When Prime Minister Keir Starmer met Donald J. Trump at Trump Tower for dinner on Sept. 26, it was part of a British charm offensive to nurture a relationship between a left-wing leader and a right-wing potential president. So when Mr. Trump turned to Mr. Starmer before parting and told him, “We are friends,” according to a person involved in the evening, it did not go unnoticed.

Whether they stay friends is anybody’s guess.

For months leading up to Mr. Trump’s political comeback — and in the heady days since his victory was confirmed — foreign leaders have rushed, once again, to ingratiate themselves with him. Their emissaries have cultivated people in Mr. Trump’s orbit or with think tanks expected to be influential in setting policies for a second Trump administration.

Some leaders, like President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, are drafting their pitches to appeal to Mr. Trump’s transactional nature; others, like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, have deployed teams of officials to the United States to visit dozens of Republican leaders in the hope that they can moderate Mr. Trump’s most radical instincts on imposing tariffs.

History suggests that many of these bridge-building efforts will fail. By the end of his first term, Mr. Trump had soured on several leaders with whom he started off on good terms. His protectionist trade policy and aversion to alliances — coupled with a mercurial personality — fueled clashes that overrode the rapport that the leaders had labored to cultivate.

“There were two misapprehensions about Trump,” Malcolm Turnbull, a former prime minister of Australia, said in an interview. “The first was he would be different in office than he was on the campaign trail. The second was the best way to deal with him was to suck up to him.”

In January 2017, Mr. Turnbull had a notoriously hostile phone call with Mr. Trump over whether the United States would honor an Obama-era deal to accept 1,250 refugees, which Mr. Trump opposed (the United States did end up taking them). Mr. Turnbull said he later found other common ground with Mr. Trump, even talking him out of imposing tariffs on some Australian exports.

The difference this time, Mr. Turnbull said, is that “everybody knows exactly what they’re going to get. He’s highly transactional. You’ve got to be able to demonstrate that a particular course of action is in his interest.”

Well before the election, leaders began anticipating a Trump victory by seeking him out. Mr. Zelensky met him in New York the same week as Mr. Starmer. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel traveled to Mr. Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., estate, Mar-a-Lago, in July, as did Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary.

A populist whose autocratic style is a model for some in Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement, Mr. Orban has come, perhaps, the closest to cracking the code with Mr. Trump. The two meet and speak regularly by phone; they heap praise on each other in what has become a mutual admiration society.

Mr. Orban, Mr. Trump has said, is a “very great leader, a very strong man,” whom some do not like only “because he’s too strong.” Mr. Orban, for his part, has praised Mr. Trump as the only hope for peace in Ukraine and for the defeat of “woke globalists.”

How to Convince Trump

Convincing Mr. Trump that Ukraine’s priorities are in his own interest lies at the heart of Mr. Zelensky’s lobbying strategy. Mr. Trump’s skepticism about military support for Ukraine against Russia is well known: He claims he could end the war in a day, perhaps even before taking office, though he has not said how. Analysts fear he will force Mr. Zelensky into a peace settlement with President Vladimir V. Putin that would entrench Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine.

At their meeting in New York, Mr. Zelensky made the case that defending Ukraine is in the economic interests of the United States. That is because much of America’s military assistance benefits the country’s own defense contractors — for example, Lockheed Martin, which makes the HIMARS rocket system that has become a vital weapon in the Ukrainian arsenal.

Ukrainian officials have worked with Republican allies in Washington to develop new ways of structuring military aid, including the creation of a $500 billion lend-lease program to help Ukraine defend itself. That is the brainchild of Mike Pompeo, a former secretary of state and C.I.A. director in the first Trump administration who may take a prominent role in the new one.

“In my opinion, we should take a proactive position,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, the chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament’s foreign affairs committee. “It’s especially important and timely while Trump is beginning to form his administration and foreign policy team, and while the new Congress is beginning to form.”

Mr. Merezhko says he has read several books on Trump’s first term to help him understand how to navigate a Trump restoration. He also held two meetings — one in Washington and one in Lithuania — with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy institute whose ranks are filled with people who served in the Trump administration or on his campaign or transition teams.

Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Trump have baggage: Mr. Trump’s 2019 phone call to the Ukrainian leader, in which the American leader urged him to investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr., triggered the first impeachment proceeding against him.

