The private jet that took off from southwest Germany on Thursday afternoon was carrying a group that may have never expected to be confined together: police officers, doctors, intelligence agents, a senior aide to Germany’s chancellor — and a convicted Russian assassin.

In the back of the plane, the assassin, Vadim Krasikov, sat with his hands and feet bound and wearing protective headgear; he was not heard uttering a word on the entire flight.

At the same time, a Russian government jet was also headed for Ankara, Turkey’s capital, carrying officers from the F.S.B. intelligence agency and 16 prisoners being released by Russia and Belarus. At one point, one of the F.S.B. escorts made what seemed like a bad joke to the two best-known Russian dissidents on board: “Don’t have too much fun out there, because Krasikov could come back for you.”

This account of the tense hours surrounding the exchange — the biggest between Moscow and the West since the Cold War — is based on new details revealed by Western government officials involved in the process, and on early testimony from the Russian political prisoners released as part of the deal.

The swap freed Mr. Krasikov, the American journalist Evan Gershkovich and 22 others in a complex seven-country deal that required intricate planning and timing. The successful transfer highlighted the ability of some of the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies to cooperate on a distinct operation of shared interest, even as Russia and the West engage in a tense standoff over the war in Ukraine.

Last month, C.I.A. officers met with F.S.B. counterparts in Turkey to agree on the final terms of the swap, and also to plan the dizzying logistics for how it could actually be carried out on the tarmac in Ankara.

But even in the final hours, the Western officials said, the Americans and Germans worried that something could go wrong — for example, that Russia might not deliver the agreed-upon roster of prisoners or swap in look-alikes.

Near the front of the jet carrying Mr. Krasikov from Germany’s Karlsruhe airport, the foreign policy adviser to Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Jens Plötner, was going over contingencies with the German team. Forensics experts would visually identify the 13 Russian and German prisoners to be handed over to Germany, some of whom hadn’t been seen in public for years.

In coordination, the American plane bound for Turkey took off from Dulles Airport outside Washington D.C., carrying American officials, medical staff and a psychologist trained to treat the effects of long term captivity. Three Russian prisoners being released by the U.S. were guarded by officers of the Marshals Service.

For those being freed by Russia, the day began at Moscow’s Lefortovo jail, where they had been gathered from prisons as far away as Siberia. Aleksandra Y. Skochilenko, imprisoned for opposing the war in Ukraine, had been driven there from St. Petersburg along with Andrei Pivovarov, another political prisoner; when Mr. Pivovarov saw her, she recalled in an interview on Saturday, he deduced that they would probably be exchanged and told her, “All will be well.”

“Gather your things,” a prison guard told Ms. Skochilenko on Thursday morning.

She said she was taken downstairs to a waiting group of F.S.B. agents with their faces covered, who led her onto a bus. Despite the officers insisting they be quiet, the prisoners talked among themselves about who else was with them and who was not.

Even after an official announced, “This is a political exchange,” Ms. Skochilenko wasn’t ready to believe it. She had been lied to so many times in prison, she said, that the thought crossed her mind: “They’re going to drive us to a forest now and shoot us.”

At Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, some prisoners boarded the plane wearing only their prison robes. One of them, the opposition politician Ilya Yashin, said all he could bring were a toothbrush, toothpaste and his robe. Another, Vladimir Kara-Murza, appearing at a news conference on Friday with Mr. Yashin, said he traveled in long johns, an undershirt and rubber shower slippers.

On the plane, there was no food served, even as the accompanying F.S.B. agents in plainclothes snacked on lunches they appeared to have packed at home, Ms. Skochilenko said. The American and German prisoners all appeared to be seated in the business class section of the plane, she said; she and the other Russian political prisoners flew economy.

At one point, one of the F.S.B. agents made the crack to Mr. Yashin and Mr. Kara-Murza about Mr. Krasikov coming back to kill them, Mr. Yashin recalled.

“It was a joke, of course, an unpleasant kind of joke that does make your skin crawl a little bit,” Mr. Yashin said.

The plane landed in Ankara in coordination with multiple private jets: the one from Germany, the one from Dulles airport, and one each from Poland, Slovenia and Norway, which were also releasing prisoners to Russia.

A complex choreography ensued, the Western officials and Ms. Skochilenko said. Overseeing the operation was Turkey’s MIT spy agency, whose chief, Ibrahim Kalin, was monitoring it remotely. On the ground were Turkish agents in dark suits and sunglasses.

The American delegation on the tarmac comprised officials from the White House, F.B.I., C.I.A. and the State Department. Among the group was David Cotter, an F.B.I. agent who until recently was the National Security Council’s director for hostage and detainee affairs.

The American team stayed in touch with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan by secure, encrypted telephones.

Footage released by Russia showed German officers walking Mr. Krasikov — still wearing a helmet, in accordance with typical German practice in the transport of dangerous prisoners — to a white bus on the tarmac. The other seven prisoners being released by the West, as well as the two children of the Russian spies freed by Slovenia, were taken to the same bus.

The three released Americans — Mr. Gershkovich, the security contractor Paul Whelan and the journalist Alsu Kurmasheva — were taken onto a second bus. The other 13 prisoners being released by Russia, including Ms. Skochilenko, Mr. Kara-Murza, Mr. Yashin and several German nationals, were brought onto a third.

German forensic experts then boarded the bus carrying those being freed by Russia to verify their identities. Ms. Skochilenko said one of them asked her name and date of birth and examined her face from different angles, checking it against photographs of her that appeared to have been printed out from the internet.

