and about the pros and cons of reporting while embedded with the israeli defence force. first, the big event of the week in westminster — wednesday's autumn statement from the chancellor was preceded, as is usual on these occasions, by an appearance on bbc one on sunday morning. but as has also become usual, jeremy hunt didn't give much away to laura kuenssberg about the announcements he planned to make a few days later. you don't want to do anything that could fuel. . .see inflation taking off again. translate that, it means no income tax cuts this week. well, you'll have to wait. i know you're very experienced, laura. you know, i'm not going to give you any indication of my actual measures. you could break tradition, use the lower figure, which would mean less money in the pockets of some of the most vulnerable people in this country. you can clear that up right now. are you going to follow convention or not? laura, you know that i'm not

going to say this morning what i'm going to announce to parliament on wednesday. why change inheritance tax when you have the lower paid struggling to pay their bills? this isn't asking you to confirm it. it's a question of principle. why would you do that when people are having such a hard time? i'm sorry to say that i'm not going to be drawn on any individual tax. i think you can read the papers this morning and you can see that i'm going to abolish every single tax. andy gilding was watching that interview with the chancellor and posed this question... we asked bbc news for an answer to that and they told us...

afterjeremy hunt had actually made his speech on wednesday, bbc cameras, along with those of other media, were positioned in their traditional spot for a big day at westminster on college green, just outside the houses of parliament in central london. political correspondent ione wells joined ben thompson there on wednesday afternoon to provide some analysis of what had been announced. the government will be hoping the headline is that they've given us a tax cut. a lot of criticism that it's not a tax cut. shouting. this is simply a reduction, but we're still paying more tax overall. that's right. shouting: get tories out!

i think certainly the hope from the government is that people will feel better off, and they've done that for a number of sort of measures. one of which, of course, is this cut to the main rate to national insurance from 12% to 10%. it's, of course, very much not the first time we've featured noisy protesters drowning out broadcasts at westminster. and darren robertson was the latest viewer to object. and paul bowden agreed. friday's temporary cease fire in the middle east provided the first glimpse of hope in a conflict that's been running for seven weeks.

for much of that time, the bbc�*s international editor jeremy bowen has been reporting from israel, having travelled there directly from another war zone, ukraine, just hours after the rocket attack from gaza. it feels as if this crisis is going up a gear. extreme pressure on civilians in gaza. tension here in jerusalem. no one knows where this is going, but it's certain this is a dangerous moment, the worst middle east crisis in a generation. we don't have much detail about what the israelis are doing inside gaza. they are working very hard to control the information battlefield, which is a big part of modern war. we went into gaza with the israeli army on condition we didn't reveal their positions. video shot after they took us through the gap in the fence into gaza, though not this script, had to be submitted to their military censors. jeremy bowen joins us now. jeremy, thank you so much

for coming on newswatch. you talk very clearly about there were terms on your being embedded with the israeli defence force. can i ask, have they confiscated or blocked any of your filming while you while you were there? no, not at all. they had certain rules, not showing the faces of all but a few nominated officers, not showing positions, not showing screens inside their rather advanced military vehicles. and so we...when the cameraman, fred scott, was filming, he was aware of those rules and sort of worked around them. and then when we had put together the the edit, the completed edit, the producerfilmed it on her phone and sent it via whatsapp — without the commentary t— o the idf who had a look at it and about five or ten minutes later and said, we don't have a problem with that. so, yeah, it was important

to mention that we had had to abide by israeli censorship regulations, but they weren't particularly onerous, i'd say. because some people might be wondering whether the bbc should be agreeing to such terms at all. well, it was a choice. you know, we can either go in there and take a look at what was going on and sign the paper and agree to their rules, or we could stay out. and i felt that on balance, it was worth doing that. it gave me certainly a really eye opening insight onto the amount of damage in northern gaza. not one building was left intact. i mean, the whole place had been turned into a wasteland, and i wouldn't have known that if we hadn't gone in. i mean, for me, that was the big takeaway of the whole thing.

and, you know, it's notjust the israelis who do this. in other countries, i've been in iraq under saddam hussein, we've had to submit to censorship. so it's not, you know, totally unheard of, but i think the important thing is to be transparent about the rules that we agree to. and sometimes when you are reporting in a war or an authoritarian society like iraq in the 1990s, you sort of have to pay a bit of a price to lift the curtain and see what's underneath it. and that's what we had to do with gaza, because the whole area is under israeli military control. and as i said in one of those clips you played, they are working very hard to control the information battlefield. in a way, jeremy, you've led me onto my next question, which is there have been disputed incidents, notably who was responsible for the bombing of a hospital at the start of the war. how are you going about verifying different competing claims from either side? well, to be honest, it's very difficult when you don't get full access to the place. i mean, as a reporter who's been going to conflicts for,

god, more than 30 years, more, i think i've done more than quite a bit over 20 wars. i've learned that the the best way to verify anything is to be there yourself, to use your own eyes, to see in your own ears, to hear. now, when you can't do that, then you have to... ..try other things, which is looking at video that comes out, trying to talk to eyewitnesses and even even if not direct on the phone or via these days via text. whatsapp. whatsapp does an awful lot of business in reporting these days. and so it's not totally satisfactory. and sometimes that's why in the heat of the moment, things aren't quite accurate or sometimes mistakes are made and they're not accurate at all. so then the important thing is to recognise when you've gone wrong and hold your hands up. yeah. now the bbc does have a presence in gaza, but you've been operating, as we've been discussing, from the israeli side.

