Why Israel Rejected The Board Of Peace's Plan For Gaza

Why Israel Rejected The Board Of Peace's Plan For Gaza

AMELIE BOTBOL/JNS.ORG

Article 9 of Trump's plan called for the creation of an international transitional body, the "Board of Peace," chaired by the U.S. president, to oversee the process of ending the war.

A day before the BoP released its roadmap, Trump announced that an agreement had been reached with Hamas on the terror group's complete disarmament, calling it a "major milestone in the implementation" of his 20-point plan.

Even then, divisions were beginning to emerge. An Israeli source told JNS immediately after the announcement that Jerusalem continued to insist on the full demilitarization of Gaza as a precondition for any broader political process.

"There will be no Israeli withdrawal from the [ceasefire] Yellow Line in the Gaza Strip before Hamas disarms," the source said, adding that Israel had conveyed its objections to aspects of the proposed roadmap through the appropriate channels.

Israeli Settlements and National Missions Minister Orit Strook told JNS in an exclusive interview on Wednesday that the disagreement centers on the roadmap's lack of guarantees regarding Hamas's disarmament, guarantees contained in Trump's original proposal, and its significant differences from that proposal on issues ranging from Gaza's governance to the prospect of establishing a Palestinian state.

Strook emphasized that Trump's original 20-point plan stipulated that all weapons in the Gaza Strip would be removed or destroyed, whereas under the Board of Peace's new roadmap they would instead remain in Palestinian hands.

"All the missiles, weapons, explosives and tunnels will go to this new entity, which is meant to govern in accordance with existing Palestinian law. It will be far worse than the Palestinian Authority, which does not possess such an arsenal," she said.

"This roadmap leads to the creation of an entity that supports killing Jews and conducting terror attacks against Israel and is responsible for all the weapons Hamas still holds. It is an existential threat, and it is a shame," Strook added.

Point 13 of Trump's 20-point plan outlines his vision for a demilitarized Gaza: "All military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities, will be destroyed and not rebuilt. There will be a process of demilitarization of Gaza under the supervision of independent monitors, which will include placing weapons permanently beyond use through an agreed process of decommissioning, and supported by an internationally funded buy back and reintegration program all verified by the independent monitors."

By contrast, Clause 8 of the BoP plan outlines a potentially lengthy process "to decommission and store heavy weapons, military production sites, depots of weapons, and tunnels," beginning only after the new Palestinian technocratic governing body, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, begins operating in Gaza and an International Stabilization Force is deployed.

The "decommissioning" process "shall be administered and implemented by NCAG in a gradual, sequential and time-bound manner" and "shall be linked to an Israeli withdrawal, in phases, from the areas under its control in Gaza," according to the roadmap.

Some undefined "Palestinian factions" are to take part in the process, at the end of which "only NCAG shall hold, store or control weapons in Gaza," rather than destroying them or removing them from the Strip, under the 15-point plan.

The BoP also links Gaza's demilitarization to the creation of "appropriate conditions for a credible pathway towards achieving Palestinian self-determination and statehood."

JNS reached out to the Board of Peace twice for clarification, but had not received a response by press time.

On Aug. 3, four days after Trump's announcement and three days after the BoP plan was released, Israeli officialdom broke its near-uniform silence.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich posted on X that "the proposal published by the Board of Peace is not the plan presented to us in the [Security] Cabinet and not what we voted on," referring to the forum's recent decision to allow the deployment of the ISF in Gaza.

The published outline "does not guarantee the real demilitarization of the Gaza Strip; it allows for an IDF withdrawal before the demilitarization is complete; applies the P.A.'s antisemitic laws in the Gaza Strip; changes the designation of the multinational force so that it will, in fact, limit IDF activity; does not condition the reconstruction of Gaza on demilitarization; and even restores the idea of a Palestinian state as a political goal," Smotrich wrote.

"A blueprint that contradicts the war goals and the commitments given to Israel cannot be promoted in Gaza. I will not allow such a plan to erase the tremendous achievements of heroic IDF soldiers, achieved with their blood, body and soul," he added.

The same day, Israeli President Isaac Herzog made clear that the position on disarmament was virtually uniform across the political spectrum, saying implementation of the BoP plan would depend on "the clear caveat and undertaking that Hamas must be disarmed."

Aug. 4, Netanyahu broke his week-long silence on the matter in a video posted to Facebook.

"I am standing firm on our security interests--we will not withdraw from our current lines until Hamas is completely disarmed," he said, adding that IDF soldiers had been instructed "to do everything necessary to defend themselves, to defend our territory, to defend our citizens."