Once the Americans were certain the Russians had delivered on their end of the deal, they gave signed clemency papers to the three Russian prisoners in their custody. The Germans also gave the Turks the green light. Ms. Skochilenko said she watched through the bus window as the Russians being released by the West boarded their plane to Moscow.

The Russian jet took off quickly, headed back to Vnukovo airport, where a red-carpet welcome by Mr. Putin and an honor guard awaited them.

Those released by Russia were whisked to a secure airport building, where they could finally eat and make brief calls. The swap had been so secret that some relatives of the Russian political prisoners were in the dark about whether their loved ones would be freed.

“Do you realize what’s happening?” Oleg Orlov, the co-chairman of the human rights group Memorial, asked his wife Tatyana Kasatkina when he called her, she said.

The three freed American prisoners then boarded the plane, which made its way back to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. From there, they would fly to San Antonio, Texas, to a facility run by the military that specializes in PISA — post isolation support activities. There, they are expected to spend days under supervision as they try to readjust to normal life.

Mr. Plötner, the German chancellor’s aide, told the 13 German and Russian released prisoners that they would be flying to Cologne. They would be greeted at the airport by Mr. Scholz, provided with German travel documents if necessary, and taken to a military hospital in the nearby city of Koblenz.

In one last precaution, their bags — to the extent they had any — were X-rayed before being loaded onto two planes.

“I wanted to cry,” Ms. Skochilenko said. “But I couldn’t.”

Reporting was contributed by Philip Kaleta from Washington, Ben Hubbard from Istanbul, Valerie Hopkins from Cologne, Germany, Ekaterina Bodyagina from Berlin and Lauren Leatherby from London.

After they spread pink petals on golden statues of Ganesh and Shiva, and recited prayers to blue-skinned and eight-armed gods, the Hindu faithful left their temple and headed to a party for another one of their divinities — the Catholic St. Rosalia.

“To the other goddess!” said Swasthika Sasiyendran, 23, after she changed from her gold-and-white sari into a T-shirt bearing Rosalia’s face.

Every year, in the height of Sicily’s summer heat, Palermo fills with festival lights and honking scooters as people gather to celebrate Rosalia, the city’s patron saint. Among the hundreds of thousands who join the procession, which culminates with a towering statue of the saint being carried through the streets, are members of the city’s Sri Lankan Tamil community, some of Rosalia’s most ardent worshipers.

Palermo is prone to this kind of medley. It is a city that sits between continents, shaped by the overlapping of Greek, Byzantine, Arab, Norman and Spanish civilizations, which hundreds of years ago made it a cosmopolitan, open and refined metropolis.

The blurring of lines between faiths, origins and traditions stands in stark contrast to a growing political discourse in Italy and Europe that insists on firm borders between nations and religions, and immutable identities.

In recent decades, Palermo has welcomed a new generation of immigrants, including thousands of Tamils, both Catholic and Hindu, who fled civil war and came to look for work, forming one of the biggest communities in Italy.

While segregation and discrimination remain in many quarters of the city, locals say Palermo has kept some of its tolerance and openness. The shabby and affordable city center has allowed foreigners to settle in, rather than being segregated in only the suburbs. The downtown Ballarò market has quickly absorbed stands selling plantains and cassava alongside those offering traditional fried chickpea patties and boiled octopus. Many groups promoting dialogue between cultures have sprung up.

While some praise Leoluca Orlando, who was the city’s progressive mayor for more than 20 years, for sending out a message of inclusion, many Tamils credit someone else.

“Santa Rosalia,” Ms. Sasiyendran said. “She welcomes everybody.”

Palermo’s Hindu Tamils, most of whom are originally from Sri Lanka, have added the Catholic saint to their colorful pantheon of gods. Many are attracted to her reputation for miracles, especially for saving the city from a plague in the 17th century. They are also drawn to her mystical sanctuary, a cave on a mount north of the city where she is said to have died after escaping an arranged marriage.

Most of the pilgrims who visited the cave on a recent Sunday were Tamils. In the shrines that many Tamils have in their homes, the image of Rosalia in a monk’s habit features alongside images of Hindu gods like Lakshmi, wrapped in golden necklaces, her legs crossed on top of a lotus flower.

“Santa Rosalia is like our mother,” said Tharsan Mahadevar, the secretary of the Hindu temple, as he sat eating lentils and a spicy vegetable curry while wearing a shiny sarong, the image of Ganesha tattooed on his arms and chest.

Like many other Tamils, Ms. Sasiyendran’s father, Sasi, came to Palermo in the 1990s from Sri Lanka, which was then ravaged by civil war. He did not have a Hindu temple in Palermo, or a place of worship to attend, except for the peaceful Santa Rosalia sanctuary atop Mount Pellegrino. Surrounded by umbrella pines, the site reminded him of the temples back home, hidden in the green mountains of northern Sri Lanka.

He and other lonely, scared men, including many Catholic Tamils, began calling Rosalia “Madonna,” a mother who welcomed them to Palermo. Three days after Ms. Sasiyendran’s mother traveled from South Asia to Palermo to marry her father, he took her to the sanctuary, which he had begun calling Mazhai Kovil Madha, or “Mountain Church Mary.”

Over the years, their Hindu temple was built, wedged between short buildings and bleached awnings near Palermo’s shipyards, but Mr. Sasiyendran continued turning to Rosalia for help and comfort.

When he died of a lung disease in 2022, he was holding a statue of the Madonna, his daughter said.

“I think he is with her now,” said his wife, Eswari Sasiyendran, as she stood in their apartment in Palermo, where a key holder decorated with Rosalia hung alongside a shrine with golden statues of Ganesh. Ms. Sasiyendran said she had resisted pleas from her family to leave Palermo and return home since she had been widowed.

