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Israeli attack kills two children in southern Gaza despite ceasefire

Al Jazeera

Can Pakistan join the Gaza stabilisation force? Two Palestinian children have been killed in an Israeli drone attack on the town of Bani Suheila, east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, according to medics. Witnesses told Al Jazeera that drones dropped a bomb on a group of civilians near al-Farabi School on Saturday morning, killing two brothers, Juma and Fadi Tamer Abu Assi. The area targeted by the attack lies beyond the so-called Yellow Line marking the Israeli forces' redeployment boundary agreed under the ceasefire agreement, which took effect on October 10, sources said. Earlier on Saturday, the Israeli military launched ground, naval, and air attacks on several parts of Gaza.


Meet the Palestinian Teens Trying to Win Robotics Gold

WIRED

Next week, five teens from Palestine will head to Panama to compete in one of the world's largest youth robotics competitions. To win--and then teach STEM to their peers displaced by the Israel-Hamas war. For the entirety of the past year, as the teenage roboticists of Team Palestine have been working on their latest project, their homeland has been engulfed in Israel's war with Hamas . Earlier this month, that all changed. With a fragile ceasefire in place, Israeli forces began to pull back from parts of Gaza, and the teens put the final touches on the project they hope will bring them victory: a robot that can maneuver through a series of simulated challenges based on the effects of climate change.


HebID: Detecting Social Identities in Hebrew-language Political Text

Mor-Lan, Guy, Rivlin-Angert, Naama, Kaplan, Yael R., Sheafer, Tamir, Shenhav, Shaul R.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Political language is deeply intertwined with social identities. While social identities are often shaped by specific cultural contexts and expressed through particular uses of language, existing datasets for group and identity detection are predominantly English-centric, single-label and focus on coarse identity categories. We introduce HebID, the first multilabel Hebrew corpus for social identity detection: 5,536 sentences from Israeli politicians' Facebook posts (Dec 2018-Apr 2021), manually annotated for twelve nuanced social identities (e.g. Rightist, Ultra-Orthodox, Socially-oriented) grounded by survey data. We benchmark multilabel and single-label encoders alongside 2B-9B-parameter generative LLMs, finding that Hebrew-tuned LLMs provide the best results (macro-$F_1$ = 0.74). We apply our classifier to politicians' Facebook posts and parliamentary speeches, evaluating differences in popularity, temporal trends, clustering patterns, and gender-related variations in identity expression. We utilize identity choices from a national public survey, enabling a comparison between identities portrayed in elite discourse and the public's identity priorities. HebID provides a comprehensive foundation for studying social identities in Hebrew and can serve as a model for similar research in other non-English political contexts.


Italy, Spain send navy ships to protect Gaza flotilla after drone attacks

Al Jazeera

Can Israel survive economic isolation? Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has said his country's navy will join Italy in sending warships to protect the Global Sumud Flotilla, which has come under drone attack in international waters en route to deliver aid to Gaza. Speaking to reporters in New York on Wednesday, where he is attending the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), Sanchez said international law must be respected and the citizens of 45 nations participating in the aid mission had every right to sail in the Mediterranean unharmed. "Tomorrow we will dispatch a naval vessel from Cartagena with all necessary resources in case it is necessary to assist the flotilla and carry out a rescue operation." On Wednesday night, activists described a wave of attacks by Israeli drones and other aircraft which targeted vessels in the small fleet in what flotilla organisers described as "an alarmingly dangerous escalation".


Italy condemns 'drone attack' on Gaza aid flotilla and deploys frigate

BBC News

Italy condemns'drone attack' on Gaza aid flotilla and deploys frigate Italy's defence minister has condemned what he said was an overnight drone attack by unidentified perpetrators on a flotilla trying to breach Israel's naval blockade of Gaza to deliver aid. Guido Crosetto also said he had ordered an Italian Navy frigate to head towards the 52 boats in the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF), which are mostly off the coast of Crete, to assist Italian citizens on board. The GSF said several boats reported explosions and unidentified objects being dropped, as well as drones overhead and communications jamming. It accused Israel of a dangerous escalation. Israel's government has not commented.


Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, UN commission of inquiry says

BBC News

A United Nations commission of inquiry says Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. A new report says there are reasonable grounds to conclude that four of the five genocidal acts defined under international law have been carried out since the start of the war with Hamas in 2023: killing members of a group, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to destroy the group, and preventing births. It cites statements by Israeli leaders, and the pattern of conduct by Israeli forces, as evidence of genocidal intent. Israel's foreign ministry said it categorically rejected the report, denouncing it as distorted and false. A spokesperson accused the three experts on the commission of serving as Hamas proxies and relying entirely on Hamas falsehoods, laundered and repeated by others that had already been thoroughly debunked.


Right-Wing Influencers Are Turning to Foreign Affairs

WIRED

Conservative creators are increasingly focusing on foreign policy. Wearing combat helmets and protective vests, some of the US's most popular right-wing creators toured what they called an aid distribution hub in Gaza late last month--a trip carefully funded by Israel's foreign ministry. By way of the nonprofit Israel365, the Israeli government funneled at least $70,000 to 15 MAGA creators to bring them to Gaza's humanitarian sites, the Western Wall, and the Golan Heights, among other areas. "It sits here to spoil and be stolen," Xaviaer DuRousseau captioned a photo of himself standing in front of what he claimed was food aid on X last month . "How is that Israel's fault?"


Suspected Palestinian gunmen kill six people in East Jerusalem

Al Jazeera

Six people were killed in a shooting attack by suspected Palestinian gunmen at a bus stop in occupied East Jerusalem. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the site, as Palestinian groups praised the attack without claiming responsibility. Israel wants to'destroy Gaza City, not occupy it'


Freedom Flotilla accuses Israel of alleged drone attack on Gaza aid ship

Al Jazeera

"This is a war crime." A representative of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition accused "Israel or one of its allies" of conducting what the group says was a drone attack on its ship carrying aid to Gaza. The Israeli government has not responded to the allegations.


Israeli drone attack kills 1 in southern Lebanon despite ceasefire deal

Al Jazeera

At least one person has been killed in an Israeli drone attack on a vehicle in southern Lebanon, just one day after Israeli troops withdrew from most of the border area. Lebanon's state-run National News Agency (NNA) reported that "an enemy drone struck a vehicle… in the town of Aita al-Shaab" on Wednesday. Sanad, Al Jazeera's fact-checking agency, identified the victim as Yusuf Mohammed Sorour, the son of the mayor of the town, targeted while he was sitting in his car in front of his home. NNA had earlier reported that in a separate attack, one person was wounded in the Wazzani region after Israeli forces opened fire "while residents were inspecting" restaurants and cafes in the area. The NNA also reported Israeli forces shot towards homes near the town of Shebaa.