After war meet, Netanyahu said to favor complete conquest of Gaza even if hostages harmed

Published

1 month ago

August 5, 2025

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with senior security officials on Tuesday to hammer out Gaza war plans, and reportedly came out in favor of the military taking control of the entire enclave, even if it meant that the remaining hostages could be harmed or executed by Hamas.

The meeting came amid multiple reports of rising tensions between the prime minister and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir over the prospect of Israeli forces fully occupying the enclave.

The Prime Minister’s Office said in a brief statement that Netanyahu “held a limited security discussion today that lasted about 3 hours, in which the chief of staff presented the options for continuing the campaign in Gaza.”

“The IDF is prepared to implement any decision made by the security cabinet,” the statement added, an apparent reference to reported opposition from the IDF chief to plans to reoccupy Gaza, following the apparent breakdown of hostage-ceasefire talks with Hamas in recent weeks.

The meeting aimed to finalize a plan to present to a broader cabinet session later this week, according to reports in multiple Hebrew outlets.

Others attending Tuesday’s meeting included Defense Minister Israel Katz, Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and IDF Operations Directorate head Maj. Gen. Itzik Cohen.

Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — both ardent advocates of a complete Gaza takeover by Israel — were excluded from the meeting, Israel Hayom reported.

Netanyahu reportedly told ministers this week that he will seek cabinet backing for a plan to fully occupy the Gaza Strip, despite objections from within the IDF. Zamir was said to have opposed the plan, sparking anger against the IDF chief from Netanyahu loyalists, with unnamed senior officials calling on him to resign if he didn’t like his orders.

Hostage families and their supporters rally at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv on August 2, 2025. The screen shows, from right to left, pictures of hostage Evyatar David before his abduction; in a propaganda video from February 2025; and in a propaganda video from July 2025. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)

Following the meeting, an unnamed source familiar with the talks told the Kan public broadcaster that Netanyahu is heavily leaning toward occupying the Palestinian enclave. Other Hebrew-language news outlets, including Ynet and i24 News, carried similar reports, all quoting anonymous sources.

One source told Kan that the government is aware that the military campaign to gain full control over Gaza will likely endanger the remaining hostages, of whom 20 are believed to be alive.

The report said that the IDF and the defense establishment remain opposed to the plan, in part because it puts the hostages in danger of being executed by their captors should troops approach where they are being held.

The IDF currently holds control over approximately 75 percent of the Gaza Strip, but under the new plan, the military would be expected to occupy the remaining territory as well, bringing the entire enclave under Israeli control.

The military has largely refrained from operating in certain areas where it is believed that the hostages are held. Hamas has repeatedly said it will execute them if it believes Israeli forces are closing in.

It is also unclear what such a move would mean for the Strip’s millions of civilians and humanitarian groups operating in the enclave.

Earlier Tuesday, reports of Zamir’s reluctance drew sharp condemnations from the far-right and Netanyahu loyalists, including his son.

Ben Gvir urged Zamir to publicly commit to carrying out the orders of elected officials, even if they decide on the occupation of the Strip

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir meets with officers at an army base, July 22, 2025. (Israel Defense Forces)

“The chief of staff must say clearly that he will fully carry out the orders of the political echelon, even if it’s decided to go for full conquest and a clear result,” Ben Gvir said in a post on X.

Netanyahu’s eldest son, Yair, also took to social media from his home in Miami to lambaste Zamir in a series of posts on X, and implied the IDF chief was trying to lead a military rebellion against his father.

He claimed Zamir was only appointed to his position because Defense Minister Katz insisted on the choice.

He also seemed to imply that Zamir secretly dictated a post on X by Yedioth Aharonoth military correspondent Yossi Yehoshua, in which the journalist criticized Netanyahu’s reported plan to occupy Gaza.