“I have got someone here to pamper me,” she said, referring to the saint.

She added: “Mother doesn’t see fair son or Black daughter. For her, everyone is equal.”

The Sasiyendran family credits the saint with an array of favors, including catching flights, finding forgotten bags and protecting their father when he was still sleeping on benches in Palermo’s parks. Many of the Tamils who climbed up the mountain on a recent morning — who were afforded a stunning view of Palermo in the rosy dawn light — also came with gratitude.

Kuganathan Kanagasingam, 54, said that when his wife had depression in 2022, he began walking up the mountain every Sunday at 5 a.m. — even in the pouring rain or scorching heat.

“Now she is well,” he said. “The medicines do a part, God does the other,” he said, before kissing the steps leading to Rosalia’s cave.

Alongside the cave hung baby shoes, ultrasound photographs and silver figurines of organs the saint had healed, among other votive paraphernalia.

Kiru Ponnampalam, 48, a Tamil cleaner, lit a red candle and placed it in front of Rosalia’s statue. He said he had been married for 10 years with no children until he began going to the sanctuary, when he finally managed to have a child, Abi, who is now 6.

“It was a miracle by Santa Rosalia,” he said.

Academics who have studied the community say that the Tamils’ devotion to Rosalia has provided a way to legitimize themselves and to be accepted by Sicilians.

“It was a way for them to become visible,” said Eugenio Giorgianni, an anthropologist at the University of Messina. “To enter the public space.”

Agostino Palazzotto, 62, an Italian volunteer at the sanctuary, watched on as a long line of Tamils climbed up the church’s stairs.

“I believe in the Santuzza,” he said, using a local nickname for the saint. “They believe in her A LOT.”

Polytheistic religions like Hinduism have the benefit of allowing for the continual incorporation of new gods. Pagan Romans venerated a mix of Greek, Egyptian and Persian gods, in addition to their own emperors.

“Santa Rosalia was a person,” said Mohan Thampiaijah, 56, another Tamil pilgrim. “Vishnu is blue and Ganesh is an elephant.” He paused. “I haven’t heard of any other differences.”

A family of Tamil pilgrims, after wetting their hands with holy water from a spring in the sanctuary, went to change from their cotton dresses into elaborate red-and-gold saris before heading to the Hindu temple. Others soon joined them, some still wearing plastic Christian crosses.

That evening, they headed to Rosalia’s annual party, where they mixed with Sicilians, tourists, street vendors and loudspeakers blasting Italian summer hits. They watched the fireworks and admired Rosalia’s statue: Like the Hindu goddess Lakhsmi, she was wrapped in flower petals, a lily this time.

“I really don’t see that big of a difference,” said Dhanja Kirupakaran, 20 — who, according to her mother, was born because of a miracle by the saint.

Violent unrest has erupted in several towns and cities in Britain in recent days, and the authorities are bracing for further disorder this weekend as far-right agitators plan more rallies around the country.

The violence has been driven by online disinformation and extremist right-wing groups intent on creating disorder after a deadly knife attack on a children’s event in northwestern England, experts said.

A disparate range of far-right factions and individuals, including neo-Nazis, violence-prone soccer fans and anti-Muslim campaigners, have promoted and taken part in the unrest, which has also been stoked by online influencers.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed to deploy additional police officers to crack down on the disorder. “This is not a protest that has got out of hand,” he said on Thursday. “It is a group of individuals who are absolutely bent on violence.”

Here is what we know about the unrest and some of those involved.

Where have riots taken place?

The first riot took place on Tuesday evening in Southport, a town in northwestern England, after a deadly stabbing attack the previous day at a children’s dance and yoga class. Three girls died of their injuries, and eight other children and two adults were wounded.

The suspect, Axel Rudakubana, was born in Britain, but in the hours after the attack, disinformation about his identity — including the false claim that he was an undocumented migrant — spread rapidly online. Far-right activists used messaging apps including Telegram and X to urge people to take to the streets.

Over 200 people descended on Southport on Tuesday night, many traveling by train from elsewhere in Britain, the police said. Rioters attacked a mosque, wounded more than 50 police officers and set vehicles alight.

On Wednesday night, another far-right demonstration brought clashes with the police in central London, leading to over 100 arrests. Smaller pockets of disorder broke out in Hartlepool, in northeastern England; in the city of Manchester; and in Aldershot, a town southeast of London.

On Friday night, Northumbria Police said its officers had been “subjected to serious violence” as far-right demonstrators set fires and attacked officers in Sunderland, a city in the northeast.

The chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, Gavin Stephens, told BBC Radio on Friday that extra officers would be on Britain’s streets this weekend and that the police would use lessons learned from the 2011 London riots.

“We will have surge capacity in our intelligence, in our briefing and in the resources that are out in local communities,” he said.

Which groups are behind the unrest?

Several far-right groups have been at the riots or promoted them on social media. David Miles, a prominent member of Patriotic Alternative, a fascist group, shared photographs of himself in Southport, according to Hope Not Hate, a Britain-based advocacy group that researches extremist organizations.

Other far-right agitators spread information about the protest on social media, including British Movement, a neo-Nazi group. Images of the protests examined by Hope not Hate showed some people with Nazi tattoos.

After the disorder in Southport, the police said that supporters of the English Defence League had been involved. The riots have also attracted people linked to soccer violence, which has long overlapped with nationalist movements in Britain.

