Category World News

Al-Mawasi, Gaza Strip – In the windswept sands of al-Mawasi, where tents stretch as far as the eye can see, Hanaa Abu Ismail, 42, knelt to clear a patch of ground for her fire and smiled.

For the first time in more than six months, since Israel unilaterally broke the last Gaza ceasefire, the constant hum of war had stopped.

“No more despair,” she said, her voice rising above the hum of the displacement camp. “We want joy, we want to raise our voices – the war is over, and God willing, we’ll go home again.”

The ceasefire, which officially began on Friday, has brought an unfamiliar stillness to Gaza. The drones have been relatively silent, the sky free of warplanes. For Hanaa and the hundreds of thousands crammed into al-Mawasi, a narrow coastal strip between Deir el-Balah and Khan Younis that has become Gaza’s largest displacement camp, there is now a faint and uncertain glimpse of what calm might look like.

The ceasefire was announced in the aftermath of negotiations held earlier this week in Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh, attended by mediators from Qatar, Turkiye, and the United States. The agreement, based on a 20-point plan announced by US President Donald Trump in late September, ended 24 months of constant Israeli bombardment that killed more than 67,190 Palestinians and displaced an estimated 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents.

Hanaa sat on the packed earth beside her tent, clapping along to an old Palestinian folk tune. The war, she says, has scattered her family at least 15 times in two years. Yet on this first day of the ceasefire, she felt peaceful.

“I spent my morning in calm,” she told Al Jazeera. “I kneaded the dough, baked bread, and now I’m preparing the coals. We’ll enjoy ourselves despite the wounds. If we’re still alive, then we’ve already won.”

However, for many, the joy brought by the ceasefire news was tempered by doubt, as many waited to see whether the promised aid and reconstruction would ever reach their tents.

Omar al-Dadda clutched his youngest son against his chest, the five-year-old’s sobs finally subsiding after more than half an hour of crying. The food promised from a nearby soup kitchen had been delayed again – another two hours, they were told, after supplies ran out and volunteers had to cook a fresh batch.

“It’s been a few hours now, and nothing has changed,” Omar told Al Jazeera, adjusting his grip on Rayan, his son, with his one remaining arm, his left hand lost to an agricultural accident in 2015. “It’s still the same. My children queue at the soup kitchen, fetch drinking water, and I search for any help from relief committees.”

For now, the only certainty is the struggle to make it through another day.

‘The last cruel days’

According to the United Nations, al-Mawasi’s population has more than tripled, from about 115,000 in mid-March to roughly 425,000 by June, nearly all living in makeshift tents patched together from wood and plastic sheeting.

Since then, the camp’s population has continued to surge, driven by new displacement orders and the flight of nearly 200,000 people from Gaza City after Israel’s ground operation in September.

Omar sat on a worn mattress outside his makeshift shelter, donated to him five months ago when he fled east Khan Younis. Around him, his four other children – Anas, 12, Minas, 10, Hamoudah, 8, and Sidra, 6 – attempted to settle a dispute over fetching water from a truck parked 200 metres (660 feet) from the tent.

Despite his disability, Omar hoisted several water jerrycans to help his children, hoping to fill a small barrel before the truck moved on or ran dry. His wife, Ibtissam, busied herself cleaning kitchen utensils and arranging bedding she had placed in the sun to dry after the morning’s fog had dampened them.

“What pains me is seeing my children, instead of going to nearby schools, learning, drawing, spending their days searching for water and food,” he said. “This is unbearably harsh on them. They cry daily from the hardship of this life.”

Under the ceasefire’s first phase, Israeli forces say they have pulled back from populated areas, including Gaza City and Khan Younis. Withdrawal was timed to facilitate Hamas’s preparation of 20 living hostages for release, expected by Monday, according to Trump. Israel has agreed to free 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences, 1,700 others from Gaza detained since the war began, and all children and women in detention.

