A cold weather phenomenon known as frost quakes, which make loud booming or popping sounds and unleash small earthquake-like tremors, was felt around Chicago during this week’s bout of below-zero temperatures.

Illinois state climatologist Trent Ford said there was no formal reporting system for frost quakes, which occur after a sudden freezing of the ground, but he had seen and heard reports of the phenomenon on social media. He’s also experienced some frost quakes, officially known as cryoseism, in the past.

“It sort of sounds like somebody is either snapping a very large branch off a tree or maybe popping very large bubble wrap. It’s not quite gunfire, but it’s sort of like that, and it can be that loud,” Ford said.

“The shaking is less common,” he added. “Those can be like small earthquakes, not nearly to the extent of where pictures fall off the wall.”

Frost quakes can be unsettling, especially if people aren’t aware of them, but they don’t pose any real danger, Ford added. In extreme cases, they can cause damage to roads or building foundations, but that’s rare.

Where and how frost quakes occur

The phenomenon isn’t unique to the US Midwest; frost quakes have also been reported in New England, Canada and parts of Scandinavia. They can happen in rural or urban areas.

Frost quakes typically occur under a certain set of winter conditions, Ford said — after a wet, rainy period and when there’s little snow, which has an insulating effect, on the ground. How common the quakes are is unclear since there isn’t much research on them yet.

“What we need is for the soil to be nearly saturated with water so that there’s very little airspace to fill,” he said. “And then you need a rapid freeze.”

Once the soil is frozen, it acts like a different material. It becomes more solid, not shrinking and swelling as it normally would.

“That water in the soil freezes and expands … within the soil and essentially cracks or fractures the (frozen) soil almost like a rock. So it’s that fracturing that makes (the) popping and booming sound.”

Mapped by social media

Frost quakes caught the attention of Andrew Leung, a Climate Lab researcher at the University of Toronto Scarborough, when he heard what sounded like the noise of falling trees after an ice storm in December 2013. He went online to tweet about it and saw that others in southern Ontario had experienced something similar.

“I was surprised that many others around Toronto reported similar sounds being heard,” Leung said. “I felt that fallen trees might not be the best explanation for such noise.”

Leung went on to investigate the phenomenon as part of his doctorate and published a paper on frost quakes in the journal Citizen Empowered Mapping in 2017.

Using social media posts and climate data analysis, he mapped frost quakes in Ontario and neighboring regions in 2013 and 2014. Leung identified two frost quake clusters and the first known frost quakes in three Canadian provinces and seven US states, according to his thesis.

“Since temperature typically drops at night, frost quakes are most frequently reported at night or overnight, sometimes being mistaken as a burglar breaking into the house,” he said.

While networks have been set up to study and detect earthquakes, frost quakes are too localized and infrequent to monitor systematically, making social media reports particularly valuable in this instance, he said.

New findings on frost quakes

In northern Finland, a string of relatively strong frost quakes in the city of Oulu generated concern after the seismic phenomenon damaged a house in 2016 and ruptured roads that year and again in 2021.

During the winter of 2022 and 2023, a team of Finnish researchers installed two networks of seismic instruments, one in Oulu, and one farther north in Sodankylä, to investigate further. The scientists shared preliminary data from their study late last year.

They were able to identify the frost quakes in the seismic data they collected because the wave form is distinctive, said Kari Moisio, a senior researcher at the University of Oulu and one of the authors of the study, which he said would publish in a scientific journal soon. The team also tracked soil temperature over the course of the study.

The researchers detected 11 frost quakes in the site near Oulu and 34 farther north near Sodankylä over the study period.

“At least to our understanding, this was the first time we could actually look at these events so precisely,” he said.

Frost quakes are likely to occur when the temperature rapidly drops to more than minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit) at a rate of about 1 degree per hour, the researchers found.

Roads and other areas cleared of snow were thought to be particularly vulnerable to frost quakes. However, the latest study suggested that some frost quakes occurred in wetlands and swamps, where water accumulates. These areas typically had snow cover, Moisio said, thus the finding surprised the research team.

To understand whether frost quakes are increasing, the team plans to monitor the same areas this winter and next. The researchers also hope to map how common frost quakes are in other areas of the country.

Moisio said that wetter winters and less stable winter temperatures due to climate change could lead to frost quakes becoming more frequent.

“There will be not as much snow in the future in Scandinavia at these latitudes where we are,” he said.

Instead, he said, it will rain more.

“This, I think, might create even more dramatic events … because this will increase water in the subsurface.”

Leung agreed. “We have no evidence that they are becoming more frequent,” he said. “However, the overall decreasing snow depth trend due to climate change in theory can make the ground more susceptible to frost quakes because snow is no longer insulating the ground.”

Japan’s “Moon Sniper” robotic explorer landed on the lunar surface, but the mission may end prematurely since the spacecraft’s solar cell is not generating electricity, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said. The agency said it is currently receiving a signal from the lander, which is communicating as expected.

The uncrewed Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, mission landed just after 10:20 a.m. ET Friday (12:20 a.m. Saturday Japan Standard Time), according to telemetry data shared on JAXA’s live broadcast.

Currently, the lander is operating on limited battery power, only expected to last several hours, and the JAXA team is analyzing the data to determine the cause of the solar cell issue and the next steps for the lander. It’s possible that the solar cell issue is due to the fact that the spacecraft is not pointing in the intended direction, JAXA officials said.

There is hope that as the solar angle changes on the moon, the solar cell may be able to charge again, but that may take some time and will depend on whether SLIM can survive the frigid lunar night, the team shared during a news conference.

The agency believes the mission has met the criteria to declare it a “minimum success,” because the spacecraft achieved a precise and soft lunar landing using optical navigation. The touchdown makes Japan the third country this century — and the fifth ever — to land on the moon.

When asked to score the landing operation for SLIM, JAXA director general Dr. Hitoshi Kuninaka gave it a “60 out of 100,” while also mentioning that he is known for making “harsh comments.”

The team is also working to gather all of the scientific data obtained by the lander.

The lander was able to release its two lunar rovers, LEV-1 and LEV-2. The LEV-1 rover moves using a hopping mechanism and is equipped with wide-angle visible light cameras, scientific equipment and antennas that allow it to communicate with Earth.
And LEV-2, also outfitted with cameras, can change shape to move across the lunar surface.

The team is receiving a signal from LEV-1 and will see whether its cameras were able to capture any images. JAXA officials said they will not definitively confirm the status of LEV-2 until more data is received.

