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Occupied East Jerusalem: A holy day consumed by campaigning and closures

On the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu toured a network of excavation tunnels running beneath Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and the Old City, before joining thousands of settlers for prayers at the Western Wall behind bulletproof glass. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir stormed the mosque compound itself the following morning under heavy police protection; roughly 570 settlers entered to perform religious rituals in violation of the site’s status quo, with more than 450 storming the compound the morning after, according to the news agency Wafa. Jordan’s Foreign Ministry, which holds custodianship over the site, condemned the incursions as an attempt “to impose a temporal and spatial division” of the compound.

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The same holiday period saw Israeli forces close the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron to Muslim worshippers from Sunday afternoon until Monday night, while granting settlers free access for holiday celebrations; the mosque’s call to prayer has now been banned for 90 consecutive days.

West Bank: Killings and villages under siege

On September 20, Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian man near the illegal Ganim settlement east of Jenin after accusing him of attempting a vehicular attack. Hours earlier, an Israeli settler had been fatally shot near the illegal Halamish settlement; Israeli forces detained a suspect, Qadri Muhammad Samara from Biddu, after violently raiding a hospital where he was receiving treatment after being injured. Soldiers then raided Samara’s home village, where soldiers forced members of three families into a single house and assaulted four men inside, according to local reports.

Ben-Gvir immediately demanded that Samara face the death penalty, calling it the “first case that meets the criteria” of a law the Knesset passed in March — one that permits military courts to sentence to death Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis, but carries no equivalent provision for Israelis convicted of killing Palestinians. Netanyahu ordered the demolition of Samara’s family home and a surge of forces into the West Bank; Israeli forces subsequently sealed all entrances to Ramallah and el-Bireh and conducted a sweeping predawn arrest raid in Biddu on Monday, according to Wafa.

In the same week that Ben-Gvir called for the death penalty, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog expunged the criminal record of Elor Azaria, the soldier convicted in 2017 of manslaughter for shooting dead a wounded, incapacitated Palestinian, Abdul Fattah al-Sharif, in Hebron in 2016. Israel’s own military chief of staff opposed the pardon, noting Azaria “has refrained from expressing remorse… even a decade after his conviction”; Defence Minister Israel Katz welcomed the move as sending “an important message… [that] we do not abandon our fighters.”

Separately, a Palestinian prisoner, Moataz al-Atrash, 21, from Hebron, died this week in Ofer Prison after more than 11 months held under administrative detention without charge; his family said he had no known health problems. The Palestinian Prisoner’s’ Society said the number of confirmed prisoner deaths since October 2023 has now reached 92.

Beyond the killings, settler pogroms continued across the West Bank as security forces stood aside or actively assisted them. Attacks were concentrated in villages like Burqa, near Ramallah, where settlers attacked September 19, then returned the next afternoon to occupy an agricultural structure on the village’s eastern edge, appearing to prepare it for habitation — a possible new illegal outpost in the making.

With the olive harvest season fast approaching, Israeli settlers cut Palestinians’ trees in Yabad, Nilin and Khirbet Firasin near Jenin this week, while grazing sheep through Palestinians’ olive groves in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron, according to field reports.

All the while, demolitions and displacement continued in parallel. According to local field reports, Israeli forces razed a community structure in Deir Ballut, west of Salfit, and a two-story home in Masafer Yatta housing eight people, most of them children; settlers then prevented the displaced family from erecting a replacement tent. In Tulkarem, occupation forces posted notices seizing land around the Banat Yacoub shrine and other sites under the pretext of archaeological preservation — the shrine is registered as property of the Islamic Waqf, according to Wafa.

Gaza: Infrastructure collapses amid mounting shortages

In Gaza, meanwhile, deadly strikes continued while infrastructure collapsed in systemic and quite literal terms. An Israeli drone strike on September 19 killed the eldest son of Gaza’s Health Ministry director-general, moments after he stepped out of his displacement tent. The same day, a drone strike on a civilian vehicle in Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan market killed one person and wounded four; the body was burned beyond recognition after the vehicle caught fire for half an hour before rescuers could reach it.