On Wednesday, however, Mr. Zelensky won a coveted place near the top of Mr. Trump’s list of well-wishers, and he offered the president-elect unstinting praise for what he called a “historic and landslide victory.” “It was a very warm conversation,” Mr. Zelensky said. He did not mention that Mr. Trump had put Elon Musk, the Silicon Valley billionaire who backed his campaign, on the phone with them.

Casting a Wide Net

Canada, too, has cast a wide net to influence the incoming administration. Starting last January, Mr. Trudeau deployed cabinet ministers on regular visits to the United States to meet federal and state officials to promote the value of the sprawling U.S.-Canada trade relationship.

Mr. Trump has said he wants all imported goods to be subject to a 10 percent tariff or higher. That would be catastrophic for Canada. Mr. Trudeau’s envoys were trying to tell anyone who would listen that it would be bad for the United States, too. They fanned out to 23 states, targeting Republican leaders.

Mr. Trudeau himself has had a star-crossed relationship with Mr. Trump. Once quite chummy, the two fell out over tariffs, with Mr. Trump walking out of a Group of 7 meeting in Canada in 2018 and calling Mr. Trudeau “dishonest and weak.” But Canada’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, has maintained good relations with Robert Lighthizer, Mr. Trump’s top adviser on trade, from their work together negotiating a successor trade agreement to NAFTA.

Ms. Freeland said she and Mr. Lighthizer had recently discussed how a flood of Chinese imports hollowed out manufacturing in the United States and hurt middle-class workers. “That’s an area where Ambassador Lighthizer and I are very strongly in agreement,” she told reporters.

Insiders and Outsiders

Engaging a new Trump administration is easier for some countries than others. For several months, Israeli officials have given briefings about the war in Gaza to Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, who worked on Middle East issues during his first term, and David Friedman, who served as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Israel, said two Israeli officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive meetings.

Yossi Dagan, an Israeli settler leader who campaigned for Mr. Trump, has already been invited to attend his inauguration in Washington, said a spokeswoman for Mr. Dagan, Esther Allush. Mr. Dagan hosted Mr. Friedman at an event to promote Mr. Friedman’s book “One Jewish State” last month.

Mr. Netanyahu, like Mr. Trudeau, has had his ups and downs with Mr. Trump. During his first term, Mr. Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the American Embassy there, giving Mr. Netanyahu a major victory. But in 2020, Mr. Netanyahu angered him by congratulating Mr. Biden on his presidential election victory.

After his fence-mending visit to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Netanyahu was among the first leaders to call Mr. Trump on Wednesday for what the Israeli government described as a “warm and cordial” conversation.

That was restrained, compared with the wording used by other leaders. Kenya’s president, William Ruto, the only African leader hosted by Mr. Biden for a state visit, said Mr. Trump’s win was a tribute to his “visionary, bold and innovative leadership.”

Taiwan, whose self-rule is under threat from an increasingly expansionist China, is among the global hot spots most eager to win Mr. Trump’s ear. In 2016, Mr. Trump took a phone call from Tsai Ing-wen, then Taiwan’s president, a break with U.S. convention against high-level political contacts with Taiwan after Washington shifted diplomatic recognition to Beijing in 1979.

That presaged stronger support for Taiwan under Mr. Trump. But his mood toward the island has since cooled, and there are no signs so far of a call between him and the current Taiwanese president, Lai Ching-te. Both Mr. Lai and President Xi Jinping of China sent congratulatory messages to Mr. Trump.

In the European Union, anxiety about Mr. Trump’s return has also led to pre-emptive brainstorming. In recent weeks, Björn Seibert, the top aide to the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has held small group sessions with ambassadors to discuss scenarios for the next administration. These have concentrated on Mr. Trump and trade, several European officials said.

European diplomats are realistic about the task that confronts them. But they cling to the idea that with the proper approach, Mr. Trump can be swayed.

Karen Pierce, Britain’s ambassador to the United States, said: “With President Trump, it’s the art of the possible. If you can explain what we can do together and how we can improve things in a significant way, then you can make progress.”

Ms. Pierce’s predecessor as ambassador, Kim Darroch, was forced to leave his post after a British newspaper leaked his diplomatic cables critical of Mr. Trump. Perhaps understandably, he takes a warier view of the value of outreach to Mr. Trump.

