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Friday, 22 November 2024
AI can now create a replica of your personality: A two-hour interview is enough to accurately capture your values and preferences, according to new research from Stanford and Google DeepMind.
I am reposting this article from MIT technology review to show how easy it now is for AI to create a digital twin. 2 hours of an interview and you are decoded. This is exactly what WEF spokesperson Juval Harrari was speaking about - that AI will know you better than you know yourself. You can see the clip in this video about my books “Transhuman”:
The technocratic transhumanist Agenda is progressing at lightening speed - with no stopping in sight. Remember that the self assembly nanotechnology in your body connecting with your Digital Twin is bidirectional. In the below video you can see COVID19 unvaccinated blood and a microrobot swarm that is building a Mesogen DNA microchip. I filmed this in one of my patients at 400x Magnification:
AI can change you by downloading and rewriting your neurons via the self assembly nanotechnology without your knowing, exactly as Harrari said. Here are some articles in which I explained the technology further:
Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your childhood, your formative memories, and your career to your thoughts on immigration policy. Not long after, a virtual replica of you is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning accuracy.
That’s now possible, according to a new paper from a team including researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind, which has been published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Led by Joon Sung Park, a Stanford PhD student in computer science, the team recruited 1,000 people who varied by age, gender, race, region, education, and political ideology. They were paid up to $100 for their participation. From interviews with them, the team created agent replicas of those individuals. As a test of how well the agents mimicked their human counterparts, participants did a series of personality tests, social surveys, and logic games, twice each, two weeks apart; then the agents completed the same exercises. The results were 85% similar.
“If you can have a bunch of small ‘yous’ running around and actually making the decisions that you would have made—that, I think, is ultimately the future,” Park says.
In the paper the replicas are called simulation agents, and the impetus for creating them is to make it easier for researchers in social sciences and other fields to conduct studies that would be expensive, impractical, or unethical to do with real human subjects. If you can create AI models that behave like real people, the thinking goes, you can use them to test everything from how well interventions on social media combat misinformation to what behaviors cause traffic jams.
Such simulation agents are slightly different from the agents that are dominating the work of leading AI companies today. Called tool-based agents, those are models built to do things for you, not converse with you. For example, they might enter data, retrieve information you have stored somewhere, or—someday—book travel for you and schedule appointments. Salesforce announced its own tool-based agents in September, followed by Anthropic in October, and OpenAI is planning to release some in January, according to Bloomberg.
The two types of agents are different but share common ground. Research on simulation agents, like the ones in this paper, is likely to lead to stronger AI agents overall, says John Horton, an associate professor of information technologies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who founded a company to conduct research using AI-simulated participants.
“This paper is showing how you can do a kind of hybrid: use real humans to generate personas which can then be used programmatically/in-simulation in ways you could not with real humans,” he told MIT Technology Review in an email.
The research comes with caveats, not the least of which is the danger that it points to. Just as image generation technology has made it easy to create harmful deepfakes of people without their consent, any agent generation technology raises questions about the ease with which people can build tools to personify others online, saying or authorizing things they didn’t intend to say.
The evaluation methods the team used to test how well the AI agents replicated their corresponding humans were also fairly basic. These included the General Social Survey—which collects information on one’s demographics, happiness, behaviors, and more—and assessments of the Big Five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Such tests are commonly used in social science research but don’t pretend to capture all the unique details that make us ourselves. The AI agents were also worse at replicating the humans in behavioral tests like the “dictator game,” which is meant to illuminate how participants consider values such as fairness.
The next big thing is AI tools that can do more complex tasks. Here’s how they will work.
To build an AI agent that replicates people well, the researchers needed ways to distill our uniqueness into language AI models can understand. They chose qualitative interviews to do just that, Park says. He says he was convinced that interviews are the most efficient way to learn about someone after he appeared on countless podcasts following a 2023 paper that he wrote on generative agents, which sparked a huge amount of interest in the field. “I would go on maybe a two-hour podcast podcast interview, and after the interview, I felt like, wow, people know a lot about me now,” he says. “Two hours can be very powerful.”
These interviews can also reveal idiosyncrasies that are less likely to show up on a survey. “Imagine somebody just had cancer but was finally cured last year. That’s very unique information about you that says a lot about how you might behave and think about things,” he says. It would be difficult to craft survey questions that elicit these sorts of memories and responses.