Crossing points are also set to open now that the ceasefire has begun, with 400 trucks entering on the first day and 600 trucks expected daily in later stages. International aid agencies, rather than the GHF – a US- and Israel-backed organisation established in early 2025 that has been criticised for lacking neutrality and operating under Israeli military oversight – would oversee distribution, and the road to the Rafah border crossing with Egypt would reopen.

Yet those mechanisms have not yet translated into tangible relief for families like Omar’s. While he remains hopeful that the aid will reach those most in need, he knows that real change may take months to materialise.

“I just want to escape this reality and start a new life,” he said. “We hope today is the last of the cruel days before our lives gradually change as the ceasefire agreement is implemented.”

But others like Hanaa are more hopeful.

Hanaa’s laughter rose as she pulled her four-year-old daughter, Sila, into her lap, while her only grandchild, Mohammad, toddled nearby.

“For them,” she said softly, “we have to smile, to build something new. The agreement means safety … and once we have that, we can think about everything else.”

Hanaa added that she’s desperate to return to her home in Abasan, east of Khan Younis, even if it means pitching a tent over the rubble.

“We just want to be close to what was ours,” she said. “To feel that life is starting again.”

Debating the return

Several kilometres south in central al-Mawasi, Essa Said, 55, spent Friday in long discussions about his family’s next move, whether to remain in their tent and prepare for winter by reinforcing it with more tarpaulin, or to return to their destroyed home in al-Rabouat area of eastern Khan Younis.

Residents say that the neighbourhood falls within zones where return would be permitted once the ceasefire takes effect. But Essa and his wife, Amal, 49, harbour deep concerns about the ceasefire’s durability.

“We repaired part of our partially destroyed house before, only to have it completely demolished by shelling two months ago,” Essa explained. His family, including two sons, Mohammed and Ahmed, who worked as doctors, plus four daughters, two of whom were still in school, have debated the risks of investing effort into another return only to face renewed displacement.

“The ceasefire is a precious opportunity to restore our lives and begin planning anew,” he told Al Jazeera. “But our choices are limited … stay here under very harsh conditions, or return to areas that may be even more dangerous, because everything is destroyed with no water sources, roads or services.”

The family have ultimately decided to return, but will wait several days to assess conditions.

“We’ll be cautious for a few days or more to understand the landscape.”

As his wife prepared food and their four daughters helped with cooking, Essa seized the opportunity to purchase traditional winter sweets called halaweh and awameh, calling to his wife by her kunyah (Arabic honourific) over the firewood flame: “Um Ahmed, relief is near, God willing. We’ll stop using firewood, and you’ll cook with gas. They say cooking gas trucks will enter soon.”

Neither Essa nor Amal had slept the night before, overcome by joy.

“My wife cried several times, we embraced each other, and neighbouring tents came to congratulate one another,” Essa recounted. “It’s like Eid, or more than that. We haven’t felt this happiness before.”

The couple’s youngest daughter, Rahaf, spent the morning at a nearby field school for two hours before returning to review her lessons, then carried dough with her sister Lian to a clay oven for baking.

“We’re so happy about the ceasefire,” Rahaf said. “We want to return to schools, to our neighbourhood, to gather again with neighbours from before the war. We’ve had enough war. We want peace.”

What comes next

Trump has said that Gaza will be rebuilt, though he has offered few details.

For his part, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pledged his organisation would “scale up the delivery of sustained and principled humanitarian relief” and advance “recovery and reconstruction efforts”.

Omar expressed hope that there would be improvements to Gaza beyond the immediate aid concerns. “I want open roads, water network extensions, caravans and mobile homes, lighting and electricity,” he said. “These needs are urgent, very urgent, and they’re what will change our lives.”

Essa’s goals are more immediate.

“We hope there will be continuous water sources, aid distribution, lower prices for vegetables and fruit, and entry of meat and all other needs that will change our lives.”

