US and Israel 'moving to next phase' of war with Iran

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. This is not the future we were promised. Like, hell that out for a tagline for the show. From the BBC, this is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Secretary saying that firepower was about to surge dramatically.

1:02The United States has eased its oil embargo on Russia to make up for shortages caused by the war. President Trump has sacked his controversial homeland security secretary, Christy Knowham. Also in this podcast. Imagine if we have done this before January 3rd. We would all have been jail, but instead this gave us more courage and now we are not afraid. As the US State Department restores diplomatic and consular relations with Venezuela, we have an exclusive report from inside the country following the toppling of Nicolas Maduro. Early on Friday, Israel stepped up its assault on Iran and its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah. The Israeli military said that it had launched what it said was a large-scale wave of strikes against Iranian terror regime infrastructure in Tehran. It put out a similar statement regarding Hezbollah in Beirut's southern suburbs.

2:05Earlier, the United States and Israel said that their war against the Islamic Republic would enter a new phase on this the seventh day of the conflict. The commander of the US forces in the Middle East Admiral Brad Cooper said that in the last 72 hours, the US bomber force had hit nearly 200 targets in Iran and sunk more than 30 of Iran's ships. The Iranian authorities said that more than 1200 people had been killed since the US Israeli assault began on Saturday. Tehran has been described as a ghost town with people mostly sheltering at home. The US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the amount of firepower over Iran will surge dramatically. Our capabilities are overwhelming and gathering still as are those of our Israeli partners. Our munitions are full up and our will is iron clad, which means our timeline is ours and ours alone to control.

3:05President Trump has offered the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a key part of the Islamic regime immunity if they surrender or face guaranteed death. We also urge Iranian diplomats around the world to request asylum and to help us shape a new and better Iran with great potential. It's a country with great potential as much better future for Iran. It's now beginning. It's going to be I think a great future and the United States will ensure that whoever leads the country next Iran will not threaten America or its neighbors, Israel, anybody. Earlier Mr. Trump had told US media that he needed to be personally involved in the appointment of a successor to the Supreme Leader Ali Kamehnai who was killed in an air strike on Saturday, and he said he couldn't accept Hamehnai's son as that successor, calling him a lightweight. I asked our chief international correspondent, Leastu Set, what she made of Mr. Trump's comment that he should decide who runs Iran. This tells us more about the state of President Trump's

4:10thinking that he should suggest something which would be unthinkable in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Anyone who knows their history is nearly a half century of history of outright hostility, deep distrust and suspicion on both sides. Iran has its own procedures for its new leader. It's under the Constitution and there's absolutely no way they're going to let a foreigner, much less President Donald Trump, President Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America dictate who should lead Iran. What do the people of Iran want though? Would they prefer someone nominated by the clerics of the Islamic Republic or someone that Donald Trump played this? It's extraordinary that we even have to ask that question in these times, such as the nature of these times that we're living through. I think we always have to say, Iran is a vast country, 92 million people. We don't have opinion polls. The internet is always restricted and now it's severely restricted. I have found on recent trips, including in February,

5:17that Iran does feel like a different country now, that after the wave of protests in January was put down with unprecedented force causing many thousands of casualties, possibly the biggest number in Iranian history, that the emotion was still raw, so much pain and anger, and so many people calling for change. For some people, they want that change to be economic change, to make their lives better. They're dealing with 60 percent inflation, prices doubling, and right now, they're doubling and doubling again with some of the pressures of this war, but others feel, but the only way that this can change is that you change the regime, but this has to come from within. As this war drags on, more and more of the comments that we are getting is that Iranians are shocked, they're scared, they're running for their lives, they're worried for the future of their country, they're worried that this is going to end in chaos and collapse. Yes, they want change, but they don't want their country to fall apart and they don't want to be set in the

6:18kind of spiral that the region has seen all too often when there is an external intervention. Is there any sign that the Americans are right and that the regime is buckling? It's so hard to know that they still seem to be functioning, that there's layers and layers of succession that have been prepared both in terms of the security commanders and in terms of possible political leaders. A few days ago, the White House said they had killed 49 very senior leaders, President Trump, almost every day he says, well, the leaders we had in mind, they're now dead. So that indicates that they are familiar with some of the possible contenders, but some of the very key people, including Ali Larajani, who's the Secretary of the National Security Council, which, frankly, is the most powerful organization running the country now, even though under the Constitution, there's a three-man leadership council with the reformist president, the hardline head of the judiciary, and another senior cleric. It is the National Security Council, it is the