Officials noted that not everyone at the demonstrations had far-right views. David Hanson, a cabinet minister, told LBC Radio on Friday: “Some might be caught up in the summer madness. Some might be people who’ve got genuine concerns.”

But, he warned, “If you are organizing this now, we will be watching you.”

What is the English Defence League?

Created in 2009, the English Defence League was a far-right street movement notorious for violent protests and an anti-Islam, anti-immigration stance.

The group emerged in Luton, England, where community tensions had risen after a handful of Islamic extremists chanted abuse at British soldiers returning home from Iraq. Luton was already associated with Islamist extremism, because it was home to a small number of adherents to Al Muhajiroun, an extremist group implicated in the 2005 London bombings.

Among the English Defence League founders was Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the name Tommy Robinson. Born in Luton, he was at one time a member of the far-right British National Party. He also had connections to soccer violence and was convicted of leading soccer fans in a brawl in Luton in 2010.

In the group’s early years, regional divisions carried out local demonstrations, including protests over planned mosques, and engaged in actions like placing pig heads around Muslim sites.

According to Matthew Feldman, a specialist on right-wing extremism, the group represented a new stage in far-right British politics, because unlike the National Front or the British National Party, it did not contest elections.

“This is direct-action politics, disseminated and coordinated via the new media — ranging from Facebook to mobile phones, and digital film to YouTube,” Professor Feldman wrote in a 2011 academic study of the English Defence League.

In 2013, Mr. Yaxley-Lennon said he had broken ties with the league. And after leadership disputes and internal divisions, the group no longer formally exists. But experts say that many of its supporters remain active through other nationalist groups with similar aims and tactics.

In the later 2010s, Mr. Yaxley-Lennon rose to prominence in international circles that shared his anti-Muslim stance, including in Europe and the United States. In the past week, he has used social media, including a previously banned X profile that was reinstated under Elon Musk, to promote falsehoods about the identity of the Southport attacker.

Nowadays, experts say the English Defence League has evolved into a diffuse idea spread mainly online. Its Islamophobic and xenophobic stance has become an “ideal that people self-radicalize themselves into,” said Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a nonprofit that researches public attitudes on immigration and identity.

Why is the disorder so hard to quash?

Many far-right groups in Britain have deliberately moved away from formal hierarchies and leadership structures, experts say.

Joe Mulhall, Hope Not Hate’s director of research, called the movement “post organizational” in a 2018 analysis. Social media and other technologies, he wrote, offer “new ways for it to engage in activism outside the confines of traditional, organizational structures.”

Violent street rallies, a core part of the English Defence League’s rise, often serve as a recruiting tool for extremist groups, according to Paul Jackson, a University of Northampton professor who specializes in the history of radicalism and extremism.

“Social movements thrive on such demonstrations,” he wrote in a 2011 paper. “They are ‘performances’ that can reinforce the perceived senses of injustice and being ignored by mainstream voices to followers.”

The police may also struggle to respond to mobs that can be conjured within hours through private messaging apps. According to Professor Feldman, “police are still oftentimes thinking in 20th-century terms — that something like this might take a few days to set up; that they might ask for a permit for a march.”

The Southport riot, he said, “was very nearly a flash demo.”

Follow our latest updates on the Middle East crisis here.

As he perused a market selling everything from stolen children’s shoes to battered plumbing pipes, Mahmoud al-Jabri was surprised to find something familiar: his own book collection.

Among the collection was his first published work of poems, with his handwriting scrawled along the margins. Even more shocking than seeing the book he had toiled for years to create was that the vendor wanted a paltry 5 shekels, or about $1, for it.

The salesman suggested using the pages for kindling.

“I was torn between two feelings,” he said, “laughter and bitterness.”

In Gaza, even poetry books can become a source of profit for enterprising thieves. A pervasive lawlessness has emerged from the rubble of cities obliterated since Israel launched its all-out offensive on the enclave in retaliation for the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7.

“Thieves’ markets,” as they are called by locals, have proliferated across Gaza, selling loot plundered from homes, businesses and even hospitals. With Israel blocking the flow of most goods into Gaza, the markets have become important places for finding household necessities. And visits to the markets have become a weary ritual for Gazans seeking to reclaim stolen pieces of their lives.

Some, like Mr. Al-Jabri, even stumble upon belongings they had not yet realized were missing.

In his hometown in southern Gaza, Khan Younis, where the central market was reduced to rubble by Israeli strikes, vendors sell stolen hospital supplies and clothes on plastic tarps or wooden carts alongside produce sellers on the main road out of the battered city.

In Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, the bustling trade in stolen goods happens next to the traditional street market. Once a tangled network of streets awash in the smell of spices and the chants of vendors hawking fruit, that market has been reduced to a single thoroughfare as most commerce has dried up under the Israeli blockade.

Now, it is the thieves’ markets that thrive, teeming with nervous energy as crowds mill about piles of loot.

Shoppers and vendors look around suspiciously as they go about their business. Sometimes, families forced to buy their own possessions back at exorbitant prices are overcome with rage at sellers who claim to have no idea where the goods came from. The arguments can come to blows, residents say, and, occasionally, even gunfire.

The lawlessness is felt everywhere in Gaza. Many increasingly destitute people have been driven to petty thievery.

Prisons abandoned by Hamas jailers are now empty, and felons roam free, residents say. Criminal gangs band together to strip bare hospital and university buildings, or ambush the few trucks that enter with food and supplies.

Before the current war, Hamas-affiliated police patrolled the streets and kept a lid on crime. But they have now all but disappeared, targets of Israel’s military as it undertakes its aim to “dismantle Hamas military and administrative capabilities.”

