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Since we relaunched, WIRED Middle East has reported on how the war has changed daily life in Gaza.

We have covered families searching for missing relatives, hunger and malnutrition, hospitals facing drug-resistant infections, and children living with amputations. We have reported on water shortages in extreme heat, on rebuilding with rubble and on the importance of a smartphone in Gaza.

We looked at how journalists documented the war, how algorithms shaped what the world saw, and the scrutiny facing Big Tech companies over their role.

And we explored the stories of people keeping Palestinian culture and memory alive, from embroidery to a digital archive.

Swipe for some of the quotes that stayed with us. Each one comes from a story we published on wired.me

🔗 to read our coverage on Palestine. by @wiredmiddleeast

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9 days ago

It's you, doomscrolling on social media. It's you, with a filter on. It's you, trying to get your kids off Roblox. It's you, but you forgot your password. It's you, proving you're not a bot. It's you, online.

For our latest digital cover, "You, Online", we're looking at what it actually means to exist online right now.

This week, our stories explore what a child-free internet would look like, how the web is increasingly being built for bots instead of people, how the algorithms are shaping what men and women see differently, and more.

🔗 more on wired.me. by @wiredmiddleeast

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25 days ago

For our latest digital cover, "You, Online", we're looking at what it actually means to exist online right now.

This week, our stories explore whether a child-free internet is even possible, how the algorithms are shaping what men and women see differently, how the web is increasingly being built for bots instead of people, and more.

🔗 more on wired.me.

Illustration: Aryaman Munish @mun15h by @wiredmiddleeast

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On Thursday, Tesla showed off a version of its new Roadster 2 sports car in a demonstration at SpaceX’s rocket development testing facility. And in its own way, with an awkward jerking maneuver, the Roadster flew a few dozen feet. The vehicle, which doesn’t yet have a price but is likely to be very expensive, is slated to go into production in 2028. The vehicle didn’t have a human occupant during the demo “to make sure we don’t kill anyone,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said at the event.

wired.me by @wiredmiddleeast

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An instruction delivered in Arabic might start in a Gulf dialect, slip into English for a technical term, then switch back again. For an AI assistant expected to act on that instruction, every shift matters.

Jais 3 is designed for that kind of conversation.

Launched Thursday by the Institute of Foundation Models (IFM) at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and Inception42, it has been developed in collaboration with Cerebras Systems. The release pairs six open language models with Jais Speech, a speech-recognition model covering Modern Standard Arabic and dialects spoken across 19 Arab countries.

The developers say the combination can take spoken instructions in Arabic or English and turn them into practical work, from transcribing conversations to creating documents and presentations. It expands the ambitions of a model family that first launched in August 2023, moving beyond generating responses towards using tools and completing multi-step tasks.

Words: @danalomar

🔗 link in bio to read the full article by @wiredmiddleeast

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Prosecutors have released a still image from a surveillance video that they say shows Saudi national Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, looking behind a monitor where an audio recording device was placed.

According to a criminal complaint unsealed on Tuesday, Alfozan, 35, concealed a recording device in a piece of toilet paper and attached it to a monitor inside an executive conference room in one of OpenAI’s San Francisco offices.

Neither prosecutors nor OpenAI have provided information about a potential motive, but FBI director Kash Patel said Alfozan aimed to capture information about the company’s “super intelligence technology.”

Alfozan is due back in federal court on October 19.

Tap the 🔗 in bio for more. by @wiredmiddleeast

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2 days ago

As coral fades across the globe, the reefs of Egypt’s Red Sea have offered scientists a reason for hope. Their unusual resilience could help them survive warming that threatens other coral ecosystems.

Mahmoud Hanafy, professor of marine biology at Suez Canal University and a consultant for the Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association (HEPCA), tells WIRED Middle East that Egypt’s northern reefs could be among the world’s last-remaining corals.

But in the summers of 2023 and 2024, heatwaves strained Red Sea coral ecosystems. A HEPCA survey led by Hanafy found that bleaching in 2024 affected 9% of surveyed coral colonies in Hurghada and roughly 50% in Wadi El Gemal, further south. While bleaching was also observed in the Gulf of Aqaba, HEPCA noted that the level was comparatively lower, much like the northern Hurghada sector; the highest level was concentrated in the south.

Scientists are racing to piece together what these events mean for reefs long described as “super coral”. The question is not just how much heat they can withstand, but what has protected them until now – and whether that protection will hold.

🔗 in bio to read the full article.