7:20Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and they are still operating. They're still, even though they're firing fewer ballistic missiles, fewer drones, dramatically fewer, they're still able, we saw that they fired another salvo towards Israel. They fired more salvos towards the Gulf. So they may be down, but they're not out. Least you said, the Iranian government is trying to give the message that despite the strikes, it is business as usual and that the Islamic Republic is still fighting back. In an interview with the US television network CBS, the Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Iraqi denied US claims that Iran had been asking for renewed negotiations. We are not asking for a ceasefire, and we don't see any reason why we should negotiate with the US, but when we negotiated with them twice, and every time they attacked us, the middle of negotiations. So there is no request for a ceasefire by us, and there is no request for the negotiation with the US from us. But thousands of Iranians are fleeing the

8:26violence, and some of them have told the BBC, life is tiring, and they feel trapped. Personally, I don't really know what will happen. The only thing I do know is that I absolutely don't want anything to do with the clerics. I think most people feel the same way. They have to stay mostly at home to avoid getting caught in a middle of an attack, just to save my life, and the sound of ongoing blasts is fatiguing. They heat a lot of places near our house. They obstruct the police station and a passage base. From what I can see, everyone's happy, though they are stressed because of the sounds. Some of the messages from inside Iran sent to the BBC's Persian service. Hours after Israel ordered hundreds of thousands of people to leave the south of Lebanon's capital, Beirut, its military, as I mentioned earlier, has begun attacking more targets there, which it claims a link to Hezbollah. Traffic has been at a standstill

9:27on roads out of the city, as people try to flee. Where a Davies sent this report before night fell on Thursday. Chaotic scenes in Beirut this evening. A mass exodus from the Lebanese capital after an unprecedented evacuation order from the Israeli military, roughly half of the entire city, including Dakhia, a stronghold of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, now under threat of even more bombing. My kids called me. They told me the strikes were about to start. They warned me to leave Dakhia. There's nowhere else to go. Israel's also targeting huge swathes of southern Lebanon. This all that remains of a four-story building in the town of Saida. Israel said it was being used by Hezbollah. On this occasion, they issued a specific warning to evacuate. That's not always the case. The occupants, including several families, said they had half an hour to leave. There are clear signs of support

10:30for Hezbollah here, but it's something that people are reluctant to talk about, given what's happened here already, and the intensifying Israeli military operations here and further south. I don't know why they hit here. There are only civilians, women and kids here, says Ahmed. There was no one with weapons. It's a nice area. Israel disagrees. Its troops have reinvaded southern Lebanon. Continuing to bomb Hezbollah positions, it says are targeting Northern Israel. With thousands of civilians also ordered to leave the south, some have seen it all before, while others are oblivious to what might come next. We're a Davis and state media in Lebanon have said that Israel has also launched air strikes on the south of the country, as Hezbollah fighters said that they fired rockets and artillery shells at Israeli forces. Hezbollah has warned Israeli residents to evacuate towns within five kilometers of the border with Lebanon.

11:32The war is spreading fast around the region, with Iran continuing to carry out retaliatory attacks on America's Gulf allies and others, though at a smaller number. And of course, the war has caused turmoil and volatility in the financial and commodity markets, resulting in a sharp rise in the price of oil. In an effort to tackle this, the U.S. is temporarily eased its embargo on Russian oil, which will allow India to purchase Russian supplies. Our business correspondent, Nick Marsh, is in Singapore. The intention is to basically sustain flows of oil in the global market. Now, India has been a huge buyer of Russian oil ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, and Russia was cut off basically from most Western markets pretty much, and India was buying it out of this count. The U.S. has been trying to put a lot of pressure on India to stop buying this sanctioned oil, and India very recently did agree to that. So,