Israel’s 10-month war in Gaza — and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to articulate a postwar plan — has essentially created a power vacuum in the enclave, though without any alternative leadership in place, Hamas has been able to regroup in some areas and re-emerge as a military force.

In some southern regions of Gaza, Hamas officials have also tried to re-exert influence by sending members to patrol markets for price gouging. Yet Hamas itself stands accused by locals of profiting off the chaos, with suspicions high that its militants are somehow affiliated with armed gangs that sell their services to protect warehouses or goods.

Communal trust has also been depleted. Locals trade stories of business partners who robbed them, or of thieves who sneak in among rescue workers after an airstrike, stealing anything from jewelry to kitchen utensils as families are being dug out from the rubble.

When civilians flee their homes in response to Israeli evacuation orders, thieves descend upon empty neighborhoods, sneaking into apartments and ripping out everything they can, residents say.

Anas Al-Tawashy, 32, went to the thieves’ market in Deir al-Balah after his house was robbed for the third time. He said he was trying to find his niece’s pajamas and his wife’s pots and pans — everyday items that have become ever more rare amid waves of bombardment, displacement and the Israeli blockade.

Yet what he most longed to find was the PlayStation and games that he and his twin brother, now far away in Canada, spent hours playing together as young boys.

“Those were my childhood memories,” he said, after days of fruitless searching. “I feel so much pain over this.”

Not even toilets are spared the thieving frenzy. So many have been stolen that when families return home or relocate to towns where fighting has ebbed, they are forced to buy used toilets for their lodgings. Thieves effectively created soaring demand for toilets, selling them at around $100 — triple their price before the war.

After evacuation orders came to his neighborhood in Khan Younis, Salah Al-Qedra tried to pre-empt the thieves by emptying out his home of everything he could, including the toilets. His family moved in with nearby relatives, but like so many homeowners in Gaza, he risks his own life every day by remaining in an area Israel has warned it may strike to stand guard over the remnants of his home.

Last month, Mr. Al-Qedra said he and his neighbors watched helplessly as armed gangs looted the nearby European Hospital. The crime was especially outrageous, he said, because it incapacitated one of the few hospitals still able to treat the constant flow of wounded.

“What if a thief got injured? Where will he be taken? How would he get treatment?” he asked. “This hospital served the community and displaced people for more than eight months, and that good deed was repaid by simply robbing them.”

The thieves, undeterred by onlookers filming them with their phones, dragged out loot like beds, stretchers and IV equipment, Mr. Al-Qedra said.

Hospitals are a lucrative target, just like the schools that have mostly been converted into refugee shelters, as most have large solar panels on the rooftops to power their facilities.

In today’s wartime conditions, a solar panel is not only a power supply, but a business opportunity. Savvy entrepreneurs can use solar panels to set up charging stations amid the rows of tents in displacement camps, allowing locals to charge their phones or batteries to power lighting or other electronics at night.

Even as more crimes are orchestrated, others are spontaneous attacks symptomatic of a desperate population.

Last month in Khan Younis, a man ran toward a crowd of people on a busy street, shouting: “Everyone! A truck loaded with tents is coming this way!”

With so many Gazans displaced more than once in this war, tents are invaluable.

Passers-by and street vendors sprang into action, looking for rocks and sticks to strike the truck, and blocking the road. The truck, its carriage caged in steel for protection, barreled toward the crowd at top speed, as gunmen inside opened fire, leaving behind a cloud of dust and a disappointed crowd.

But clever thieves can repurpose nearly anything for profit, like the stolen books that Mr. Al-Jabri, the poet, initially assumed were sold for people to read and pass time during the war.

Once he understood the books were being sold for kindling, Mr. Al-Jabri walked away in disgust. The vendor chased after him crying, he recalled, offering to drop the price.

“At that moment, I lost my passion for the written word,” Mr. Al-Jabri said. “The priority now is survival — to eat, not to read.”

The beach is more about broken glass from generations of illicit parties than sand. The roar and squeal of a nearby railway locomotive compete with the birdsong. The wind carries a sweet chemical scent from a cooking oil processing plant to the west.

And just across the Detroit River, the skyline offered up by the United States is dominated by a sooty factory puffing out clouds of steam and intermittently shooting orange flame from a chimney as it turns coal into coke for steel mills.

But amid all this blight peeks out a most surprising sight: familiar yellow signs sporting the beaver logo of Parks Canada.

In a country with national parks set amid majestic mountains and vast expanses of wilderness, this unprepossessing stretch of land in Windsor, Ontario, is set to become part of Canada’s newest national park.

“People were really excited to see the first signs,” said Mike Fisher, a member of a volunteer group that has long promoted the idea of a national park here. “It’s essentially the beginnings of the tiniest national park in Canada.”

Despite more than a century of industrial and urban encroachment, the area that will form the core of the national park is covered by some of the last remaining tallgrass prairie that once dominated the southern landscape of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. Living within the area, currently called the Ojibway Prairie Complex, are more than 3,000 species of plants and animals, including 200 or so that biologists have categorized as being at risk.

But the planned park is in a city that like its American neighbor, Detroit, is best known for automaking, and it is about more than protecting a natural area.

It is one of six urban national parks currently under various stages of development that are also an attempt by Parks Canada at reconciliation with the country’s Indigenous people.

For much of its early history, the parks agency forcibly removed Indigenous people from their lands and excluded them from management of the resulting parks.

For example, Point Pelee National Park, about an hour’s drive from Windsor, was established in 1918 on land that was once the home of the Caldwell First Nation. It was not compensated for the loss of the land until 2011.

