Gaza aid contractor says he saw colleagues fire on hungry Palestinians
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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Valerie Sanderson and in the early hours of Friday the 4th of July, these are our main stories. A former security contractor who worked for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distributing aid says he saw colleagues firing on Palestinians who posed no threat. Trump's big beautiful bill passes narrowly, ready for the President's approval by his July the 4th deadline.

Also in this podcast, in Sudan, warnings from a medical charity that civilians are facing starvation, sexual violence and executions in a city under siege by militia. And the object from outer space spotted by a telescope in Chile. The more sunlight it reflects, the easier it is to spot. So we know where the big stuff is. We know where those dinosaur killers or potential human killers are out there in the solar system.

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We start in Gaza, where there are reports that Israeli forces have killed a large number of civilians. Many of the 69 victims, according to the Gaza Civil Defense Agency, were attempting to get humanitarian aid. Since May, the UN says more than 400 Palestinians have been reportedly killed since the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, backed by the US and Israel, took over aid distribution from the UN. The

The chair of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Reverend Johnny Moore, an American evangelical pastor, said that the GHF investigated reports of killings near its aid sites. He spoke to the BBC World Service last week. In most circumstances, we haven't been able to identify anything happening. Certainly there are people dying every day in the Gaza Strip.

It is an active war zone. We are not doing this work in the middle of a ceasefire. We're doing it in the middle of a hot war. Some of that is unintentional. I'm sure some of it is certainly intentional, at least on the Hamas side. And the IDF has said, you know, overtly a few times that they are responsible for

for some casualties. However, I think people need to understand that it is disinformation that people going to GHF sites are being killed. We have no evidence of that happening in proximity to our sites. Now, a former security contractor who worked for the GHF has told the BBC that he witnessed colleagues opening fire using machine guns to fire on Palestinians who posed no threat. The Foundation says the claims are categorically false.

Our Middle East correspondent Lucy Williamson sent us this report from Jerusalem as Israel has barred international journalists from entering Gaza independently.

days after gaza's new aid operation began one contractor was already having doubts so add on that side of the berm they're taking down the polls standing inside the perimeter at site number four a security guard for the gaza humanitarian foundation told us he watched colleagues fire on a departing crowd of palestinians first machine gun fire from a watchtower

Then, more than 20 shots from a nearby security guard, clearly audible in the mobile phone footage he shared. When this guy was shooting into this group, this man dropped to the ground and was motionless. I think you hit one.

And then the other contractor who was standing there was like, damn, I think you got one. And then they laughed about it. The former contractor, who spoke to us on condition that we hide his identity, said his complaints to superiors were ignored. I brought this to the attention of the leadership directly. And then the leadership said to me, well, you have no way of knowing that that person was hit with a bullet. Maybe they tripped. Maybe they were tired and they passed out.

The whistleblower told us he saw Palestinians being shot at or injured by contractors several times, including one woman who was lifted limp and unconscious onto a donkey cart after being hit with a stun grenade. Team leaders referred to Garzans as the zombie horde, he said, and instead of clear rules of engagement, gave this advice to contractors. If there's anything that you feel uncomfortable with, shoot and ask questions later. If you feel threatened,

shoot shoot to kill and ask questions later and that's a direct quote and he even gave us like a a physical demonstration of like hey if you're if we're out on a site and you see someone with a gun um that's it that's a threat take them out if we're on a site and somebody you know um is any way aggressive towards you take them out that's a threat and that's just

That is legally, ethically and morally unequivocally untrue. GHF said the claims were categorically false, that gunfire heard in the footage came from Israeli forces and that civilians had never come under fire at its sites. The GHF narrative

that no one at a site has been injured, hurt, shot at is an absolute bold-faced lie. It's not a, oh, we didn't know that, or, oh, we weren't aware of that. They are aware of it, because I made them aware of it, and they've seen it. But an internal report seen by the BBC suggests that 30% of Garzons had been harmed during distribution at GHF sites in one 12-day period.