12:36Scott Besson, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, his intention is to basically say, look, you know, the flow of oil is going to continue to global markets. How it's going to work, though, is a very different question. I mean, so much oil is still stuck near the strait of hall mues. I don't think this easing of the embargo is going to change things in a material sense. And there's also, you know, the argument to be made that India hadn't really stopped buying Russian oil on the ground in any case. So, I think this is a case of the White House doing something or maybe just wanting to be seen to be doing something as it gets increasingly worried about the rising price of oil. Yes. So, from what you're saying, this announcement is not terribly likely to make any great difference to global oil prices. It doesn't seem so. I mean, oil has risen by 20% since the start of the war. I think the name of the game now from the Americans' point of view is just stabilisation, you know, make sure that things don't really, really spike in skyrocket. Because Americans are already feeling the cost of this at the petrol pump, the gallon of gas, as it's known in the U.S.,

13:42has gone up by 27 cents just in the past, what, five, six days. You know, that's pretty bad, you know, considering that Donald Trump and his administration are making cost of living, you know, pretty much the number one priority. It was the cornerstone of Donald Trump's state of the union address, actually, the fact that gas prices were going down. And now they're going up as a result of his intervention. So, we're expecting more announcements from the White House later today. Let's see what they are and let's see if they make an effect. Nick Marsh, with fewer Iranian retaliatory strikes against Israel and hardly any missiles breaking through air defenses, the authorities there have lifted certain restrictions which were imposed on Saturday, at the start of the war. Limited public gatherings are being allowed, according to a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute. Most of the Jewish population in the country is in favor of military action against Iran. 93% of respondents were supportive. Middle East correspondent Hugo

14:42Bashegar reports from Tel Aviv to find out why. The pace of Iran's missile attacks has slowed. Israel is easing some restrictions on the public with shops reopening and people returning to work. A lot of going back and forth from the shelters, it's kind of like a strange COVID vibe but with missiles. Israel, Belmer, is originally from North London, but moved to Israel three years ago. You know, I think it's very dangerous that I live them having those kind of weapons, so I do think it's necessary. I mean, hopefully it leads to longer last and change so that we can stop kind of going in and out of war. For decades, Iran has been framed in Israel as an existential threat, including by the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. With Iranian leaders repeatedly calling for Israel's destruction, this is seen as a just war. Tamar Harman is a senior research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. Even during the former campaign against Iran, we didn't have such high numbers. My explanation is that the damage thus far was very, very limited

15:48in Israel. With the war in Lebanon in 2024, the success of the war last year with Iran, the success of foreign this war, do you think that Israelis are becoming too easy with the idea of embracing military conflict? I certainly would say that on the radical right, people are much more eager to deal with the regional problems by force. They see all this Manbu Jabba of diplomatic negotiations is starting that will not save us once there is someone in Tehran that is interested in destroying us. Certainly in many Israelis, even these who are not on the radical right do not trust the world to come to our rest. Ten people have been killed by Iranian missiles in Israel so far in this war, including one woman here in Central Tel Aviv on Saturday. I'm

16:50standing right outside the building that was hit. It's now being demolished and many of those around are badly damaged. It's completely wrecked. All the windows are tear out of the place filled with shrapnel for from glass all over. Pretty obvious if we were in the building to end up well. Dan was visiting family when the missiles struck. Had they been home, he thinks they may not have survived. But despite his flat being destroyed, he still supports the war. I don't trust Iran. I think it was pretty obvious they were doing anything in their power to get to a bomb and if there's ever a justified war, this is a justified war. But there's a small minority who are firmly against it. I'm making a black coffee so well. Ron owns a coffee shop in Central Tel Aviv. Said actually it's a bit time for Israel. Israel should not attack Iran. She's not the police of the world. No right by the international law,

17:52but the moral law, you don't have the right to attack a nation far away from here. It's still not clear what the endgame of the war is. Benjamin Netanyahu is promising a new era of bees. Instead, this could lead to chaos and instability and even more wars. Hugo Bachego in Tel Aviv. Still to come in this podcast. A strad of areas, how can you spot the real violins from the fakes? This is not the future we were promised. Black held that up for a tagline for the show. From the BBC, this is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world.

