Israeli troops move up to the Netzarim Corridor which divides the north and south of the Gaza Strip, while Hamas fires rockets into Israel. And EU leaders discuss how to beef up European defence in the face of Russian threats.
Chapter 1: How is Israel's ground offensive impacting Gaza?
You're listening to the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. We're recording this at 14 hours GMT on Thursday the 20th of March. The Israeli military tells Palestinians not to use the main road linking north and south Gaza, while Hamas fires rockets into Israel. EU leaders meet to discuss how to beef up European defence in the face of Russian threats.
And a unique medical trial is being carried out in Bangladesh to identify victims of methanol poisoning. Also in the podcast, the French survival manual for armed conflict and natural disaster.
And... There'll never be anyone like Eddie Jordan. Eddie was a huge influence on me and many, many people in motorsport and around the world. There'll never be anyone like him.
Tributes are paid to motor racing boss Eddie Jordan, who's died at the age of 76. Israel is once again tightening its grip on Gaza, deploying troops in an area known as the Netzarim Corridor, a buffer between north and south. The Israeli army has warned people to avoid the main road through the middle of the Palestinian territory.
Hamas says the ground operation is a new and dangerous violation of the ceasefire, and it's launched rockets at Israel. Hundreds of people have been killed since Israel resumed its attacks on Gaza on Monday night. Saqib Roqadiyah is a doctor at Nasser Hospital in Han Yunis.
The emergency area, it was just chaos. So whilst we were there, there were bodies and patients, alive and dead, just on the back of donkey carts, pulling up to the hospital. And in amidst this, a few healthcare workers, there were a couple of nurses there, who were just calm, resilient, worked hard, even through the most atrocious times.
Just before we came into the studio, I got an update on events in Gaza from our Middle East correspondent, Emi Anada.
Yesterday, we saw the first resumption of Israel's ground operations since the ceasefire came into effect at the beginning of January. The ground forces had mostly pulled back from Gaza, but had remained on a kind of buffer zone around the perimeter. And then this key corridor that the Israeli army had cut through Gaza during the war, called the Net Stream Corridor, as you mentioned,
They've begun to return to certain locations along this corridor. It cuts the north and the south of Gaza in two.
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Chapter 2: What are EU leaders discussing about European defense?
The main dissenter there is Hungary. It has never provided military aid for Ukraine and it stays away from declarations. It pulls out of them. So the declaration gets signed by 26 EU nations on these sort of things rather than 27.
The former motor racing boss Eddie Jordan has died in South Africa at the age of 76. The flamboyant Irish businessman was also a successful television pundit. Retired Formula One star Damon Hill says he was a huge influence.
He was gregarious, as you know. He was irreverent. He was crazy. I lived in Ireland when I raced with Eddie, and I was privileged to have won the Grand Prix with Eddie. He influenced everyone. There isn't a single person in that era and since, really, who has not been affected positively in some way by Eddie. He gave a huge amount to charity. He never stopped.
He never wasted a single second of his life, and he energised everyone he was near.
Damon Hill, the BBC's former Formula One correspondent, Jonathan Ledyard, told me why Eddie Jordan was so special.
He was a one-off. He was a unique character, as Damon Hill was saying there. People say that some characters in life you meet, their glass is half full. Eddie's was always overflowing. He brought such a unique charisma, a unique personality, humanity, resilience, but also he knew how to do a deal, from selling cars in Dublin...
And here was a man who started as a banker, then wanted to go racing, selling cars and so on. He went from being a wannabe Formula One star in a Silverstone lock-up garage to winning the Belgian Grand Prix at the iconic Spa Circuit with Damon Hill, the 1996 world champion, leading home Ralf Schumacher, his Jordan teammate, and an extraordinary 1-2.
He always believed the impossible was possible, and usually he did that.
Yeah, tell us more about his team and how he challenged the more established teams.
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Chapter 3: How has Eddie Jordan influenced Formula One?
Pop stars and tech titans, founders and filmmakers, inventors and investors, we cover them all. And for the first time, we're talking about a video game designer.
Yep, we're talking about Marcus Persson, the Swedish coding king who programmed the world's most successful game, Minecraft, all by himself.
He made a billion, but is he good, bad, or just another billionaire? Find out on Good Bad Billionaire, listen on the BBC app, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Returning to the conflict in Ukraine now, and the Ukrainians may have signed up to the American plan for a ceasefire, but Russia has not. So what levers might the US be able to pull? Some in the Republican Party have called for new or tougher sanctions, an idea floated by President Trump himself.
Jamie Kumar Asami spoke to Maria Shagina at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, asking first what type of sanctions has America already imposed on Russia?
The US sanctions is part of the broader transatlantic coalition, and we have unprecedented sanctions imposed on Russia. Russia is now the most sanctioned country in the world with more than 17,000 measures being put in place, and we can roughly break them down in three categories, which is energy sanctions, trade-related sanctions, including financial sanctions, but also on dual-use goods.
The Trump administration has been critical of the Biden administration saying it only put, well, I think it said three out of 10 it gave it for the level of sanctions that it originally imposed on Russia. I mean, what's your assessment?
Trump has some sort of truth there. And I think he's correct on two things, that despite the title that Russia is the most sanctioned country in the world, it doesn't mean it belongs to the category of heavily sanctioned jurisdictions such as Iran, Syria, North Korea. In terms of
quality of sanctions there is still a lot of room to ramp up sanctions and when trump was announcing policy towards russia he talked about ending the war and using sanctions to bring russia to the negotiating table so what might that mean then in practice do you think well i think there is a big unpredictability whether trump is seriously thinking about using sanctions as a lever on russia
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Chapter 4: Why are Canada-China relations strained?
Marine conservationist Lorna Dugan explained how the blobfish beat off the competition.
Its ascent to the surface has been dizzying, not only from the dark depths to be crowned Fish of the Year 2025. There was a bit of a battle of the deep. We had two deep sea contenders for this title this year, the orange roughy and the blobfish. They've gotten a pretty bad rap because down in the deep, dark ocean where they're perfectly adapted to, they actually look like a normal sort of fish.
But once you start to bring them to the surface, that increase in pressure and being trawled up in a big net, their skin sloughs off. and their tissue is very jelly-like, and they pretty much disintegrate, unfortunately, once they get to the surface, and they look very sad indeed.
When we're teaching in schools about marine conservation, the blobfish is one of our examples of a deep-sea, perfectly adapted specimen. But, yeah, the only time that we ever interact with them is when they've been pulled from the depths up to the surface very, very quickly. So they are definitely worse for wear once they hit the surface.
Lorna Dugan. And that's all from us for now, but the Global News Podcast will be back very soon. This edition was mixed by Jack Wilfan and produced by Vanessa Heaney. Our editors, Karen Martin. I'm Oliver Conway. Until next time, goodbye.
On our podcast, Good Bad Billionaire, we explain how the world's billionaires made all their money.
Pop stars and tech titans, founders and filmmakers, inventors and investors, we cover them all. And for the first time, we're talking about a video game designer.
Yep, we're talking about Marcus Persson, the Swedish coding king who programmed the world's most successful game, Minecraft, all by himself.
He made a billion, but is he good, bad, or just another billionaire? Find out on Good Bad Billionaire, listen on the BBC app, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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