in other parts of the Middle East

and Muslim majority countries around the world who saw what McDonald's was

doing in Israel and started boycotting them. Now McDonald's knows what's going on is bad for

business. So what they've decided to do is they are buying back all of these

Israeli branches and now they can kind of say hey look McDonald's

under new management in Israel we're politically neutral if you've been

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