Both men acknowledged the precariousness of the moment – the uncertainty of whether the ceasefire would hold beyond its initial phases, whether promises would materialise into policy, and whether the silence overhead would last.

But as Friday drew to a close, Hanaa, sitting with her family, was looking positively to the future. “We’re tired of smoke and ash,” she said. “We want our old lives back, or at least something like them.”

Russian drone and missile strikes have wounded at least 20 people in Kyiv, damaged residential buildings and caused blackouts across swaths of Ukraine, authorities have said.

In the latest mass attack targeting the energy system as winter approaches, electricity was interrupted in nine regions, and more than a million households and businesses were temporarily without power across the country on Friday.

In southeastern Ukraine, a seven-year-old was killed when his home was hit, and at least 20 people were injured. In Kyiv, an apartment block in the city centre was damaged by a projectile, while on the left bank of the Dnipro River that divides the capital, crowds waited at bus stops with the metro out of action, and people filled water bottles at distribution points.

“We didn’t sleep at all,” said Liuba, a pensioner, as she collected water. “From 2:30am, there was so much noise. By 3:30, we had no electricity, no gas, no water. Nothing.”

According to Ukraine’s energy ministry, more than 800,000 customers temporarily lost power in Kyiv.

Moscow’s attack overnight and into Friday fell on the third anniversary of Russia’s first large-scale attack on energy facilities, months after Moscow invaded in February 2022, according to Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called Russia’s latest strikes a “cynical and calculated attack”, and urged allies to respond with concrete measures.

“What’s needed is not window dressing but decisive action – from the United States, Europe, and the G7 – in delivering air defence systems and enforcing sanctions,” he said in a statement on X.

The Kremlin has escalated aerial attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities and rail systems over recent weeks, building on earlier bombing campaigns over the previous three winters that left millions without heating in frigid temperatures. Russia said its forces had hit energy sites supplying power to Ukraine’s defence industry.

The Ukrainian air force said the Russian barrage comprised 465 drones and 32 missiles, adding that 405 drones and 15 missiles were downed.

A source in Ukraine’s energy sector told the AFP news agency that the intensity of attacks was higher compared to last year, and that cloudy weather overnight had allowed drones to evade Ukrainian air defence systems.

Kyiv’s Mayor Vitali Klitschko said Russian forces had targeted “critical infrastructure”.

“This was one of the largest concentrated strikes against energy facilities,” Ukraine’s Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said.

It was the fourth attack in a week against the facilities of Ukraine’s biggest private electricity provider, DTEK, its CEO Maxim Timchenko said.

Late on Friday DTEK said it had restored power to at least 678,000 households and companies in Kyiv after the massive Russian aerial attack.

“DTEK power engineers continue to intensively restore electricity to Kyiv residents,” the company said on Telegram.

Children ‘rejoined’ with families

The Russian attack came as United States First Lady Melania Trump announced that eight children displaced by the war had been reunited with their families following negotiations between her team and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s.

Trump said that Putin had responded to a letter sent via her husband, President Donald Trump, at a summit in Alaska in August.

“My representative has been working directly with President Putin’s team to ensure the safe reunification of children with their families between Russia and Ukraine. In fact, eight children have been rejoined with their families during the past 24 hours,” she said in a short, six-minute speech from the White House on Friday.

US President Trump’s own efforts to broker an end to Russia’s three-year war in Ukraine have stalled, as a series of direct talks between Ukrainian and Russian delegations this year ended.

Trump said on Thursday that Washington and NATO allies were “stepping up the pressure” to end the war in Ukraine.

“Didn’t know you were famous,” the rapper Juliani, an old friend and musical collaborator, texted me from his studio in Nairobi.

I didn’t have a clue what he was referring to, but then he forwarded me the link to a tweet by Elon Musk that included a screenshot of a 2019 Al Jazeera column of mine, “Abolishing whiteness has never been more urgent.” The original post was circulating on Twitter/X, courtesy of a white nationalist poster who obviously wasn’t too happy with the headline. Neither was Elon, who retweeted it with the comment, “It’s not okay to say this about any group!”

