US Secretary of State visits Israel as IDF destroys more Gaza City buildings
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 14 September 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is visiting to discuss the war in Gaza following Israel's attack on Hamas members in Qatar. His visit comes as Israeli forces continue to destroy residential buildings in Gaza City, forcing thousands to flee ahead of an expected ground offensive to seize the city.
Also on the programme: We hear from an American city sitting on the border between two US states with opposing abortion laws three years on from US citizens losing their constitutional right to abortion nationwide; and we'll speak to one of the organisers of the protests in Nepal about why she is backing the country's interim prime minister.
(Photo: U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visit the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest prayer site, in Jerusalem's Old City on September 14, 2025. Credit: REUTERS/Nathan Howard/Pool)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service, live from London with Owen Bennett Jones. |
| 0:08.6 | Now, the US has been reluctant since October the 7th attacks to criticise Israel, |
| 0:13.5 | but the strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar did lead the US president to say he was very unhappy about what had happened. |
| 0:21.9 | Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, is in Israel today, a prearranged visit, |
| 0:26.9 | and he will presumably be making the point that the US has a military base in Qatar, |
| 0:31.6 | may also have in mind the Air Force One airline Qatar is giving to the US. |
| 0:36.4 | He hasn't spoken in Israel yet publicly. He said this before he set off. I'm going to get a much better understanding of what their plans are moving forward. What's happened has happened. Obviously, we were not happy about it. The president was not happy about it. Now we need to move forward and figure out what comes next. Because at the end of the day, when all is said and done, there is still a group called Hamas, which is an evil group that still has weapons |
| 0:57.5 | and is terrorizing. There is still 48 hostages that deserve to be released immediately all at once. |
| 1:04.2 | Well, Mr. Netanyahu, for his part in welcoming Mr. Rubio, was quick to highlight how strong |
| 1:09.7 | he thought the relationship between the U.S. and Israel is. |
| 1:13.5 | I think his visit here is a testament to the durability, the strength of the Israeli-American alliance. |
| 1:20.2 | It's as strong and as durable as the stones of the Western world that we just touched under President Trump. |
| 1:27.4 | This alliance has never been |
| 1:28.9 | stronger. |
| 1:29.9 | Well, the BBC's Tom Bateman has been following the two men in Jerusalem. |
| 1:34.1 | Sorry, asked, what have they been doing? |
| 1:36.5 | Well, so far, we haven't had much of the diplomacy visibly anyway, because there was a visit |
| 1:42.2 | to the Western Wall by Mr. Rubio and Mr. Netanyahu. |
| 1:47.0 | And then they also visited this area called the Western Wall Tunnels, |
| 1:51.5 | which is basically a sort of archaeological excavation site that Israel has been carrying out for decades and has extended. |
| 1:57.2 | It is controversial and sitting by Palestinians as a provocation because of some of the tunneling work as close to the foundations of the site known to Muslims as for Amal-Therif to Jews as Temple Mount, |
| 2:10.1 | but arguably the most sensitive holy site in Jerusalem. |
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