i'mjeremy bowen. i'm the international editor of bbc news. ijoined the bbc on september 24th, 1984. jeremy bowen explains. airships blimps, as they're known, seem to be coming back into fashion. and 2005, i got thejob of middle east editor and in a way i'm still middle east editor, but i'm also international editor. where were you on october 7th? well, i woke up that morning in kyiv, in ukraine. i woke up and, you know, i reached for my phone to see what had been going on in the world, and the first thing i saw on whatsapp was a message to thejerusalem whatsapp group chat, saying, "something incredible is happening." rocket fires alarms sound at that time, what it was was hundreds and hundreds of rockets being fired into israel. but it subsequently transpired that that was... and very quickly, it became clear that hamas had crossed the border, was in israel. gunshots and videos started emerging of dead soldiers, dead civilians. so, very quickly, we decided — and i spoke to the people here in london — that we needed to change plans. we immediately started packing, making plans, we managed to get going by about midday. before i left kyiv, i did some lives from the roof of the hyatt regency hotel, in the pouring rain, talking about what was going on. they wanted me to talk about it and it was already clear that what we were seeing was an absolutely enormous story. let's talk to our international editor, jeremy bowen, whojoins us this morning live from kyiv. and, jeremy, you know this region well, what's your assessment of what's going on right now? what's going on is really unprecedented in terms of the actions that hamas have taken against israel. and i think that israel may well now be planning an unprecedented response. i was away from home... from leaving for ukraine to coming back today, i was away for six weeks. what's it like? do you get scared? no, i don't get scared. i've covered many wars over many years. and in some of them, there are moments where you get very scared. if something suddenly flares up, you're suddenly face—to—face with some madman at a roadblock who's armed to the teeth, or there's an explosion very close to you, or... but no, i didn't think this was going to be something that would be directed at me, i didn't think that i was going to be in any serious danger. so they came in on those bikes. very early on, we were able to get to two of these border communities, kibbutzes. newsreel: the first few days of war at this small israeli community called kfar aza are a microcosm of israel's trauma and a glimpse of what might come next. there had been a wholesale slaughter by the people who came through the wire. kill her, cut her. and her body's still there. we went with israeli military and when we arrived there, they were still clearing the area, there was shooting going on, there were hundreds of troops around the place, you know, in sort of fighting positions. and they were taking out bodies of israelis in body bags, quite reverentially. the dead hamas guys were lying where they were killed. and a lot of them were there for some days. they started rotting, it was stinking. most people would find that absolutely life—changing to witness something like that. how do you deal with it? it sounds horrible, it's not meant to be, it's not meant to sound... i'm not dismissing anything, but i've been doing this job for a very long time and i've seen a lot of things. i'll give you an example. the �*91 gulf war, i was in baghdad, the americans blew up an air raid shelter. they killed, i think, more than 400 civilians in one go. newsreel: the bomb or missile went through a reinforced concrete roof, at least a yard thick. the iraqis say the attack happened at about four o'clock this morning. i saw them pulling out the bodies, and i, you know, isaw where they took the bodies. the morgue was full, there were bodies on the steps of this lecture theatre. untranslated shouting there were bodies in the corridor. we had to step over them to go filming. i personally find much more affecting on an emotional level — and i'm quite an emotional person, very emotional, my friends would probably say — i'm much more affected by people who are alive than people who are dead. you can do nothing for a dead person, but if you see a situation where someone is trying, you know, some poor kid whose parents are killed, or some parents whose kid is killed, or people who have had their house destroyed in front of them, or they've lost everything they've ever worked for. and we turn up there at that moment as reporters, news teams, and it's, you know, it's inherently a very intrusive process. let's just talk about that trip to the kibbutz. like you said, you were there with the idf and they gave you access to that story. yeah, we'd never have got in without the israeli army, without the israel defense forces. how can you be properly objective if you're reliant on the israeli military for... there's no way you could even be there without them? yeah. well, the choice is either you cooperate with the military, or you don't see it, you don't get there. it was a closed military area. there were roadblocks with combat soldiers and police armed to the teeth. and because they were still getting reports of hamas gunmen on the loose, they were extremely jumpy. there was no way you get through it, so you have to go with the military. but