Back in Windsor, that the future park’s patchwork of grasslands and woods survived into 2024 is largely thanks to an event that happened almost 100 years ago: the Great Depression.

Before the Depression, United States Steel had announced it would build a major factory here, with jobs for 16,000 workers and an adjacent model city to be called Ojibway.

But then the economic collapse came, and the complex was only partly built before the land was sold for underground salt mining, though remnants of the project lingered. Sidewalks leftover from the company town that never was remain, in a distressed state, although the rusting fire hydrants that once accompanied them are gone.

The land has been preserved, informally and formally, since then. The area along the Detroit River shoreline was owned by the federal government, which passed it last year to Parks Canada from the port authority. A large municipal park and a tract of mostly open grassland belonging to the Province of Ontario will also be incorporated into the national park.

What the proposed park lacks in epic grandeur, it more than compensates for with biodiversity, said Catherine Febria, a biologist who studies the restoration of freshwater areas at the University of Windsor. “Ultimately, it’s not science that’s going to restore this,” Dr. Febria said. “It is people coming together over time.”

Particularly important, Dr. Febria said, will be the area’s Indigenous people.

Some of what the Indigenous involvement may look like in the national park was previewed in an area of the future park known as Spring Garden, where three young people from the Walpole Island First Nation, which is about 55 miles upstream from Windsor, had recently done traditional, low-intensity controlled burns to keep invasive grasses from taking over.

This area also illustrates the competition between the urban and the natural that the park must resolve.

A large pond, ringed by a rusting chain-link fence, has been cleared of invasive plants by Parks Canada and is now filled with waterfowl and lined with local species of water plants. Nearby, residents were walking dogs through the area, and horses and their riders from the nearby Rowdy Girls’ Ranch often came down the path, as did cyclists.

All of those uses will continue in the national park. But Karen Cedar, a coordinator at the City of Windsor’s nature center, said that the national park status would help prevent less-welcome activities. She pointed high up a tree where the ears of some recently hatched great horned owls poked above a crumbling, plastic laundry basket.

The basket, Ms. Cedar said, was placed in the tree a few years earlier by “well-meaning, but misguided” residents after a wind storm blew down the owls’ nest. “The great horned owl is notorious for being not much into nest building,” she said.

The name of the new park has yet to be finalized. But it has the jump on the other five urban national park candidates with its official designation.

Brian Masse, who represents the area in Parliament, introduced a bill to establish it. With backing from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, the bill has passed the House of Commons and is in the unelected Senate. Mr. Trudeau’s current budget bill includes money to set up and operate the park.

In addition to the park’s name, many other questions remain, including exactly what land will be included.

One parcel of city-owned land is of particular interest to the Caldwell First Nation.

Surrounded by an expressway exit ramp, as well as by the main thoroughfare leading to the bridge to Detroit and by a residential subdivision, the parcel, known as Aboriginal Park, is not much to look at. It is mostly a lawn with a single basketball net, two benches and some playground equipment, including a swing set. Overgrown bush, where someone has placed crudely built shelters for feral cats, rings two sides of it.

In a chilly drizzle, Zack Hamm, an archaeologist who works for the Caldwell First Nation, pointed to where streams once led up to the site, which had been long used for burials by Indigenous people.

From the 1930s to the late 1980s, he said, archaeologists found about 30 buried remains in the area. The last of those archaeological surveys, in 1989, exhumed some of the bodies and then reburied them without recording their location, Mr. Hamm said. His guess is that they are within an unkempt area next to the expressway ramp, but he added that it was quite possible that they were beneath the playground.

Not only does Chief Mary Duckworth of the Caldwell First Nation want Aboriginal Park incorporated into the new national park, she also wants it transformed.

“I want a memorial to the bodies that are buried in here that we know nothing about,” Chief Duckworth said. “It’s like us going to a cemetery and taking down the headstones and us putting a playground on top of your grandfather.”

She acknowledged that the neighbors were unlikely to be happy about losing their only playground, but said that she was confident they would come around.

“Most people, if they knew the truth, would understand why we’re doing what we do,” she said. “Windsor is a real industrial town. It’s a dirty town. So can we leave something nice for everybody? Do we have to fight about it?”

President To Lam of Vietnam, best known for implementing a sweeping anticorruption drive, will become the country’s next Communist Party general secretary, the government’s Politburo announced on Saturday.

General secretary is the top job in Vietnam’s political system of collective leadership, and Mr. Lam was named to the post temporarily in July, after the death of Nguyen Phu Trong, who had been general secretary since 2011.

The appointment gives Mr. Lam the chance to consolidate his position within the party before it holds its congress in 2026 to select the country’s top leaders for the following five years.

“He might be the starting horse in the race for 2026, but he has to go through a particular process,” said Carl Thayer, a Vietnam expert and emeritus professor of politics at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia. He added: “There is a lot of space in there for people to oppose him.”

Mr. Lam’s rise from within the party ranks has been rapid. He was named president in May after serving as the minister of public security. In that position, Mr. Lam implemented Mr. Trong’s anticorruption campaign, known as “blazing furnace,” which targeted Vietnam’s rampant official corruption, sending many officials to jail and leading others to resign.

He pledged to continue the effort as president, even as business leaders in Vietnam and international investors had begun to complain that the campaign had led to paralysis for new projects, sending a chill through the economy.

The U.S. Commerce Department said on Friday that it would continue to classify Vietnam as a nonmarket economy country, denying Vietnam’s request for an upgrade that would have reduced the punitive antidumping duties levied on economies shaped by heavy state influence. American officials stressed that the decision was not punitive, and would not hinder efforts to improve relations and economic ties between the two countries.