Interviews aren’t the only option, though. Companies that offer to make “digital twins” of users, like Tavus, can have their AI models ingest customer emails or other data. It tends to take a pretty large data set to replicate someone’s personality that way, Tavus CEO Hassaan Raza told me, but this new paper suggests a more efficient route.
“What was really cool here is that they show you might not need that much information,” Raza says, adding that his company will experiment with the approach. “How about you just talk to an AI interviewer for 30 minutes today, 30 minutes tomorrow? And then we use that to construct this digital twin of you.”
#10 - Megyn Kelly exposes where the “Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset” hoax came from.
If you caught even a glimpse of mainstream media over the past week, you couldn’t miss that they’ve been relentlessly branding Trump’s DNI (Director of National Intelligence) pick, Tulsi Gabbard, as a “Russian asset.”
Similar to how the media accused Trump of the same crime, the sniff test will quickly tell you this is a hoax. But where did this baseless claim originate from? Well, it all started with—surprise—Hillary Clinton.
Megyn Kelly explained how, starting around 2015, Clinton lamented Gabbard’s status as a “rising star” in the Democratic Party. Gabbard was smart, a person of color, articulate, a combat veteran, and beautiful—all qualities that Clinton longed for before her presidential run came crashing down in 2016.
As Gabbard’s popularity continued to rise, she launched her presidential campaign in 2019, championing a populist, anti-war message that challenged the Democratic establishment’s norms. By October of that year, Clinton suggested in a podcast that Gabbard was being groomed by the Russians for a third-party run. The media quickly picked up on this story, the hoax began, and it hasn’t gone away ever since.
Megyn Kelly explains:
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“This was started by Hillary Clinton. She started the Tulsi [“Russian asset” hoax] because Tulsi was a rising star within Democratic politics. She had all the boxes checked. She was a woman. She was a minority. She was the first this and the first that. And she was a combat vet, beautiful, well-spoken, like amazing [person],” Kelly noted.
“And then she [Tulsi] started to be kind of open-minded to what Bernie Sanders was saying and maybe had some problems with the Hillary Clinton messaging and having Hillary shoved down our throat as the Democratic nominee back in 2016,” Kelly detailed.
“She [Tulsi] spoke up about it and started to make enemies in the party because of that. And then [she] was outraged when she found out the DNC cheated on behalf of Hillary to try to make sure she got the nomination and screwed Bernie. And she was angry, and a rift was formed.”
“Then Hillary Clinton called her a Russian asset,” Kelly continued, “just like Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the one that made up that Donald Trump was a Russian asset… Those were lies made up by the Clinton campaign. Hillary Clinton absolutely loved making up lies. And her campaign spread them about the Russians interfering against anybody who she didn’t like or wanted to undermine. Tulsi was just one of them.”
Kelly shared how Gabbard’s opposition to the Ukraine war and her meeting with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad added to the “Russian asset” hoax.
But to put that in perspective, Trump famously met a much more hostile leader, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, in an effort to make peace.
Longtime Democrat turned Trump voter Jillian Michaels responded to Kelly’s explanation of the Tulsi hoax, saying, “This makes perfect sense to me.”
She added, “Diplomacy means you talk to your enemies,” arguing that it is even “more important than talking to your allies.”
#9 - Jesse Watters Goes OFF After Guest Reveals the Corrupt Medical System’s Conflicts of Interest
1. Almost 50% of the FDA's budget comes from the pharmaceutical industry.
2. Revolving Door: In the past 20 years, 11 of 12 FDA commissioners went on to take high-paying jobs at pharmaceutical companies.
3. “In 2020, the USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee, 95% of the panelists had conflicts of interest with the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry.”
4. “The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics… not only do they own stock in ultra-processed food companies, but they take gifts from ultra-processed food companies as well.”
5. “The food pyramid was a pyramid scheme to get certain people rich and other people fat and sick.”
#8 - Cenk Uygur Stuns Liberals, Tells Them to ‘Take the Win’ on Cutting Government Spending
“Why would we fight them on a thing we agree on?”
Earlier today, Uygur got a reply from Elon Musk when he said the first place to cut government spending is The Pentagon.
“Hey, Elon Musk put me in charge of the Pentagon: 400 billion, easy. That’ll get you 20% to your goal of 2 trillion right out of the gate,” he posted on X.