are you comfortable with that relationship? well, i think it's... you don't have a choice. i mean, the ideal thing, of course, would be to just bowl up there in your own car and... ..but sadly, the world doesn't work like that. did they censor your material? the only time that i agreed to anything like that — and you had to do it if you wanted to be part of it — was when i went into gaza with the israeli army. newsreel: they're moving in, as the war approaches a critical point. their colleagues already inside the strip have surrounded gaza city. they sent over quite a long document and i had to tick boxes and sign things. and, first of all, it was an indemnity, i had to say if i got killed, it wasn't theirfault and we would not sue them, the bbc, in any court of law in the world. and i also had to promise to do certain things. the main thing was about giving away their position. and with any military force i've ever been around, we never try and give away their positions, even if it's, you know, a bunch of guerrillas somewhere in thejungle, ora big organised standing army, because that's not the right thing to do. it's not ourjob to put people in danger. so i agreed not to show the location, which meant no big, wide shots for television, no specific identity about where we are. gunshots jeremy! 0k? yeah. they're still firing in this area. it's not... no. did you ever take anything out on the orders of a censor, or did you change a script? or is there anything that you would have said to the audience that you changed or didn't say because of censorship? we didn't get some of the kinds of shots we might have got. you know, you go to an area and it's completely destroyed, everything was destroyed, a classic thing you do, when you're out news—gathering is to go to a high building, get as close to the top as you could, get a great big wide shot to show scale and position. we'd agreed not to do that. but i will absolutely say we didn't take anything out at their request, because they didn't ask us to. and i didn't play them my commentary, they didn't know what it was, the script, and i wouldn't anyway have given them any kind of editorial right of veto over it. newsreel: we got out of the back of an armoured vehicle and walked into a wasteland. after a month of air strikes and more than a week of tanks and troops, every building i saw was damaged or destroyed. i absolutely would not try to cover things in a certain way in the hope of currying favour, or being asked again, being invited. you know, the bbc is not very popular in israel for a whole range of reasons and... i don't know. i mean, i was never tempted to try and get into anybody�*s good books by saying the kinds of things they wanted us to say. how dependent are you on your crew? i went over there with fred scott, who is a veteran cameraman, and an editor. kathy long. she's very experienced and brilliant at what she does. and then when she had to go back home for a while, so sam granville took over, who is also a very, very good producer. she works in the washington office and, as well as that, worked with a very good israeli freelance producer who, again, i've worked with a lot over the years, oren rosenfeld, and who's got lots of connections. so it is all about the team. i could not do anything on my own. you put an image on instagram, i think of a coffee pot, saying, "this is the friend of the foreign correspondent." those little human pleasantries, is that an important part of trying to stay sane on the road? sure. so i bring various things. i have an addiction to a certain kind of south african tea called rooibos. so i have many rooibos teabags and i drink a lot of that when we're editing. i have this plug—in espresso machine, which at the beginning of the day, you know, my day would start with the today programme and it wouldn't be too obscenely early, because it's two hours ahead over there, but i had to get across what was going on in the news. so i'm looking at all of this and i'm drinking my coffee, because i'm a bit of coffee addict. because i'm a bit of a coffee addict. so, yeah, you've got to have your few little comforts. music plays the bbc does not call hamas a terrorist organisation. no. though we have started saying in intros, using this formula, which is... hamas, a group which is designated as a terrorist organisation... ..by many western governments... ..including the uk. i think it's exactly the right position and i'm notjust saying that because i work for the bbc and i want to continue working for them. the word "terrorist", "terrorism" it's a very loaded word. "terrorism", it's a very loaded word. there aren't agreed definitions of who's a terrorist and who isn't a terrorist. and we do not want to get involved in this loaded discussion. it is far better to describe what people do. yes, we don't ban the word, if people want to use it themselves, or i've quoted people saying that they're terrorists... i think that's fine, doing it the way that we do. i think it works very, very effectively. and, you know, it's very important, in our business, not to take sides. and the thing at the moment out there is there are israelis and palestinians who are in so much... ..you know, psychic pain, existential pain. untranslated shouting untranslated reciting what they want, both sides, is sympathy, support. they want their victimhood to be very