18:55This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life, and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast. The United States and Venezuela have formally restarted diplomatic and consular relations seven years after Washington closed its embassy in Caracas. Since the US military raid on Venezuela in January and the seizure of Nicholas Maduro, his former deputy and interim president, Elsie Rodriguez, has promised safe conditions for foreign mining companies to invest in Venezuela during a visit from the US Interior Minister. But there are concerns from some Venezuelans that there is still no timeline for fresh elections.

19:56From the capital Caracas, here's our South America correspondent A. N. Wells. This is the first time I've been able to report from Venezuela in two years. And on the surface, there are lots of signs that Nicholas Maduro's government is still in charge. There are wanted posters plastered around the airport for the opposition's last election candidate at Mundo González. The city's covered in billboards of Maduro and his wife. With the hashtag, we want them back. Has changed as the government is now working with the US. This week US Interior Minister Doug Berger met interim president Del Siro Rodriguez on a visit to push mining development. I'm at the International Airport now where Doug Berger is about to set off and go back to the US United States. At a press conference, he was asked whether he raised democracy with Del Siro Rodriguez. We certainly talked about a positive future for this country and there's a number of things that are happening again under the current leadership that are very positive

20:57for everybody in this country. One change of Venezuela has been the release of political prisoners, although hundreds of people remain behind bars. I'm outside the El Broteo prison now where there's an encampment of tents of family members, people still inside protesting and campaigning every day for their release. One person here is Juan Pablo Juanipa. He's an opposition politician. He was accused of terrorism and treason for challenging the 2024 election result and was detained in May 2025. The first 21 days of my imprisonment were 21 days of humiliation and outrage. I went 21 days without washing, without bathing. When they released me, I went out to visit some detention centers. That really annoyed the regime and they arrested me again. My freedom is incomplete because there are still many political prisoners. I asked him what had changed since the US took Maduro after

22:03military strikes and claimed it would run the country. Because it has changed the balance of power. Even the fact this protest is happening daily shows the big changes that have happened in Venezuela. Months ago, people would have been too afraid of repercussions for protests like this. Imagine if we have done this before January 3rd. We would have all have been jailed, but instead this gave us more courage and now we are not afraid. But even though this fear seems to be gradually cautiously lifting, I've spoken to many people here who still feel afraid of speaking freely. I'm on the streets of central Caracas exactly two months after the US seized Nicolas Maduro in a military raid. Sports is of him a gathering here to show their support for him returning. Kelsey is carrying the weight for Venezuela, resisting the blows and fighting for our population.

23:08Because while it is true the precedent is imprisoned, there is a population of resistance. Off mic though, some of the people here told me it was mostly government employees feeling obliged to go and while some of them are privately critical of the government, they're still too afraid to say so publicly. After decades of the same government, supporters and critics want to know is the transition really coming? And if so, when? Ioni Wells. Before the war in Iran broke out, President Trump was embroiled in a battle within his own country's borders. His mass deportation efforts which targeted thousands of immigrants and their families had led to protests in Minnesota in which two people were shot dead. Now the US President has sacked the woman who ran the campaign, Christie Knowham, anchor desire heard more from our Washington correspondent Will Grant.

24:09With her firing, Christie Knowham becomes the first, if you like, casualty, the first major change in Donald Trump's cabinet in his second term. His first term, as you remember, was peppered with changes to his personnel, but this time round, that's not been the case. Now, of course, there is this change, which is significant coming in the wake, as you said in your introduction, of the deployment of ICE immigration agents to the streets of Minneapolis and Minnesota more broadly. In that, of course, two American citizens were killed by agents, the killing of Rene Good and Alex Pretti in separate incidents. Shortly after, Secretary Knowham described them as domestic terrorists to claim which was later, of course, disproven. And early this week she gave a very, very combative appearance at a hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee, clashing with senators on both side of the aisle, refused to retract that initial description of the victims and tried instead to sort of steer the conversation

