Jabalia
Israeli soldiers and settlers kill 11 Palestinians across Gaza, West Bank
'This is an apartheid regime' Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed at least 11 Palestinians across Gaza and the occupied West Bank, according to Palestinian officials and local media, in the latest bloodshed to occur during a "ceasefire" announced in October. In Gaza, at least seven Palestinians were killed in a series of Israeli attacks, including a child who died from injuries sustained days earlier, while 21 were reported on Tuesday to have been injured over a 24-hour period. Another Palestinian man was later killed on Tuesday in an Israeli drone attack near the Sheikh Nasser neighbourhood, east of Khan Younis. In northern Gaza, a Palestinian woman was killed when Israeli naval forces shelled tents sheltering displaced families northwest of Beit Lahiya. Verified video obtained by Al Jazeera showed the body of Abdullah Dawas, a child wrapped in white cloth for burial, after he succumbed to injuries 10 days after being shot in the head near al-Fakhoura clinic in northern Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp.
Israel's exploding robots still terrorise Gaza neighbourhoods
Will Hamas agree to hand over its weapons? Has another Nakba been averted? 'When the bombs in Gaza stop, the true pain starts' The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas brought thousands of people back to their homes in Gaza City, to assess the damage, see what can be salvaged, and start to rebuild. In Jabalia, Sheikh Radwan, Abu Iskandar and beyond, people returned to flattened neighbourhoods, and to the knowledge that, still among the rubble, some of the explosive robots that had caused it sat, silent and undetonated. The "robots" had become a common fear in northern Gaza since the Israeli army first used them on Jabalia refugee camp in May 2024.
Israeli strikes kill at least 42 across Gaza as UN eyes ceasefire vote
Israeli attacks have killed at least 42 people across Gaza since dawn, medical sources told Al Jazeera, as the United Nations General Assembly prepares for a vote urging an unconditional ceasefire in the besieged enclave. Sources told Al Jazeera that at least 26 of the people killed on Thursday died in Israeli drone attacks while waiting for food and basic supplies being distributed by the controversial United States and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Gaza civil defence official Mohammed el-Mougher told AFP news agency that al-Awda Hospital received at least 10 bodies and about 200 others who were wounded "after Israeli drones dropped multiple bombs on gatherings of civilians near an aid distribution point around the Netzarim checkpoint in central Gaza". El-Mougher said that Gaza City's al-Shifa Hospital also received six bodies after Israeli attacks on aid queues near Netzarim and in the as-Sudaniya area in northwestern Gaza. Since the GHF began its operation in Gaza in late May, dozens of Palestinians have been killed while trying to reach the aid distribution points, according to Gaza's civil defence agency.
Israel retrofitting DJI commercial drones to bomb and surveil Gaza
The Israeli military has been altering commercial drones to carry bombs and surveil people in Gaza, an investigation by Al Jazeera's Sanad verification agency has found. According to Sanad, drones manufactured by the Chinese tech giant DJI have been used to attack hospitals and civilian shelters and to surveil Palestinian prisoners being forced to act as human shields for heavily armoured Israeli soldiers. This is not the first time DJI drones have been modified and used by armies. There were similar reports about both sides of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022. At the time, DJI suspended all sales to both countries and introduced software modifications that restricted the areas where its drones could be used and how high they could fly.
Gaza appeals for help as Israeli army attacks key hospitals
The Israeli military is targeting three major hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip as doctors and authorities in the enclave request immediate intervention by the international community. On Tuesday, weeklong Israeli attacks intensified on the besieged Kamal Adwan Hospital and Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya, and the al-Awda Hospital located east of the Jabalia refugee camp. Two explosive-laden unmanned robotic vehicles planted earlier by the Israeli military blew up in the vicinity of Kamal Adwan in the early hours of Tuesday, wounding approximately 20 patients and medical staff, hospital director Hussam Abu Safia told Al Jazeera. This was the first time Israeli forces used the explosives outside Kamal Adwan, but there have been similar reports of them being used to detonate buildings in northern Gaza. Reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, Al Jazeera's Hani Mahmoud said, "An eyewitness told us that much of the area around the hospital has been cleared from buildings, the infrastructure destroyed and severely damaged, impeding movement in and out of the hospital."