strongly recognised. they want us to take sides in their... ..one or the other. they're not very interested in what, at the bbc, we call impartial reporting, because sometimes impartial reporting contains things which are uncomfortable to hear. and people don't want... at a time like this, they want comfort, they want support, they want a cheerleader. explosion newsreel: the missile hit the hospital not long after dark. untranslated shouting you can hear the impact. i've got to ask you about the hospital on the 17th of october. oh, which...? oh, yeah, al—ahli, yeah, ok. the bbc was criticised heavily for its reporting of that event. tell us what happened that night and, you know, bluntly, where were you getting your information and do you regret anything that you said that night? so, it broke in, i suppose, mid—evening. and to answer your question, no, i don't regret one thing in my reporting, because i think... i think i was measured throughout, i didn't race tojudgment. but you said that building had been flattened. oh, yeah, well, i got that wrong, because i was looking at the pictures and what i could see was a square that appeared to be flaming on all sides. and there was a... ..you know, a sort of a void in the middle. and it was, i think it was a picture taken from a drone. and so, you know, we have to piece together what we see. and i thought, "well, that looks like the whole building's gone." and that was my conclusion from looking at the pictures and i was wrong on that. but i don't feel particularly bad about that, that was just the conclusion i drew. to be honest, if we were allowed in... ..to report it ourselves, if the israelis opened the border, as they have in other wars, and said, "all right, "guys, you want to go in? "it's up to you, you know, dangerous, you might get killed, "but if you want to do it, you can." but they don't want to do that because they want to control the media war, as i'm sure hamas do as well. so, because we're not in there, we have to rely on things people say. we have to try and weigh up what's said. we looked at the multiplicity of video that comes out and, using our eyes, try and work out how that... and if you're working under a lot of pressure, you know, you have to make judgments very, very fast, and sometimes you don't get them 100% right. you have a huge responsibility in these times, as the bbc, your listeners are dependent on you to get this information. and when you, for several hours, were broadcasting an israeli strike on a hospital, you were doing them a huge disservice. i have, on one or two occasions, gone a bit further than just simply reporting what's going on and i've commented on some of the criticisms that is being made of our reporting. for the record, i would... i think that colonel lerner, who i know well, is, on this occasion, mischaracterising what it was that we were saying on air. i think that in my position, with the word "editor" in myjob title, that's part of it, in a sense, and i'm proud of what we do, so i feel fine about defending it. in fact, i think it's very important that we defend it, because, you know, if we don't, who the hell is? we don't have a political agenda. we have a truth agenda at the bbc. and that's the difference between what we do and what some other people do. so, yeah, sometimes i'm very happy to stand up for it and i always will. newsreel: a car park outside the al—ahli hospital became a killing ground. the arguments about who's responsible come too late for the people whose lives ended here. even with their bodies taken away, the clean—up this morning also meant collecting small pieces of flesh. do we show too much or too little brutality, do you think? too little. why? well, because i think we have a tendency to try and spare people's feelings. and i think sometimes that creeps into sanitising the news. there's loads of things i would not show — you know, the effect of the way that high explosive can... ..blow a body to pieces. i wouldn't show that. but equally, at times, the world's horrible, and if we're in the news business, it's the truth business, you've got to show the truth. hang on, hang on. i think talking about things is very important. right. i've had my share of mental health problems over the years. just stop for a minute, fred, actually. particularly after a very good colleague, a friend of mine, was killed by the israelis when i was working with him in 2000. the israeli army has admitted it made a tragic mistake in killing a bbc driver in southern lebanon last month. i was very close to where it happened and they tried to kill me and the cameraman as well at the same time. newsreel: it destroyed our car and killed the driver, the bbc�*s abed takkoush. jeremy bowen: that's abed! bleep, he's dead! he must be dead. bleep. oh, my god! you can't go through things like that without some kind of consequences. i would say talking about things at the time, in real time, is important. i think someone who spends many years going to many tough stories around the world, if they say they haven't been affected by it, they're not telling the truth. i think it's made me the person i am, in many ways. you know, the professional experiences you have in yourjob influence the person you are and the person you become. i think, mentally, i'm in a very good place these days. i'm very positive. my glass is half—full, not