Yair Netanyahu arrives for a court hearing in Tel Aviv on November 29, 2022. (Avshalom Sassoni/ Flash90/ File)

“If Netanyahu really is interested in making the really dramatic and divisive decision among the Israeli public — the occupation of Gaza City and the central camps — he needs to stand before the nation, clarify the expected price to the lives of the hostages and soldiers who will fall, and declare that he takes full responsibility, despite the IDF’s opposition,” Yehoshua wrote.

Yair Netanyahu replied: “If whoever dictated to you that tweet is who we think, this is a rebellion and attempted military coup fit for a banana republic in Central America during the 70s. This is completely criminal.”

And even the defense minister appeared to issue a veiled attempt to pressure Zamir into backing down.

“Once the political leadership makes the necessary decisions, the military echelon, as it has done in all fronts of war so far, will professionally implement the determined policy,” Katz said during a visit to an IDF post in the Gaza buffer zone on Tuesday. “My role as the defense minister in charge of the IDF is to ensure that this will be the case, and that is what I will do.”

Katz said he had formulated his positions “regarding the security and political steps Israel must take to ensure the achievement of the war’s objectives,” and would present them to Netanyahu and cabinet ministers at the meeting later in the day.

Defense Minister Israel Katz visits an IDF post in the Gaza Strip buffer zone, August 5, 2025. (Ariel Hermoni/Defense Ministry)

Speaking publicly, during a meeting with new recruits to the IDF’s Armored Corps and Combat Engineering Corps at the main military induction base in central Israel, Netanyahu reiterated the three stated aims of the war, without mentioning the prospect of conquering Gaza entirely.

He told troops that there is “still a need to complete the defeat of the enemy in Gaza, to release all our hostages and to ensure that Gaza is no longer a threat to Israel.”

Zamir, however, received support from the opposition and from Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, the sole government minister to back him publicly.

“The chief of staff is required to express his professional opinion clearly and unequivocally to the political echelon. I am convinced that he will do so,” Saar wrote on X. “He is not required to clarify the subordination of the military echelon to the government’s decisions.”

Reports of Netanyahu’s dispute with Zamir prompted objections from Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, who insisted that such disagreements must remain “behind closed doors.”

“IDF soldiers should not think that a divided and conflicted leadership is leading them, that the political echelon does not respect their commander, that they are selling them out for a headline,” Lapid wrote on X.

He added that an “operational price” exists for such leaks, since they could dissuade the IDF chief from voicing his opinion if he thinks it may make it to the press.

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid on the plenum floor of the Knesset in Jerusalem, July 23, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Blue and White-National Unity chairman Benny Gantz condemned cabinet ministers’ “unrestrained attacks” against Zamir.

“In the State of Israel, the chief of staff is subordinate to the political echelon, as it has always been and will be, but he is not a puppet on a string or a rubber stamp,” Gantz posted. “Instead of threatening and whining, perhaps it’s worth internalizing: The problem lies with the political echelon, not the military one.”

The war began with the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which killed some 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostage. Since then, the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 60,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters.

IDF troops operate in the Gaza Strip, in an image published on August 5, 2025. (Israel Defense Forces)

Israel says it has killed some 20,000 combatants in battle as of January and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 onslaught. Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.

Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 459. The toll includes two police officers and three Defense Ministry civilian contractors.

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Anthropic pays authors $1.5 billion to settle copyright infringement lawsuit

Published

1 hour ago

September 6, 2025

Matt O'Brien

NEW YORK (AP) — Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot.

The landmark settlement, if approved by a judge as soon as Monday, could mark a turning point in legal battles between AI companies and the writers, visual artists and other creative professionals who accuse them of copyright infringement.

The company has agreed to pay authors or publishers about $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement.

“As best as we can tell, it’s the largest copyright recovery ever,” said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors. “It is the first of its kind in the AI era.”

A trio of authors — thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — sued last year and now represent a broader group of writers and publishers whose books Anthropic downloaded to train its chatbot Claude.

Thriller novelist Andrea Bartz is photographed in her home, in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025 (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

A federal judge dealt the case a mixed ruling in June, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn’t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.