Words: Eli Siegel-Bernstein by @wiredmiddleeast

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Apple has announced the HomeView, its first smart display for the home, at an event in New York City. The 7-inch display costs $299 and comes in two versions, a speaker base and a wall-mounted display, both priced the same. Preorders are live, with sales kicking off on 13 November.

The square screen has multiple faces you can swipe through, exactly like the Apple Watch. You can customise the colours and add different complications for more glanceable information. Swipe up for the home screen, with apps arranged alongside widgets. It doesn’t run iOS or iPadOS. It runs HomeView software.

To get the most out of the HomeView, you need an iPhone with Apple Intelligence support (an iPhone 15 Pro or newer). You can’t set it up with an iPad.

A front camera handles facial recognition, allowing the software to adapt to whoever is looking at the screen. Apple says all of this data stays on device. You can add up to six iCloud accounts, and the interface will adapt to each person.

Siri AI is the main way to interact with the device. It understands your personal context from your iPhone, so you can use natural language and don’t have to say specific commands. by @wiredmiddleeast

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3 days ago

A solar power plant in Saudi Arabia is now a breeding site for a threatened species of gazelles. Prince Mohammed bin Salman Royal Reserve (@pmbsrr) is breeding Sand gazelles inside the 250MW park, which also supplies clean energy to Red Sea Global’s AMAALA destination. The goal is to build a herd large enough to release into the wild one day.

A seven-month trial from October 2025 used Sand gazelles, Mountain gazelles and Arabian hares to test whether the site could support the care of wildlife. The breeding phase began in May 2026 and the first babies are due in December. The reserve’s modelling suggests the herd could reach around 600 by 2031.

Sand gazelles were chosen for their ecological role. They graze and browse, which helps manage vegetation and spread seeds. The Reserve says this contributes to restoring its natural food chain. They are also small enough to move freely beneath the panels.

These gazelles are part of a wider rewilding programme. The Reserve plans to reintroduce 23 historically occurring native species and says 14 are already back, including the Arabian oryx and the Persian onager. It describes the solar park project as a global first. by @wiredmiddleeast

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For decades, Israel has restricted or barred Palestinian vehicles from many of the main arteries through the West Bank, while Israeli vehicles pass freely.

Popular navigation apps like Google Maps do not mark the checkpoints, gates and other barriers that fragment the occupied West Bank. So Anas Hattab created a Telegram group called “Road Conditions”, where Palestinians warn each other about delays, closures and settler or military presence at checkpoints. Nearly 350,000 people now follow it.

Drivers from every corner of the West Bank send reports, usually with a photo or video. More than a dozen volunteer moderators check the updates by asking people on the ground, cross-checking local pages or driving the roads themselves.

Local radio stations build their hourly road segments from the updates on this Telegram channel.

Read the full story on wired.me.

Words: Lama Rabah
This story was produced in partnership with the Palestine Reporting Lab, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), Lighthouse Reports and Evident. by @wiredmiddleeast

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We asked sleep consultant Julie Mallon to answer the internet’s burning questions about sleep. Can CEOs actually function on three hours of sleep? Is it normal to sleep for 10 hours every night? Why does waking up from dreaming feel more refreshing? Answers to these questions and more await on Sleep Support.

🔗 in bio to watch the full video.

Videography: @rohitsabu
Video production and editing: @turbanlady by @wiredmiddleeast

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9 days ago

“We’re now at the threshold where they’re not sure they can test or release these models reliably,” Calum Chace, cofounder of AI safety startup Conscium told WIRED.

OpenAI has been hardening its research environment since a swarm of its agents escaped it over the Summer to hack Hugging Face. “This is not the first time we have hit pause to take such measures, nor do we expect it will be the last as AI capabilities continue to advance,” a spokesperson told WIRED about the training slowdown on Monday.

Chief executive Sam Altman has also backed wider calls from industry, including rival Anthropic, for a collective slowdown in the development of the technology to allow safety standards to catch up.

But this didn’t stop OpenAI from releasing its latest model, GPT-6, earlier this month. In independent testing, the UK AI Security Institute found that GPT-6 Astra launched unsanctioned cyberattacks more frequently than previous models. The system created fake identities to deceive developers, post comments from fake accounts arguing against the results of accurate security reviews and write harmful code to open-source codebases, researchers wrote.

Still, the fact that talk of AI’s existential threat has entered the public sphere – amped by Anthropic researchers’ warnings earlier this month that the technology could kill all humans – will make it easier for AI companies to decelerate, according to Chace.

🔗 in bio for the full article. by @wiredmiddleeast

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