does it feel like a problem that you are only seeing one side of the war? yeah, i think it's a great big problem. i mean, i'd like to be able to move around freely. i'd like to be able to go in and out. to to try to get to the places and report from there myself. but it can't be done because the israelis have completely sealed the place off. and from a journalistic point of view, if you weren't there on october the seventh, which in effect means if you weren't part of the resident palestinian press corps that that lives there and works there, then there's no access. and the only access that there has been has been on these trips organised by the israeli army for which you have to sign up to certain rules. jeremy, newswatch viewers have been expressing quite a lot of concern for the last few weeks that ukraine has been pushed out of the news by the reporting from gaza. and, of course, you were there in ukraine immediately before. i wonder if you share that concern. well, i think the middle east story has been huge. so you can understand why in the, you know, this period of, what, it's about six weeks now that it has

absolutely dominated all world news coverage. i mean, the problem is that there's never enough bandwidth in terms of, i think, mental bandwidth among journalists and air time as well. i think it's been understandable that ukraine has taken a back—seat in terms of news coverage in the last five, six weeks. but clearly, if that continued, it wouldn't be a good thing because people are being killed, they're bashing away at each other. it's a horrendous situation. but i think it will be back in the news and on news programmes. fear not, it's bound to be. jeremy bowen, thank you so much for coming on newswatch. thank you for all your comments this week. if you want to share your opinions about what you see or hear on bbc news, on tv, radio, online and social media email newswatch at bbc.co.uk or you can find us on x —

formerly known as twitter — at newswatchbbc. you can call us on 0370106676. and do you have a look at previous interviews on our website, bbc.co.uk/ newswatch. do get in touch, particularly if you might be interested injoining in a discussion. we're planning for our last programme of the year in three weeks�* time. if you've got thoughts on how the bbc has covered the news this year, i would like to appear on the newswatch sofa to express them. we'd love to hear from you, but for now, goodbye. this is bbc news. we will have the headlines for you at the top of the hour just after this headlines for you at the top of the hourjust after this programme.

stockholm, capital of sweden, and a city of islands, 14 of them to be precise, which makes water transport a big thing around these parts. so today i've decided to take the ferry. but this is no ordinary ferry because this ferry... ..can fly. this is the candela p—12, the prototype of a ferry which should go into service

injuly 202a. and at its cruising speed of 25 knots, narrow wings called hydrofoils, provide huge amounts of lift. in the same way that aircraft wings can get a plane off the ground, these wings can raise the whole hull above the surface. and because hardly any of the boat is having to push through the water, it doesn't need as powerful a motor. and that means there's something else that's very special about this craft. it's electric. these small propellers are all that are needed to get the ferry up to speed and its onboard batteries give it a range of 50 nautical miles, all of which promises to make waterborne transport a whole lot cleaner and a whole lot greener. normal boats consume an awful lot of fuel and they are extremely inefficient, compared to land—based transport. and this is because the boat

is trying to push its way through the water, there's a lot of resistance, isn't there? exactly. a lot of friction in the water. you can use batteries on ferries if they run very slowly. but whenever you want to go a bit faster, a bit longer distances, then it sort of, the whole thing collapse because you could of course put in more batteries, but at the end you put in so much batteries that the boat will sink. so you have sort of a physical limit here that you can't get around. gustav says that one hour of charging will allow this ferry to run for three hours, meaning it could service commuters during the morning rush on one charge and be ready for the afternoon peak after being recharged at lunchtime. there's another advantage to being almost entirely out of the water, too. it doesn't bounce about on the waves. and i got to say, it is pretty steady. i mean, i can't tell that i'm out of the water, but i can tell i'm not feeling all the waves that i can see around. and, actually, our camera boat is using the same hydrofoil technology,

so you can see that it's also out of the water, which means he gets pretty much steady shots of us too. i mean, look at martin, he's having the time of his life out there. but whereas the c—8 speed boat is built for pleasure, leisure, and basically showing off, the p—12 ferry is being pitched as a way to make waterborne public transport competitive again, both in fuel costs and in environmental costs too — because as well as not feeling the waves, it doesn't make them either. and that's what this boat is having to do. it's having to adjust its position hundreds of times a second to keep it perfectly balanced. you couldn't do that manually. so this thing is covered in sensors that monitor exactly what its orientation is. and then the computers are doing that compensation. and they do that by adjusting the angle of the wings in the water, again hundreds of times a second,

to keep it perfectly balanced.