This new distribution system, which Israel says is designed to stop aid going to Hamas, has been widely criticised for making vast crowds walk through active combat zones to a handful of overcrowded sites. Condemned by international aid organisations and Gazans themselves, it's also now being accused of negligence from within.

Lucy Williamson. We heard more on the latest Israeli strikes in Gaza from our correspondent Rushdie Abu-Aloof, who's based in Cairo.

Yes, about 70 people were killed in the last 12 hours or so, or since midnight, according to Hamas-run civil defense agency. About 13 or 14 of them were killed in a school sheltering displaced people in west of Gaza City. People who were displaced or ordered to evacuate by the Israelis from the eastern side of the city, where an active Israeli military operation going on, they were targeted in the east.

About 30 people, according to Hamas health ministry, were killed near the GHF distribution centers in the middle, like 12 people of one family in Khan Yunis. The Israeli army spokesman this morning said that they have carried out 100 operations

and 50 airstrikes within the last 24 hours, which is, I think, equal the number of airstrikes that at the start of the war, the first week or two weeks of the war, Israel used to carry this amount of airstrikes. So the sound of bombs and airstrikes in Gaza are louder than the sound of

talks and negotiations in Doha and Egypt where Hamas are involved in talks with the mediators. So the war goes on in Gaza and the talks seem to be not making any progress. The BBC's Gaza correspondent, Rushdie Abou-Alouf.

In the United States, after days of debate, what President Trump calls his big, beautiful bill has passed. On this vote, the yeas are 218, the nays are 214. The motion is adopted.

The flagship bill of sweeping tax and spending cuts narrowly passed its final legislative hurdle in the US House of Representatives. In the end, only two Republicans voted against the legislation after massive efforts to bring rebels on side. Mr Trump said the bill would turn the US into a rocket ship. The head of the Democratic National Committee said the legislation sent a message to America, if you're not a billionaire, we don't give a damn about you.

Speaking to the BBC, the Democratic congressman for Arizona, Greg Stanton, said the bill would prove unpopular with voters. To their credit, they did pass this bill. The problem for them is what's in the bill. The bill such vastly disproportionately helps the wealthiest Americans and the largest corporations, whereas working class Americans are hurt by this bill because it rips away health care from them. Energy costs are going up. Clean energy is less expensive now.

than other forms of energy. By getting us out of the clean energy business, energy costs are going up. After issue after issue, the more the American people learn about the bill, the less they like it. So certainly they got it done today. The president's going to sign that bill tomorrow. And in the next election, they're going to rue the day that they pass this bill. But it will be seen as a big success for President Trump. I got more from our North America correspondent, Peter Bowes.

Well, the initiatives in this bill were indeed at the heart of Mr Trump's election campaign last year, and it's that important to him to fulfil his promises. Increased spending for border security to help achieve his target for deporting undocumented migrants. Also increasing spending for the US military and energy production, but not, as we've just heard, green energy. It will also extend large-scale

tax cuts that the president put in place during his first term in office. All of this comes at a cost and to pay for these flagship policies there will be cuts to health care benefits for low-income Americans and food assistance programs. Now the president says the changes to health care are to root out waste, fraud and abuse of the system. He says rather than to make life harder for

for those who legitimately claim benefits. But are the poor going to suffer much more than the rich from this bill?

That is the concern. The other big concern is the overall cost of this bill. According to the Congressional Budget Office, which is a nonpartisan federal agency, the bill will add more than $3 trillion to the U.S. national debt. And Republicans are balking at that, especially conservative Republicans, arguing that they want the federal government to be much more flexible.

frugal. And yes, on the issue of poorer Americans, moderate Republicans are worried about the impact on health care. Some critics suggesting that about 12 million Americans could be stripped of their health insurance coverage. And those Republicans in districts where this applies to many of their constituents, they'll be worried about the potential political implications come the midterm elections next year.

Do we know how this is going down with voters? I mean, any evidence yet of how Americans think about it?

Yes, we've been hearing for weeks that Americans are uneasy about this bill. Views, I think it's still fair to say, largely divide down political lines. But on balance, more people have said when asked that they think the contents of the bill will hurt their families rather than help them. Again, health care is a prime concern, but also on the issues of tax breaks with cuts for families.