Uygur also found it “fantastic” how Don Jr. agreed with him when he said we should ban conflicts of interest by preventing retired generals from taking cushy jobs with defense contractors.
UYGUR: “... I have one suggestion already. The generals are not allowed to get a job with defense contractors for ten years. They authorize so much wasteful spending because they’re going to get hired by those same companies.”
DON JR: “This is a great idea that has been discussed.”
#7 - Seth Meyers Goes Quiet as Ex-NBC Anchor Torches Democrats for ‘Insulting’ the Working Class
“It is tough love time for the Democratic Party. I think it needs to be stripped down and rebuilt.”
Here's how they alienated working-class voters, according to Brian Williams:
1. Ignoring Rising Costs: "A 12-pack of Bounty [paper towels] is $40. Rich folks don't feel that. Poor folks already switched to Sparkle during the COVID lockdown."
2. Touting Stock Market Success While Ignoring Economic Hardship for Regular People: "I think telling them that the Nasdaq is gangbusters is further insulting. It's insulting."
3. Downplaying Border Issues: "I think the biggest unforced error of the Biden administration by far was the border.... To tell people it's not a problem is insulting."
4. Providing Benefits to Migrants While Ignoring Citizens: "For the working class to see incoming migrants getting welcome bags, debit cards, and motel rooms is probably insulting as well."
5. Failing to Address Biden's Cognitive Decline: "I want to know who thought it was a good idea that Joe Biden stand for another four years at 80 years of age and 37% popularity."
#6 - MSNBC Accidentally Proves Pam Bondi Is a Perfect AG pick.
“She will be every bit the loyalist that Matt Gaetz would have been, just with a little more legal experience and a little less baggage.”
Pam Bondi is also:
• ferociously against “Venezuelan prisoners coming straight into our country.”
• a believer that Trump actually won the 2020 election.
“She even stood by Trump's side during his Manhattan criminal trials and defended him outside the courthouse.”
That all sounds pretty darn good to me.
While you’re here, don’t forget to subscribe to this page for more daily news roundups.
#1 - Disgraced Bob Casey has officially conceded in Pennsylvania.
Scott Presler writes, “Congratulations to Senator-Elect Dave McCormick! We won’t forget that democrat Bucks County commissioners tried to steal this election. We’re still coming for your seats.”
The entire history of Zionism’s injustices, in one Bedouin village
The destruction of Umm Al-Hiran exemplifies the Zionist view of Palestinians as impermanent; moveable chess pieces in a game of demographic engineering.
Israeli police surround and destroy the mosque in Umm Al-Hiran, Nov. 14, 2024. (Oren Ziv)
Last week, the State of Israel hung the scalp of another Palestinian community on its belt after completing the demolition of Umm Al-Hiran. On the morning of Nov. 14, hundreds of police stormed the Bedouin village — which is located in the Negev/Naqab desert, in southern Israel — accompanied by special forces officers and helicopters. The residents, Israeli citizens who had long feared that this day would come, had already self-demolished most of the structures in the village to avoid having to pay large fines. All that was left for police to destroy was the mosque.
Just like that, two and a half decades of legal struggle to save the village came to an end, and the residents were rendered homeless. If you want to understand the entire history of Zionism’s injustices against Palestinians — with all the discrimination, racism, dispossession, and violence, grounded in a vision of Jewish supremacy and a concomitant obsession with demographic engineering — you need look no further than Umm Al-Hiran.
In Israeli-Jewish discourse, the destruction of a Bedouin community barely raises eyebrows, let alone makes headlines. After all, it was an “unrecognized village” — a linguistic device Israel deploys to portray Bedouin citizens as invaders in their own lands. The Israeli public perceives the systematic destruction of these communities as a mere crackdown on rulebreakers. But not only were the residents of Umm Al-Hiran not invaders, they were moved there by the state itself.
Before Israel was established, the community that became Umm Al-Hiran lived in the northwestern Negev. In 1952, Israel’s military government forcibly displaced them further east in order to expropriate their land for the construction of Kibbutz Shoval. Four years later, the state decided to uproot them again, pushing them to an area just inside the Green Line, near the southwestern tip of the West Bank, where they remained until last week.
Israeli police surround and destroy the mosque in Umm Al-Hiran, Nov. 14, 2024. (Oren Ziv)
Throughout all these decades, the state did not bother to regulate the status of the village. It did not provide residents with infrastructure or basic services such as electricity, water, education, or sanitation. This is Zionism’s sleaze laid bare: depriving the Negev’s Palestinian residents of the most basic living conditions for generations, before one day replacing them with a Jewish community in the name of “making the desert bloom.”