“It’s essential to do it; it’s remiss not to do it,” Mr. Darroch said. “But I’m skeptical that we will shift him on issues where he’s made public commitments, whether tariffs or ending U.S. arms supplies to Ukraine.”

Reporting was contributed by Andrew Higgins from Warsaw; Aaron Boxerman from Jerusalem; Chris Buckley from Taipei, Taiwan; Mujib Mashal from New Delhi; Abdi Latif Dahir from Nairobi, Kenya; Steven Erlanger from Berlin; and Jenny Gross from Brussels.

As Ukraine’s cemeteries have filled with dead soldiers, a legion of war widows has been growing.

It is impossible to say how many widows this war has created because Ukraine closely guards its casualty figures. But estimates suggest they number in the tens of thousands.

The widows all have loss in common. But each copes in her or his own way.

Iryna Sharhorodska, 29, always told her husband everything. His death did not change that — for over a year, she has visited his grave daily to speak to him.

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Amsterdam banned demonstrations over the weekend under an emergency order and mobilized additional police officers after what city officials described as antisemitic attacks on Israeli soccer fans during the week.

The order prohibited the wearing of face masks or face coverings and stepped up security at Jewish institutions. It also gave police the power to stop and search people.

This week’s violence unfolded over days around a soccer match on Thursday between Ajax, a Dutch team, and Maccabi Tel Aviv, an Israeli team. Tensions had mounted a day earlier when Israeli fans vandalized a taxi and burned a Palestinian flag in the city. After the game, people on scooters kicked and beat Israeli fans, sending some to the hospital.

The police in Amsterdam initially detained 62 people. By Saturday, most had been released and four were being held, according to Marijke Stor, a Dutch police spokeswoman. The four are all suspected of public violence, she said, adding that one is a 26-year-old who was arrested on Friday after the police identified him from CCTV footage.

“If people are released, it doesn’t mean they are no longer a suspect,” Ms. Stor said. “Other arrests can still be made, of course, because the investigation is still ongoing,” she added. Prosecutors have not charged anyone, she said.

The tensions had been building up in the city before Thursday’s match.

Pro-Palestinian protests were planned for that day. But on Wednesday, Amsterdam’s mayor, Femke Halsema, had banned demonstrations near the stadium in an effort to stave off violence.

Videos from Thursday showed Israeli fans shouting anti-Arab chants on their way to the match as the police escorted them near Amsterdam’s central train station to ensure their safety amid anger over the Gaza war. One of their chants said: “Why is there no school in Gaza? There are no children left there.”

The police deployed 800 officers to try to maintain order during the game. At the stadium, riot police and mounted officers kept pro-Palestinian groups and Israeli fans apart. Although the game went ahead without violence, there were confrontations in or near the city center.

The Dutch police said that some people riding scooters had kicked and beat Israeli fans in hit-and-run attacks on Thursday, while others pelted them with fireworks. Five Israelis were hospitalized with injuries and were later discharged, the police said, and 20 to 30 others sustained light injuries.

David van Weel, the Dutch justice and security minister, acknowledged that the police had been caught by surprise that the attacks on the Maccabi fans were carried out by small groups of people — rather than the kind of large clashes typically seen after soccer matches.

“Much to everyone’s surprise, what happened was there was a kind of manhunt for individual supporters moving around the city,” he said on a talk show on Friday evening.

Social media appears to have played a role in the attacks, the mayor, Ms. Halsema, said at a news conference on Friday. The authorities had seen a “rapid spread via Telegram groups,” she said.

“Telegram groups wherein people were discussing hunting Jews — so shocking and so reprehensible,” she told reporters on Friday.

Hateful discourse and incitement have often spread on the Telegram platform, which played a role in recent riots in Britain and arson at migrant housing centers in Ireland. In the past, Telegram has said it was making improvements to its features and moderating of posts.

Peter Holla, Amsterdam’s police chief, expressed shock at a news conference on Friday that “one of the largest deployments that we as Amsterdam police — with national assistance — have made in a year could not prevent this violence.”

Amsterdam on Thursday was also commemorating the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht — the night in 1938 when Nazi troops organized regular Germans to loot Jewish businesses, burn down synagogues, and attack and arrest Jews in Germany.