The small-scale SLIM robotic explorer, which launched in September, goes by the nickname “Moon Sniper” because it carried new precision technology to demonstrate a “pinpoint” landing.

Previous lunar missions have been able to target and reach specific zones that spanned many kilometers, but the SLIM lander targeted a landing site that stretches just 100 meters (328 feet) across. The lander’s “smart eyes” — an image-matching-based navigation technology — rapidly photographed the sloped lunar surface on approach and autonomously made adjustments as the spacecraft descended toward touchdown.

The JAXA team is still working to determine the accuracy of SLIM’s landing, which could take up to a month.

Moon Sniper’s journey

The Moon Sniper targeted a landing site near the small Shioli crater within a lunar plain called the Sea of Nectar that was created by ancient volcanic activity and lies just south of the Sea of Tranquility, where Apollo 11 landed in 1969. The lander is designed to briefly study rocks at the site that could reveal insights into the moon’s origin.

When meteorites and other objects strike the moon, they create craters as well as rocky debris that litters the surface. These rocks intrigue scientists because studying them is effectively like peering inside the moon itself. Minerals and other aspects of the rocks’ composition can potentially shed more light on how the moon formed.

Landing near the sloped, rock-strewn areas around craters is a hazardous process that most missions usually avoid, but JAXA believes its lander has the technology to touch down safely on rocky terrain.

New space race

Multiple space agencies and countries have attempted moon landing missions over the past year, leading to a historic first as well as failures.

India became the fourth country — after the United States, the former Soviet Union and China — to execute a controlled landing on the moon when its Chandrayaan-3 mission arrived near the lunar south pole in August.

Meanwhile, Japanese company Ispace’s Hakuto-R lunar lander fell 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) before crashing into the moon during a landing attempt in April. Russia’s Luna-25 also crash-landed in August during the country’s first attempt to return to the moon since the Soviet Union’s fall. Astrobotic Technology’s Peregrine spacecraft — the first US lunar lander to launch in five decades — met a fiery end Thursday after a critical fuel leak made safely landing on the moon out of the question.

Part of the motivation behind the new lunar space race is a desire to access water trapped as ice in permanently shadowed regions at the lunar south pole. It could be used for drinking water or fuel as humanity pushes the bounds of space exploration in the future. This region is riddled with craters and strewn with rocks, leading to narrow landing sites.

The lightweight SLIM lander might be an effective design that could not only land in small areas of interest on the moon but also on planets such as Mars, according to JAXA.

Divisions within the Israeli government are deepening after war cabinet minister Gadi Eisenkot suggested the key war aim of defeating Hamas is unrealistic and called for elections within months.

“Those who say that there was a major blow and demolition of the capabilities in the north of the strip are telling the truth,” Eisenkot told told Israeli broadcaster Channel 12 News on Thursday evening. “Those who talk about an absolute defeat and lack of will and ability do not tell the truth. This is why there is no need to tell tall tales.”

Eisenkot was speaking shortly after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again said Israel’s military campaign would continue until it achieved “complete victory” over Hamas. His comments also come after Israel withdrew some troops from northern Gaza and signaled a new phase of the conflict would begin soon.

But Eisenkot said: “A strategic achievement was not reached … We did not demolish the Hamas organization.”

The remarks are the latest symptom of rifts within Israel’s coalition government, as well as growing discontent with Netanyahu’s war plans. Established shortly after Hamas’ brutal October 7 attack, the Israeli war cabinet includes some ministers already at odds with one another.

Calls for fresh elections

In his interview, Eisenkot said Israel needed fresh elections because the public no longer has trust in Netanyahu’s leadership.

He also dismissed concerns over holding elections in the country while it’s at war. “Lack of trust among the public in its government is no less severe than lack of unity during a war,” he said.

“We need to go to the polls and have an election in the next few months, in order to renew the trust as currently there is no trust,” he said. “The state of Israel is a democracy and needs to ask itself, after such a serious event, how do we go forward with a leadership that is responsible for such an absolute failure?”

While the cabinet was created to show unity, it “does not disguise the fact that there are already major differences in policy and approach,” said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) in Jerusalem, adding that these divisions are now surfacing.

Over three months into Netanyahu’s war on Gaza, there is no end to the conflict in sight. Israel began its campaign after Hamas launched surprise cross-border attacks, killing 1,200 people and seizing more than 240 hostages. The Israeli authorities believe that around 100 are still alive in captivity, after 105 were released during a temporary truce in December. Dozens of hostages have been killed and their bodies remain in Gaza.

In the meantime, more than 24,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in the enclave, and swathes of the territory have been flattened.

Hazan says the Israeli government has decided it has two goals in this war, which may not both be attainable. “One is to destroy Hamas, and the other is to return the hostages home,” he said, “And as we’ve seen, after over a hundred days, you cannot achieve both.”

Eisenkot said the government had failed to achieve what he says should be its highest priority: securing the release of the hostages.

“There’s no question for me what task is of highest priority,” he said. “There’s no dilemma: for me, the mission is to save civilians (hostages) before eliminating the enemy,” Eisenkot said, adding that there would be time later to eliminate Hamas.

A poll by Israel Democracy Institute conducted in November found that while Israelis overwhelmingly support both defeating Hamas and retrieving hostages, they see the return of the hostages are more important.

Tensions with US over Palestinian statehood

Israel’s relations with its strongest ally, the US, have also been on a downward spiral. On Thursday the Israeli prime minister voiced a strong rejection of a post-war scenario that entails the creation of a Palestinian state, which the US and other countries have called for.

The idea of creating a Palestinian state would clash with the security of Israel, Netanyahu said. Netanyahu has made clear his opposition to a Palestinian state several times prior to his remarks on Thursday.

“In any arrangement in the foreseeable future, whether with or without an arrangement, the State of Israel must control the security of all the land, which is west of the Jordan River,” he told a press conference in Tel Aviv when asked about reports that he told US officials he opposes the idea of Palestinian sovereignty that would encompass both the West Bank and Gaza.

Netanyahu added that Israeli politicians asking for him to step down are essentially asking for the creation of a Palestinian state.

Hazan sees the relationship between Israel and US as likely to worsen, particularly, he said, because Netanyahu wants to cling to power.

Current and former Israeli politicians have asked Netanyahu to step down.

When asked if he thought Netanyahu had been prolonging the conflict to ensure his own political survival, Eisenkot said he did not believe that to be the case.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has also called for fresh elections. In an op-ed published in Haaretz on Thursday, he warned that Netanyahu’s current strategy risks alienating the US and leaving Israel “mired in the Gaza quagmire.”

