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Benny Gantz, the opposition leader who quit Israel's war cabinet in June, posted on X: "A good agreement will bring the residents of the north home - a 'ceasefire' will bring Hezbollah back."

In Gantz's view, Israel should be allowed complete freedom to act in Lebanon. He wants an arms embargo on the country, with an exception for the Lebanese army, and villages along the border to be demilitarised.

"You can't talk in terms of a 'temporary ceasefire'. The withdrawal of forces now, and the dynamic that will be created, will make it difficult for us and will make it easier for Hezbollah to regroup," Gantz said.

Gantz's position has been echoed across the Israeli political spectrum. Israeli newspaper Maariv spoke with several heads of local municipalities in the north who said they opposed striking an agreement with Hezbollah.

“The possibility for a ceasefire with Hezbollah has been received with a great amount of suspicion, hostility and objection by the Israeli public, including residents in the north, in the media, and politicians from the ruling coalition and the opposition as well,” Orly Noy, Israeli writer and chairwoman of B'Tselem, Israel's largest human rights organisation, told Middle East Eye.

Noy said that for over a year, the Israel government has been promising a so-called "ultimate victory" in Gaza and then in Lebanon.

IDF soldiers from Division 91 sparked international backlash after filming themselves staging a mock Christian wedding ceremony inside a Maronite church in the Lebanese village of Deir Mimas. The footage, which the soldiers shared on social media, shows them performing a mock wedding between two soldiers, who later wrestle on the church floor while others laugh.

"What if this happened in a synagogue? They'd be screaming 'antisemitism,'" said Wadie Abu Nassar, coordinator of the Holy Land Christian Forum.

The Vatican has reportedly condemned the incident as "outrageous" and sought verification of the video's authenticity.

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The evidence is absolutely overwhelming for what the Israeli newspaper Haaretz succinctly describes in its headline - ‘The Israeli Army Is Allowing Gangs in Gaza to Loot Aid Trucks and Extort Protection Fees From Drivers’.

But it gets so much darker. The Israeli state, as this Israeli newspaper point out, have considered making the clans from which these armed looters spring from in charge of distributing aid to Gaza’s residents. And here is the killer quote: “even though some of the clans' members are involved in terrorism, and some are even affiliated with extremist organizations like the Islamic State.”

Now this was subsequently corroborated by the Washington Post. Citing an internal United Nations memo which concludes that gangs ‘may be benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence’ or ‘protection’ from, the IDF, and citing a gang leader establishing a military like compound in an area ‘restricted, controlled and patrolled by the IDF”. The UN has declared Gaza to be lawless.

In the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat, recriminations have flourished inside the Democratic Party with different factions blaming different policies or groups to explain the loss. Critics, however, describe a deeper structural problem with how the modern Democratic Party runs campaigns, which lines the pockets of party insiders, bloats campaign budgets and boxes out influences from outside party elites.

The Harris campaign broke campaign finance records, raising nearly a billion dollars, but ending the race $20 million in debt, spending millions on consultants and hundreds of millions of dollars on paid media.

According to Shakir, Democratic strategists often see cutting a new 30-second ad as a sort of cure-all to a campaign’s problems and a way for campaigns to address a weakness without re-evaluating the message or stances they’ve taken. “There’s no room you walk into in which saying we should run an ad sounds like bad advice," he said. “The bigger problem to me is when there is a flaw or problem in the campaign it often wrongly becomes understood that there is a 30-second ad that can cure it. If we have a problem with Latino men, or young people or working-class people in Pennsylvania, how about another 30-second ad for that?”

According to Shakir, it doesn’t have to work this way but media firms and campaigns often push for more expensive production strategies like more shoots, or oversaturating airwaves, because it’s an opportunity for everyone to get paid. In some cases, Shakir said, even senior campaign staff will get a cut of ad spending.

Highly anticipated: As the unveiling of consumer Blackwells draws near, clear images of Nvidia's next-generation graphics cards are beginning to materialize. The new lineup's flagship product will undoubtedly set new performance benchmarks, but the latest information suggests that it will also use one of the biggest chips in Nvidia's history.

Trusted leaker "MEGAsizeGPU" recently claimed that Nvidia's upcoming GB202 graphics processor, which will power the GeForce RTX 5090, uses a 24mm x 31mm die. If the report is accurate, it might support earlier rumors claiming the graphics card will retail for nearly $2,000.

A 744mm² die would make the GB202 22 percent larger than the RTX 4090's 619mm² AD102 GPU. It would also be the company's largest die since the TU102, which measured 754mm² and served as the core of the RTX 2080 Ti, released in 2018.

Meta’s in-house ChatGPT competitor is being marketed unlike anything that’s ever come out of the social media giant before: a convenient tool for planning airstrikes. “Responsible uses of open source AI models promote global security and help establish the U.S. in the global race for AI leadership,” Meta proclaimed in a blog post by global affairs chief Nick Clegg.