The U.S. move, though likely to displease some leaders in Hanoi, is unlikely to significantly alter Vietnam’s foreign policy approach, according to another Vietnam expert. “Geopolitically, Hanoi still needs Washington to counterbalance Beijing’s influence in the region,” said Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, a research organization in Singapore.

Mr. Thayer said that the position of party chief will be a test for Mr. Lam, forcing him to manage complex foreign relations and a wide range of views about the anticorruption drive.

“When he was minister of public security, it was top down,” Mr. Thayer said. “Now he has to be a consensus builder.”

Vietnam, one of the world’s few remaining Communist autocracies, is led by a collective of four leaders known as the four pillars — the party general secretary, the president, the prime minister and the chairman of the National Assembly. The general secretary is seen as having the most powerful role, but responsibility is well distributed. The president, for example, is the military’s commander in chief.

At various points, the country’s leaders have debated whether to centralize some of that power by combining the role of president and party chief, but there has long been a consensus about the need for stability with a power-sharing system that might prevent the rise of a single all-powerful leader. Regardless of who serves in the top position, policy is set by the party as a whole, and major changes are not expected.

“The policies are set in stone,” Mr. Thayer said, adding: “The driving force is to be a modern industrial country by 2045 with a high income.”

Standing in front of a lectern on Thursday, his voice at times taut with anger, Britain’s prime minister announced a crackdown on what he called the “gangs of thugs” who instigated violent unrest in several towns this week.

But the question of how to confront one of the key accelerants — a flood of online misinformation about a deadly stabbing attack — remained largely unanswered.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer called out online companies directly, after false information about the identity of the 17-year-old suspected in the attack spread rapidly on their platforms, no matter how many times police and government officials pushed back against the claims.

Three girls died after the attacker rampaged through a dance class in Southport, northwest England, on Monday. Of the eight children injured, five remain in the hospital, along with their teacher, who had tried to protect them.

Immediately after the attack, false claims began circulating about the perpetrator, including that he was an asylum seeker from Syria. In fact, he was born in Cardiff, Wales, and had lived in Britain all his life. According to the BBC and The Times of London, his parents are from Rwanda.

The misinformation was amplified by far-right agitators with large online followings, many of whom used messaging apps like Telegram and X to call for people to protest. Clashes followed in several U.K. towns, leading to more than 50 police officers being injured in Southport and more than 100 arrests in London.

On Friday evening, a charged riot broke out in the working-class city of Sunderland in England’s northeast, during which police officers were injured and at least eight people were arrested, according to the local police. Footage of the unrest showed protesters hurling rocks, cars set ablaze and a police station engulfed in flames.

Officials fear more violence in the days ahead. The viral falsehoods were so prevalent that a judge took the unusual step of lifting restrictions on naming underage suspects, identifying the alleged attacker as Axel Rudakubana.

“Let me also say to large social media companies and those who run them: Violent disorder, clearly whipped up online, that is also a crime, it’s happening on your premises, and the law must be upheld everywhere,” Mr. Starmer said in his televised speech, though he did not name any company or executive specifically.

“We will take all necessary action to keep our streets safe,” he added.

The attack in Southport, England, has been a case study in how online misinformation can lead to actual violence. But governments, including Britain, have long struggled to find an effective way to respond. Policing the internet is legally murky terrain for most democracies, where individual rights and free speech protections are balanced against a desire to block harmful material.

Last year, Britain adopted a law called the Online Safety Act that requires social media companies to introduce new protections for child safety, while also forcing the firms to prevent and rapidly remove illegal content like terrorism propaganda and revenge pornography.

But the law is less clear about how companies must treat misinformation and incendiary, xenophobic language. Instead, the law gives the British agency Ofcom, which oversees television and other traditional media formats, more authority to regulate online platforms. Thus far, the agency has not taken much action to tackle the issue.

Jacob Davey, a director of policy and research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a group that has tracked online far-right extremism, said many social media platforms have internal policies that prohibit hate speech and other illicit content, but enforcement is spotty. Other companies like X, now owned by Elon Musk, and Telegram have less moderation.

“Given the confrontational tone set by some companies it will be challenging to hold them accountable for harmful but legal content if they decide they don’t want to enforce against it,” said Mr. Davey.

The European Union has a law called the Digital Services Act that requires the largest social media companies to have robust content moderation teams and policies in place. With the new powers, regulators in Brussels are investigating X and have threatened to fine the company in part for its content moderation policies.

In the United States, where free speech protections are more robust than in Europe, the government has few options to force companies to take down content.

X could not be reached for comment, though Mr. Musk replied “insane” to a video on X of Mr. Starmer’s remarks. Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Telegram said that calls to violence are “explicitly forbidden” on its platform and that it was developing a tool that would allow fact-checkers within a country to add verified information to posts that are being viewed by users in that territory.

British policymakers said the country must address false information spread by the far right on social media.

“I see it almost every single day — straight-up lies about these situations designed to cause violence, to incite racial hatred, to incite people to violence,” Jonathan Brash, a member of Parliament from Hartlepool, an area where there were violent clashes with the police, said Thursday on BBC Radio 4. “There is so much misinformation and it’s being spread quite deliberately to stoke tension in communities.”

Al Baker, the managing director of Prose Intelligence, a British company that provides services for monitoring Telegram, said the online discourse was a reflection of wider societal challenges.

“It’s important not to go too far and say the internet is the cause,” Mr. Baker said. “The internet and social media are an accelerant that intensify existing problems we have as a society.”

Follow our latest updates on the Middle East crisis here.