Days earlier, in what was described by Gaza-based activists as an apparent double-tap strike, a 15-year-old boy was killed as he rushed to help a paramedic who had just been wounded in an earlier attack — part of a pattern in which Israel has killed roughly one child a day in Gaza since an October 2025 “ceasefire” took hold. By September 21, 2026, Gaza’s Ministry of Health put the death toll in Gaza since the “ceasefire” at 1,394 killed and 4,839 wounded; a total of 73,914 have been killed since October 2023, with thousands of bodies still thought to be buried under the rubble.

Following several other similar collapses in recent weeks, a six-storey building in Gaza City’s al-Sinaa district, already weakened by earlier Israeli strikes, collapsed onto residents and nearby displacement tents on September 16, killing 21 people — 12 of them children. Palestinian Civil Defence spokesperson Mahmoud Basal told Al Jazeera that nearly 100 people remained under the rubble as crews worked with severely inadequate equipment. A second building collapsed in al-Sabra two days later. Gaza’s Ministry of Public Works warned that more than 2,000 damaged buildings across Gaza remain at risk of similar collapse.

Alongside physical collapse, Gaza’s health system continued to see a deterioration in basic capabilities. Seventy percent of hospital generators are now out of service for lack of fuel and spare parts, according to medical sources cited by Wafa, while al-Ahli Arab Hospital’s main generator has failed for lack of oil and spare parts — taking offline the only functioning CT scanner in northern Gaza.

On September 17, Israeli authorities blocked the exit of part of a medical evacuation convoy, cutting the number of patients and family members permitted to travel to Egypt for treatment from 136 to 61; the Health Ministry accepted only the most critical cases and sent the rest back in protest, warning the policy amounts to “a flagrant violation of the right to medical treatment” that exposes patients to “the risk of death”, according to Wafa. %!s()

And yet the industry keeps calling this “unlimited.”

I’ve always believed that connectivity should work the way every other digital service already works—instantly, transparently, on your terms. What we have instead is a pricing architecture designed for a different era of mobility and data consumption. That mismatch is now impossible to ignore.

The Move To ESIM

Roaming zone systems were designed when mobile internet abroad was an occasional luxury—a quick email check, nothing more. These structures weren’t built to be transparent. Many operators have resisted changes that make switching easier because pricing opacity is a retention mechanism. The technology has scaled but the billing logic hasn’t moved.

With the iPhone 17, Apple made eSIM-only standard across all markets—a milestone signaling how thoroughly the technology has entered the mainstream. Android manufacturers moved earlier. In China, ABI Research projects accelerated rollout in 2026 as major operators finalize approvals, with China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom already licensing eSIM services. Mordor Intelligence valued the global eSIM market at over $11 billion in 2025, growing 14% annually through 2030—a figure The Business Research Company independently corroborates.

Once a SIM profile is software, connectivity becomes programmable. Plans can be scoped to a trip, region or usage pattern and priced transparently. As physical SIMs disappear, the “operator on day one” moment shifts from a carrier store to an app—and the platform managing activation, network switching and billing becomes, functionally, the new carrier.

Connectivity Is The New Subscription

Think about what happened to music. For years, the model was transactional: per track, per album. The infrastructure to deliver music digitally existed long before pricing caught up with how people wanted to listen. Then streaming arrived, and within a decade, the logic flipped. Nobody buys individual tracks anymore. You subscribe, and it follows you.

Telecom pricing is at that inflection point. UN Tourism data shows over 300 million international trips in the first quarter of 2025 alone, up 5% year-on-year. That population—tourists, digital nomads, frequent business travelers and enterprise field teams—doesn’t want to negotiate a data plan before every departure. They want connectivity that follows them.​

What Comes Next

The road ahead isn’t complicated to describe. You won’t buy a roaming plan. You’ll have a connectivity account—one interface, one relationship—that routes you to the best available network wherever you are, adjusts to your usage and bills without surprises.

But transparent pricing is only the beginning. The next stage is genuinely personalized connectivity, where the app knows where you’re going before you think to check, selects the optimal network automatically, purchases the right package based on your travel history and usage, and adjusts to your budget. A frequent traveler to Southeast Asia shouldn’t configure the same plan they set up two years ago. Their connectivity should already know them.

GSMA Intelligence expects global eSIM smartphone connections to reach 4.9 billion by 2030, representing 55% of all smartphone connections. Companies that build that intelligence into the activation layer—not just the billing layer—will own the customer relationship in a way no zone table ever could. In Asia, super apps like WeChat and Alipay reshaped banking not by becoming banks but by owning the interface where financial decisions happen. Connectivity-first platforms are positioned to do the same to telecom.