Netanyahu’s political survival

Once the war comes to an end, the Israeli public’s focus may shift to Netanyahu’s pre-war shortcomings, some analysts say. More attention could fall on responsibility for the October 7 attack, as well as a new mandate for leadership, according to Plesner.

“Given Netanyahu’s situation in public opinion, I am not sure he is very keen on seeing this phase unfold,” he added.

The prime minister, who before the war was facing mass protests against his plans for a judicial overhaul, has so far refused to take any responsibility for the events of October 7. He has also allegedly refused to hold high-level discussions on plans for post-war Gaza, Israeli media reported, leaving a handful of far-right members of the governing coalition to fill the void with ideas viewed by many as extremist.

“(Netanyahu) understands that in order for him to stay in power, the war has to continue,” Hazan of the Hebrew University said, “Because the day the war ends, that’s when the people of Israel will turn against him.”

An opinion poll published earlier this month by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) found that only 15% of Israelis want Netanyahu to remain prime minister after the war. Twenty-three percent said they wanted Gantz as prime minister after the war.

Gantz is widely considered a likely successor to Netanyahu when an election is called.

“So, as horrible as this sounds, it is in the political and survival interests of Netanyahu to continue the war, and that will put him at odds with the Biden administration,” Hazan said.

Even if elections are held in Israel, Netanyahu will likely campaign against the prospect of a Palestinian state, telling those who support him that “only he can say no to the United States, and can say no to a Palestinian state,” Hazan said, adding that the prime minister likely believes this would turn public sentiments back in his favor.

Plesner, however, does not believe Netanyahu is trying to extend the war to remain in power. War decisions don’t come from Netanyahu alone, he said, noting that while Israelis want to see the hostages come home, there isn’t significant support for a permanent ceasefire that may further empower Hamas.

On the edge of a dark, suburban park in Brisbane, teams of volunteer toad-catchers gather around Gary King as he shoves another squirming specimen into a cooler box.

“Who’s got some more?” asks King, a local leader of this year’s Great Cane Toad Bust, a small and ultimately futile campaign to dent Australia’s massive invasive population of some 200 million cane toads.

Native to South and Central America, the brown, warty-skinned pest has been causing havoc in Australia since being released in the northern state of Queensland to eat cane beetles in 1935.

Since then, they’ve spread north, south and thousands of miles to the west, hitching rides on vehicles and developing stronger, longer legs to hop across state borders, poisoning native fauna with their toxic glands as they go.

Australia’s not the only country with a cane toad problem – the United States, Japan, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and islands in the Pacific and Caribbean also host the species, either through accident or mislaid hopes that they would solve another pest-related problem.

Cane toads are unwelcome in Australia because the bulbous amphibian is a voracious eater that when stressed releases a toxin strong enough to kill lizards, snakes, crocodiles – almost anything that dares to attack it. In a suburban setting, that includes dogs and cats.

The toads are toxic at every stage of their life cycle and ingesting their poison – emitted from bulky glands on their shoulders – can cause rapid heartbeat, convulsions, paralysis and even death for some animals. In humans it can cause intense pain.

For the most part, the battle against cane toads has been mounted by local ecological warriors wearing rubber gloves who scan the streets for adult toads. But the Australians have a secret weapon not yet available worldwide – a lure that attracts cane toad tadpoles so thousands can be killed in one hit.

Cane toad culls

In Brisbane, King’s volunteer toad busters include father and son team Luke and Austin Rogers, who moved to Australia from the United Kingdom over a decade ago.

They don’t normally do this kind of thing; fishing is more typical of their father-son expeditions.

But as they scan the ground, wearing rubber gloves and head torches, the competitive element of toad-catching takes over, delivering the same dose of adrenaline as the first nibble on a hook.

Luke spots a particularly large specimen in a puddle, but as he bends down to grab it, it jumps away and he gives chase, triumphantly slipping it into a bucket that’s getting heavier with each catch.

Does he think he’s putting much of a dent in the population?

“I’m doing it half because I enjoy it,” he says. “There’s definitely part of me that thinks we’re not even going to scratch the surface.”

A more efficient method of eradicating toads has already been invented that targets the tadpoles that hatch from clutches of up to 30,000 eggs.

It’s the collaborative work of Professor Rob Capon, a natural products chemist from the University of Queensland and Professor Rick Shine, an evolutionary biologist and ecologist from Macquarie University.

Shine, one of Australia’s leading authorities on cane toads, had noticed that even in murky water, cane toad tadpoles were able to swim toward eggs laid by rival females, which they’d eat for nutrition and to build their stores of toxins.

In the laboratory, Capon set out to find out why.

“It turned out that they were tracking in on some sort of chemical cue that was released by the eggs,” Capon said.

To prove the theory, and try to mimic it, they’d first need a heap of dead cane toads.

Initially, their efforts to obtain corpses were somewhat frustrated by the university’s ethical obligations to ensure the animals were killed humanely for scientific study, said Capon.

We want to get rid of them, but we need to do so with as much humanity as if we were trying to get rid of koalas.

Rick Shine, Macquarie University

A humane death was hard to guarantee in a state where toads were once hunted with hockey sticks and golf clubs in an unofficial sport.

“I grew up being told that it was fun to kill cane toads and you could do so in ways that were as painful as possible for the animal,” says Shine, who was born in Queensland.

“I guess my perspective now is, it’s not the toad’s fault. It didn’t come to Australia of its own accord,” he said.

“We want to get rid of them, but we need to do so with as much humanity as if we were trying to get rid of koalas.”

Beginnings of the challenge

To satisfy the university’s ethics committee and obtain the requisite number of dead toads, Capon and his team created the “Cane Toad Challenge.”

The program encouraged backyard hunters to find the toads and send in their catch. And it reaped enough dead toads to keep the university supplied with subjects for several years of testing.

During that time, Capon and his team identified the pheromone that attracts the tadpoles, extracted it from toads and processed it into a liquid that can be used to bait a lure.

The lure – a drenched stone – is placed inside a trap that’s submerged near tadpoles, tempting them to swim in through a hole.

The recommended method for killing tadpoles and adult cane toads in Australia is to put them in the fridge for 24 hours, then freeze them for another day or two before putting them in the trash.

For obvious reasons, killing cane toad tadpoles en masse is far more efficient than picking up fully grown adults, Capon said.

But even he admits that eliminating cane toads in Australia is an impossible task.