The Negev constitutes more than half of the territory of the State of Israel, and vast areas of it are empty. Yet the state nonetheless insists on destroying “unrecognized” Arab villages to build new Jewish ones. In the case of Umm Al-Hiran, the new community was originally supposed to bear a Judaized version of the name of the village it was replacing: Hiran. Someone thought better, and now it is to be called Dror — “freedom.”
This is, of course, nothing new. Israel has been destroying Palestinian communities and settling Jews in their place since its establishment. It depopulated hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages during the Nakba of 1948 alone. But the story of Umm Al-Hiran contains another layer of Israel’s attitude toward Palestinians, which is essential to understanding Zionism’s modus operandi: the perception of Palestinians’ presence as temporary.
This is one of the most violent expressions of Jewish supremacy. Palestinians are seen as human dust that can be simply swept away, or as chess pieces that can be moved from one square to another in accordance with Israel’s never-ending project of demographic engineering between the river and the sea. It is an essential part of the dehumanization of those whose lands the state has its eyes on: the deep conviction that these people have no roots, and therefore moving them from place to place cannot possibly be considered displacement.
Villagers stand next to the rubble of destroyed buildings in Umm Al-Hiran, Nov. 14, 2024. (Oren Ziv)
In this way, it is possible to keep ignoring the pleas of the residents of the Galilee villages of Iqrit and Bir’em, more than half a century after the High Court ruled that they should be allowed to return to their lands after they were expelled during the Nakba; it is possible to carry out widespread ethnic cleansing in the West Bank under the pretext of security and the rule of law; and it is possible to order hundreds of thousands of Gazans to evacuate again and again and again, turning them into eternal nomads as Zionism intended — and, on top of it all, to consider this a humanitarian act.
Zionism’s demographic engineering is not limited to Palestinians. The story of Givat Amal, a Mizrahi neighborhood in Tel Aviv that was forcibly evicted and demolished in 2021, has many parallels to the story of Umm al-Hiran; there, too, the state compelled a marginalized community to move to a frontier area, never regulated their status or rights to the land, and as soon as that land’s value increased, it expelled the residents out of greed. Meanwhile, state-approved “admissions committees” continue to uphold apartheid in hundreds of Jewish communities across the Negev and the Galilee, ensuring that the “right people” live in the right places.
But it is Palestinians whom Zionism has transformed into a temporary people with a transient identity. This is the assumption that lies at the heart of the land-swap plan championed a decade ago by Avigdor Liberman, which would see several Palestinian communities inside Israel dislocated to the West Bank while Israel annexes some of the settlements: today Palestinians can be citizens of Israel, but tomorrow, with the wave of a finger, they can cease to be so. (Liberman, once considered to be on the far right of Israeli politics, has lately become a kind of hero of the center left.)
Perhaps what underpins this Zionist determination to rip Palestinians out of their place is an internalized fear of their deep-rooted connection to the land. Perhaps it’s the delusion that if they are uprooted and thrown about from place to place enough times — whether by death marches in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, or destruction and expulsion in the Negev — they will eventually give up and leave.
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Eight years ago, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid wrote an ode to the Hashomer Hachadash movement, in which he quipped that “a man who plants a tree is not going anywhere.” There is something remarkable about the ways in which the subconscious sometimes erupts from the pen, in spite of the person holding it. After all, the state knows exactly who planted the olive trees that the army bombs in Gaza and settlers set ablaze in the West Bank. But even after decades of destruction, expulsion, and carnage, Zionism refuses to accept that they are not going anywhere.
A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.
In Egypt, Gazans endure ‘unbearable’ life with little support
Over 100,000 Palestinians have fled to Egypt during the war. Feeling stranded by the state and the PA, they describe a precarious existence in legal limbo.
Palestinians who fled their homes wait at the Rafah border crossing to Egypt in the southern Gaza Strip, on October 14, 2023. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
A year ago, Khaled’s life came crashing down. It was only a few weeks after Israel’s onslaught on Gaza had begun, and he was having dinner with his wife and two children in their home in Al-Bureij refugee camp, in the center of the Strip. Suddenly, an airstrike hit their neighbor’s house, killing 10 people. Khaled and his family survived, but their home was severely damaged, forcing them to evacuate to the nearby city of Deir Al-Balah.