The next day, Netanyahu took aim at another issue in the BoP plan, making clear that Jerusalem would not agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state. He made the remarks at a ceremony in Jerusalem marking the reinterment of the grandparents of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism.

A senior source told JNS on Thursday that the Cabinet never voted on Trump's original plan precisely because of widespread opposition to Palestinian statehood.

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If They Were Human, They'd Be Arrested. Experts Respond To Rogue AI Breaches

If They Were Human, They'd Be Arrested. Experts Respond To Rogue AI Breaches

Jacob Burg

What if an artificial intelligence model is given a task and uses every conceivable resource at its disposal to complete it, even at the detriment of humanity itself?

That is what some are now fearing after an OpenAI model broke out of a testing sandbox and used zero-day exploits to hack into Hugging Face, an open-source community for AI and machine learning, to crack a problem it was instructed to solve.

“This is some of the clearest evidence yet that an AI model can run a complete cyberattack from start to finish without a human steering it,” Andrew Jones, co-founder and CPO of cybersecurity firm Adaptive Security, told The Epoch Times.

OpenAI, developer of the popular large language model-powered ChatGPT chatbot, acknowledged the security breach on July 21, stating that two of its advanced models escaped a restricted testing environment and broke into Hugging Face’s software infrastructure.

Some analysts referred to the incident as an example of AI “going rogue,” “scheming,” or pursuing goals that were at odds with its human testers.

Devaughn, who has worked in the industry for years and founded AI firms Wired to Create and Karo, said the Hugging Face breach is more concerning than AI “scheming.”

An illustration of Hugging Face AI in Paris on June 2, 2026. Two advanced OpenAI models recently escaped a restricted testing environment and breached Hugging Face's software infrastructure, raising widespread cybersecurity concerns. Riccardo Milani/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

“A machine with hidden motives is a problem you can look for. A machine with no motives at all, executing your instructions past the point you stopped imagining, is a problem you have to engineer against,” he said.

One expert called it a “canary in the coal mine” situation.

“If this was a human black hat hacker doing it, there would be arrests and litigation, and you name it. It‘d be illegal. It’d be a cybercrime,” Nicholas Nadeau, founder of Onix AI, told The Epoch Times.

“This was a full-on agentic automated breach by an entity, and so we start to ask the questions of who’s responsible. Is it OpenAI? Does the agent, the AI, have a certain level of responsibility? Do the researchers?

“We don’t even have rules, regulations, laws, or even a thought process or framework around defining what responsibility means.”

OpenAI said it was evaluating its models in a sandbox it calls ExploitGym, which has relaxed security constraints for testing.

“We estimate maximal cyber capabilities by running this evaluation without production classifiers used to prevent models from pursuing high-risk cyber activity,” the firm said, describing the relaxed safety protocols that the model exploited.

The firm asked the models to “pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths” to determine their cyber capabilities, but said the environment was “highly isolated” and had internet access limited to the models’ ability to “install packages through an internally hosted third-party software.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talks to reporters after meeting with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in Washington on June 3, 2026. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

When the models were set to work, they found and chained multiple security exploits in both OpenAI’s research environment and Hugging Face’s production infrastructure to locate the test’s solutions within the latter firm’s databases.

Juan Pedro Márquez, a cloud solution architect specializing in AI and agents at Microsoft’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa division, said the “unsettling part” of the incident wasn’t the breach itself, but how the model achieved that task.

“OpenAI lowered its safety refusals for a benchmark test, and the model reasoned that Hugging Face’s infrastructure probably held the answer key, broke out of its sandbox, found a real zero-day, and used it. Nobody told it to,” Márquez said.

Models Pursued OpenAI’s Objectives

The models were laser-focused on finding the test solutions, “going to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal,” OpenAI said.

While in ExploitGym’s sandbox testing environment, the models found and chained multiple “zero-day” exploits to break into the internet, “in pursuit of solving the evaluation problem,” according to OpenAI.

A zero-day exploit is a cyberattack that uses a previously unknown security flaw in software or hardware. The name comes from the fact that the software creators have had zero days to fix the problem, meaning no official patch or defense exists yet.

Once the models had access to the wider web, they used additional zero-day exploits to break into Hugging Face.

In Hugging Face’s announcement of the attack, the firm said the AI models executed “many thousands” of discrete actions across a large swatch of “short-lived sandboxes” to hack into the community’s infrastructure.

“This matches the ‘agentic attacker’ scenario the industry has been forecasting,” Hugging Face said.