“Toad busting is terrific. Tadpole trapping is a really good adjunct to toad busting because if you can pick up the adults and you take out the tadpoles, you’ve got a bigger buffer for the next generation,” he said.

“But Australia is a big place. And there’s lots of places that toads are happily living where there’s nobody to do tadpole trapping or toad busting.

“So, unless you’re going to stick an army of retirees on a bus across North Queensland every week of every summer, we’re not going to get rid of the toads.”

The problem in Florida

The southwestern state of Florida in the United States has a similar warm climate to Queensland, with plenty of cane toads and not enough retirees to catch them all.

Like in Australia, cane toads were introduced in Florida in the 1930s to attack cane beetles, but the local theory suggests their numbers really took off by accident in the 1950s.

“The running narrative right now is that there were those initial attempts, none of them worked, but then somehow this giant crate full of 20 or so toads got busted open in Miami airport. And because it was warm enough down there, they became established,” said Jacob LaFond, a lab coordinator and instructor at the University of Tampa.

So far, they haven’t moved beyond the peninsula – it’s too cold up north – and it seems they prefer human habitats to Florida’s natural environment.

That means cats and dogs tend to be more vulnerable than Florida’s wildlife, which is accustomed to living alongside other types of toxic toads.

“There’s no evidence that there’s a lot of toxic poisoning of native wildlife here in Florida,” said Steve Johnson, a professor in Wildlife Ecology & Conservation at the University of Florida.

“In Florida, cane toads are mainly a socio-economic issue. If you have a dog that attacks a cane toad or eats one and dies, if you’re a dog lover, that’s a major blow to you, and then there’s the costs associated with taking a dog to the vet,” he said.

Experts say there’s no big government campaign to eradicate cane toads, because Florida has bigger issues with invasive pests.

“We have these giant Burmese pythons that are eradicating a lot of the ecosystem in South Florida. We have these iguanas that are building tunnels that are messing with our highway infrastructure. So, I certainly understand why the toads have taken a back seat,” LaFond said.

That’s not to say that no one is interested.

Nikki Tomsett, an invasive species project officer at Australian not-for-profit Watergum, which is about to begin producing Capon’s tadpole lures, says most of the emails she receives from outside Australia are from Hawaii and Florida.

The lures aren’t available for distribution outside Australia yet – the group is still working through licensing issues – but Tomsett suggests it isn’t a quick fix for the US. More rigorous testing is needed in the field to ensure native toads – including the southern toad – don’t become bycatch.

“For us, not being familiar with the southern toad and the ecology of Florida, we would need to do some more trials and a lot of research and development,” Tomsett said.

Slowing the cane toad advance

As Florida’s numbers multiplied, small businesses offering toad-busting services sprang up offering regular toad maintenance for homes.

Australia takes more of a DIY approach in the suburbs, while a much more vigorous campaign is underway by state authorities to slow their rapid march west.

The cane toad front line now sits near the town of Derby in Western Australia – and is moving toward the coast at about 50 kilometers (31 miles) a year.

That means it’s likely to hit the coastline in the next two years, and while authorities are working to slow its progress, they’re also preparing native animals for the inevitable onslaught.

As well as manual toad catching and tadpole baiting, native animals are being fed cane toad flesh laced with poison or nausea-inducing chemicals to make them sick.

The idea is that they learn not to eat cane toads before the arrival of large, toxic adult males.

“We drop those baits just before the frontline arrives, and then when the cane toads do arrive, that animal won’t go for a cane toad because it’s already tried a sausage and felt sick,” said Sara McAllister, an invasive species project officer from the Western Australia Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions.

“If we just let nature run its course and we have the large highly toxic toads coming into the environment first, then you see a lot of animals die.”

The style of bait depends on the animals being targeted; they’re chosen with guidance from local Aboriginal rangers who have intimate knowledge of the land and its inhabitants.

Northern quolls – small carnivorous marsupials – get a cane toad sausage, goannas are fed tiny live toads and freshwater crocodiles receive cane toad legs with a dose of lithium chloride.

Back in Brisbane, the clear winner of the evening’s toad hunt was 9-year-old Connor Holmes, who with his father John caught 25 toads in just over an hour.

“We have a system, don’t we? I hold the bucket. And he catches,” John said.

“Because I’m the faster one,” Connor explains.

They say they’d go cane toad catching more often, if only for one issue.

“I don’t think the wife would appreciate the buckets of toads in the freezer,” John says. “That is the problem.”

North Korea on Friday claimed it had successfully tested an underwater nuclear weapons system earlier this week in response to naval drills by the United States, South Korea and Japan.

According to North Korean state media, its military conducted a new test of its underwater nuclear-capable drone, the Haeil, in waters off the southern end of the peninsula, in response to what it described as “frantic” and “provocative” US allied military exercises.

Following tests of the Haeil system last year, North Korean state media said it could carry a nuclear warhead that could create a “radioactive tsunami,” though analysts at the time said Pyongyang offered no proof.

North Korean state media on Friday did not show evidence for the success of the latest test, but warned the US, South Korea and Japan of the “catastrophic consequences” of their actions.

“The armed forces of (North Korea) will strike horror into their hearts through responsible, prompt and bold exercise of its deterrent,” said the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) report.

The US-led trilateral naval exercises, which included aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, Japanese helicopter carrier JS Hyūga, and guided-missile-equipped surface ships from the three partners, were conducted to “advance the deterrence and response capabilities to North Korea’s nuclear, missile and underwater threats,” South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

A statement from the US Navy 7th Fleet said the exercises near Jeju island demonstrated the three navies’ “commitment to bolstering regional security and stability in the Indo-Pacific.”

Pyongyang called the exercises “an act of seriously threatening the security” of North Korea that further destabilized the situation in the region, according to state media.

“The U.S., Japan and the Republic of Korea are getting frantic in their provocative military exercises,” the KCNA report said.

Already high tensions on the Korean Peninsula have been growing since late December when KCNA reported that leader Kim Jong Un had instructed the country’s army, munitions industry, nuclear weapons and civil defense sectors to accelerate war preparations in response to “confrontation moves” by the US.

Kim followed that up by saying North Korea will no longer seek reconciliation and reunification with South Korea, a stance he reiterated earlier this week by telling the country’s Supreme People’s Assembly that a massive monument to the possible reunification of the Korean Peninsula that his father constructed in Pyongyang must be destroyed. Kim called it an “eyesore,” according to KCNA.

