Good morning. A cease-fire is in effect in Gaza, Israel said. Its soldiers were repositioning themselves after the government approved a deal that may end the war. The deal includes the release of all hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, as well as an initial pullback by the Israeli military in Gaza. We have more on that below. We’re also covering:
One step closer
Israel and Hamas are wrapping up their deal to end the war in Gaza, and President Trump is planning his victory lap. He’s headed to a formal signing in Egypt this weekend and will speak before Israel’s Parliament. The parties will exchange hostages and prisoners early next week, Trump said. Many of the agreement’s details remain in flux. Here’s what we know so far:
This is where each side stands: Hamas is taking a risk. The group would give up much of its leverage over Israel by releasing the remaining hostages. There is no certainty that by doing so, it will achieve its main goals: the complete withdrawal of Israeli military forces from Gaza and a permanent end to the war. Netanyahu is thinking ahead. He had promised “total victory” in Gaza and is pulling back before Hamas has disarmed. But welcoming home Israeli hostages is a major political boost, and he will soon be up for re-election. Trump claims victory. He craves the Nobel Prize Prize. He did not win today, but this agreement boosts his chances in the future. More news on Gaza
High energy
This summer, I got a good look at China’s clean-energy future, nearly 10,000 feet above sea level in Tibet. Solar panels stretch to the horizon and cover an area seven times the size of Manhattan. (They soak up sunlight that is much brighter than at sea level because the air is so thin.) Wind turbines dot nearby ridgelines, capturing night breezes. Hydropower dams sit where rivers spill down long chasms at the edges of the plateau. And high-voltage power lines carry this electricity to businesses and homes more than 1,000 miles away. The intention is to harness the region’s bright sunshine, cold temperatures and sky-touching altitude to power the plateau and beyond, including data centers used in China’s artificial intelligence development. While China still burns as much coal as the rest of the world combined, last month President Xi Jinping promised to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and expand renewable energy sixfold in coming years. A big part of that effort is in sparsely inhabited Qinghai, a province in western China in a region known among the Tibetans as Amdo. I came as part of a government-organized media tour of clean energy sites in Qinghai, which usually bars foreign journalists to hide dissent by its large ethnic Tibetan population. (The Times paid for my travel.) Today, I’ll tell you what I saw. A huge effort
China is not the first country to experiment with high-altitude clean energy. But other places — in Switzerland and Chile, for instance — are mountainous and steep. Qinghai, slightly bigger than Texas, is mostly flat. That’s perfect for solar panels and the roads needed to bring them in. And the cold air improves the efficiency of solar panels. The ones here can could run every household in Chicago. And China is building more, including panels at 17,000 feet. The main group of solar farms, known as the Talatan Solar Park, dwarfs every other cluster of solar farms in the world. It covers 162 square miles in Gonghe County, an alpine desert. Electricity from solar and wind power in Qinghai (the birthplace of the current Dalai Lama, now in exile) costs about 40 percent less than coal-fired power. As a result, several electricity-intensive industries are moving to the region. One type of plant turns quartzite from mines into polysilicon to make solar panels. And Qinghai plans to quintuple the number of data centers in the province. At this altitude, they consume 40 percent less electricity than centers at sea level, because they barely need air-conditioning here. (Air warmed by the servers is piped away to heat other buildings.) Where sheep roam
As an incentive to build solar farms, many western Chinese provinces initially offered free land to companies. When the Talatan solar project installed its first panels in 2012, they were low to the ground. Ethnic Tibetan herders use the sparse vegetation here to graze their sheep, but the animals had trouble getting to the grass. Now installers place the panels on higher mountings. Dislocating people for power projects is politically sensitive all over the world. But high-altitude projects affect relatively few people. China pushed more than one million people out of their homes in west-central China a quarter-century ago and flooded a vast area for the reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam. This year, China has been installing enough solar panels every three weeks to match the power generation capacity of that dam.
Li You contributed research from Gonghe County.
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