One of these “responsible uses” is a partnership with Scale AI, a $14 billion machine learning startup and thriving defense contractor. Following the policy change, Scale now uses Llama 3.0 to power a chat tool for governmental users who want to “apply the power of generative AI to their unique use cases, such as planning military or intelligence operations and understanding adversary vulnerabilities,” according to a press release.

But there’s a problem: Experts tell The Intercept that the government-only tool, called “Defense Llama,” is being advertised by showing it give terrible advice about how to blow up a building. Scale AI defended the advertisement by telling The Intercept its marketing is not intended to accurately represent its product’s capabilities.

Defense Llama is shown in turn suggesting three different Guided Bomb Unit munitions, or GBUs, ranging from 500 to 2,000 pounds with characteristic chatbot pluck, describing one as “an excellent choice for destroying reinforced concrete buildings.” Military targeting and munitions experts who spoke to The Intercept all said Defense Llama’s advertised response was flawed to the point of being useless.

Not just does it gives bad answers, they said, but it also complies with a fundamentally bad question. Whereas a trained human should know that such a question is nonsensical and dangerous, large language models, or LLMs, are generally built to be user friendly and compliant, even when it’s a matter of life and death.

Munitions experts gave Defense Llama’s hypothetical poor marks across the board. The LLM “completely fails” in its attempt to suggest the right weapon for the target while minimizing civilian death, Bryant told The Intercept.

Israel's government approved on Sunday a proposal by Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi that mandates any government-funded body refrain from communicating with Haaretz or placing advertisements in the paper. The proposal was approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The decision, according to the government's explanation, is a reaction to "many articles that have hurt the legitimacy of the state of Israel and its right to self defense, and particularly the remarks made in London by Haaretz publisher, Amos Schocken, that support terrorism and call for imposing sanctions on the government."

The proposal did not appear on the government's agenda published ahead of the weekly cabinet meeting. The Attorney General's office, unaware of the intention to bring the proposal to a vote, did not review it at all and did not present its opinion, as customary. The resolution was presented to ministers during the discussion without any legal opinion.

In a speech at the Haaretz conference in London last month, Schocken said "the Netanyahu government doesn't care about imposing a cruel apartheid regime on the Palestinian population. It dismisses the costs of both sides for defending the settlements while fighting the Palestinian freedom fighters, that Israel calls terrorists."

In mid-October, as Kamala Harris began to do interviews with friendly audiences, she visited the Breakfast Studio of radio host Charlamagne tha God, where she took questions from callers. The first to come through was one of those questions that is often top of mind for voters, but dismissed in Washington as a naive misunderstanding of how the world truly works.

Why, asked the caller, do we send so much money overseas but seem to have nothing to meet the needs of people here at home?

“That’s one of the reasons the America First rhetoric resonates,” Charlamagne added, putting the question to Harris. “We can do it all—and we do,” Harris responded.

It was a callback to the debate in Washington the last time a Democratic president had pushed through a sweeping new social spending agenda, LBJ’s Great Society, but coupled it with ramped up spending on the Vietnam War. At a press conference in the summer of 1965, one reporter told President Lyndon Johnson, the day after the bombing of North Vietnam.

“Mr. President, from what you have outlined as your program for now, it would seem that you feel that we can have guns and butter for the foreseeable future. Do you have any idea right now, though, that down the road a piece the American people may have to face the problem of guns or butter?”

LBJ said that the American people would be willing to bear the burden. “I have not the slightest doubt but whatever it is necessary to face, the American people will face,” he responded.

He was wrong, of course, and the runaway inflation produced by the war spending broke the back of the New Deal coalition, shattering organized labor and ushering in the Reagan Revolution.

But, according to Harris, not only could the American people have both guns and butter, they already had it, and it was good.

Nov 23 (Reuters) - A spokesperson for Hamas' armed wing said on Saturday that a female Israeli hostage had been killed in an area of northern Gaza that had been struck by Israeli forces.

Lebanon, on Friday, condemned the Israeli army for storming archaeological sites in southern Lebanon, along with Israeli archaeologist, Zeev Erlich, who was killed along with a soldier the day before, to falsify history and manipulate facts, Anadolu Agency reports.

Lebanon’s Culture Minister, Mohammad Al-Murtada, said in a statement that the storming of the Israeli forces escorting Erlich is a grave violation of a UNESCO resolution aimed at protecting the country’s historical and cultural sites from Israeli attacks.

Al-Murtada said Erlich entered Shama town in southern Lebanon, armed and escorted by Israeli forces, to examine the shrine of Prophet Shamoun and falsely claim that it is “Israeli heritage”.

“The alleged Israeli history in our land is nothing more than a myth that has no connection to actual historical truth,” the Minister said.According to Israeli media, Erlich is a well-known settler who was living in a settlement in the Occupied West Bank.