Peter Bowes. In Syria, years of war have left deep scars and deep divisions between those loyal to the Assad regime and those who opposed it.

Now many in the Druze religious community, an offshoot of Islam, are worried about being isolated and targeted in post-war Syria. They're also fearful that Syria is drifting towards an intolerant Sunni-dominated order with little space for religious minorities like themselves, following violent attacks against them on the outskirts of Damascus in April. From Damascus, Leela Sinjab sent us this report.

I've just arrived in Darayya, one of the neighborhoods in the western suburbs of Damascus that has been bombed and attacked by the Assad regime. This is where the first initiatives of peaceful protests started. So we had bombarded in front of me, just in front of my home here. Lama was in her flat when the attack happened.

She described men wearing military uniforms and riding in armoured vehicles moving just below her window. Then came marchers calling for jihad against the Druze, with many long beaded men and with some carrying the white Islamic flag, which made her even more frightened, she told me.

It was all triggered by an audio recording with an alleged Druze religious leader insulting Prophet Mohammed. Although the leader denied it was his voice and Syria's Ministry of Interior later confirmed the recording was fake, the damage was already done. This video of a student from Homs University calling for immediate revenge against the Druze went viral.

Hello. How are you?

I was in the front line of the ambush. We were hit by gunfire from multiple directions. There were hundreds of fighters. The gunfire was intense, and they used mortars and drones. I was shot in the back. The bullet passed near my spine, went through my lung, broke two ribs, and lodged under my collarbone.

When the attack started in Ashrafiyat Sahnaya, Hadi and his friends took up arms and headed towards the area to help protect Druze there. He lost many friends. Frankly, we don't feel safe with these people. Their ideology is religious, not based on the law or the state. And when someone acts out of religious or sectarian hate, they don't represent us.

What represents us is the law and the state. The law is what protects everyone.

A view reflected among many here. Lama Zahreddin is a university student set to graduate this year. But the hate speech and rounds of violence made her and thousands other students leave universities and head home for their own safety. The sectarian incitement that happened, especially in Homs, they went into student dorms and threw dishes at students, beat them with chains.

The promises need to be kept on the ground, not just talk. Anyone who incites sectarianism should be punished. There is big mistrust between the Druze community and the new Islamist-led government, a mistrust shared widely in the country. People want to see an inclusive civic state rather than an Islamic one.

Lina Sinjab reporting from Damascus. The Syrian government has repeatedly stressed the sovereignty and unity of all Syrian territories and denominations of Syrian society, including the Druze. Still to come, the mystery of unusually large Roman footwear.

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The Sudanese army has killed more than 60 fighters from the paramilitary rapid support forces in airstrikes near the city of Al-Fasha in north Darfur. The armed forces have been stepping up their attacks in Darfur. Al-Fasha is the only city still under their control.

It's been under siege from the RSF for many months. Now the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, or MSF, says it's been forced to withdraw from the city. It's warning that civilians are facing starvation, sexual violence and executions by the militia. Christopher Lockyer is the Secretary General of MSF.

It's about the people who have been besieged, attacked and starved and faced mass atrocities in the town of Al-Fasha and the nearby displacement camp of Zamzam, both in North Darfur. What we aim to do is expose the levels of violence, particularly the ethnically targeted violence against the Zagawas, who are one of the

non-Arab tribes in Darfur at the hands of the rapid support forces or the RSF. And this is in light of both the violence that we're directly witnessing against them, whether that's siege, salvation or the destruction of the health facilities.

But also considering that earlier in this conflict, also at the hands of the RSF, another non-Arab tribe, the Masalit, was targeted in mass ethnic violence in El Janina, the capital of West Darfur. And so we're worried that we're seeing, on top of a famine-stricken population, a full-blown attack of a people. And our patients, our staff and survivors are talking to us and wanting us to tell their story. So that's the reason behind the report today. You

You know, what we're seeing are several trends. Firstly, there is the ethnic targeting. We've had witnesses talk of RSF saying that they would clean al-Fasher, particularly of the Zagawa. One man told us that they speak a lot, the RSF, saying that if they were to take al-Fasher, they would kill all Falange, which is a word used for slave, especially the Zagawa people.