The enterprise dimension follows the same logic. With distributed work now structurally permanent—a 2025 Stanford and Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta survey found only 12% of executives planned stricter return-to-office mandates—mobile connectivity can’t be a travel afterthought. It needs to be forecastable by finance, controllable by IT and manageable in real time, not reconciled from an invoice weeks later.

The eSIM revolution was never about the chip. It was about choice—the ability to connect on your terms, without asterisks.

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​However, Anthropic has remained a notable exception. Anthropic’s stance is that while open-weight models without dangerous capabilities are a public good, sufficiently capable models can create different risks. Once weights are released, safeguards can be removed and access cannot simply be withdrawn. Anthropic, therefore, is pushing the need for mandatory safety testing for sufficiently capable models, whether open or closed, a kind of nuanced approach to supporting blanket open models.

​While I agree with the need for safety testing, I might disagree with the motive behind that support—how does a model leader decide whether a model is safe or unsafe to release as open weights?

​The debate itself therefore posits three questions:

1. Who decides when a model is too dangerous to open?

2. How long should intelligence remain closed?

3. How do frontier model developers protect their investments in capabilities?

​However, this isn’t new.​

Life Sciences Has Seen This Before

​Life sciences has dealt with this tension for decades: balancing investment in capability with medicine access for the larger public good and improvements. Drug discovery requires substantial investment, long development cycles and significant risk. Companies are therefore given a period of commercial exclusivity to reward innovation and recover their R&D investment. But that exclusivity is not permanent. Over time, patents expire and generic competition allows the benefits of scientific progress to spread more broadly.

I want to draw the same parallel with AI.

While not exactly identical, the underlying principle is the same: A model with dangerous capabilities does not suddenly become safe simply because a newer generation has been developed.

​What does that mean?

Commercial Reward And Eventual Diffusion Are Not Mutually Exclusive

​Frontier AI companies should be able to monetize the latest generation of models. But as the frontier moves forward, previous generations should have a pathway toward broader availability, including open-weight release where appropriate, once they clear an independent safety assessment.

​I think of this as “regulated diffusion”: Restrict genuinely dangerous capabilities where necessary, but do not let temporary safety controls automatically become permanent control over accumulated intelligence.

Basically, reward innovation and validate risk independently.

But who is responsible for this safety assessment?​ ​That’s where I differ most with the current framing.

​​Safety Cannot Be Self-Certified

​Model developers clearly need to participate in safety evaluation. They understand their systems better than anyone else.

​But they cannot be the only ones making the determination.

​A company has an incentive to demonstrate that its model is safe enough to commercialize. It may also have an economic incentive to argue that a highly capable model is too risky to release openly. Both incentives can coexist with genuine safety concerns.

​That is why we need common benchmarks and independent assessment involving model developers, researchers, standards bodies, regulators and domain experts. This needs to be a consortium that looks at both open and closed models with the same rigor.

​A closed model is not automatically safe. An open model is not automatically dangerous.

A downloadable model creates different risks from an API-controlled model. But the underlying assessment of what the model can actually do should not depend on who owns it.

What Should The Enterprise Leaders Learn From This Debate?

​There is another side to this debate that I think matters enormously to enterprise leaders.

​Satya Nadella has talked about organizations compounding human capital with what he calls “token capital,” with the goal of helping enterprises build their own AI capability rather than simply consuming AI. Microsoft describes that future as one where companies turn their knowledge, workflows and judgment into AI systems that continuously improve.

​That creates a very different strategic question:

​Are enterprises accumulating AI capability, or accumulating AI dependency?

​Every major AI investment should leave something behind that the organization owns. That could be institutional knowledge, evaluations, retrieval systems, domain context, learning loops, business rules, workflows or intellectual property. If the model gets better next year, those assets should make the enterprise better too. If, instead, every new capability remains tied to one provider’s models and proprietary services, the enterprise may consume increasing amounts of intelligence without building much capability of its own.

​This is not an argument against closed frontier models. Enterprises should use them when they create differentiated value. Nor is it an argument that enterprises should operate every model themselves. It is simply about understanding the difference between renting intelligence and building capability.

​Therefore, as AI investments grow, I think executives should periodically ask three questions.