If Anthropic had not settled, experts say losing the case after a scheduled December trial could have cost the San Francisco-based company even more money.

“We were looking at a strong possibility of multiple billions of dollars, enough to potentially cripple or even put Anthropic out of business,” said William Long, a legal analyst for Wolters Kluwer.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco has scheduled a Monday hearing to review the settlement terms.

Anthropic said in a statement Friday that the settlement, if approved, “will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims.”

“We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems,” said Aparna Sridhar, the company’s deputy general counsel.

As part of the settlement, the company has also agreed to destroy the original book files it downloaded.

Books are known to be important sources of data — in essence, billions of words carefully strung together — that are needed to build the AI large language models behind chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and its chief rival, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Alsup’s June ruling found that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million digitized books that it “knew had been pirated.” It started with nearly 200,000 from an online library called Books3, assembled by AI researchers outside of OpenAI to match the vast collections on which ChatGPT was trained.

Debut thriller novel “The Lost Night” by Bartz, a lead plaintiff in the case, was among those found in the dataset.

Thriller novelist Andrea Bartz is photographed in her home, in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025 (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Anthropic later took at least 5 million copies from the pirate website Library Genesis, or LibGen, and at least 2 million copies from the Pirate Library Mirror, Alsup wrote.

The Authors Guild told its thousands of members last month that it expected “damages will be minimally $750 per work and could be much higher” if Anthropic was found at trial to have willfully infringed their copyrights. The settlement’s higher award — approximately $3,000 per work — likely reflects a smaller pool of affected books, after taking out duplicates and those without copyright.

On Friday, Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, called the settlement “an excellent result for authors, publishers, and rightsholders generally, sending a strong message to the AI industry that there are serious consequences when they pirate authors’ works to train their AI, robbing those least able to afford it.”

The Danish Rights Alliance, which successfully fought to take down one of those shadow libraries, said Friday that the settlement would be of little help to European writers and publishers whose works aren’t registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.

“On the one hand, it’s comforting to see that compiling AI training datasets by downloading millions of books from known illegal file-sharing sites comes at a price,” said Thomas Heldrup, the group’s head of content protection and enforcement.

On the other hand, Heldrup said it fits a tech industry playbook to grow a business first and later pay a relatively small fine, compared to the size of the business, for breaking the rules.

“It is my understanding that these companies see a settlement like the Anthropic one as a price of conducting business in a fiercely competitive space,” Heldrup said.

The privately held Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI leaders in 2021, earlier this week put its value at $183 billion after raising another $13 billion in investments.

Anthropic also said it expects to make $5 billion in sales this year, but, like OpenAI and many other AI startups, it has never reported making a profit, relying instead on investors to back the high costs of developing AI technology for the expectation of future payoffs.

The settlement could influence other disputes, including an ongoing lawsuit by authors and newspapers against OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft, and cases against Metaand Midjourney. And just as the Anthropic settlement terms were filed, another group of authors sued Apple on Friday in the same San Francisco federal court.

“This indicates that maybe for other cases, it’s possible for creators and AI companies to reach settlements without having to essentially go for broke in court,” said Long, the legal analyst.

The industry, including Anthropic, had largely praised Alsup’s June ruling because he found that training AI systems on copyrighted works so chatbots can produce their own passages of text qualified as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law because it was “quintessentially transformative.”

Comparing the AI model to “any reader aspiring to be a writer,” Alsup wrote that Anthropic “trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different.”

But documents disclosed in court showed Anthropic employees’ internal concerns about the legality of their use of pirate sites. The company later shifted its approach and hired Tom Turvey, the former Google executive in charge of Google Books, a searchable library of digitized books that successfully weathered years of copyright battles.

With his help, Anthropic began buying books in bulk, tearing off the bindings and scanning each page before feeding the digitized versions into its AI model, according to court documents. That was legal but didn’t undo the earlier piracy, according to the judge.