Like thousands of other families in Gaza, Khaled was desperate to get his loved ones out of the line of fire. But with Israel attacking every part of the Strip, he realized real safety would require evacuating from Gaza. To do so, he needed to raise thousands of dollars to pay their way through the Egyptian-controlled Rafah Crossing — Gazans’ sole route to the outside world.
These permits came at a significant cost: around $5,000 for each adult and $2,500 for children under 16, paid to a private company called Hala Consulting and Tourism Services. Owned by Egyptian businessman Ibrahim Alarjani, an ally of President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, Hala holds a monopoly on Gazans’ travel to Egypt and has hiked up prices accordingly, raking in around $2 million per day until Israel invaded Rafah and seized control of the crossing in May. Since then, travel out of Gaza has been virtually impossible, at any cost.
Khaled managed to gather together $10,000 — enough to secure passage for only one adult and two children. His family had a decision to make.
“We decided that I’d travel with my children to get them out of the war, and raise the $5,000 for my wife’s permit fee later,” Khaled, 33, told +972 Magazine.
Khaled and his kids crossed into Egypt in April. But since Israel’s takeover of the Rafah border crossing in May, and Hala’s subsequent halting of its services, Khaled’s wife has remained cut off from their family — a situation has taken a serious toll on his children, and one that has now become terribly common for many Palestinian families.
Palestinians with foreign passports leave Gaza to Egypt via the Rafah Crossing, southern Gaza Strip, February 6, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
“[Since we left] my wife has been displaced along with her family in Gaza. She rarely has access to the internet, and my children are constantly stressed and bad-tempered as they can’t talk to her on a regular basis,” he noted. “They are traumatized children who need their mother.”
Since the outbreak of the war, some 105,000 Palestinians have fled Gaza to Egypt, according to the Palestinian ambassador to Egypt, Diab Al-Louh. However, even those who successfully cross the border face severe hardships. Upon arriving, Egyptian authorities grant them 45-day residency permits, but once these expire, they are left without the ability to access legal work or basic services.
Egypt is obligated to support refugees under the 1951 International Refugee Convention, but Palestinian refugees, who are supposed to receive social services and assistance from the UN Relief and Words Agency (UNRWA), are not normally covered under that convention. However, Egypt has never granted UNRWA a mandate to operate within the country, arguing that the agency’s presence could undermine Palestinian refugees’ right of return. This has opened up what humanitarian agencies call “serious protection gaps” for the tens of thousands of Palestinians now residing in Egypt.
Khaled, who was a professional barber in Gaza, found a job in a local barbershop in Cairo, where he earned less than $100 a month. “I got paid 100 Egyptian pounds daily [about $2] for 8 to 10 hours [of work] a day, but I had to quit because I couldn’t leave my children alone. I now rely on assistance from my friends in Europe.”
“Our lives as Palestinians in Egypt are extremely difficult. We can’t work without residency. Available job opportunities offer salaries that are too low to cover basic living expenses, and rent and daily expenses are incredibly high,” he added.
Palestinian at an UNRWA camp in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, November 4, 2023. (Atia Mohammed/Flash90)
For Khaled, returning to Gaza will not be feasible for the foreseeable future, so he plans to seek asylum with his children in Europe, via Turkey.
“I’ve approached dozens of travel agencies for a visa to Turkey, but they refused as I don’t have legal residency in Egypt,” he told +972. “I’m now in touch with a smuggler who helped many Gazans get to Turkey. From there, we’ll travel by sea to Greece and apply for asylum, in hopes of reuniting with my wife.”
‘We were treated like animals’
Shatha, a 30-year-old English teacher from Gaza City, was forced to evacuate to Rafah and shelter with relatives when her family’s home was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023. Shortly after arriving, she and her family members were wounded when a nearby building was bombed. They were treated at the European Hospital near Khan Yunis, and remained sheltering there for a few months.
But as living conditions in the hospital became unbearable, Shatha decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign — raising $33,000 over several months to cover the cost of travel permits for her and her family. They left Gaza in February, but found little relief upon arriving in Cairo.
“I applied for many jobs [when we arrived] in Egypt, but they refused my application because of the [lack of] residency status,” Shatha told +972. “I am currently working illegally for an Egyptian private school for $50 a month, without any rights — something I had to accept to make ends meet. I decided to switch to online work [for the school] to save the costs of commuting.”