25:14towards President Trump's economic performance. We were relying on the hours after that incident that was so horrific on information we were getting from the ground of our agents, but I wanted to say to the family of Rene Good, after you called them domestic terrorists. Can't even imagine what they have gone through in the loss of their son, in the loss of their family members. But how about specifically calling them domestic terrorists without any evidence of that? Sir, I did, a man I did not call him a domestic terrorist. I said it appeared to be an incident of. I think the parents side for what it was. It feels very much like President Trump's patients with ran out. She is now to be replaced by the Oklahoma Senator, Mullen, at the end of this month, and she will move to a different role, the special envoy for the shield of the Americas. That's basically a security initiative for the Western Hemisphere, which will be announced sometime this weekend. And will is anything likely to change policy wise at all? I personally doubt it in the

26:18short term. I mean, there may be a feeling that things have gone too far, even among senior Republican leadership in terms of the role of ICE agents on the streets of different cities in the United States. But as an overall sort of policy direction, I don't suspect that we'll see a major, major change in the role of ICE as if you're like the enforcement, the crackdown on undocumented immigration in the United States. We'll grant in Washington. Now, have you ever wondered what people ate during the Stone Age? Well, thanks to a study of prehistoric dishes by a team of researchers at York University in the North of England, we now know that our forefathers had quite a sophisticated palate. Here's our science reporter, Esmi Stellat. Stone Age people are often termed huntigatherers. It turns out they may have been rather good at turning what they caught or picked into something really rather tasty.

27:18But the discovery about the variety of the diet enjoyed by our prehistoric ancestors was somewhat by chance. Researchers at the University of York had initially been focused on trying to understand what mesolithic pottery in northern Europe was being used for, explain Professor Oliver Craig, one of the authors of the study. We can use carbonized deposits on the insides of the vessels. The lead researcher was able to identify macroscopic fragments of plants within these carbonized deposits attached to the sides of the pots. So this gives us a whole new window into culinary history right back in deep time. What the researchers found in this left-over food was Stone Age communities were using a broad range of plants from wild grasses to vegetable roots. But they were also following recipes, favouring certain vegetables and specific plant parts to go with the meat they had cooked. A firm favourite seemed to be the berries of the gildorose with fish. Esmi Stellat, take a listen to this.

28:28The unique sound of a Stradivarius violin played by James Inus. These instruments are so prized, they have their own names. That one is called Baron D'Arcini. They're also extremely valuable, but they rarely come up for sale. And when they do, they change hands for millions of dollars. Antonio Stradivari came from Cremona in Italy and he made more than a thousand violins between the late 17th and early 18th centuries, but only around 650 survived. They're also quite a few fakes around, but scientists who specialise in dendrochronology, or the study of tree rings, are confident they can now tell not only whether a Stradivarius is real, but also where the wood came from. That's here from an expert in the field, Professor Paolo Cherobini, who is a forest ecologist based in Switzerland. If you take the belly of a violin and you see the tree rings and you measure the width

29:33of each ring and you build a chronology with all the rings you see and measure on the belly, then you can compare these three rings series with the chronologist's string series of different valleys of different forests. And so you can try to understand when the last ring you see on the belly was formed. So exactly the year in which it was formed. The Stradivari was dying in 1737. So if the last ring on the belly of your violin was built after the death of Stradivari, then it's certainly not a Stradivari. But that's the only thing that then the chronology, the study of tree rings can say. We can't say if it is a Stradivari, but we can say if it might be or certainly is not a Stradivari. Stradivari was using Norway's

30:36proofs, growing at the subalpine level, so on the Dolomites or the Alps at around 1600, 1800 meters elevation. And such elevations, the trees grow faster, they grow larger rings. If the summer air temperature is higher, if you have a colder summer, then you have a very, very narrow ring. We saw the study showing that Stradivari was taking the wood after 1700 during his golden age, only from the Valdifiem in Trentino on the Dolomites Eastern Alps in Italy. Probably he decided that this was the best wood for his violins. Professor Paolo Cherubini. And that's all from us for now. If you want to get in touch, you can email us at

31:37globalpodcast at BBC.co.uk. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag globalnewspod. And don't forget our sister podcast, the global story, which goes in depth and beyond the headlines on one big story. This edition of the global news podcast was mixed by Charlotte Hadroy to Gymska and the producers were Daniel Mann and Muzaffa Shakir. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Alex Ritson until next time. Goodbye. This is not the future we were promised. Like hell that up for a tagline for the show. From the BBC, this is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your weak and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life,

32:43and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.