Iran has arrested more than two dozen people, including senior intelligence officers, military officials and staff workers at a military-run guesthouse in Tehran, in response to a huge and humiliating security breach that enabled the assassination of a top leader of Hamas, according to two Iranians familiar with the investigation.

The high-level arrests came after the killing in an explosion early Wednesday of Ismail Haniyeh, who had led Hamas’s political office in Qatar and was visiting Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new president and staying at the guesthouse in northern Tehran, Iran’s capital.

The fervor of the response to the killing of Mr. Haniyeh underscores what a devastating security failure this was for Iran’s leadership, with the assassination occurring at a heavily guarded compound in the country’s capital within hours of the swearing-in ceremony of the country’s new president.

“The perception that Iran can neither protect its homeland nor its key allies could be fatal for the Iranian regime, because it basically signals to its foes that if they can’t topple the Islamic Republic, they can decapitate it,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran director for the International Crisis Group.

Officials in both the Middle East and in Iran itself have said the deadly blast was the result of a bomb that had been planted in Mr. Haniyeh’s room as long as two months before his arrival.

Iranian officials and Hamas said Wednesday that Israel was responsible for the assassination, an assessment also reached by several U.S. officials. Israel, which has vowed to destroy Hamas’s governing and military abilities, has not acknowledged that it was responsible for planting the bomb.

The Revolutionary Guards Corps’ specialized intelligence unit for espionage has taken over the investigation and is hunting down suspects that it hopes will lead it to members of the assassin team that planned, aided and carried out the killing, according to the two Iranian officials, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigations.

The news of the sweeping arrests came after the Revolutionary Guards announced in a statement that “the scope and details of this incident are under investigation and will be announced in due course.”

The Guards Corps has not yet made public any details of the arrests nor of its investigation into the explosion, including its cause. But it has vowed a severe revenge, as has Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who issued an order to strike Israel in retaliation, according to the Iranian officials.

The intensity and scope of the Guards’ investigation reveal the degree to which the assassination has shocked and rattled the country’s leadership.

The deadly blast, which also killed Mr. Haniyeh’s Palestinian bodyguard, wasn’t only an earth-shattering collapse of intelligence and security; nor only a failure to protect a key ally; nor evidence of the inability to curb the infiltration of Mossad; nor a humiliating reputational blow. It was all of those, and more.

Perhaps most important, it delivered a jarring realization that if Israel could target such an important guest, on a day when the capital was under heightened security, and carry out the attack at a highly secure compound equipped with bulletproof windows, air defense and radar, then no one was really safe.

“This security breach requires different policies and strategies; it may be arresting spies if there was infiltration, or retaliation if the operation was conducted from outside the borders, or a combination of both,” Sasan Karimi, a political analyst in Tehran, said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Haniyeh’s proximity to Iran’s supreme leader — with the two men meeting at Mr. Khamenei’s residence just hours before the assassination — has also raised concerns.

At Mr. Haniyeh’s funeral in Tehran on Friday, Mr. Khamenei was surrounded by a tighter circle of bodyguards than usual when he performed an Islamic prayer ritual on the body. He then left immediately, only pausing briefly to greet Mr. Haniyeh’s son.

Iran and Israel have been engaged in a covert war for years. Israel has assassinated more than a dozen nuclear scientists and military commanders inside Iran, including the country’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, with an A.I.-assisted, remote-controlled killer robot in 2020. Israel has also sabotaged infrastructure, blowing up gas pipes in February, as well as conducting attacks on military and nuclear sites.

Iran has reeled after each attack and pledged to find the culprits. It has fired a top intelligence chief, arrested a military commander and announced multiple times that it has discovered an Israeli spy network.

Just four days before Mr. Haniyeh’s assassination, the country’ minister of intelligence, Seyed Esmaeil Khatib, said to local media that Iran had “disintegrated and destroyed a network of Mossad infiltrators who were every day assassinating some of our scientists and sabotaging our key facilities.”

Then came the shock of Mr. Haniyeh’s assassination.

After the attack, Iranian security agents raided the guesthouse compound, which belongs to the Revolutionary Guards Corps and which is where Mr. Haniyeh frequently stayed — in the same room — on his visits to Tehran. The agents placed all the guesthouse’s staff members under quarantine, arrested some, and confiscated all electronic devices, including personal phones, according to the two Iranians.

A separate team of agents interrogated senior military and intelligence officials with roles in safeguarding the capital. It placed a number of them under arrest until investigations are completed, according to the two Iranians.

When the security agents raided the guesthouse compound, they combed through every inch of it, inspecting surveillance cameras dating back months as well as guest lists. They also were examining the comings and goings of staff members, who are strictly vetted before employment and drawn from the rank and file of the Guards as well as from the Basij, its paramilitary volunteer task force, the two Iranian officials said.

The investigation also focused on Tehran’s international and domestic airports, where agents have been stationed, looking through months of footage on cameras from the arrival and departure lounges and examining flight lists, the two Iranians said. They said that Iran believes members of Mossad’s assassin team are still in the country and their goal is to arrest them.

An Iranian member of the Revolutionary Guards, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak, said he was not aware of the arrests, but said that security protocols had been completely overhauled in the past two days for senior officials. The security details for senior officials were changed, and electronic equipment such as mobile phones swapped. He said some senior officials had been moved to a different location.

A former president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, who has served in senior security roles, said in a statement that by assassinating Mr. Haniyeh, Israel was also “targeting Iran’s security and stability at the start of a new government,” and he added that the way to confront the threat would be for all security, intelligence and military branches to cooperate and strengthen their capabilities.