Given the anniversary, Amsterdam’s mayor was worried about heightened tensions, her spokeswoman said on Saturday. But the country’s counterterrorism agency did not see any increased or specific threats, and the national threat level was not changed.

In a letter to lawmakers on Friday, Mr. van Weel, the justice minister, said he had ordered an investigation into whether there were any warnings from Israeli intelligence before the match.

Israel’s government, concerned about the safety of its citizens, warned soccer fans in Amsterdam to stay off the streets and to avoid wearing Israeli or Jewish symbols. It also helped arrange flights to bring Israeli citizens home.

Gideon Saar, Israel’s newly appointed foreign minister, traveled to the Netherlands on Thursday and met with the Dutch justice minister and Geert Wilders, whose anti-Muslim party is the largest party in the Dutch Parliament.

In a series of social media posts, Mr. Wilders has used the clashes to attack what he calls “radical Islam” in sometimes incendiary language.

On the other side of the political spectrum, Stephan van Baarle, the leader of DENK, a small pro-immigrant party, blamed the authorities for failing to stop what he called provocations by Israeli fans.

“Where were the police when Maccabi thugs chanted genocidal and racist slogans about Gaza?” he said in a video posted to the party’s website.

The Amsterdam police say they have launched a broad investigation and have asked members of the public to come forward with relevant images and information.

Rosanne Kropman contributed reporting from Amsterdam.

This Sunday was the day that Daniel García, a Venezuelan delivery worker living in the capital of Colombia, had planned to begin an arduous land journey toward the United States.

Then Donald J. Trump became president-elect, and everything changed. Unsure if he could make it to the border before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, and fearful that he would be turned away once Mr. Trump was in office, Mr. García, 31, has decided to stay put.

“It is a very high investment,” he said of the journey north, which he figured would cost him $2,500, about a year’s savings. “I prefer not to risk it,” he added.

With Mr. Trump now headed back to the White House, many potential migrants are rethinking their plans, while border officials are working hard to understand what a Trump presidency will mean for the number of people trying to make it the United States.

Mr. Trump made a broad crackdown on immigration a pillar of his campaign — a message that spread around the world.

In Mexico, humanitarian groups and migration officials are preparing for a possible rush of migrants to the United States before he assumes the presidency in January.

“The vast majority of those in Mexico are going to try to get to the border,” said Irineo Mujica, the Mexico director of People Without Borders, a transnational advocacy group. “The door definitely closes now, and a lot of them are going to try to make a run for it.”

But it is too early to tell if that surge will actually materialize. Online, in Facebook and WhatsApp groups where potential migrants share information, smugglers are using Mr. Trump’s election to urge people to use their services — now.

“There’s still time,” said one smuggler in a WhatsApp group for potential migrants that has more than 400 members.

A person in good health, with some savings and luck, can make it from South America to the U.S. border in about two months.

If the person is kidnapped, robbed or assaulted — common experiences for migrants, particularly when passing through Mexico — it can take longer.

And, of course, many migrants never even get close to the U.S.-Mexico border. They are deported, stopped by Mexican authorities or become victims of injuries — or worse.

Some people who had considered the journey, however, said they have already decided that Mr. Trump’s election means that they will not try to make it to the United States, by illegal or legal means. Some said they feared deportation, or simply an unwelcoming climate.

Mr. Trump has blamed immigrants for many problems in the United States, like crime and rising housing costs, and has vowed to carry out the largest mass deportation effort in the country’s history.

In Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second largest city, Josefina Quintero, 59, said her daughter had left for the United States years ago and had urged her to consider applying for a legal entry program known as humanitarian parole so the family could be reunited.

Ms. Quintero, who makes about $20 a week doing cleaning work, never applied. She worried about leaving her 90-year-old father, who has dementia, and she now believes that Mr. Trump will end the program.

“That dream is gone. I have to settle with staying,” she said. “It hurts me not to meet my grandchildren in person, to never hug them. I will continue talking to them by video call until there is a new opportunity.”

Migration at the U.S. southern border surged to record levels under the Biden administration, fueled by poverty and conflict in countries like Venezuela and Ecuador. Another factor has been the growing popularity of a route through the Darién Gap, the jungle straddling South and North Americas that was once a formidable physical barrier for people who sought to trek to the United States.