Doctors and patients begin to flee from the European Hospital as the Israeli army requested an evacuation to begin a new military operation east of the city of Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, July 2, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
“Life here is unbearable. We can’t receive international money transfers or get a phone number or even internet in our names due to the residency issue.”
Without long-term legal status, Palestinians in Egypt cannot access health services, enter the formal labor market, or even enroll their children in public schools. After losing several months of education in Gaza, Shatha’s younger brother, Mohammed (13), has now been set back even further.
“We also approached several public middle schools, but they all asked about residency.” she said. “Even private schools refused to register him, although we offered to pay the tuition fees.”
In September, the West Bank-based Palestinian Ministry of Education launched an online platform to help Palestinian students from Gaza both inside and outside the Strip to continue their education. However, the lack of available internet and electricity due to Israel’s war means that this is not a viable option for most students who remain in Gaza, while Palestinians in Egypt also view it as a less-than-ideal solution.
“Mohammed has to study online, but he hasn’t adapted to it. He needs on-campus learning and the experience of studying with classmates,” Shatha explained. “It has badly affected him psychologically, and hurt his social skills.”
Displaced Palestinian children study at a school that was bombed by Israeli warplanes in recent war in Khan Yunis, October 9, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
The lack of legal status for Palestinians is also complicating their relations with Egyptian citizens. Rania, a 30-year-old Gazan, fled to Egypt after her sister was killed in an Israeli attack in Rafah on October 20. Shortly after crossing into Egypt, she met an Egyptian man and they decided to marry. In June, they went to an Egyptian court in Cairo to approve the marriage agreement, but the court refused to sign because of Rania’s residency status.
The couple then approached the Palestinian Embassy in Egypt, where they were told they had to get two adults in the West Bank to sign off on the marriage agreement in court on Rania’s behalf and send it back to Egypt.
“How can I find a person I don’t know to sign my marriage agreement on my behalf?” Rania told +972. “We asked many Egyptian courts, but they all refused. Even if we signed a religious marriage agreement at a mosque, it wouldn’t be legal. We were treated like animals.”
The couple soon understood that the only way for them to get married legally was to do so in another country. Since Rania’s Egyptian partner normally lives in Austria, and Rania received a scholarship to get a master’s degree in Ireland, they decided to meet in Dublin, where they will soon reunite.
“I survived the war [in Gaza] for five months but went through another war in Egypt. It’s hell for Palestinians. We were deprived of all basic rights there.”
View of the Rafah Border Crossing, on July 15, 2024. (Oren Cohen/Flash90)
Given the absence of any long-term recognition or assistance from the Egyptian state, various NGOs and activists in Egypt have launched campaigns to support Gazans arriving in the country.
One activist, a Palestinian who fled the war and spoke to +972 Magazine on the condition of anonymity, is part of a group that started a humanitarian campaign in January to assist Gazans now living in Egypt, gathering food, clothing, and other in-kind assistance from donors — primarily Egyptians.
“We collect all the donated clothing at a charity shop in Cairo, where Palestinians in need can take what they need,” he explained.
The team, made up of 40 Palestinian and foreign volunteers, has also collaborated with numerous Egyptian employers who have offered over 100 jobs to Palestinians from Gaza, and with psychologists to help those in need of mental health support. They have also launched a sponsorship program to allow individual donors to directly support Palestinian families.
“We connect families in need with Egyptian, Palestinian, and foreign donors. The minimum donation is between $200 and $300 per family, with support continuing for at least six months. So far, more than 300 families have received sponsorship.”
Donated clothes for Palestinians at a charity shop in Cairo. (Courtesy)
For medical evacuees, a struggle to make ends meet
Of the more than 105,000 Gazans who have fled to Egypt, there are an estimated 10,000 wounded and sick civilians who left the Strip to seek medical care. Currently 1,800 injured Palestinians, along with 3,000 accompanying individuals, are receiving medical care in Egyptian hospitals under the supervision of the Palestinian embassy.
Khaled Rajab, a Palestinian freelance journalist and university lecturer, was seriously injured in January when Israel targeted the press car he was traveling in, killing Al Jazeera journalist Hamza Al-Dahdouh and his colleague Mustafa Althuraya — two of the 129 Palestinian journalists and media workers killed in Gaza since October 7.
