cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/40321940

By Ahmed Dremly in Gaza City, occupied Palestine
14 December 2025 12:47 GMT

Since winter began, Saber has lived in constant fear. Their fragile tent offered little protection from rain or wind, and he knew it could collapse at any moment.

Two weeks earlier, rainwater had already flooded the tent, reaching nearly 30cm. His daughters fell ill with colds that lasted for days. Desperate to prevent it from happening again, Saber borrowed money from one of his relatives to buy a plastic tarpaulin and reinforced the tent with wooden poles.

But when the latest storm hit Gaza a few days ago, his efforts proved useless.

“I spent the first night of the rain holding the tent up with my own hands as rain poured in from every direction,” Saber told Middle East Eye.

“It felt like I had done nothing at all. The tent collapsed on us in the first hours of the rain.”

Peter Link

2025-12-14 17:03:30

Rain and rubble: Gaza families face a double threat in makeshift homes

By Ahmed Dremly in Gaza City, occupied Palestine
14 December 2025 12:47 GMT

Since winter began, Saber has lived in constant fear. Their fragile tent offered little protection from rain or wind, and he knew it could collapse at any moment.

Two weeks earlier, rainwater had already flooded the tent, reaching nearly 30cm. His daughters fell ill with colds that lasted for days. Desperate to prevent it from happening again, Saber borrowed money from one of his relatives to buy a plastic tarpaulin and reinforced the tent with wooden poles.

But when the latest storm hit Gaza a few days ago, his efforts proved useless.

“I spent the first night of the rain holding the tent up with my own hands as rain poured in from every direction,” Saber told Middle East Eye.

“It felt like I had done nothing at all. The tent collapsed on us in the first hours of the rain.”

Rain and rubble: Gaza families face a double threat in makeshift homes

For the past several days, Saber Dawas and his wife have been struggling to keep their seven daughters warm and dry after heavy rain and strong winds destroyed their tent in Gaza.

^{Ahmed Dremly (Middle East Eye)}

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/40321940

By Ahmed Dremly in Gaza City, occupied Palestine
14 December 2025 12:47 GMT

Since winter began, Saber has lived in constant fear. Their fragile tent offered little protection from rain or wind, and he knew it could collapse at any moment.

Two weeks earlier, rainwater had already flooded the tent, reaching nearly 30cm. His daughters fell ill with colds that lasted for days. Desperate to prevent it from happening again, Saber borrowed money from one of his relatives to buy a plastic tarpaulin and reinforced the tent with wooden poles.

But when the latest storm hit Gaza a few days ago, his efforts proved useless.

“I spent the first night of the rain holding the tent up with my own hands as rain poured in from every direction,” Saber told Middle East Eye.

“It felt like I had done nothing at all. The tent collapsed on us in the first hours of the rain.”

Peter Link

2025-12-14 17:03:30

Rain and rubble: Gaza families face a double threat in makeshift homes

By Ahmed Dremly in Gaza City, occupied Palestine
14 December 2025 12:47 GMT

Since winter began, Saber has lived in constant fear. Their fragile tent offered little protection from rain or wind, and he knew it could collapse at any moment.

Two weeks earlier, rainwater had already flooded the tent, reaching nearly 30cm. His daughters fell ill with colds that lasted for days. Desperate to prevent it from happening again, Saber borrowed money from one of his relatives to buy a plastic tarpaulin and reinforced the tent with wooden poles.

But when the latest storm hit Gaza a few days ago, his efforts proved useless.

“I spent the first night of the rain holding the tent up with my own hands as rain poured in from every direction,” Saber told Middle East Eye.

“It felt like I had done nothing at all. The tent collapsed on us in the first hours of the rain.”

Rain and rubble: Gaza families face a double threat in makeshift homes

For the past several days, Saber Dawas and his wife have been struggling to keep their seven daughters warm and dry after heavy rain and strong winds destroyed their tent in Gaza.

^{Ahmed Dremly (Middle East Eye)}

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/40321023

Last Wednesday, Palestinian teenager Owais Hammam was on a walk near his home in the West Bank village of Kharbatha Bani Harith, when he was ambushed by a group of Israeli settlers, dragged to a hilltop outpost, and beaten unconscious. From his hospital bed in Ramallah, Hammam spoke to photojournalist Faiz Abu Rmeleh, recounting how both settlers and Israeli soldiers took part in his brutal torture.