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College of Charleston instructor among victims killed in Lisbon funicular crash

Published

2 hours ago

September 5, 2025

Babak Dehghanpisheh

The College of Charleston confirmed on Friday that one of its instructors was among the 16 people killed in the crash of the popular funicular railway in Lisbon on Wednesday, which shocked Portugal and led to pointed questions about the cause of the accident.

Heather Hall, a member of the faculty of the Department of Teacher Education, was the only American killed in the accident, which also injured 21. Among the dead were five Portuguese citizens, two South Koreans, one Swiss, three British citizens, two Canadians, one French and one Ukrainian, according to the Portuguese police.

Hall had been in Lisbon to speak at a conference, Fran Welch, the dean of the School of Education, said in a statement.

“This is a tragic loss for all of us,” Welch said. “As an alumna of the College (‘97) and a dynamic instructor with a specialization is special education, she shared her love of travel with her students.”

The statement noted that Hall had been a Fulbright Scholar in Ghana and had taken her students on study abroad trips to Italy.

Welch added, “Her energy, kindness and student-centeredness will be deeply missed.”

Hall’s passion for travel is highlighted on her Facebook page which shows photos of her in Havana, Venice and at the Colosseum in Rome.

The wreckage of the funicular, known as the Elevador da Glória, was cleared overnight and put in police custody.

Alexandre Rodrigues, the commander of the Lisbon fire brigade, told reporters Wednesday that authorities were alerted about the derailment at 6:01 p.m. local time (12:01 p.m. ET) and arrived within three minutes. The funicular derailed and crashed into a building, he said.

Becky Britton, of Minnesota, was vacationing in the city with her husband when she walked past the scene and saw what she described as carnage.

“I feel sad, and when you’re here it’s real. If it happened to us, our families, we would have been notified and that’s just devastating,” she said.

Emergency officials said all victims were pulled out of the wreckage in just over two hours.

Classified as a national monument, the Elevador da Glória funicular connected Restauradores Square to the Jardim de São Pedro de Alcântara, a popular garden in the Bairro Alto neighborhood.

The service, which was inaugurated in 1885, goes up and down a few hundred yards of a hill on a curved, traffic-free road in tandem with one going the opposite way. It is a popular attraction with Lisbon’s tourists, and long lines of people typically form for the brief rides.

Harnessed by steel cables, it can carry more than 40 people, seated and standing, and it is also commonly used by Lisbon residents.

The government’s Office for Air and Rail Accident Investigations is expected to release a preliminary technical report on the accident on Saturday.

Babak Dehghanpisheh

Colin Sheeley

The Associated Press contributed.

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Chiefs vs. Chargers live updates: Game score, analysis, highlights as AFC West rivals meet in Brazil

Published

2 hours ago

September 5, 2025

Garrett Podell

The 2025 NFL season is here, and Brazil is the host of a clash between AFC West heavyweights Friday night: the three-time defending conference champion Kansas City Chiefs and 2024 wild card Los Angeles Chargers.

There’s plenty of fun matchups all over the field. Los Angeles returns much of its defensive core that comprised the NFL’s No. 1 scoring defense for the first of two showdowns with the Chiefs’ dynamic future Hall of Fame duo of quarterback Patrick Mahomes and tight end Travis Kelce. Kansas City will counter Chargers Pro Bowl quarterback Justin Herbert, fresh off a career year in 2024, with the league’s No. 4 scoring defense (19.2 points per game allowed) from a year ago.

It’s also a near guarantee Friday night’s showdown will go down to the wire even though the Chiefs have won the past seven matchups. Six of those meetings were one-score games.

Will the Chiefs, whose 17-game winning streak in one-score games including the playoffs is the longest in NFL history, escape with another narrow victory over their division rivals? Or will the ball finally bounce the Chargers’ way under the lights in Sao Paulo?

Keep it locked here as CBS Sports provides you with live updates, highlights and analysis as the Chiefs battle the Chargers in Week 1.