North and South Korea have been cut off from each other since the Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice. The two sides are still technically at war, but both governments have long sought the goal of one day reunifying.

Relations have ebbed and flowed over the decades, but tensions have remained particularly high in more recent years after Kim ramped up the country’s nuclear weapons program in defiance of international sanctions.

In just the past month, North Korea has been stepping up military activities, including firing hundreds of artillery rounds into waters near a disputed border between North and South and testing what it said was a ballistic missile topped with a hypersonic glide vehicle.

Meanwhile, Kim on Monday called the South the North’s “primary foe and invariable principal enemy.”

Analysts say it all points to an even more intractable North Korea.

“If North Korea’s artillery fire near the inter-Korean maritime border was just part of routine training, it would be less concerning. But the Kim regime was also asserting that it will not be outdone regarding shows of force,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ehwa University in Seoul.

“Pyongyang is going much further by rejecting dialogue, dismantling organizations for inter-Korean exchanges, and defining Seoul as an adversary,” he said.

“This appears to be an ideological adjustment for regime survival,” justifying Kim’s focus on nuclear weapons, Easley said.

The number of North Korean defectors entering South Korea nearly tripled in 2023 compared to the previous two years, authorities said Thursday – including a higher number of youth and members of the North Korean elite.

South Korea’s Unification Ministry recorded 196 defectors entering the country last year, it said in a briefing. More than half were in their 20s and 30s, and about 84% were women or girls, according to government data.

The total figure is just a fraction of pre-pandemic levels – 1,047 defectors arrived in 2019 – but it still marks a significant rise after a steep decline during the Covid-19 pandemic.

North Korea slammed its already tight borders shut in 2020, plunging the hermit nation into even greater isolation. Only 63 defectors entered South Korea in 2021, and 67 in 2022, according to government data.

The country began reopening somewhat in 2023, allowing citizens living abroad to return, and resuming international flights to certain countries including China and Russia. But the Unification Ministry said some North Koreans living overseas chose not to return – and instead fled to the South.

About 10 what it described as elite North Koreans were among those who defected last year, the highest number of this group since 2017, according to the ministry. They include “diplomats, other officials and students based overseas (who) were told to return last year as the pandemic situation entered a new phase,” a ministry official said.

“Many must have found it unacceptable after experiencing what (it) was like to live in the free world, knowing that the economic situation even worsened and internal controls strengthened in North Korea,” the official said.

The ministry said further details could not be given for safety reasons.

The most cited reason for defection in 2023 was dissent towards the ruling Kim regime, said South Korean officials – followed by lack of food and hunger in North Korea, which had previously been the most cited reason in recent years.

While millions of North Koreans live in impoverished conditions under the dynastic dictatorship of leader Kim Jong Un, the country’s wealthy elite, such as senior government officials and their families, reportedly have access to luxuries such as air conditioning, coffee and even smartphones – though the phones can only access heavily censored government-run intranet.

These residents mostly live in the capital Pyongyang, where a privileged few enjoy facilities like cinemas, department stores and indoor gyms.

A majority of those who entered South Korea last year had in fact left North Korea years ago, staying in third countries for a long time before making the journey to Seoul, said the ministry – adding that the diversification of defection routes signified the “very tough” situation within North Korea.

Many defectors leave through North Korea’s border into China, crossing the Yalu river that separates the two countries. After entering China, many cross the border illegally into Laos or Myanmar and head for the South Korean embassy in those countries or continue through to Thailand.

While the South Korean government is working to support the settlement of North Korean defectors entering the country, it is closely watching the possibility that the number of defectors could gradually increase if North Korea opens its border with China, said the ministry.

China, a close ally of Pyongyang, doesn’t consider North Korean defectors to be refugees, instead seeing them as illegal economic migrants. Under a border agreement with North Korea, it forcibly deports them.

Once back in North Korea, defectors face possible torture, sexual violence, hard labor, imprisonment in political or re-education camps, or even execution by the North Korean state, according to activists.

A quadcopter was flying low above the door of his house, he said, and he feared he was about to be targeted in an Israeli airstrike. As a highly visible Palestinian online who had received threats before, Azaiza believed he had reason to be afraid.

Hundreds of people flooded the replies with concern for the 24-year-old Palestinian photojournalist, who has been documenting Israel’s military assault on Gaza on social media since Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7.

“I’m so scared for Motaz,” the replies read.

“I hope Motaz is okay.”

“Pray for Motaz.”

Noor, a medical student in California who asked to go by her first name for safety reasons, was one of the people worrying. For months, she’s been following Azaiza’s dispatches from Gaza, broadcast to his millions of followers: images of his once vibrant neighborhood transformed into a gray wasteland, raw glimpses of carnage in the ashes, and reflections on his own feelings of rage and exhaustion.

Noor refers to Azaiza with the familiarity of his first name. She gets notifications on her phone each time he posts, and worries when too much time passes.

Noor isn’t Palestinian and has never been to Gaza. What’s happening there still hits close to home. Her family is Iraqi, and she grew up against the backdrop of the Iraq War. When Azaiza said he feared being killed for his work, Noor found herself feeling scared and anxious for a virtual stranger halfway around the world.

“Their journalism isn’t just journalism. It’s a diary,” Noor said of the Gazans posting on social media. “They’re showing us their lives. They’re telling us, ‘Hey, I couldn’t shower for a week.’ ‘Hey, I barely had some of this to eat today.’”

After hours with no information following that fear of an airstrike, Azaiza finally posted again. A targeted attack on his house hadn’t materialized, but there was bad news elsewhere: a refugee camp was hit in an Israeli attack.

Still, his posts signaled he was alive, and Noor could breathe a sad sigh of relief.

Palestinians on social media are a window into the war

Like millions of others around the world, Noor is witnessing the war in Gaza through the eyes of Palestinians who are sharing their daily realities on social media. Through their posts on Instagram, X and other platforms, these citizen journalists are putting a face to the conflict.

In return, their followers are developing strong emotional connections with them.

Leyla Hamed, a sports journalist in London, said the first thing she does when she wakes up is open Instagram to visit the profiles of Palestinians she follows and watch their stories one by one. As a journalist herself, she sees them as colleagues and feels a responsibility to bear witness.

“I feel so much empathy for them that I sometimes feel scared to open their profiles, just thinking something bad has happened to them,” she said.

Kanwal Ahmed, a filmmaker and storyteller in Toronto, has a similar routine.