from +972’s Sunday Recap
+972 Magazine [published in Israel]
Dec 14, 2025

Also:
* Israel preparing largest ever act of ‘archeological cleansing’ in West Bank
* Israel’s Gaza proxy strategy is collapsing
* After Israel-Hamas prisoner deal, ‘48 Palestinians ask when their turn will come
* Netanyahu’s pardon request is a lens into Israel’s political psyche
* The GOP fed the antisemitism monster. Now it’s turning on its masters

Peter Link

2025-12-14 16:26:43

Anatomy of a settler abduction

Last Wednesday, Palestinian teenager Owais Hammam was on a walk near his home in the West Bank village of Kharbatha Bani Harith, when he was ambushed by a group of Israeli settlers, dragged to a hilltop outpost, and beaten unconscious. From his hospital bed in Ramallah, Hammam spoke to photojournalist Faiz Abu Rmeleh, recounting how both settlers and Israeli soldiers took part in his brutal torture.

from +972’s Sunday Recap
+972 Magazine [published in Israel]
Dec 14, 2025

Also:
* Israel preparing largest ever act of ‘archeological cleansing’ in West Bank
* Israel’s Gaza proxy strategy is collapsing
* After Israel-Hamas prisoner deal, ‘48 Palestinians ask when their turn will come
* Netanyahu’s pardon request is a lens into Israel’s political psyche
* The GOP fed the antisemitism monster. Now it’s turning on its masters

https://www.972mag.com/wp-content/themes/rgb/newsletter.php?page_id=8&section_id=189049

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/40321023

Last Wednesday, Palestinian teenager Owais Hammam was on a walk near his home in the West Bank village of Kharbatha Bani Harith, when he was ambushed by a group of Israeli settlers, dragged to a hilltop outpost, and beaten unconscious. From his hospital bed in Ramallah, Hammam spoke to photojournalist Faiz Abu Rmeleh, recounting how both settlers and Israeli soldiers took part in his brutal torture.

from +972’s Sunday Recap
+972 Magazine [published in Israel]
Dec 14, 2025

Also:
* Israel preparing largest ever act of ‘archeological cleansing’ in West Bank
* Israel’s Gaza proxy strategy is collapsing
* After Israel-Hamas prisoner deal, ‘48 Palestinians ask when their turn will come
* Netanyahu’s pardon request is a lens into Israel’s political psyche
* The GOP fed the antisemitism monster. Now it’s turning on its masters

Peter Link

2025-12-14 16:26:43

Anatomy of a settler abduction

Last Wednesday, Palestinian teenager Owais Hammam was on a walk near his home in the West Bank village of Kharbatha Bani Harith, when he was ambushed by a group of Israeli settlers, dragged to a hilltop outpost, and beaten unconscious. From his hospital bed in Ramallah, Hammam spoke to photojournalist Faiz Abu Rmeleh, recounting how both settlers and Israeli soldiers took part in his brutal torture.

from +972’s Sunday Recap
+972 Magazine [published in Israel]
Dec 14, 2025

Also:
* Israel preparing largest ever act of ‘archeological cleansing’ in West Bank
* Israel’s Gaza proxy strategy is collapsing
* After Israel-Hamas prisoner deal, ‘48 Palestinians ask when their turn will come
* Netanyahu’s pardon request is a lens into Israel’s political psyche
* The GOP fed the antisemitism monster. Now it’s turning on its masters

https://www.972mag.com/wp-content/themes/rgb/newsletter.php?page_id=8&section_id=189049

In a small room in San Diego last week, a man in a black leather jacket explained to me how to save the world from destruction by AI. Max Tegmark, a notable figure in the AI-safety movement, believes that “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, could precipitate the end of human life. I was in town for NeurIPS, one of the largest AI-research conferences, and Tegmark had invited me, along with five other journalists, to a briefing on an AI-safety index that he would release the next day. No company scored better than a C+.

The threat of technological superintelligence is the stuff of science fiction, yet it has become a topic of serious discussion in the past few years. Despite the lack of clear definition—even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has called AGI a “weakly defined term”—the idea that powerful AI contains an inherent threat to humanity has gained acceptance among respected cultural critics.

Granted, generative AI is a powerful technology that has already had a massive impact on our work and culture. But superintelligence has become one of several questionable narratives promoted by the AI industry, along with the ideas that AI learns like a human, that it has “emergent” capabilities, that “reasoning models” are actually reasoning, and that the technology will eventually improve itself.

I traveled to NeurIPS, held at the waterfront fortress that is the San Diego Convention Center, partly to understand how seriously these narratives are taken within the AI industry. Do AGI aspirations guide research and product development? When I asked Tegmark about this, he told me that the major AI companies were sincerely trying to build AGI, but his reasoning was unconvincing. “I know their founders,” he said. “And they’ve said so publicly.”