Mr. Trump blasted the Biden administration’s border and migration policies, calling them too lax. On the route to the United States over the past two years, many Venezuelans have told New York Times reporters that part of their decision to make the journey had to do with a belief that Mr. Biden had created a special border entry policy for people from their country.

In 2022, apprehensions of migrants at the southern border surged to 2.2 million, feeding discontent in the United States and becoming a centerpiece of the November presidential election.

Crossings at the U.S. southern border have slowed in recent months, as the Biden administration cracked down, narrowing options for claiming asylum and encouraging countries along the route to make it more difficult for people to pass through. The administration has also expanded legal entry programs.

The Mexican government has made it particularly arduous for people to traverse the nation, sending migrants who arrive in the northern part of the country back to distant southern regions, and creating what one researcher called a “migratory carousel.”

In this loop, migrants have to cross Mexico again and again to make it to the U.S. border, worn down in each attempt by criminal groups that use violence to extract money. In some cases, they have become the victims of migration officials and even the armed forces.

Some people who had considered migrating in recent months said a growing understanding about the risks of the route — and not Mr. Trump’s election — ultimately swayed them against making the journey.

Berky Silva, 49, who lives in a working-class part of Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, said two relatives, a father and son, had left recently for the United States, fleeing a wave of repression inside the country.

The last she heard of them, in early November, they had been kidnapped in Mexico and needed $4,000 to be freed.

Facing this kind of violence on the route, only to face “xenophobia or being illegal” once she arrived in the United States, she said, “is not something I want to experience.”

Some would-be migrants said they were considering staying put for a different reason: A number of Venezuelans said they viewed Mr. Trump’s election as potentially positive for their country.

They thought the incoming president might be able to oust their nation’s autocrat, Nicolás Maduro, eliminating the need to leave. (Analysts say this is unlikely to happen.)

Pedro Ron, 28, a delivery worker from Venezuela who lives in Bogotá, the Colombian capital, said his neighborhood was full of celebrating Venezuelans on Nov. 6, the day after Mr. Trump’s victory

“We all cried when we heard the result,” he said. “Everybody was like, ‘I hope Trump lends a hand to help.’”

U.S. border apprehensions may be down, but there are still thousands of people already en route to the United States and many others who say they have migration plans firmly in place — no matter who the president is.

In Ecuador, Javier Olivo, 50, a construction worker from Guayaquil, a large city on the country’s Pacific Coast, said that because of his country’s security problems — an expanding narcotrafficking industry has unleashed a surge of violence — he had been thinking for years about heading to the United States.

Now, frequent electricity cuts — caused by a historic drought that has been made worse by climate change — have increased his desire to leave.

While he had heard that Mr. Trump planned to treat migrants with a “heavy hand,” he said that the decision to go to the United States with his wife had “already been made.”

“With God’s help, we hope things go well for us there,” he said. His trip is planned for May.

There are now three migrant caravans in southern Mexico heading north — the largest of them with about 1,600 people, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency.

More caravans, which migrants often join for protection against criminal groups, are expected to come together in the next few days, said Luis Rey García Villagrán, a migrant advocate who has helped organize them for years.

At a shelter in the Mexican border city of Tijuana, Rosalba Magallón, 45, said she used to sell quesadillas in the Mexican state of Michoacán, until cartel members burned her house when she refused to pay extortion fees.

It did not matter that Trump was about to become president, she said. She fears that cartel gunmen may have followed her to Tijuana, and thinks the United States is the only place she might find safety.

“I fled, and now I live in uncertainty,” she said. “We are obviously worried about the arrival of Trump, but I can’t go back.”

Reporting was contributed by Aline Corpus from Tijuana, Mexico; Jody García from Guatemala City; Sheyla Urdaneta from Maracaibo, Venezuela; Isayen Herrera from Caracas, Venezuela; and Thalíe Ponce from Guayaquil, Ecuador.

Qatar, a key mediator between Israel and Hamas, announced on Saturday night that it had paused its efforts to broker a cease-fire between the two sides to end the war in Gaza, citing the deadlock in talks.

“Qatar will resume those efforts with its partners when the parties show willingness and seriousness to end the brutal war,” Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for the Qatari Foreign Ministry, said in a statement.

