Israel’s deadly attack on tent camp confirms ‘there is no safety’ in Gaza, survivors say
WARNING: This story contains graphic details.
Families who survived a deadly Israeli airstrike on a tent camp in Rafah described a horrific scene of scorched tents and burning bodies on Sunday, as the attack brought further scrutiny to Israel’s continued offensive in the city.
Witnesses said people were preparing for evening prayer when the strike hit the Tel al-Sultan neighbourhood, where thousands had tried to find shelter after Israeli forces launched a ground offensive in the east of Rafah more than two weeks ago.
“We were sitting safely and suddenly we find bodies thrown on the ground, blood splattered on the ground — heads cut off, hands cut off…. We were screaming at each other,” said Malak Filfel, 23, who said children were among those killed.
“This is not a life,” Filfel said added. “There is no safety. We’re not getting out. No matter where we go, we will die here.”
Israeli leaflets instructed Gazans to head for camp
The airstrike started a massive fire that quickly tore through thin tents and makeshift shelters. The health ministry in Gaza said 45 people were killed in the attack. By daylight Monday, the camp was filled with smoking tents, twisted metal and charred belongings. Women cried as men prayed over the bodies.
Some survivors said they had come to the camp because they followed a warning on Israeli leaflets, telling them to leave Rafah for the “humanitarian area.”
“For your safety, the Israeli Defence Force is asking you to leave these areas immediately and to go to known shelters in Deir el Balah or the humanitarian area in Tel al-Sultan through Beach Road,” read one leaflet translated from Arabic.
“Don’t blame us after we warned you.”
Defeated, Filfel described reading the white and red papers.
“They threw on us leaflets saying, ‘Go to the south.’ … So when we came here to the south, they also massacred us,” she said.
Families from across Gaza fled to Rafah after being told by Israeli forces to move south. After a deadly strike over the weekend, some are asking if they’ll ever find safety again.
Abu Mohamed Abu Al-Sabaa, 67, said he chose Tel al-Sultan as his next refuge because it was supposed to be a humanitarian area. He said he looked out of his tent after hearing a loud noise Sunday to find flames “two metres high” before his neighbour’s shelter collapsed, leaving him momentarily trapped.
“I hit the plastic [tent] with the power of God to open the way and the kids and everyone got out,” he said.
“I got out and found bodies.”
More than half of the dead were women, children and elderly people, Palestinian health officials said, adding that the death toll was likely to rise as more people caught in the blaze were in critical condition with severe burns.
“There is nowhere safe in the Gaza strip. We strongly contest any idea that there is somewhere you are able to go and find safety. It’s been proven time and time again that no matter where people are, no matter where families and children are sheltering, they are not safe,” said Louise Wateridge, a spokesperson for UNRWA, the main United Nations agency in Gaza.
UNRWA said 800,000 people have been forced to flee Rafah since Israel launched its military operation in the area earlier this month.
“I swear to god we’re exhausted,” said Umm Mohamed Taha, 37. “We’re displaced from here to there and there to here.”
“Tell me where can I find a safe place to go with our kids.”
International condemnation rises
The international community was quick to condemn the attack, as were some of Israel’s closest allies. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday said the strike was “a “tragic accident,” but reinforced the nation’s commitment to a complete defeat of Hamas.
“In Rafah, we already evacuated about one million non-combatant residents and despite our utmost effort not to harm non-combatants, something unfortunately went tragically wrong,” he said in a speech in parliament.
Israel has continued its attack on Rafah despite a ruling from the UN’s top court on Friday ordering the nation to stop. The court also reiterated calls for Hamas to immediately release hostages held in Gaza without condition.
Canadian politicians had harsh words for the attack.
“Women and children were burned alive in tents. They were told they were in a safe zone, in a refugee encampment, yet they were burned alive,” NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said Monday.
“Our position has been clear on Rafah, and we’ve been saying it now for weeks: Palestinian civilians do not have any safe space to go. the killing of innocent civilians is completely unacceptable and the decisions of the International Court of Justice are binding,” said Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly.
