Alex Ritson

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Alex Ritson, and at 15 hours GMT on Tuesday 12th May, these are our main stories.

Israel's parliament passes a new law that permits the death penalty for those found guilty of taking part in the October 7th attacks.

The EU approves fresh sanctions against Israeli settlers accused of supporting the extremist and violent colonisation of the West Bank.

Britain's embattled Prime Minister tells his Cabinet he's going nowhere as he faces growing calls to resign.

Also in this podcast, we speak to our reporter in the Afghan capital, Kabul, who tells us about the deadliest single attack on the country in decades.

So we can look at these patterns to see if someone is older or younger than the number of birthdays they've had.

And we found that people who engage more in the arts have got this younger epigenetic age.

New research suggests participating in artistic endeavours could slow the ageing process.

On 7 October 2023, Hamas-led fighters killed more than 1,200 people in southern Israel.

Another 251 were kidnapped.

Now Israel's parliament has passed a new law to impose the death penalty and conduct public trials for those involved in the attacks and kidnappings.

Human rights groups have criticised the legislation, saying the trials will not be fair, and some confessions have been extracted through torture, which Israel denies.

I heard more from Yoland Nel in Jerusalem.

This law passed with 93 votes to zero, an unusual level of cross-party support in the 120-seat Israeli parliament, the Knesset.

And what it basically does is it's empowering a panel of judges using both civil and military law to hand down the death penalty by a majority vote.

And key parts of these hearings, expected to take place or begin in about a year's time, they're going to be shown on a live stream in a specially set-up Jerusalem courtroom.

So all of that has led to comparisons with Israel's trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, which was shown on television back in 1961.

He was hanged in 1962, the last person to be executed, actually the only person to be executed after conviction by an Israeli civil court, although the death penalty has remained on Israel's statute books.