Earlier, Qatari officials also told Hamas political leaders they were no longer welcome in the country because of the stalled state of negotiations, U.S. and Israeli officials said over the weekend. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.

Mr. al-Ansari did not directly comment on the claim about Hamas’s presence in the country. Before the ministry’s statement was issued, an official familiar with the matter said that Qatar had decided that the political office maintained by Hamas in the capital, Doha, no longer served its purpose because of the stalled negotiations.

In the Foreign Ministry statement, Mr. al-Ansari said that news media reports about the Hamas office were “inaccurate,” without specifying which reports or what information was disputed. “The main goal” of the office in Qatar “is to be a channel of communication between the concerned parties, and this channel has contributed to achieving a cease-fire in previous stages,” the statement said.

It was far from clear if Qatar would actually evict Hamas leaders from Doha or declare the office closed without expelling officials from the country. The tiny Gulf state has gained outsized influence from its role as a gateway to actors like Hamas, with whom most Western countries have no formal ties.

But the Qatari threats appeared to be at least an attempt to increase pressure on Hamas and Israel to compromise on terms for a cease-fire and to free the remaining hostages still in Gaza after more than a year of war.

Qatar has hosted Hamas’s exiled political leaders since 2012, making Doha a focal point for negotiations with Israel to end the war and free the hostages. Egypt, which borders Gaza, is the other major mediator between the sides.

Hamas officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Hamas has long insisted on a permanent end to the war and a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza before it would agree to release any of the remaining hostages. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has vowed to continue fighting until Hamas’s destruction in Gaza, and has suggested Israeli forces would have to remain in parts of the enclave during any cease-fire.

Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly changed his conditions for a deal, and his critics in Israel have accused him of prioritizing his political survival over freeing the hostages. His hard-line coalition allies have called for indefinite Israeli rule in Gaza and opposed previous truce proposals that would have ended the campaign against Hamas.

Being forced to leave Qatar — where some Hamas leaders have been based for over a decade, often alongside their families — would be another blow to Hamas.

Israel has methodically eliminated many of the group’s political and military leaders since the war began last October with the Hamas-led attacks on Israel. Over the last year, Israel has killed two of Hamas’s political chiefs and the leader of its armed wing, as well as dozens of lower-ranking officials.

Last month, Israeli soldiers killed the leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, in a firefight in the southern Gaza Strip. Diplomats and analysts said Mr. Sinwar — one of the architects of the Oct. 7 attack — had dominated Hamas’s decision-making, leaving its future direction unclear.

The Hamas office in Doha was established over a decade ago to create a point where negotiations could be conducted with the group, which the United States and other countries consider a terrorist organization.

But if it became clear that the office in Doha was not facilitating talks toward peace or easing suffering in the region, then there would be no reason for such an office to remain, according to a senior defense official from one of the countries mediating between Israel and Hamas. That message was conveyed to Hamas in recent weeks.

Expelling Hamas could be a double-edged sword for Qatar. Pressuring Hamas’s political leaders could compel them show more flexibility in talks with Israel, but it could also reduce Qatar’s importance in the talks should they move to another regional hub.

Two weeks ago, after the death of Mr. Sinwar but before the U.S. election, the Biden administration asked Qatar to kick Hamas out of Doha, according to people briefed on the discussions.

American frustration with Hamas has been growing since militants from the group executed Hersh Goldberg, an American hostage held in Gaza, alongside five other captives, U.S. officials said. The killing of Mr. Goldberg convinced many in the Biden administration that Hamas was not serious about reaching a cease-fire deal.

After the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against Khaled Meshal, a Hamas leader based in Doha, in September, some officials began urging more vociferously for Hamas to be removed from Qatar, American officials said.

Ronen Bergman contributed reporting.

Mariam Abu Amra’s six children panic when the sun goes down.

They are afraid of the dark, and ever since the war in Gaza began, their home is pitch-black by bedtime. The neighborhood outside is dark, too, illuminated only by cellphone screens that use up precious battery life.

The power has been out for more than one year in the Gaza Strip, and Gazans have had to make do with alternatives that fall far short of their basic needs.

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At least two dozen people were killed and more than 40 others wounded in a suicide bombing at a train station in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta on Saturday morning, officials said.

