Global News Podcast
Israel says Gaza ceasefire will end unless Hamas frees hostages by Saturday
Wed, 12 Feb 2025
Israel says the ceasefire will end unless Hamas frees hostages by Saturday. Also: the US teacher held in Russia for four years is freed, and remembering the child chimney sweep whose death changed England's labour laws.
Chapter 1: What are the main headlines of this episode?
This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Nick Miles and in the early hours of Wednesday the 12th of February, these are our main stories. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the Gaza ceasefire deal will end if Hamas does not free hostages by Saturday. Mr Netanyahu added that intense fighting would also resume.
King Abdullah of Jordan has told President Trump that his country would take thousands of sick children from Gaza. In other news, the author Salman Rushdie has testified at the trial in New York State of a man accused of attempting to murder him. Also in this podcast.
It's a great relief. It's been very difficult, but we're all here. We're all together and we're looking forward to healing.
Washington says it secured the release of a US school teacher who had been held in Russia for four years. We speak to his sister. Israel and Hamas are midway through the first stage of a fragile ceasefire. So far, 16 Israeli hostages have been released in exchange for more than 500 Palestinian prisoners. Another exchange is due to take place on Saturday. But all that has been thrown into question.
Hamas said they may delay the release because of what they said were Israeli violations of the agreement. The U.S. President Donald Trump says that if all hostages aren't returned by noon on Saturday, then, in his words, all hell will break loose. Meanwhile, after meeting his security cabinet, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said this.
The decision that I pass unanimously in the cabinet is this. If Hamas does not return our hostages by Saturday noon, the ceasefire will end and the army will return to intense fighting until Hamas is finally defeated.
So is Benjamin Netanyahu really demanding the release of all hostages on Saturday, like President Trump? A question for our correspondent in Jerusalem, Wira Davis.
I think Mr Netanyahu has been deliberately vague. There are members of his cabinet who've come out and said they back Mr Trump 100 percent. And some unofficial comments from the government say, yes, that is what they want. They want all hostages released. But I think in practice, that will be very vague.
unfeasible because it would mean Netanyahu unilaterally changing the terms of an agreed ceasefire. If Hamas, for example, on Friday afternoon, as they've done so far, give a list of three hostages to be released as was planned, and Netanyahu says all of a sudden, no, that's not enough, we want them all out. And in that case, war would resume. There would be huge repercussions in Israel.
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Chapter 2: What is the current status of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire?
So the judge has ruled that the couple will be able to hand the keys back to the seller and get most of their money back, plus damages for ruined clothes and furniture. Stephanie Zachrisson. Still to come.
George Brewster was the boy that changed the law and I would like all children to know this boy's name.
Honouring England's last climbing boy, the Victorian child, who died after he became stuck up a chimney, triggering national outrage and a change in child labour laws. The White House has announced that an American man, a teacher, Mark Fogel, who'd been held in Russia since 2021 on drugs charges, has now been freed.
The 63-year-old, who once worked as a diplomat at the US embassy in Moscow, was serving a sentence for being caught in possession of what was said to be a small amount of cannabis. In a moment, we'll hear from Mark's sister. But first, Steve Rosenberg, the BBC's Russia editor in Moscow.
We haven't heard from the Russian side. Mark Vogel had been given a 14-year prison sentence. But everything changed when Donald Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, flew to Russia, flew to Moscow, to secure Mark Vogel's release. He was able to do that.
And later, Donald Trump's National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, said that the Trump administration had negotiated an exchange that serves as a show of good faith in the Russians and a sign we're moving in the right direction to end the war in Ukraine. So, first of all, this talk about an exchange, we have no details whatsoever about for whom or for what Mark Fogel was exchanged.
But also, it's interesting, isn't it, that the release of a US prisoner and the war in Ukraine... are mentioned in the same paragraph.
And I think that amid all the talk we're hearing of possible peace talks to end the war in Ukraine, of some kind of imminent US peace plan, I suspect that any sign of a thaw in US-Russian relations, and this kind of language we're seeing, show of good faith in the Russians, moving in the right direction, I suspect that in Ukraine, in Kiev, they'll be pretty wary of that and wondering if that means moving in the right direction for Moscow.
Steve Rosenberg. Speaking from the state of Montana, Mark Fogel's sister, Anne Fogel, gave her reaction to my colleague Celia Hatton.
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