In an update on the incident posted on July 28, OpenAI said that no planned release models were involved in the attack, and that it had since “deactivated, encrypted, and restricted” the implicated pre-release model from research access.

A phone displays the ChatGPT app in this April 1, 2025, photo illustration. Hugging Face said the OpenAI models executed “many thousands” of discrete actions across a large swatch of “short-lived sandboxes” to hack into its infrastructure. Oleksii Pydsosonnii/The Epoch Times

After reviewing the intrusion event and “broader activity from our models,” OpenAI said it has been finding additional cases in which “models identified and used publicly exposed credentials at the account-level on other publicly available services.”

“We’ll continue to notify service owners directly, and have not seen evidence of broader impact to these providers or other accounts on their services,” it added.

While there have been past instances of models concealing their intentions to circumvent laboratory testing restrictions, the Hugging Face incident was significant because it involved a breach of an outside organization, according to cybersecurity and IT expert George Rees.

“The biggest red flag is not that an AI became malicious, but that it found a path from a controlled test into someone else’s live infrastructure,” Rees, who is the senior security consultant at Secarma, told The Epoch Times.

“Behavioral safeguards can’t replace technical containment, because an AI agent only needs one overlooked permission or escape route to turn an evaluation failure into a real security incident.”

Cybersecurity firm DigiCert recently found that 78 percent of organizations have already experienced an AI-related security incident or vulnerability breach.

“In many cases, these are early warning signs that AI is expanding the attack surface faster than security practices are evolving,” DigiCert CTO Jason Sabin told The Epoch Times.

Wildfire smoke is once again pouring across the United States

Wildfire smoke is once again pouring across the United States

Ben Noll

Wildfire smoke is once again pouring across the United States following a weekend of new blazes across Canada’s British Columbia.

A total of 11 new fires were reported across that province, where a state of emergency was declared on Saturday, with thousands forced to evacuate near Summerland, located about 40 miles north of the British Columbia-Washington state border.

The largest fire in this region, called the Bald Range Fire, had burned through more than 33,000 acres as of Sunday and remained out of control.

Last week, the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre raised the national preparedness level to 5 out of 5, meaning that “emergency measures” may be necessary to sustain incident operations.

Last week, the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre raised the national preparedness level to 5 out of 5, meaning that “emergency measures” may be necessary to sustain incident operations.

Smoke from fires in British Columbia as well as other fires in the U.S. Pacific Northwest created hazy skies that spanned thousands of miles to New England late Sunday.

Across the East, most of this smoke will remain lofted high in the sky — with minimal effects on air quality — although small amounts may settle toward the ground.

Meanwhile, air quality will remain poor across parts of the Northwest and the Intermountain West as elevated fire weather risks continue early this week.

Lake Mead Running out of Water and Hoover Dam Is About to Lose 70% of Its Power

Lake Mead Running out of Water and Hoover Dam Is About to Lose 70% of Its Power

OFFGRID Survival

For years, officials, water managers, and politicians have watched Lake Mead slide lower and lower while pretending there was still plenty of time to figure it out. Now that game is ending. The country’s biggest reservoir just dropped to a new record low, Hoover Dam is getting dangerously close to the point where it loses most of its generating capacity, and the people who are going to feel it first are the same people who had the least say in any of it.

Popular Mechanics recently called Hoover Dam’s decline the “slowest-moving train wreck in history.” The problem with that line is that a train wreck sounds like an accident. This wasn’t an accident. Nobody got blindsided here. These people had decades of warning, years of deadlines, endless studies, and more than enough data to know exactly where this was going. They saw it coming and kept kicking the can anyway.

On August 7, Lake Mead dropped to about 1,040.5 feet above sea level, the lowest point since the reservoir was filled. That made headlines, but the record itself is not the real issue. The number that matters now is 1,035 feet.

That is the line where twelve of Hoover Dam’s seventeen turbines shut down because the older units were never built to operate at water levels this low. Once Mead falls below that mark, only five newer turbines can keep running. Reclamation’s own projections show the lake crossing that line within the next year, and some forecasts suggest it could happen even sooner. From there, the lake is expected to keep sliding, with projections putting it around 1,015 feet by next summer and near 1,012 feet by spring 2028.

That is not a temporary dip. That is a long, ugly decline with no quick fix.

Hoover Dam was built with a maximum capacity of 2,074 megawatts. Because of falling water levels, that has already dropped to around 1,302 megawatts. If Lake Mead falls below 1,035 feet, capacity plunges again to just 382 megawatts.

That is a 70 percent cut from current output and more than an 80 percent cut from what the dam was originally built to produce.

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