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Two Israeli soldiers were killed, and six others were wounded after a gunman opened fire at close range on an IDF post at the Tayasir checkpoint in the Jordan Valley, West Bank.

Two are in moderate-to-serious condition, while the remaining soldiers were lightly wounded.

According to the IDF, the attacker arrived overnight at the post's entrance near the checkpoint, armed with an M-16 and wearing a military vest. He opened fire at the rooms inside the IDF post.

Approximately seven out of ten Israelis support the idea that “Arabs from Gaza should relocate to another country,” according to a poll conducted by the Jewish People Policy Institute.

According to the poll, 43 percent of all Israelis believe former US President Donald Trump’s proposal to transfer Palestinians in Gaza elsewhere is “practical” and should be pursued. Among Jewish Israelis, this view is held by a narrow majority of 52 percent.

An additional 30 percent of Jewish Israelis described the plan as “not practical, but desirable”.

Meanwhile, Arab Israelis largely oppose the idea. More than half (54 percent) of Arab respondents described the plan as “immoral,” compared to just 3 percent of Jewish Israelis. Overall, 13 percent of all Israelis consider the proposal immoral.

Ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to the White House, Human Rights Watch has urged the US to cut off military support to Israel.

"If President Trump wants to break with the Biden administration's complicity in the Israeli government's atrocities in Gaza, he should immediately suspend arms transfers to Israel," said Bruno Stagno, HRW’s chief advocacy officer.

"Trump said the hostilities in Gaza were ‘not our war’ but 'their war,' but unless the US ends its military support, Gaza will also be Trump’s war."

During a panel discussion on Friday’s Real Time, Maher brought up China’s advancements in AI, noting the China startup DeepSeek has emerged as a major rival to US companies recently. The comedian compared the race between the United States and China on the technology front to the space race between the US and Russia.

Maher declared China is “the new Islam” in that people are too hesitant to criticize out of fear for how they’ll be perceived.

“China’s like the new Islam. We can’t be honest about them because they’re not white,” he said. “And China, okay, I’m sorry, kids, they do some bad things, China. And we should just recognize that.”

Facial recognition of criminals are among applications for AI to be deployed by the new Belgian government after Vanessa Matz was sworn in on Monday as the first federal minister to be tasked with digitalisation, AI and privacy.

The former member of the centrist party Les Engagés in the French-speaking parliament in Belgium will have a broad portfolio which also includes oversight over public companies and the civil service.

The government plan specifically mentions use of AI tools by the law enforcement authorities and police.

Last month, Sebutinde, who arguably holds the most prestigious judicial position, was accused of directly lifting sentences almost word for word in her dissenting opinion written on 19 July.

A study seen by Middle East Eye compiled by Majd Abuamer, a Palestinian researcher at the Doha Institute, for an upcoming book by US scholar Norman Finkelstein has now alleged that “at least 32 percent of Sebutinde’s dissent was plagiarised”. The research will be presented as part of a chapter in Finkelstein's upcoming book Gaza Gravediggers, which will be published in June.

Finkelstein told MEE that when he initially read the Ugandan judge's dissenting opinion in July, he found it to be “bizarre”, and suspected that sentences may have been plagiarised. “So I posted on my Twitter account: ‘Would anyone care to volunteer to help me track down some plagiarism?’” the writer and scholar said.

Following Finkestein’s call-out on X, formerly known as Twitter, Abuamer, who grew up in Gaza, responded with a thorough examination of the document. “He's very precise. He finds 32.2 percent of her dissent was plagiarised," said Finkelstein. One of the sources Abuamer found that Sebutinde repeatedly borrowed sentences from, word for word, is a video by conservative activist David Brog, entitled “Why isn’t there a Palestinian state?”.

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and unelected adviser to President Donald Trump, is asserting control over much of the federal bureaucracy and sensitive government computer systems despite lacking clear authority.

The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department was pushed out after refusing to hand Musk’s team the keys to the government’s entire payment system and the $6 trillion in payments the system processes annually, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and Medicare benefits. Musk and his team have also seized control at the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, key institutions that function as the central nervous system of the U.S. government.

“In any other situation, this would be called state capture, and people around the world would be condemning it,” says Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid, who writes in a new blog post that Elon Musk is staging a coup.

In the last 24 hours, 20 martyrs were received at Gaza hospitals, including 18 bodies recovered from under the rubble, one martyr who succumbed to their injuries, and one new martyr, a child killed in an airstrike on a vehicle which left 20 people injured.

The Ministry also confirmed that many victims remain trapped under the rubble and in the streets, as rescue teams and civil defense are unable to reach them due to the ongoing bombing and escalation.

Despite the ceasefire deal announced on January 19, 2025, 'Israeli' forces violated the truce with the latest attack.

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Swedish prosecutors decided Monday to release a vessel belonging to a Bulgarian shipping company after ruling out initial suspicions that sabotage caused damage to an undersea fiber-optic cable between Sweden and Latvia.

Damage to the cable running between the Latvian city of Ventspils and the Swedish island of Gotland was detected on Jan. 26 and the vessel was seized by Swedish authorities later that day. This was one of a string of recent incidents of ruptured undersea cables that have heightened fears of Russian sabotage and spying in the region.

An investigation into a possible role of the Vezhen ship “has clarified that it is not a case of gross sabotage,” the prosecutors said in a statement.

Navibulgar had cited crew accounts that the ship had been sailing in extremely bad weather and that its left anchor was apparently dragging along the seabed.

On Friday, authorities in neighboring Norway inspected a Norwegian-owned and Russian-crewed ship, the Silver Dana, that authorities initially suspected may have been involved in damage to the cable, but later released the vessel. Norwegian police said no findings had been made that would have linked the ship to the act.