“They’ve become family to the entire world,” she said. “If (creator Bisan Owda) hasn’t posted for 12 hours, there are hundreds of tweets: ‘Where’s Bisan?’ ‘Does anybody know where Bisan is?’ ‘Is she okay?’ If (Azaiza) has posted a picture where you can tell that he’s looking extremely depressed or he’s lost weight, there’s people discussing that.”

These images and accounts from Palestinians offer an instantaneous view that some young people feel like they haven’t gotten from traditional media outlets, Ahmed said. Young Palestinians like Azaiza, content creator Bisan Owda and freelance journalist Hind Khoudary haven’t just been on the ground since the beginning. They are reporting from their homes, their communities.

They’ve become family to the entire world.

Kanwal Ahmed, filmmaker

Through raw, selfie-style videos chronicling the ever-present threat of explosions or the everyday indignities of displacement, they’re giving outsiders an intimate look at the human costs of war from the perspective of people who live there. Many of the images they share are so graphic that Instagram obscures them with “sensitive content” warnings.

“Everyone’s getting a chance to tell their own stories,” Ahmed said. “People can tell for themselves … And it’s very hard to look away when you’re seeing somebody sitting in a pile of rubble, or if you’re seeing a five-year-old girl crying next to her father’s dead body.”

Seeing the war directly through these channels changes how people understand it, said Zaina Arafat, a Palestinian American author in Brooklyn who has written about witnessing the assault on Gaza through Instagram.

“The constancy of these images and the way that we watch them through our phones very much in private allows for a more direct and forceful impact,” she said. “It’s this very immediate connection between journalist and viewer, which I do think heightens the response.”

They are changing the way the world sees war

Israel began its relentless bombardment and ground assault in Gaza after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, killing more than 1,200 and taking more than 200 hostages, according to Israeli authorities.

Israel says its offensive is aimed at wiping out Hamas, a militant group that the US, European Union and others consider a terrorist organization. But the conflict has also created a humanitarian crisis — one that people around the world are able to see up close.

Direct accounts from Palestinians are one of the most reliable ways for people to understand the devastation in Gaza, where about one in every 100 people has been killed and more than one in 40 have been wounded since the war began, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah, which draws its statistics from hospitals in Hamas-controlled Gaza. Israel’s military denies accusations that it deliberately targets civilians.

“This is as close as you can get to factual and minute-by-minute reporting on the atrocities on the ground,” said Marwa Fatafta, an analyst and researcher who leads Middle East and North Africa policy and advocacy work for the digital rights organization Access Now.

Independent journalism out of Gaza is scant. With notable exceptions, among them international news agencies such as Reuters and Agence France-Presse, most news organizations have been unable to cover the war in Gaza with their own correspondents. Israel, along with Egypt, has largely blocked international journalists from the territory on the premise that it cannot guarantee their safety. The few foreign journalists who have been allowed to enter have primarily embedded with the Israel Defense Forces and may have had to submit their footage to the military for security review.

Eyewitness accounts on social media are critical in understanding global conflicts, including past flare-ups between Israelis and Palestinians. In 2021, Palestinian poet and writer Mohammed el-Kurd rose to social media prominence for his activism around a series of forced eviction cases in his Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem.

What’s different this time, according to Fatafta, is how many more people are paying attention.

“What we see now is a continuation of what happened in 2021, but of course, on a massive scale, because also what’s happening in Gaza is unprecedented,” she said.

Before October 2023, Azaiza had about 25,000 Instagram followers, according to the social media analytics firm Social Blade. That number has since grown to more than 18 million. Bisan Owda has 3.8 million followers, and Hind Khoudary recently surpassed one million.

The reports show how much violence has affected their lives

Plestia Alaqad said she wanted to tell stories about the beauty of Gaza before the events of October 7 turned her into a de facto war reporter.

After one of her videos capturing a blast going off near her building went viral, she said she felt a duty to continue. Like many Gazans on social media, she posted in fluent English, allowing her photos and videos on Instagram to reach a global audience that now numbers 4.7 million people.

Alaqad has been on both sides of this dynamic, first as a citizen journalist and now as a viewer. Through October and much of November of 2023, she was reporting daily on what was happening on the ground in Gaza, with her followers hanging on to every update.

As a Palestinian living in Gaza, you don’t have a choice but to be a war journalist.

Plestia Alaqad, Palestinian content creator

As overwhelming as it felt at times to have so many people relying on her for updates, Alaqad said she wanted viewers to feel connected. She didn’t want people to learn from TV about some new tragedy in Gaza and just move on with their day.

She wanted viewers to see Palestinians as someone’s child, friend or neighbor, with lives and dreams of their own.

“It’s not about me as Plestia,” she said. “It’s about me as a Palestinian. I’d like people to know about Palestine, to see Gaza through my eyes.”

In November, she made the difficult decision to leave Gaza with her family after her uncle in Australia secured emergency visas for them. Now watching from afar in Melbourne, she’s the one refreshing her social media feeds and anxiously texting relatives, friends and colleagues to make sure they’re safe.

The everyday details are just as moving as the violence

Viewers who scroll back far enough through these Gazans’ social media posts are hit with sobering reminders of a life before the war. Motaz Azaiza was still documenting flare-ups in the ongoing conflict before the events of October, but he also spent time near the sea photographing children playing and shared a selfie celebrating his graduation from university. Plestia Alaqad filmed a tour of Gaza’s Old City, did a photoshoot in a motorcycle helmet and posed for pictures with dogs.

“They would go to restaurants. They would go to the beach. They would watch their favorite films. They would take care of the gardens. They have a life just like me and you,” said Leyla Hamed, the sports journalist.

Others can still see themselves in parts of these people’s lives, even as they are under siege. Last month, Owda shared that she had to chop off her signature brown curls because she no longer had clean water or products to care for her hair properly.

It might seem trivial to mourn the loss of hair in such a situation, but it was an intimate detail people could identify with, said Syed Faizan Raza, a design researcher in Islamabad.

“It goes back to those moments of relatability and how you are familiar with these people. Everyone knows these people by name and they’re following them quite diligently,” he said.

The connections are virtual, but the danger is very real

The work of these photographers, storytellers and citizen journalists is dangerous.

At least 82 journalists and media workers have been killed while covering the war as of January 16, 75 of them Palestinian, according to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists. Reporters in the region also face assaults, arrests and threats, in addition to communications blackouts.

The landscape is so dire that some have decided to cease their efforts. On January 10, blogger Ismail al Dahdouh announced to his 1.2 million Instagram followers that he would no longer be documenting the war in order to seek safety with his family.