In an exchange during question period, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh asked Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly about the deadly airstrike in Rafah. Joly called the situation ‘heartbreaking’ and ‘horrific’ and called for an immediate ceasefire.
The Israeli military said “precise intelligence” indicated the attack had killed two Hamas leaders, including its chief of staff for the occupied West Bank. An independent body “responsible for examining unusual incidents in combat” would investigate the incident, the Israeli Defence Force added.
UNRWA said the images from the “horrifying” attack on Sunday were “yet another testament” that Gaza has become “hell on earth.”
Wateridge said the civilian casualties should have been avoided.
“What is shockingly clear is that striking such an area densely packed with civilians, the outcome that has been last night and today was entirely predictable,” she said in an interview with CBC’s As It Happens.
As It Happens6:57Civilian deaths in Rafah airstrike ‘entirely predictable,’ says UNRWA
“There has to be a different way for any military offensive to go forward and the safety of civilians has to be put first.”
Israel’s assault on Gaza has killed more than 36,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry. Israel attacked the enclave after Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people and took another 250 hostage in a surprise attack on Oct. 7, according to Israeli tallies.
Published at Mon, 27 May 2024 20:14:30 +0000
Neuralink looks to the public to solve a seemingly impossible problem
Elon Musk’s quest to wirelessly connect human brains with machines has run into a seemingly impossible obstacle, experts say. The company is now asking the public for help finding a solution.
Musk’s startup Neuralink, which is in the early stages of testing in human subjects, is pitched as a brain implant that will let people control computers and other devices using their thoughts. Some of Musk’s predictions for the technology include letting paralyzed people “walk again and use their arms normally.”
Turning brain signals into computer inputs means transmitting a lot of data very quickly. A problem for Neuralink is that the implant generates about 200 times more brain data per second than it can currently wirelessly transmit. Now, the company is seeking a new algorithm that can transmit this data in a smaller package — a process called compression — through a public challenge.
As a barebones web page announcing the Neuralink Compression Challenge posted on Thursday explains, “[greater than] 200x compression is needed.” The winning solution must also run in real time, and at low power.
Crucially, it specifies that the compression must be “lossless.” A “lossy” compression would be like a low-quality MP3 file, compared to pristine vinyl.
The reward for developing this miraculous leap forward in technology? A job interview, according to Neuralink employee Bliss Chapman. There is no mention of monetary compensation on the web page.
‘Seeking a miracle’
To kickstart the challenge, Neuralink released one hour of raw brain recordings from a monkey playing a simple video game. Participants are asked to compress this data. Controlling a video game — dubbed MindPong — was one of the earliest demos of the implant, revealed in 2021.
Observers on social media immediately branded the task “impossible,” even speculating that Neuralink staff launched the challenge as a way of convincing the infamously incalcitrant Musk that it couldn’t be done.
Neuralink did not respond to a request for comment.
The skepticism is well-founded, said Karl Martin, chief technology officer of data science company Integrate.ai. Martin’s PhD thesis at the University of Toronto focused on data compression and security.
Neuralink’s brainwave signals are compressible at ratios of around 2 to 1 and up to 7 to 1, he said in an email. But 200 to 1 “is far beyond what we expect to be the fundamental limit of possibility.”
Key to Neuralink’s pitch is wireless data transfer. Earlier versions of brain implants required bulky wires to protrude from the patient’s head to communicate with an external device that read the neural signals and translated them into instructions.
That won’t do in the real world, so companies working on wireless brain implants — there are several besides Neuralink — are seeking technology that can transfer large quantities of data very quickly. For Neuralink, that means compression.
Martin explained that, rather than a software engineering problem, the challenge primarily concerns information theory, constrained by the laws of physics. Succeeding would require a completely “atypical” advance in the field that redefines how we understand neural signals and their compression.
“It’s essentially seeking a miracle.”
