Naqab, Israel – In 1992, Mohamed Abu Qwaider watched his mother's home bulldozed by the Israeli army in the unrecognised Bedouin village of az-Zarnug in the Naqab Desert. The then-10-year-old helped his family rebuild the house using stone and concrete, sturdier than the previous metal shack. A few days after completing their new home, the family got another demolition order stating the structure was built illegally and had to watch it flattened to the ground. "I was too young so I didn't know the regulations," Abu Qwaider, now 41, said. "All I knew is that we had the right – anybody has the right to upgrade their house and live peacefully," he told Al Jazeera.

Cross-border violence between Israel and Lebanon, the Saudi ambassador to Yemen meets the Houthis, and Iran's hijab crackdown. Here's your round up of our coverage, written by Abubakr Al-Shamahi, Al Jazeera Digital's Middle East and North Africa editor. First, there were the reports of a single rocket flying across the border from Lebanon into Israel. And then the news that more than 30 had been launched. The majority were intercepted by Israel, but the attack led to the most violent confrontation between Lebanon and Israel since 2006, a sign that the increasing violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories is threatening to spread across the region.

Netanyahu spoke to Fox News Digital following the release of his new memoir, "Bibi: My Story." Officials in Israel say Iran is responsible for a drone strike that hit an Israel-associated, Liberian-flagged oil tanker off the coast of Oman on Tuesday. The tanker, the Pacific Zircon, sustained minor damage to its hull with no injuries or spillage of the gas oil cargo, Israeli-controlled Eastern Pacific Shipping said Wednesday, and an Israeli official said Iran was responsible. Three maritime sources told Reuters that a drone was suspected to have attacked the tanker. An Israeli official said Iran was responsible for the attack by using a Shahed-136 drone, the type it has been supplying to Russia for use in its war against Ukraine.

Ariel Koren, a Google employee who became a face of worker protests against the company's contract with the Israeli government, announced her resignation yesterday. The Jewish marketing manager says she faced retaliation from management and some colleagues for expressing pro-Palestinian views within the company. In October she joined other Google and Amazon employees in public opposition to Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract for Google and Amazon to provide cloud computing to Israel, including its defense ministry. She says that Google later gave her an ultimatum: Agree to move to Brazil within 17 days or lose her job. Training documents leaked to the Intercept show Project Nimbus providing Israel with access to Google's cloud AI services, including face and expression detection, video analysis, and sentiment analysis.

Training materials reviewed by The Intercept confirm that Google is offering advanced artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities to the Israeli government through its controversial "Project Nimbus" contract. The Israeli Finance Ministry announced the contract in April 2021 for a $1.2 billion cloud computing system jointly built by Google and Amazon. "The project is intended to provide the government, the defense establishment and others with an all-encompassing cloud solution," the ministry said in its announcement. Google engineers have spent the time since worrying whether their efforts would inadvertently bolster the ongoing Israeli military occupation of Palestine. In 2021, both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International formally accused Israel of committing crimes against humanity by maintaining an apartheid system against Palestinians.

Washington, DC – Despite numerous eyewitness testimonies, investigations by media outlets and rights groups, and a Palestinian probe all determining that Israeli forces fatally shot journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, the United States has not condemned Israel for the killing. Instead, since the veteran Al Jazeera reporter was killed on May 11 in the occupied West Bank, top US officials have insisted that Israel can and should conduct an investigation. But in this US response, many advocates see a familiar script that President Joe Biden's administration has employed on more than one occasion to address Israeli violations: raise concerns, call for more information, and then move on like they never happened. "It's pretty damn thick file of abuses and murders and violations without any end or acceptable outcome as to the investigation of these crimes," Khalil Jahshan, executive director of the Arab Center Washington DC, a think tank, told Al Jazeera. "So that is continuing unfortunately, and governments on purpose bet on the short attention span of the public."

It has been more than five months since the United States sanctioned the Israeli spyware company NSO Group, and stories about the use and abuse of its Pegasus product continue to break. As various organisations try to push for further measures against Israel for supplying human rights abusers with this tool to further their violations, it is important to remember that Israeli military and surveillance technology is first developed for and tested on Palestinians, before being exported. Unsurprisingly, Pegasus has already been found on the phones of six Palestinian human rights activists, one of whom is now suing NSO in France. Another target happened to be my friend and colleague whose field of work is directly connected to the relationship between Palestine and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. The thought that the Israelis have had full access to our personal conversations and exchanges in group chats has been quite disturbing, to say the least. However, this is not the first time Israel has violated my privacy and it won't be the last.

The Knesset has passed legislation that will allow companies to pilot autonomous shared transportation, like taxis, with passengers in the vehicle but without a safety driver on Israeli roads. The bill, proposed by the Ministry of Transportation and Road Safety, passed in second and third readings in the plenum and paves the way for Mobileye, Intel's autonomous driving subsidiary, to move ahead with plans to roll out "robo-taxis" and ride-hailing services in Tel Aviv this year. Russian company Yandex has also been testing self-driving cars in Israel since late 2018, as global carmakers like Ford, Toyota, and Hyundai invest in models with self-driving systems. The Israeli legislation allows companies and vehicle operators to obtain special licenses from the Ministry of Transportation and to conduct trials with autonomous cars "including for the purpose of transporting paying passengers" and "where an independent driving system replaces the driver," according to the announcement. This bill offers regulation on issues like insurance and different permits and establishes supervisory bodies as well as an advisory committee with representatives from relevant stakeholders.

That afternoon, he and his wife would leave their vacation home on the Caspian Sea and drive to their country house in Absard, a bucolic town east of Tehran, where they planned to spend the weekend. Iran's intelligence service had warned him of a possible assassination plot, but the scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, had brushed it off. Convinced that Mr. Fakhrizadeh was leading Iran's efforts to build a nuclear bomb, Israel had wanted to kill him for at least 14 years. But there had been so many threats and plots that he no longer paid them much attention. Despite his prominent position in Iran's military establishment, Mr. Fakhrizadeh wanted to live a normal life. And, disregarding the advice of his security team, he often drove his own car to Absard instead of having bodyguards drive him in an armored vehicle. It was a serious breach of security protocol, but he insisted. So shortly after noon on Friday, Nov. 27, he slipped behind the wheel of his black Nissan Teana sedan, his wife in the passenger seat beside him, and hit the road. Since 2004, when the Israeli government ordered its foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, the agency had been carrying out a campaign of sabotage and cyberattacks on Iran's nuclear fuel enrichment facilities.

Production of news content is growing at an astonishing rate. To help manage and monitor the sheer amount of text, there is an increasing need to develop efficient methods that can provide insights into emerging content areas, and stratify unstructured corpora of text into `topics' that stem intrinsically from content similarity. Here we present an unsupervised framework that brings together powerful vector embeddings from natural language processing with tools from multiscale graph partitioning that can reveal natural partitions at different resolutions without making a priori assumptions about the number of clusters in the corpus. We show the advantages of graph-based clustering through end-to-end comparisons with other popular clustering and topic modelling methods, and also evaluate different text vector embeddings, from classic Bag-of-Words to Doc2Vec to the recent transformers based model Bert. This comparative work is showcased through an analysis of a corpus of US news coverage during the presidential election year of 2016.