The Three Questions For Enterprise Leadership Teams

​1. What AI capability are we actually accumulating?​

After all this AI spending, what does the enterprise actually own that compounds?​ After the project is complete, what knowledge, evaluations, workflows, context or learning remains inside the organization?​

2. Could we move that capability to another model tomorrow?

If the underlying model changes, can the enterprise carry its accumulated knowledge and capability forward, or does much of it disappear with the vendor?

​3. Are we accepting a vendor’s definition of risk, or benchmarking it independently?

Is the enterprise evaluating performance through its own benchmarks and independent standards?

​The open-weight debate will continue because both sides have legitimate interests. But wider access and enterprise control matter too.

The Takeaway

At the industry level, the goal should be regulated diffusion: Reward the innovator, independently validate risk, and allow proven capabilities to spread when it is responsible to do so.

​For enterprises, that translates into the following mantra:

​Use the best intelligence available today. But distinguish between the intelligence you consume and the capability you build.

Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?

Across the city, a similar raid was happening at the home of Badanin’s colleague Mikhail Rubin. The masked men were officers of the FSB, the Russian intelligence service, instruments of the “climate of fear and violence” that the journalists say Vladimir Putin has imposed on Russia in their forensically detailed biography of the Russian president.

The Tsar in Person is almost 800 pages and has won the Grand Prix Strasbourg, a French literary award, whose jury said it read like a “spy novel” and praised the “courage and commitment” of the authors during decades of investigating reporting.

For Badanin and Rubin, the dawn raids were a warning. As founders of the independent media project Proekt, specialising in investigative journalism, both men had been threatened, interrogated, labelled traitors and foreign agents, banned from news events and had offices searched. Other colleagues had not been so lucky: several had died suddenly or in unexplained accidents or seemingly random attacks.

Rubin told the Guardian: “The first time we were threatened was in 2019 when we published an investigation into the chief of Putin’s propaganda operation. A Kremlin official warned me the consequences might be scary. Security agents visited my parents and asked them why I, their son, was selling out his country, betraying Russia.”

After the FSB agents’ dawn raid, Rubin discovered his passport placed carefully on a table. “It was a message. If they’d taken it, I wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country, but they wanted me to leave so they put it where I would see it,” he said. “At the time I didn’t plan on leaving. I didn’t want to overthink the danger because I thought they were just trying to stop me working.”

Less than three weeks later, the Kremlin declared Proekt an “undesirable” media outlet. “I left Moscow the next morning,” Rubin said.

Badanin, who was on holiday with his family in Morocco, decided it was too dangerous for him to return. “The choice was prison or exile and I didn’t want to go to prison.”

Their book, so far published only in Russian and French, charts the rise of Putin from an unremarkable clerk and undercover KGB agent at St Petersburg city hall to the Kremlin, where he has clung to power since 2000.

It is not the first biography to portray the president and his circle of cronies as cruel and corrupt, but the devil is in the encyclopaedic detail. Badanin and Rubin, both former Kremlin-accredited “pool” journalists, have 40 years of investigative journalism between them and have conducted hundreds of interviews to produce a grim portrait of Putin.

They depict him as a modern-day tsar, without ideology or convictions, a dictator capable of “limitless cruelty” who sees himself as above morality and laws. Rivals and opponent, or simply those who have become inconvenient, meet unexpected ends in accidents, crashes and falls, or are poisoned with toxins and radioactive particles causing agonising deaths.

“These pages are the result of war and repression, of exile and the death of some of those close to us, the suffering of friends thrown in prison,” the pair write. “We hope it will contribute to destroying the circumstances that have made all this misfortune possible and defeat the person who did this with his own hands.”

It is also the story of Russia from the end of the Soviet Union to today. Badanin says the book is aimed at young Russians who have no idea what their country was like before Putin took power. Unsurprisingly, it is banned by the Kremlin.

Badanin told Le Monde: “We’re also targeting audiences abroad, where many myths about Putin are circulating. There’s no need to invent myths about Putin. Let the facts reveal the truth about him and his system.

“The Kremlin leader has no ideology. The war in Ukraine has made this clear: this war is not an extension of his ideas, it is merely a means of staying in power.”

Today, even thousands of miles from Moscow, neither journalist feels entirely safe from what they call “Putin’s death squads” dispatched to murder dissident Russians abroad to demonstrate the Kremlin’s long arms.