They used to say that if you kill 50 Falange, your face will glow in the morning. So it's that sort of level of violence and hate speech that we're witnessing within Darfur at the moment. Christopher Lockyer from the medical charity MSF. Five years ago, the BBC reported that Nigeria was in the grip of an epidemic of kidnapping. Today, the situation appears to be even worse, with kidnappers trying to extort a ransom no longer differentiating between rich and poor.

The BBC has spoken to some of those who've been abducted, who've shared their experiences of being beaten and starved. BBC's Chris Owakoa reports from the Nigerian capital, Abuja. Adiyo was kidnapped on a Nigerian highway along with three other people.

Their captors demanded N50 million, or just over N31,000 for each person. Most Nigerian families cannot raise such a sum. They told my wife, "If you don't want us to kill your husband, bring money." They used to beat us when they want to negotiate with our people. When they are beating us, even the ones that used to teach us what we will be saying, "Tell them you need money or else they will kill you. If we kill you, we don't lose anything."

More than two million kidnap incidents were recorded in the one year to April 2024, according to a report credited to the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics, or NBS, while the government department later claimed that its website was hacked, even though it has not denied publishing the piece. Another report by SBM Intelligence, a security intelligence and research firm, had a lower figure. It said almost 22,000 people were abducted in Nigeria in just over five and a half years.

In Zamfara, northwest Nigeria, one woman who has been voiced by an actor to keep her identity hidden spent seven months in captivity after she was kidnapped.

Her mother died while she was held captive and she says it was caused by grief. We were regularly beaten, starved of food and I fell sick while in captivity. The most horrific experience was when we were forced to dig a grave and bury another kidnapped victim. It was heart-wrenching. Another Zamfara resident and his teenage daughter, whose identities were also hiding, were abducted after gunmen broke into their home.

They were held for nearly two months. After paying the second ransom, I was released while my daughter was held back for another ransom, close to six million naira. We were insulted, dealt with, and in fact, all the 42 days I stayed there, I was chained. Because of the beating, I'm still having problems with my spinal cord.

While SBM's report says $6.8 million was demanded as ransom within one year, Nigeria faces a multitude of complex and persistent security challenges, including terrorism, banditry and kidnapping, which have proven difficult to resolve.

Nigerians are warned that ransom payment is illegal, but with no other alternative, the families of kidnapped victims have to find the money or risk their loved ones facing death at the hands of their captors. Chris Ebokor in Nigeria. And just an update on a story we brought to you a couple of days ago here on the Global News Podcast.

Anti-pollution measures in India's capital Delhi to curb smog and notoriously high levels of pollution are proving difficult to police.

The selling of petrol for vehicles older than 15 years and diesel for vehicles older than 10 was banned on the 1st of July. But Delhi's environment minister has admitted that the ban is proving to be unenforceable because of technical problems like camera sensors that don't work and people driving out of Delhi to get fuel.

Next, to outer space, or rather to something from outer space that's hurtled into our own solar system. It's only the third such object to be detected. Known as 3I Atlas, it was reported by a telescope in Chile. The BBC's James Menendez got more details from Dr Megan Argo, an astrophysicist from the University of Central Lancashire here in England.

We think this one's a comet. So as you say, this is the third interstellar interloper we've seen in the solar system. We only discovered the first one in 2017. So we know these things are there. We know they come through the solar system. It's likely that there have been

thousands, millions, over millions and millions of years throughout the history of the solar system. But it's only in sort of the last 20 or so years we've really had the telescopes with the capability to detect them. So now we're starting to get a handle on just how many of these things might be out there and what kind of a threat they could potentially pose in the future. So how was this one spotted?

This one was discovered in regular observations of a telescope called ATLAS. And ATLAS stands for Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Blast Alert System. And the idea of ATLAS is that it scans the sky for 24 hours a day. So they've got telescopes in different parts of the Earth so that at some point it's always night for one of them so they can see the sky 24 hours a day.

