hamas, which is designated a terrorist organisation by some western governments, says more than 1a,000 of those killed are women and children. and it says there have been over 52,000 people injured in the conflict so far. our special correspondent fergal keane reports on the toll that this deadly conflict is taking on families there. a warning you may find this report distressing. the world is debating calls for a ceasefire and a big new reckoning of the dead is declared. but, for the people of gaza, the suffering is felt. not counted. dead children being touched a final time by their wounded father. a mother comes to mourn a lost daughter. translation: imagine that i yesterday i was brushing her hair, making her a sandwich for dinner and putting her to sleep then you wake up in the morning and there is no fatima any more. from the beginning, they have known there is no escape. not from gaza orfrom grief. 0rtrauma. the wounded now number in their tens of thousands. in al aq
abroad for safety. evan s friends collect and translate letters of support for him from all over the world, helping keep his spirits up and their own. evan is not a spy. evan is a journalist. and my greatest hope is that evan is released as soon as possible and can go home, can go back to work and go back to his family, can come and spend time with all of us again, as he should be doing right now. that s the greatest hope. the conditions in the camp have declined seriously. the barracks have black mold. but paul whelan is now facing his fifth christmas as a prisoner. are you worried that there s going to be another deal that you re going to be left behind again? yeah, i am worried that there ll be a deal to leave me here. with each case, my case is going to the back of the line that s being left in the dust. it is russia that put him here, but paul whelan wants america to push harder to get him home. sarah rainsford, bbc news. some breaking news. the irish government has deci
the release includes infamous former defence contractor leonard glenn francis known as fat leonard. he s at the center of one of the us navy s largest corruption cases. in exchange the us has freed alex saab, an aide and top ally to venezuela s president nicolas maduro, accused of laundering money on behalf of the maduro government, which he denies. mr maduro is also releasing 20 venezuelan political prisoners. it s all part of the biden administration s efforts to improve relations with venezuela, and push mr maduro to hold fair elections next year. earlier, i spoke with our reporter mimi swaby about the deal. president byers was emphasising that this was all about encouraging venezuela to hold free and fair elections. how much leveraged you think the biden administration has in that regard? this is yet another sign of significant flowing between relations between the us and venezuela after months of really high level negotiations. this comes as biden is grappling with a
new laws are intended to limit asylum seekers coming into the eu. eu member states and the parliament have agreed on this overall law on an approach to asylum seekers. it is intended to speed up and standardise the amount of people coming into the black. it proposes to do that with five new eu laws. the first of which would be the speedier vetting of arrivals using biometrics. that could be facial recognition technology, fingerprinting. which could be done at one of these new border detention centres that are being thirdly, an accelerated consideration of asylum cases, so the eu wants to speed up the time it takes to determine whether a migrant has a valid asylum claim. they want to do that in six months or less, if it s not a valid claim, they say they will accelerate the deportation of that person. finally, and crucially, allows its proposed for solidarity measure. this is a way for countries in the eu to financially support or even to help with an influx of migrants by acc