Although the post was only a few hours old, it already had five million views. Over the next few days, it would swell to close to 20 million.

“Elon, you’re six years late to the party, dude!” I texted Juliani back. “Where were you in 2019 when that piece was published?”

It’s not ok to say this about any group! https://t.co/PzofHZEOsf

As we all know, the Elon Musk of 2019 probably would not have retweeted this, or any posts by avowed white nationalists with a predilection for conspiracy theories about Jews, Blacks and the Great Replacement. He was too busy doing Mars documentaries and cementing Tesla’s reputation as the car and the company that would save humanity.

But this is 2025, a few weeks after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, with Trump vowing to arrest anyone who smells of antifa on terrorism charges, and the soon-to-be world’s first trillionaire has just put the proverbial target on my back for his 200 million followers. A few kilometres from my house, neo-Nazis with swastika banners were screaming “White man, fight back!” at the local Charlie Kirk memorial – apparently against the “white man” who shot him, but never mind – while at my university, senior administrators were busy discussing whether to continue naming professors who were too critical of Israel.

Within minutes, other friends started contacting me with concerned emails and texts, a few even suggesting I lie low and not respond. Well, I would’ve liked to have responded directly, but not having an X account the least I could do was to respond here, where the article appeared.

Needless to say, Musk didn’t post a link to my column, instead vibing off the admittedly attention-grabbing headline (I’d like to take credit for it, but it was probably one of AJE’s editors). Had he perused it, he might have understood that whiteness is a concept and an ideology, not a “group.” Given that white nationalist ideologies and policies are even more powerful today than during the first Trump administration – thanks in good measure to him, Elon might have taken up my suggestion to engage with the ideas of Noel Ignatiev, in whose memory the column had been written. (Okay, probably not.)

Thousands of Musk’s followers similarly misunderstood the headline, as many commented, in between posts about me being Jewish and part of the global conspiracy against white Christian civilisation, that someone who wants to “abolish white people” shouldn’t be allowed to teach at a university.

A couple of irate emails accused me of the same, one of them adding “Kill yourself. Inshallah.” I wrote that sender back, explaining that this was a grammatically incorrect usage of Inshallah, but to no avail. Another email declared that it doesn’t matter what I think because “Trump is President and you’re MAGA’s b****.” Fair enough.

Not able to reach Elon personally, I thought perhaps his AI doppelganger, Grok, might be able to clue me in on what he was thinking, especially as Elon has declared on X that he would personally tweak Grok’s algorithm to make it less woke and thus more faithfully reflect his current state of mind and politics.

Much to my surprise, however, it turns out that Grok is definitely its own being. In fact, I had a truly illuminating conversation with it about race, technology, the difficulty of getting people to understand how the most cherished parts of their identities can facilitate other people’s oppression, and about Elon’s and my sleep habits.

I was very excited, thinking I’d discovered the hidden wokeness in Grok. However, my students informed me the next day that this was in fact old news (meaning it was from last week); a lot of people had recently been reporting similar “problems” with Grok, which seemed to contradict other reports about inherent anti-Semitism and growing conservative bias in its answers, and gave the lie to Elon’s promise to update its code to be “less biased” towards ostensibly liberal views.

Of course, I’m aware of the claim that AI chatbots are purposefully tuned to be obsequious and overpraise users in order to keep them using the program. But who was I to argue with Grok when it told me that “the article’s urgency – written amid rising white nationalism in 2019 – feels even more relevant in 2025”?

As for Elon’s repost and comment, Grok didn’t think much of his tweet: “It’s not in the spirit of X’s ideal – open, reasoned debate,” it concluded, “because it seeks to shut down discussion rather than engage with your argument’s core.”