“My right hand, eye, and ear were all injured. I underwent around 20 surgeries on my hand at the European Hospital,” he explained, “but then decided to travel to Egypt to continue my treatment, as I could not receive care for my eye and ear in Gaza due to a lack of resources.” The hospital applied on his behalf to get a medical referral covered by the Palestinian Authority, but it was rejected — forcing him to pay $5,000 to travel to Egypt and cover the additional costs of treatment in private hospitals.
“I had to undergo most of the surgeries on my hand again because they weren’t done properly in Gaza. I still need multiple surgeries on my hand and ear, and I may need a cornea transplant soon,” he told +972. “I reached out to the Palestinian Embassy in Egypt to cover my treatment costs, but unfortunately, they did not help me.”
Rawan Abu Safia, a 30-year-old Palestinian, also sought treatment in Egypt after an Israeli tank shell struck her room in Gaza City last November. She bled for hours before an ambulance could reach her, as her home was surrounded by tanks.
Abu Safia survived, but her body was riddled with shrapnel, and damage to the retina in her right eye resulted in a partial loss of vision.
Wounded Palestinians line the corridors of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, northern Gaza, November 10, 2023. (Flash90)
She spent three months in northern Gaza, first in a hospital and later at a relative’s house, as her body slowly healed. However, her eye remained untreated due to a lack of specialized ophthalmologists, and in April, she received a medical referral funded by the Palestinian Authority to travel to Egypt.
Once they arrived, Abu Safia was admitted to Al-Azhar University Hospital in New Damietta City. However, the news she received from doctors there was devastating: there was no treatment for her damaged right eye, and most of her sight was permanently lost.
“I consulted countless ophthalmologists in Egypt, but they all confirmed that my right eye would not heal. It was overwhelming and heartbreaking, but I had to accept it,” she said.
Abu Safia is now undergoing laser treatments to remove the wound scars on her body. However, her ordeal is far from over. Sharing a cramped hospital room with two other Gazan patients for many months, she and her mother face significant financial strain. With limited funds and a reliance on hospital food, they are struggling to make ends meet.
“The medical referral covers only the treatment fees, not living expenses. The Palestinian embassy gave us only $100 a few months ago, but [now] we mostly rely on the three daily meals provided by the hospital and the small amount of money we managed to bring from Gaza.”
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In addition, Abu Safia has barely been allowed to leave the hospital — a measure, she was told, requested by the Palestinian embassy — and many Gazan patients seeking treatment in Egypt told +972 Magazine they are experiencing similar restrictions on their mobility. has been restricted.
“Initially, we weren’t allowed to leave the hospital without security accompaniment, not even for basic necessities like groceries. Visits were prohibited. Recently, the hospital security granted us two hours to walk around the hospital grounds, but only after obtaining permission from them.”
The world has gone dim for Abu Safia, who remains stuck in the hospital and faces an uncertain future. Despite the war, she still desperately clings to a glimmer of hope of returning to Gaza one day.
+972 reached out to the Palestinian Embassy in Egypt and the Egyptian state authorities for comment. Their response will be added here when received.
Our team has been devastated by the horrific events of this latest war. The world is reeling from Israel’s unprecedented onslaught on Gaza, inflicting mass devastation and death upon besieged Palestinians, as well as the atrocious attack and kidnappings by Hamas in Israel on October 7. Our hearts are with all the people and communities facing this violence.
We are in an extraordinarily dangerous era in Israel-Palestine. The bloodshed has reached extreme levels of brutality and threatens to engulf the entire region. Emboldened settlers in the West Bank, backed by the army, are seizing the opportunity to intensify their attacks on Palestinians. The most far-right government in Israel’s history is ramping up its policing of dissent, using the cover of war to silence Palestinian citizens and left-wing Jews who object to its policies.
This escalation has a very clear context, one that +972 has spent the past 14 years covering: Israeli society’s growing racism and militarism, entrenched occupation and apartheid, and a normalized siege on Gaza.
We are well positioned to cover this perilous moment – but we need your help to do it. This terrible period will challenge the humanity of all of those working for a better future in this land. Palestinians and Israelis are already organizing and strategizing to put up the fight of their lives.
Can we count on your support ? +972 Magazine is a leading media voice of this movement, a desperately needed platform where Palestinian and Israeli journalists, activists, and thinkers can report on and analyze what is happening, guided by humanism, equality, and justice. Join us.
