The Israel-Hamas deal is not a real ceasefire

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Hi all. It’s Future Perfect fellow Rachel DuRose and these are the headlines we’re looking at today: 

UP FIRST: The Israel-Hamas deal is not a real ceasefire

CATCH UP: OpenAI won the battle, but it may have lost the war 

This is the last time you’ll be getting Sentences (Rachel’s version) as my year-long fellowship with Vox’s Future Perfect desk is coming to an end. It’s been a pleasure sharing the biggest headlines of the day with you all. 

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The Israel-Hamas deal is not a real ceasefire

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Tuesday, Israel and Hamas reportedly reached a Qatar-brokered, US-backed agreement to pause fighting, release some hostages, and allow aid into Gaza. This deal will partially fulfill one of Israel’s stated goals in its war against Hamas: to rescue or secure the release of the approximately 240 hostages the group kidnapped during its October 7 attack on southern Israel. 

The lowdown: To be clear, a break in fighting is good news, both for the hostages being released and for the Palestinian people of Gaza. More than 14,000 Palestinians have been killed — over half of whom are women and children — and 1.7 million have been displaced since October 7, the Gaza Ministry of Health reports. 

“But make no mistake,” writes Vox senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp. “This deal does not alter the fundamental dynamics driving Israel to wage war in Gaza.” Israel says it wants to completely eliminate Hamas, and once this pause in the fighting ends, the war will likely rage on. 

Here’s what this truce agreement means:

• The agreement reportedly includes a hostage-prisoner exchange. During a four-day pause in fighting, Hamas will release 50 women and children it kidnapped, in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners (none of whom are convicted of murder) in Israeli custody. If the truce is extended, around 10 to 20 Hamas hostages will be released for each additional day of the pause.

• Aid will come to Gaza. The UN says 455 trucks of aid were needed daily to keep Gazans healthy before the war, but fewer than 13,000 have made it in since October 7. For the next four days, around 300 aid trucks will be allowed in each day.

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the agreement as a “ceasefire.” But it’s not. This agreement is closer to — as mediator Qatar called it — a “humanitarian pause.” A ceasefire would include political processes that bring an end to the war. This agreement merely aims to bring needed, temporary relief to the civilians of Gaza and the hostages. 

• A deal has been in the works for weeks, but Israel has only now agreed to anything. The families of the hostages taken by Hamas have become “more organized and more agitated” in recent weeks, and directly questioned Netanyahu’s power and decision-making, in some ways forcing his hand. 

The stakes: This temporary agreement between Israel and Hamas will not bring an end to the war. Following the October 7 attacks, many in Israel, including top politicians and citizens aligned with the religious far right, want the complete destruction of Hamas by nearly any means necessary. Some, including the Religious Zionist party, have even come out in opposition to the truce agreement because they believe it will give Hamas time to resupply, rearm, and develop new strategies. 

“This agreement, then, should not be dismissed as meaningless. Yet at the same time, it’s important to keep some perspective: It will not amount to the end of the war, nor is it designed to,” writes Zack. “Israel has not yet achieved its defined objective of ‘destroying Hamas’ — a vague term that has come to mean something like the elimination of Hamas as a viable governing entity in Gaza.”

Read Beauchamp’s full story on why this truce is not a ceasefire here, and read senior foreign policy writer Jonathan Guyer’s story on the details of the agreement here. 

If you have questions about the ongoing war, let us know here. And here’s where you can keep track of all our developing coverage.

OpenAI won the battle, but it may have lost the war

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

Last week, OpenAI’s board fired its CEO and co-founder Sam Altman. Now, less than a week later, he’s back in the top seat, while some of the board members who ousted him have been removed. 

The American artificial intelligence company — best known for its language model, ChatGPT — has two missions: to build AI smarter than people and make AI safe. Vox senior reporter Sigal Samuel explains how these two warring missions led to the ongoing leadership blowout:

• OpenAI was always going to break. Founded as a nonprofit research group in 2015 meant to limit the harms posed by AI, the organization also developed one of the most popular AIs available. That meant the organization's missions were always misaligned, writes Sigal: “Advanced AI [like OpenAI aims to build] could harm humans in a variety of ways, from entrenching bias to enabling bioterrorism.” 

• It’s not entirely clear why Altman was fired in the first place. Still, it may have had to do with concerns over AI safety. Altman was focused on the for-profit side of OpenAI’s business and reportedly pushed to accelerate AI development, which is said to have worried some board members concerned about the potential harm AI could cause. 

• The drama has been fast and messy. The day after Altman was fired and company president Greg Brockman resigned, both tried to get reinstated. On Sunday, they both accepted jobs at OpenAI investor Microsoft. On Monday, 95 percent of OpenAI employees threatened to leave the company over the pair's ousting and move to Microsoft. And now, on Wednesday, Altman and Brockman are back at OpenAI.

• The AI industry will face “aftershocks” from this chaos. In the battle between creating ethical, safe AI and rapidly improving the technology, Altman’s rehiring seems to signal that innovation won out. And the willingness of top AI talent to jump from an organization that claims to care about the ethics of AI to a tech giant that laid off its entire AI ethics team earlier this year should concern practically everyone.  

Read Sigal’s full story here. 

• North Korea reportedly successfully launched a satellite (via a rocket) Tuesday night. While it's unclear whether or not the satellite is functioning, the launch defied demands by the US and caused South Korea to end parts of a 2018 pact with the country. [NBC]

• A stampede at a military recruitment event in the Republic of Congo killed at least 37 people. The army is one of the few sources of employment for young people in the country. [PBS]
  

• Canadian “super pigs” are making their way into the northern US. The pigs are reportedly a cross between the Eurasian boar — which is uniquely primed to survive in the wild — and domestic pigs — which are highly fertile. This makes these “super pigs” and their proliferation particularly hard to manage. [AP]
  

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