The attack, in Balochistan Province, is the latest in a series of violent episodes in the region, which borders Iran and Afghanistan and is home to major Chinese-led projects such as a strategic port. The province is also home to insurgent separatist groups, notably the Baloch Liberation Army, which claimed responsibility for Saturday’s bombing.

Police and railway officials said that the explosion occurred on a train platform around 9 a.m., a time when the station is typically crowded with passengers, many traveling north to Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, via the garrison city of Rawalpindi.

Shahid Rind, a spokesman for the Balochistan government, said preliminary investigations indicated that it was a suicide bombing. Casualties included passengers, law enforcement personnel and railway workers, he said.

The powerful blast was heard throughout the city, according to residents, and television footage from the station showed significant damage to the platform.

Witnesses described the scene just after the explosion as chaos. “Heart-wrenching cries and screams filled the air, and human remains were scattered across the area,” said Muhammad Kaleem, a local trader who had gone to the station to buy tickets for his family. “I am grateful to God to have escaped unharmed.”

Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, denounced the bombing, saying in a statement that terrorists who harmed innocent people would pay a heavy price, and that the nation’s security forces were determined to eliminate “the menace of terrorism.”

The Baloch Liberation Army, a banned ethnic separatist group that regularly attacks Pakistani military personnel and Chinese nationals, claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attack in a statement, and said that the suicide bomber used for the violence had targeted army personnel who were gathered at the railway station.

The Pakistani military did not immediately release an official statement.

Last month, the banned group claimed responsibility for another deadly bombing, that one aimed at a convoy carrying Chinese nationals outside the busy international airport in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city.

In August, a series of attacks by the group on police stations, railway lines and highways in the province led to the deaths of dozens of people.

Terrorist violence and counterterrorism operations surged 90 percent in Pakistan in the third quarter of this year compared with a year earlier, the Center for Research and Security Studies, an Islamabad-based think tank, reported last month. Almost 97 percent of the 722 deaths attributed to the violence in that period were in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the highest rate in a decade.

A court in Russia has sentenced two Russian soldiers to life in prison for killing a family of nine after breaking into their home in occupied Ukraine, a rare legal case against atrocities committed by Moscow’s soldiers in the war.

Anton Sopov and Stanislav Rau, two contract soldiers from the Russian Far East, were found guilty on Friday of using guns equipped with silencers to murder the family because of “political, ideological, racial, national or religious hatred,” Russian state news agencies reported. The killings occurred in October 2023 in the Ukrainian town of Volnovakha, a logistics hub in southeastern Ukraine that Moscow’s forces occupied shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion began more than two and a half years ago.

The case was heard behind closed doors by a southern military court in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. Mr. Sopov, 21, and Mr. Rau, 28, pleaded not guilty and plan to appeal the verdict, according to Kommersant, a Russian business daily. During the war so far, people given such life sentences have not been allowed to avoid serving time in their high-security penal colonies by signing another contract to fight with Russia’s army in Ukraine.

Since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian officials, prosecutors and rights groups have repeatedly accused Russian forces of committing atrocities against civilians, including cases of torture, rape and executions.

Russian officials have denied such accusations, despite documented evidence and accounts collected by Ukrainian and international investigators. Moscow has also accused Kyiv of fabricating evidence to smear Russian forces.

But the murder of the nine family members caused uproar in Ukraine and beyond, because photographs of the bodies were quickly circulated on social networks, putting Russia under intense public pressure and prompting Russian investigators to open a criminal inquiry.

The victims were a married couple, Eduard Kapkanets, 53, and Tatiana Kapkanets, 51; their son Andrei, 31, and his wife, Natalia; as well as another son, Aleksandr, 25, his wife, Yekaterina, 27, their 9-year-old daughter, Anastasia, and 4-year-old son, Nikita; and Yekaterina’s brother Dmitri, 20, Kommersant reported.

According to Kommersant, one of the theories put forward by investigators was that the family was selling moonshine at home and that Mr. Sopov and Mr. Rau wanted to get some for free. Another theory was that Eduard Kapkanets had admonished the two soldiers after they appeared drunk in a store in the town.

Ukrainian prosecutors, who also investigated the killings, said that the family had refused to vacate the house to accommodate a Russian unit and that the soldiers had returned days later and “shot all nine members of the family, who were already asleep.”