Quantifying Extreme Opinions on Reddit Amidst the 2023 Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Guerra, Alessio, Lepre, Marcello, Karakus, Oktay
This study investigates the dynamics of extreme opinions on social media during the 2023 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, utilising a comprehensive dataset of over 450,000 posts from four Reddit subreddits (r/Palestine, r/Judaism, r/IsraelPalestine, and r/worldnews). A lexicon-based, unsupervised methodology was developed to measure "extreme opinions" by considering factors such as anger, polarity, and subjectivity. The analysis identifies significant peaks in extremism scores that correspond to pivotal real-life events, such as the IDF's bombings of Al Quds Hospital and the Jabalia Refugee Camp, and the end of a ceasefire following a terrorist attack. Additionally, this study explores the distribution and correlation of these scores across different subreddits and over time, providing insights into the propagation of polarised sentiments in response to conflict events. By examining the quantitative effects of each score on extremism and analysing word cloud similarities through Jaccard indices, the research offers a nuanced understanding of the factors driving extreme online opinions. This approach underscores the potential of social media analytics in capturing the complex interplay between real-world events and online discourse, while also highlighting the limitations and challenges of measuring extremism in social media contexts.
Israeli strikes on Gaza flour distribution line, residential area kill 22
At least 22 Palestinians, including women and children, have been killed after Israel launched air and drone attacks across Gaza, while a power outage threatens the lives of more than 100 patients at a hospital in the besieged territory's north. In the latest Israeli attack in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza on Monday morning, three people were targeted with a missile launched from a drone, instantly killing them, sources told Al Jazeera. "[The victims] were trying to leave their home in search of food in the vicinity of their neighbourhood when they were targeted by a drone," said Al Jazeera's Hani Mahmoud, reporting from central Deir el-Balah in Gaza. "They were killed right away. Their bodies are still in the street and nobody has the ability to get to the bombed site and remove the bodies from the street."
The FIGNEWS Shared Task on News Media Narratives
Zaghouani, Wajdi, Jarrar, Mustafa, Habash, Nizar, Bouamor, Houda, Zitouni, Imed, Diab, Mona, El-Beltagy, Samhaa R., AbuOdeh, Muhammed
We present an overview of the FIGNEWS shared task, organized as part of the ArabicNLP 2024 conference co-located with ACL 2024. The shared task addresses bias and propaganda annotation in multilingual news posts. We focus on the early days of the Israel War on Gaza as a case study. The task aims to foster collaboration in developing annotation guidelines for subjective tasks by creating frameworks for analyzing diverse narratives highlighting potential bias and propaganda. In a spirit of fostering and encouraging diversity, we address the problem from a multilingual perspective, namely within five languages: English, French, Arabic, Hebrew, and Hindi. A total of 17 teams participated in two annotation subtasks: bias (16 teams) and propaganda (6 teams). The teams competed in four evaluation tracks: guidelines development, annotation quality, annotation quantity, and consistency. Collectively, the teams produced 129,800 data points. Key findings and implications for the field are discussed.
At least 11 Palestinians killed after Israel hits tent camp in Rafah
Israeli forces have hit a tent in Rafah housing displaced Palestinians, killing at least 11 people, according to local authorities, hours after 17 people were killed in attacks elsewhere in the Gaza Strip. At least 50 people were injured in Saturday's drone attack, which took place next to the entrance of the Al-Helal Al-Emirati Maternity Hospital in Tal as-Sultan, Rafah City, Gaza's Ministry of Health said in a statement. The ministry said Abdel Fattah Abu Marhi, the head of the paramedic unit at the hospital, was killed, and that children were among the injured. "A tent filled with displaced evacuees in the area, including an entire family, has been directly hit by a drone strike," said Al Jazeera's Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Rafah. He said eight of the bodies had been taken to the Kuwait Hospital "where the scene is very chaotic" as the small facility is unprepared for the large number of injuries arriving there.
New facial recognition technology caught 'imposter' using someone else's passport, US officials say
A new facial recognition technology caught a man trying to enter the US using a passport belonging to someone else, US officials say. Officials with the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Office of Field Operations (OFO) intercepted a 26-year-old man, the agencies referred to as an "imposter", who reportedly attempted to use a French passport belonging to someone else, at Washington's Dulles International Airport. The man was travelling to the US from Brazil. "The officer utilised CBP's new facial comparison biometric technology which confirmed the man was not a match to the passport he presented," the CBP press release read. It added: "A search revealed the man's authentic Republic of Congo identification card concealed in his shoe."