Other Palestinian creators continue to record with relentless dedication. Sometimes, they express despair over whether anyone is listening, or whether their reporting makes a difference.

One day in early December, their exhaustion was especially apparent.

“I no longer have any hope of survival like I had at the beginning of this genocide, and I am certain that I will die in the next few weeks or maybe days,” Owda wrote in a December 2 Instagram post. (Israel has denied allegations of genocide in Gaza, claiming its actions in the region are in “self-defense” and that it is targeting Hamas rather than civilians.)

“The phase of risking my life to show the world what’s happening is now over. A new phase has begun — the phase to survive,” Motaz Azaiza wrote in Arabic in an Instagram post that same day.

Despite the pain, people watch to learn and bear witness

Even as people flock to learn from and support these Palestinians on social media, Noor says the exchange is overshadowed by feelings of powerlessness.

“For (Azaiza, the photojournalist), it’s almost like he’s a representative of his people,” Noor said. “By extension, your care isn’t just for him. Your care is for everyone because he is showcasing what his people are suffering.”

Still, Noor and other followers hope that their advocacy for Palestinian stories can keep public attention on the crisis in Gaza and put pressure on elected officials to bring about an end to the fighting.

In the US, people are encouraging each other to contact their representatives in Congress and demand they support a lasting ceasefire. Protests, demonstrations and public gatherings in support of Palestinians have grown in size since the start of the war, according to data from scholars and researchers with the Crowd Counting Consortium. A December 2023 Quinnipiac University poll found that US voter support for sending military aid to Israel had dropped. Israel is facing mounting international pressure to agree to a ceasefire, or at least moderate its offensive in Gaza. And in what it describes as a new phase of the conflict, the Israeli military said it has started to withdraw some troops.

It’s difficult to attribute these events to any one factor, and Fatafta cautions against drawing too straight a line between social media and changing opinions on the war. There is a rich history of solidarity with Palestine in the Arab world and beyond, and Fatafta said the massive social media followings of Palestinians like Azaiza partly reflect that.

“And it’s only growing, because also the events on the ground are beyond atrocious, and they do merit a global reaction,” Fatafta said.

“If there wasn’t, I would be scared to live in this world.”

Constantly checking Instagram to make sure Azaiza and other Palestinians documenting the war are still alive feels dystopian, Noor said. She’s had to take a break at times because the horrors she was seeing through her phone were affecting her ability to function. But she knows those in Gaza don’t have that luxury, so she never looks away for long.

“The least that I can do, or anybody can do, is to bear witness,” she said.

Japan is on the verge of a historic attempt to land its robotic “Moon Sniper” explorer on the moon, which could make it the third country this century — and the fifth ever — to put a spacecraft safely on the lunar surface.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s uncrewed Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, mission is expected to touch down on the moon at 10:20 a.m. ET Friday (12:20 a.m. Saturday Japan Standard Time). The spacecraft will start descending toward the lunar surface at 10 a.m. ET, and the event will be streamed live on YouTube in Japanese and English.

The small-scale SLIM robotic explorer, which launched in September, goes by the nickname “Moon Sniper” because it carries new precision technology to demonstrate a “pinpoint” landing.

Previous lunar missions have been able to target and reach specific zones that spanned many kilometers, but the SLIM lander will target a landing site that stretches just 100 meters (328 feet) across. The lander’s “smart eyes” — an image-matching-based navigation technology — will rapidly photograph the lunar surface on approach and autonomously make adjustments as the spacecraft descends for a more precise touchdown.

Moon Sniper’s journey

The Moon Sniper is targeting a landing site near the small Shioli crater within a lunar plain called the Sea of Nectar that was created by ancient volcanic activity and lies just south of the Sea of Tranquility, where Apollo 11 landed in 1969. If the lander touches down successfully, it will briefly study rocks at the site that could reveal insights into the moon’s origin.

When meteorites and other objects strike the moon, they create craters as well as rocky debris that litters the surface. These rocks intrigue scientists because studying them is effectively like peering inside the moon itself. Minerals and other aspects of the rocks’ composition can potentially shed more light on how the moon formed.

Landing near the sloped, rock-strewn areas around craters is a hazardous process that most missions usually avoid, but JAXA believes its lander has the technology to touch down safely on rocky terrain.

New space race

Multiple space agencies and countries have attempted moon landing missions over the past year, leading to a historic first as well as failures.

India became the fourth country — after the United States, the former Soviet Union and China — to execute a controlled landing on the moon when its Chandrayaan-3 mission arrived near the lunar south pole in August.

Meanwhile, Japanese company Ispace’s Hakuto-R lunar lander fell 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) before crashing into the moon during a landing attempt in April. Russia’s Luna-25 also crash-landed in August during the country’s first attempt to return to the moon since the Soviet Union’s fall. Astrobotic Technology’s Peregrine spacecraft — the first US lunar lander to launch in five decades — met a fiery end Thursday after a critical fuel leak made safely landing on the moon out of the question.

Part of the motivation behind the new lunar space race is a desire to access water trapped as ice in permanently shadowed regions at the lunar south pole. It could be used for drinking water or fuel as humanity pushes the bounds of space exploration in the future. This region is riddled with craters and strewn with rocks, leading to narrow landing sites.

If successful, the lightweight SLIM lander might be an effective design that could not only land in small areas of interest on the moon but also on planets such as Mars, according to JAXA.

For years, the fight against climate change has been symbolized by one number: 1.5.

Ever since countries agreed in 2015 to an ambition of restricting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the number has become synonymous with staving off catastrophic climate change.

But what if the battle to keep global warming from overshooting this limit has already been lost?

Some prominent scientists argue it has and it’s irresponsible to sugarcoat the truth. For others, that view is not only wrong, but even “dangerous.”

It was the renowned climate scientist James Hansen whose comments fueled the debate. In November, he declared the 1.5 degree-limit “deader than a doornail,” saying it was a shortcoming of the scientific community “to not make clear to the political leaders what the situation is.”

The rate of global warming is accelerating, he said at a news conference in November, and the world is certain to blow past 1.5 degrees of warming. “Anybody who understands the physics knows that.”

Hansen’s words have heft — he is widely credited as the first scientist to publicly sound the alarm on climate change in the 1980s. But other scientists have pushed back hard.

The response from Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, was even blunter. “I think that’s a very stupid thing to say,” she told reporters in November. “At the moment, (1.5 degrees) is within reach and to pretend it’s not will just lead to doing nothing even longer.”