half—empty. it's sometimes more than half—full. for me... ..i think that's related to the fact that i've had cancer and i don't have it any more — fingers crossed, touch wood. there is a reason why you're here to talk about bowel cancer. do you want to tell people? yeah, cos i was diagnosed with it last october. i had some funny pains in my legs and my back when i was in iraq last may. i think that if you're faced with a serious illness or a big problem, which for once isn't work—related, then, yeah, i mean, you've got a broader... ..perspective on life and the importance of trying to enjoy, you know, live in the moment. human beings always get caught up in, people say disparagingly, "oh, "first—world problems!" but actually people care about what they do and they want things to go well, get annoyed if they don't. but no, it's just for me, myself, itjust... ..rearranged a few things in my mind, in my head. when you come back, what do you do? well, i'd like to be at home now, but i've come to talk to you, actually! laughter and after that, i like to go home, relax, see my family, though my kids are away, and my partner... ..the dog — the dog is very happy to see me when i come back, every time! relax a bit. yeah. simple things. hmm. nothing massively complicated. no, not for me. hello there. good evening. it was another cold and frosty start this morning for many, including here in chatsworth in derbyshire, as captured by one of our weather watchers. it will turn briefly milder for many overnight tonight, but generally the theme as we head through this week is it will stay cold as we head into the start of december. more frosty nights, icy stretches, freezing fog patches and wintry showers, even possibly to the lower levels at times. but through the day today we have been dragging in some milder air across much of northern ireland, england and wales, along with showery outbreaks of rain that will continue to extend further northwards and eastward through the night, perhaps as far north as the central belt of scotland and then that rain will pull southwards as we head into the small hours of tomorrow morning. some wintry showers still piling into much of scotland, even perhaps to lower levels at times, still some airfrost here and possibly a touch of frost across northern areas of england as well as that rain clears southwards. but a lot milder, frost—free in northern ireland, england and wales for the most part. we could possibly see some snow over the tops of the pennines tomorrow morning, maybe even some of this rain falling as snow over the top of the peak district as well, but it will clear as rain further southwards and eastwards. it is blustery for these north sea facing coasts. there will be some showers here again, wintry at times, perhaps a scattering of showers further west, also some sunny spells, temperatures ranging between 7 and i2 celsius. still mild out towards the south—west of england. that low pressure system will pull away into the near continent as we head through monday night into tuesday, by which time we will be coming into that colder feeling air. watch out for some icy stretches, perhaps, on tuesday morning, where we will have seen the recent rain. there will be more showers just moving into aberdeenshire, i think wintry in nature again, even to the lower levels, some showers moving into the south—west of scotland, perhaps the far north—west of northern ireland as well, but elsewhere largely dry, plenty of added wind chill, a brisk northerly blowing and temperatures really struggling, particularly toward the north. as we head through tuesday into wednesday, we will see some freezing fog patches and then we are tracking this steep area of low pressure pushing in towards the south of england. as that rain bumps into the colder air, there is a good chance that we could see some snow to lower levels across the south of england as we head through thursday, but still a lot of uncertainty in the forecast. here is the outlook for some of our cities as we head through the week. it will be staying cold. goodbye. live from london. this is bbc news. 14 israeli hostages — and three foreign nationals — are now back in israel — as hamas says it's ready to extend the four day truce. among the 14 israelis released on sunday — nine children, including a four—year—old girl with dual us—israeli nationality. as part of the current truce deal — 39 palestinian detainees have now also been released by israel. i'm anna foster in tel aviv, with all the latest on day three of the four—day pause in fighting in gaza. also today — tributes to the former england player and manager, terry venables, who has died aged 80. welcome to bbc news. i'm lukwesa burak. hamas has said it's seeking to extend the four day truce with israel that has seen dozens of hostages released from gaza in return for palestinian prisoners. president biden has also said he's working to keep the pause in fighting going beyond monday. fourteen israelis and three foreign nationals who were being held hostage in gaza have been released during the day — the third day of the temporary truce with hamas. whilst 39 palestinian women and children were released from israeli prisons as a part of the hostage deal between israel and hamas. today's releases brings the total number of hostages released during the window to sa and the number of prisoners freed