Israel's prime minister Netanyahu says Hamas will pay price for "cruel and evil" violation of ceasefire after tests showed body returned from Gaza was not hostage Shiri Bibas. Also: cure for childhood blindness.
Chapter 1: What are the main news stories covered in this episode?
This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Nick Miles and at 14 hours GMT on Friday the 21st of February, these are our main stories. The Israeli Prime Minister has accused Hamas of a cruel and evil violation of the ceasefire in Gaza.
And Sweden's Coast Guard is investigating new damage to a cable under the Baltic Sea after a series of suspected Russian sabotage attacks in the area.
Also in this podcast... I opened the window and the light shone through really bright and he squinted. I remember welling up because that was the first time that Jace ever had any reaction to any sort of light stimulus.
We hear about the new gene therapy cure for childhood blindness. The Gaza ceasefire agreement has always been a precarious one. Now Israel has accused Hamas of violating the deal after it said its forensic testing revealed the body returned from Gaza on Thursday was not that of Shiri Bibas.
Three other bodies were handed over, the two Bibas children, Ariel and Kfir, and the peace activist Oded Lifshitz. Here's the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
The cruelty of the Hamas monsters knows no bounds. Not only did they abduct the father, Yarden Bibas, the young mother, Shiri, and their two small infants, in an unimaginably cynical manner, they didn't return Shiri to her small children and instead placed the body of a Gazan woman in a coffin.
We will act with determination to bring Shiri home, along with all of our captives, both the living and the fallen, and ensure that Hamas pays the full price for this cruel and evil violation of the agreement.
Well, Hamas has said that it's investigating a possible mix-up of bodies and called on Israel to return the mistakenly sent remains. On Saturday, a further hostage-prisoner exchange is due to take place, in which six Israelis will be returned by Hamas and more than 600 Palestinians will be released from Israeli jails. Our Middle East regional editor, Sebastian Usher, is in Jerusalem.
Hamas has said that there is a possibility of an error, that there might have been human remains that got mixed due to Israeli airstrikes. Hamas has always said that the Bibas family were killed in an Israeli airstrike in November 2023, just a month or so after they were abducted on October the 7th. I mean, it's strange that they're saying that now.
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Chapter 2: How did Israel respond to the ceasefire violation by Hamas?
He underwent experimental gene therapy at Moorfields Hospital in London and is now able to recognise objects a few metres away. His father, Brendan, spoke about the moment when it began to have an effect.
It was the morning I took Jace down to our living room. At the time, we had a big back bay window, and it was a sunny day. And I was holding him. He was still an infant or a baby at that point to me. And I opened the window, and the light shone through really bright, and he squinted. And he kind of pulled himself back. It wasn't just even an eye shut. It was kind of more of a physical reaction.
And I remember welling up and getting really emotional because that was the first time that Jace ever had any reaction to any sort of light stimulus or anything of the sort.
James Bainbridge is an eye surgeon and he was one of the team treating Jace.
Some children are affected by blindness from birth because their eyes lack a gene that's essential for normal sight. In its severest form, their sight's limited to seeing light and dark. and they face losing all sight in the first few years of life. This lack of sight at an early age can impair their general development.
So we found that by providing their eyes with healthy copies of the gene that's otherwise lacking, their sight can improve remarkably, and this seems to affect their health, their normal development.
And when you say, I mean, you make it sound simple, providing the gene that's lacking, what do you actually do? Where does the material come from, and how do you transfer it?
So we prepare normal, healthy copies of the gene in the laboratory, are able to package these into virus particles, disabled virus particles, which can be safely injected into the eye and targeted to the retina, to the cells that are needing those genes.
And what kind of a difference has it made? So we heard there from Jace's dad, he's able to recognise objects a few metres away now and couldn't see at all before. So, I mean, this is a really dramatic difference.
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