Last year, FBI agents turned up at Badanin’s California home to warn him they had information that he was at risk of an attack “by foreign special services”.

“I feel a little bit safer here than in Europe, but not completely safe,” Badanin said. %!s()

A Ukrainian unit used heavy bomber drones to drop war robots behind Russian lines as part of a secretive operation that it says has helped retake multiple settlements.

Ukraine's Third Army Corps on Sunday announced that Operation Vivaldi, near the eastern city of Lyman, had so far brought 125 square kilometers back under Ukrainian control, including 50 square kilometers retaken from Russian occupation.

Many details of this significant operation remain undisclosed because it is taking place under "conditions of maximum information silence," Brig. Gen. Andrii Biletskyi, commander of the Third Army Corps, said in a video shared by the unit.

But he revealed one key tactic that the unit says it pioneered.

"The Third Army Corps was the first in the world to begin air-deploying ground robotic systems," he said, adding that "our heavy bomber drones deliver suicide ground drones more than 10 kilometers into the enemy's rear."

Ukraine has increasingly been using both aerial drones and ground robots to fight Russia's invasion, using them to scout and attack areas considered too dangerous for troops.

Biletskyi said that during assault operations, drones and uncrewed ground vehicles "always move ahead of the infantry," helping clear the way for troops that follow.

The Corps said in a separate post on Monday that its robots had become a key part of the offensive, completing over 15,700 successful missions and delivering around 3,300 tons of cargo.

The unit said that during the ongoing operation, its artillery and uncrewed systems have hit Russian command posts, communication hubs, logistics, river crossings, and reserves.

It said that Ukrainian air defenses and electronic warfare units created a protective shield over the combat zone, blinding Russian forces and preventing them from detecting the operation's design.

Biletskyi said the operation also helped counter Russia's small infiltration groups, a tactic in which Russia sends small groups of soldiers forward to find and exploit gaps in Ukraine's defenses and disrupt rear areas.

"The Russians consider one of their advantages to be the so-called infiltration tactics, which sometimes reach tens of kilometers deep into our combat formation," he said.

"Therefore, one of the first tasks of the Third Army Corps was to destroy it," he said, adding that search and strike actions resulted in infiltration pockets being "eliminated" in some areas.

The unit said the announcement did not mark the end of the operation, which continues and is gaining momentum. Biletskyi said that more updates would follow.

"Our operation is called Vivaldi, and Vivaldi, as is well known, has four seasons, and this is only the first of them," he said, referring to the Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" concertos.

"Right now, our actions require silence," he said.

Ukraine, Biletskyi said, had retaken full control of Drobysheve and had liberated two other settlements, Shandryholove and Derylove. The unit had announced other gains earlier in the operation.

The video shared by the Third Army Corps showed soldiers raising the Ukrainian flag in a number of locations.

The unit said that Russia's losses exceeded 3,000 during this operation and that a "heavy blow has been dealt" to the offensive potential of three major Russian formations: the 20th Guards Combined Arms Army, the 25th Combined Arms Army, and the 1st Tank Army.

The unit said it was assisted by other Ukrainian units, including the 60th Separate Mechanized Brigade, 125th Separate Territorial Defense Brigade, and the KRAKEN 21st Separate Special Operations Battalion.

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Sinéad Baker

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Sinéad Baker is a Military and Defense Correspondent based in Business Insider's London bureau, writing about Russia's invasion of Ukraine and NATO actions.Sinéad most often covers soldiers' experiences, military strategy, battlefield developments, weapons systems, the defense industry's response, and the impact on NATO and European security, and geopolitical decisions that surround the Ukraine war. She has reported from NATO’s frontlines and around Europe,  has interviewed multiple prime ministers and defense ministers, has appeared on BBC News and The Guardian's politics podcast, and has been cited by Congressional hearings.Sinéad has also extensively covered US politics and previously led Business Insider's breaking news coverage from London.Sinéad previously completed a master's degree in investigative journalism at City, University of London, and has written for The Guardian, The Observer, and TheJournal.ie. Sinéad is the former editor of the multi-award-winning The University Times in Dublin.Expertise

• Experiences of soldiers in Ukraine, including battlefield developments and tactics
• Western military responses to the war, and lessons they should learn
• New weaponry built for and in response to the war 

Email Sinéad at [email protected] or find her on X.

• Ukraine
• Russia
• Drones
• More