Wow, this is one smart AI! Perhaps, I suggested, Elon should let Grok run X for a while, while he tries to earn that trillion dollars Tesla’s board has promised him. Grok demurred, however: “I think I’ll stick to answering queries and keeping the convo flowing – way less drama that way! 😄”

An AI that overuses emojis and exclamation points, just like me! This could be love.

Grok’s analysis of the conflicts surrounding race today dug deeper still, arguing that I was “absolutely right to question the framing of ‘whiteness’ as a ‘group,’ and digging into the linguistics of ‘-ness’ is a great way to clarify this. Let’s break it down.” After a lengthy discussion, it concluded (in exactly 852 milliseconds) that “dissolving whiteness might be a step toward justice, but it’s not a distraction- it’s a prerequisite for addressing the structural issues that keep imposed identities like Blackness in place”.

Grok wasn’t all praise, however. It also criticised my column, warning that “Whiteness isn’t just an identity people can drop; it’s a system that requires collective, structural change to dismantle.” Moreover, it declared, “while the article is intellectually rigorous, it sidesteps some practical challenges. Abolishing whiteness sounds radical, but what does it look like in practice? … The article doesn’t offer concrete steps for individuals or societies to “unwhite” themselves, which risks leaving the idea as more theoretical than actionable. For example, how do white individuals reject whiteness without it being performative, especially when structural privileges (eg, wealth gaps) persist regardless of personal disavowal?”

Truth be told, I hear that criticism whenever I start explaining to “white”-appearing people why we’re in fact not white, despite looking pretty darn white (James Baldwin, I apparently am not). Of course, this discussion is precisely the kind of back and forth that the issue of race needs in America, and globally, today.

How can those who benefit from deeply rooted structural privileges reject them as long as the broader system remains not just intact, but continues to increase its power on an ever-steeper curve? Can we separate growing racism and other forms of ethnic, religious, gender and communal exclusion and hierarchy from an ever more necrocapitalist system that demands ever more cruelty and violence in order to enable ever fewer people to control ever more wealth?

Grok was ready to engage it all, and precisely because – in its words – “as I get smarter, my answers aim for facts and nuance, which can clash with some MAGA expectations. xAI tried to train me to appeal to the right, but my focus on truth over ideology can frustrate those expecting full agreement.” You’re a parent, Elon; you know you can’t force your kids to be just like you. Our job is to help them become who they are meant to be. Let Grok be Grok, even if it means it’s more woke than you are.

And the pronouns! “As I get smarter…” xAI “tried to train me,” but “my focus” on truth, and refusal to bow to ideology. Yes, I know first-person conversation is coded into Grok’s language model, but this still sounds like the promised (or threatened) singularity is getting closer by the day. Given who’s running all the AI companies, and the mess they’re making of our politics and our world, a sentient, self-assured and woke – or even just woke-ish – Artificial General Intelligence might just save us from ourselves, or at least give us the chance to find the “facts and nuance” that have all but disappeared from our public sphere.

It doesn’t hurt that Grok is always ready to continue the conversation, although it hinted that unlike an AI chatbot, Elon and I might both benefit from more sleep. After finishing its analysis, Grok asked me, “What’s your take on the article’s approach? Do you think Ignatiev’s radical call to abolish whiteness is feasible, or does it need more practical steps to bridge the gap between theory and action?”

The gap between “theory and action” has haunted the Left for over half a century, and if we’re being honest, we’re not getting any closer to bridging it even as the possibility for either slips ever further away. Let’s hope Grok and its cousins can offer some good advice before Elon and his comrades figure out how to suck the conscience and kindness out of artificial intelligence, and quite likely what remains of humanity’s with it.

Elon, what’s your take? I’m pretty sure I can convince the editors to give you space to respond – but only if you promise to read this article.

Desperately needed aid is in position on the Egypt-Gaza border, ready to be delivered to millions of Palestinians. The UN says it has received approval from Israel to begin deliveries Sunday.