Disagreements over climate science are not uncommon — our planet is a highly complex system, and the nature of reaching consensus typically starts with scientists who disagree.

But as global warming fuels extreme weather — like heat waves, cyclones and even fierce winter storms, such as those that have torn through parts of the United States — the debate over the future of 1.5 is getting unusually heated.

Extraordinary heat

As many parts of the US and Europe deal with an Arctic blast of brutally cold air, it can be hard to recall just how hot 2023 was. Last year saw unprecedented global temperatures, with heat records around the world tumbling.

El Niño — a natural climate phenomenon that tends to boost the planet’s average temperature — collided with the long-term trend of global warming, making 2023 the hottest year on record. The year came within a whisker of breaching 1.5 degrees, according to data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

While scientists are most concerned about long-term warming over many years, not just one, 2023’s record heat was a stark warning sign. If the world breaches 1.5 degrees over the long term, scientists say the impacts of climate change will start to exceed the ability of humans and ecosystems to adapt.

But every fraction of a degree matters, and climate chaos is already emerging.

Over just a few years, the world has warmed from 1 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels to around 1.2 degrees today — fractions of a degree that have translated to record breaking extreme weather.

He predicts that by May, the planet will have experienced a 12-month period with an average temperature 1.6 to 1.7 degrees higher than pre-industrial levels.

“For all practical purposes we are only going to be looking at 1.5 degrees in the rearview mirror,” he said.

Is climate change accelerating?

At the center of Hansen’s argument is his much-debated assertion that the planet is warming much faster than predicted.

He points to the imbalance between the energy coming in from the sun and what leaves through heat radiating into space. This imbalance has doubled, meaning global warming is escalating, he argued in a November paper he co-authored with more than a dozen other scientists.

The paper’s scientists attribute this mainly to successful global efforts to tackle shipping pollution.

Ships burn fossil fuels that produce carbon emissions, which have a significant impact on global warming. But ships’ exhaust fumes also contain sulfur dioxide. In what may seem a strange twist, the pollutant – which is highly hazardous for human health – has a global cooling impact, as the particles reflect sunlight away from the Earth.

Hansen’s research predicts the world will breach the long-term 1.5-degree benchmark this decade, and 2 degrees before 2050. That would mean the world has failed to deliver on the central goal in the Paris Agreement on climate change, under which countries pledged to limit warming to well below 2 degrees.

Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of Earth sciences at University College London, shares Hansen’s concerns about the pace of change.

But for many other scientists, there simply isn’t the evidence to say global warming is speeding up. At least not yet.

Last year’s unprecedented heat was boosted by El Niño, Mann said, and “does not constitute a change in the trend line.”

The rate of global warming did accelerate after the 1970s as clean air laws reduced air pollution, but since then, “the planet has warmed at a roughly constant rate,” he said. The reality is bad enough, he added. “There is no need to exaggerate.”

Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, said there have been recent climate events that scientists are struggling to understand, including 2023’s record-shattering ocean temperatures.

But in terms of Hansen’s warning about the significant impacts on global warming of cleaning up shipping pollution, “we don’t see the signal,” she said.

Why 1.5 matters

Few scientists will dispute that the world faces a daunting path to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Even with current climate policies, the planet is on course for nearly 3 degrees of warming.

In some ways, the split between them is, at its heart, a debate about the value of having the 1.5 degree limit in the first place.

If we say 1.5 degrees is dead, Otto said, “that means, for a lot of people, probably the conclusion is, ‘OK, then it’s not even worth trying.’”

Smith said it risks playing into a “fatalistic narrative that is actually quite dangerous,” potentially persuading leaders to think “we’ve failed, anything goes now.”

Mann said it was “irresponsible” to claim 1.5 degrees is dead when the world can avoid crossing the threshold by making substantial and immediate reductions in carbon pollution.

McGuire takes the opposite view. There is no feasible way the world can meet this limit which would require nearly halving emissions by 2030, he said. “To suggest otherwise is duplicitous and presents a false picture of where we are.”​ Framing 1.5 as a “target” to be reached, rather than a limit to stay under, has given the illusion we have more time than we do to tackle the crisis, he said, and has allowed countries and companies keep burning fossil fuels.

But one major concern is that if politicians abandon 1.5 degrees, they won’t strive to restrict global warming to 1.6 or 1.7 degrees, but will instead focus on 2 degrees — the upper limit countries committed to in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“That is a huge danger, and that would really be catastrophic,” said Otto.

Between 1.5 and 2 degrees lies disaster: The risk of triggering a slew of climate tipping points, including ice sheet melting and mass coral reef death, and the lives and livelihoods of millions of people.

We will reach 1.5 degrees as a global average temperature, probably next year, Otto said. “Whether we stay there, or how much we go above that, really is still a political question and it is in our gift to change that.”

Footage of the burial ground showed the area bulldozed, with graves damaged and destroyed, and human remains left exposed, after the IDF conducted operations in the area.

According to international law, an intentional attack on a cemetery could amount to a war crime, except under very limited circumstances relating to that site becoming a military objective.

“If not for Hamas’ reprehensible decision to take Israeli men, women, children and babies hostages, the need for such searches for our hostages would not exist,” the IDF added.

Reports about the IDF taking corpses from gravesites have been circulating on social media, shared by people outraged by the practice. This marks the first time the IDF has admitted to the exhumations.

Israel has said that 253 people were taken hostage during the Hamas attack and believes 132 hostages are still in Gaza – 105 of them alive and 27 dead.

A satellite image of the cemetery taken by Maxar on January 15 shows the area undisturbed, indicating that the damage happened between then and when the IDF moved into the area on January 17.

The IDF operation around the area of the cemetery, which also includes the Al Nasser hospital compound and a Jordanian field hospital, sparked panic, according to videos from the scene and local witnesses.

Around 7,000 people are sheltering at the Al Nasser compound, according to the World Health Organization.

Late on Tuesday, Israeli forces began moving towards the hospital, prompting crowds of people to flee. Multiple videos from the scenes showed people carrying blankets, mattresses and other personal belongings making their way out of the compound.

The IDF said on Tuesday that Hamas had recently carried out a launch from within the hospital compound towards Israeli forces in Khan Younis. It said that IDF “commando forces have been operating in the Khan Younis area in order to locate and dismantle terror infrastructure.”

The Jordanian Armed Forces said that the field hospital they run that is located next to the cemetery in Khan Younis sustained “severe material damage” as a result of “continuous Israeli bombardment in the hospital’s surroundings overnight and into Wednesday morning.”