The first human patient has received an implant from Neuralink, Elon Musk’s computer-brain interface company. Andrew Chang explores the complexity of the N1 implant, how it’s working in clinical trials, and what Neuralink is trying to achieve with the device.
The problem, said Roy van Rijn, director of software consultancy OpenValue Rotterdam, is that the files appear very noisy. In other words, they contain many unique data points without common patterns. “If there aren’t enough ‘patterns’ in the data, it is mathematically impossible to compress something further,” he said in an email.
Van Rijn wrote a simple algorithm that compressed the Neuralink files at a ratio of 3.37 to 1. He speculated that participants using a similar approach might be able to compress the neural signals further, but that the “general consensus is that [200 to 1] is just outlandish.”
Neuralink controversies
Neuralink’s technology has progressed slowly, especially since the idea behind the implant isn’t new. In 2004, Massachusetts man Matthew Nagle became the first person with paralysis to be given a brain implant by a company called Cyberkinetics. The implant allowed him to control a computer and even play Pong.
That was 20 years ago. Cyberkinetics, along with several other companies, is still pursuing brain implant technology. In 2021, it even succeeded in transmitting wireless instructions from a human brain to a computer.
Neuralink seeks to differentiate itself with an implant that is “cosmetically invisible,” and installed by a robot rather than a human surgeon.
WATCH | Noland Arbaugh tells CBC about his Neuralink implant: 
Thirty-year-old Noland Arbaugh is the first and so far only person to receive a Neuralink N1 implant, which was installed in January. The implant primarily allows him to move a computer cursor and play video games such as the popular strategy game Civilization 6.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Neuralink received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to implant a second person in June. The company plans to implant a total of 10 people this year, according to the report.
Neuralink has been dogged by controversies. Employees told Reuters that pressure from Musk to speed up testing led to human error and botched experiments, causing more animals to be killed than necessary. Nearly 300 of those were monkeys, sheep and pigs. Reportedly, the internal panel overseeing Neuralink’s experiments was stuffed with company employees who stood to benefit from the implant reaching the market.
The failed experiments have led to federal probes. Though a 2023 probe from the U.S. Department of Agriculture found no animal welfare violations, the FDA identified several quality control lapses later that year. Those included not calibrating equipment such as a “vital signs monitor” during experiments.
Front Burner22:53What’s going on at Neuralink, Musk’s brain implant company?
Neuralink’s sole human trial to date hasn’t seen smooth sailing, either. On May 8, Neuralink revealed in a blog post that weeks after Arbaugh’s surgery, “a number of threads retracted from the brain,” making the implant less effective. Arbaugh told Wired that he hadn’t been informed that this was possible, and while the company reassured him that the threads had stabilized, and it’s unlikely to happen again, he “[has] fears about that.”
Despite the setback, Arbaugh is still excited about his Neuralink implant. “It’s helped me reconnect with the world, and to become more independent,” he previously told CBC News.
Far beyond reasonable
The compression challenge is worded vaguely enough that it’s possible a winning entry might not exactly satisfy the stated requirements. Submissions will be “scored” based on how much the algorithms can compress the neural signals, with “bonus points” for speed and power efficiency.
Adrien Rapeaux, a research associate at the Neural Interfaces Lab at Imperial College London, explains how the brain chip works and why it’s leading this field of new technology.
It’s worth noting that for other types of signals — such as videos on social media — “lossy” compression is often acceptable, making such significant compression ratios potentially possible. “If you are allowed to throw data away, large compression ratios are possible,” Van Rijn said. A ratio of 200 to 1 would be “easy.”
But Neuralink requires completely lossless compression.
“It’s hard for me to speculate, but I think when any company encounters a fundamentally hard technical challenge, seeking input from a broader community of experts is a reasonable approach,” said Martin.
“What was unique in this case is that the framing of the challenge and the goal is far beyond what the expert community would consider reasonable.”
Published at Tue, 28 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000