And they're looking for not the big rocks that we know where they are. Big ones are the easiest ones to spot. So we think we have the big rocks in the solar system pretty well cataloged by now.

But it's the smaller stuff, the stuff that's still big enough to make it through our atmosphere and the stuff that's big enough that if it were to be on a collision course with the Earth, it could still do some regional damage. So if you remember back to 2013, there was an asteroid that came in over Chelyabinsk in Russia and exploded in an air blast and broke lots of windows and there were a lot of people injured in that incident. The idea with Atlas is we can see rocks of that size coming and if it's going to have an impact,

And we need to evacuate people. We have time to evacuate people out of the way. So the telescope is doing exactly what it was designed to do. You say get people out of the way. I mean, you know, we may see this thing coming, but can we really do anything about it?

Well, with the big ones, it would be really, really difficult. The big ones of the order of the thing that wiped out the dinosaurs, we think, 66 million years ago, that would be extremely difficult to do anything about. I mean, it might be better not to know, mightn't it? Well, possibly there is that argument. Yes, ignorance is bliss in a way. But those large asteroids, things of that sort of size, we know where they are. They're big.

The reason we see them is because they reflect sunlight. So the larger the object is, the larger the rocket is, the more sunlight it reflects and the easier it is to spot. So we know where the big stuff is. We know where those dinosaur killers or potential human killers are out there in the solar system. It's the smaller stuff of the like that exploded over Chelyabinsk that are more difficult to spot. And often we do only see them with a few weeks, a few days, sometimes only a few hours notice.

So if we have a few weeks and we know it's going to hit somewhere like a major populated city, then we have enough time. It would be a logistical challenge, but we would have enough time to move people out of the way to minimize the damage, minimize the risk to people. And with the kind of air blast that happened in Chelyabinsk, if they'd known it was coming in advance, just

people opening windows would have minimized the amount of damage because if your windows are open, you don't get that much of a shockwave compared to if they're all closed when an air blast happens. So it's things like that that could minimize the damage as well as reduce the risk of casualties. Yeah, very interesting. And just in a word though, this one we're completely safe from, right? Yes, this one's not going to hit us. No, this one's not coming this far into the solar system. So it'll leave quite happily and it will never come back again. Astrophysicist Dr. Megan Argo.

And finally, unusually large shoes discovered at a Roman fort in Britain have left archaeologists baffled.

The biggest sandal from the collection of ancient footwear was more than 32 centimetres long. That's approximately a UK size 14, a US size 15 or a European size 50. So way bigger than today's average. So what's gone on? Well, the BBC's David Lewis, who wears a whopping size 13 himself, is following the story.

So this is the tale. Earlier this year, 32 shoes were dug up at the Magna Roman Fort in Northumberland. That's not far from Hadrian's Wall in the far northeast of England, the edge of Rome's empire in Britain. Eight of those shoes measured 30 centimetres long or more. That's the equivalent of a size 13 or 14 today. Why? We're not 100% sure. But the theories are tantalising. We have to assume it's something to do with the people living here having bigger

feet being potentially taller but we don't know why. That's according to the archaeologist Rachel Frame. She's insisting the leather shoes were found in a defensive ditch, a place the invading army also used to dump rubbish. They're estimated to be about 2,000 years old which tallies the Romans were in Britain from about 43 AD but due to low oxygen conditions in the soil the leather shoes have been preserved remarkably well for centuries. It all sounds unusual but it gets stranger.

Of the 5,000 shoes dug up at the nearby Vindalanda settlement, 12 or so kilometres away, just four or five of those were of the equivalent size. So regarding this outsized Roman hall, we might soon know a bit more. Later this year, a specialist team will analyse some unearthed pottery and local soil layers to better analyse who was there and when. The BBC's David Lewis.

And that's it from us for now, but there'll be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, send us an email. The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag Global News Pod.

This edition was mixed by Darren Garrett. The producers were Marion Strawn and Charles Sanctuary. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Valerie Sanderson. Until next time, bye-bye.