Israel’s military said on Monday that it had expanded a humanitarian zone it created in southern Gaza. The move came just before the expiry of a Biden administration deadline for Israel to deliver more aid to the enclave or risk a cutoff of military supplies.

In a statement, the Israeli military said that the zone would now include field hospitals; tent compounds; shelter supplies; and provisions of food, water, medicine and medical equipment, though it did not specify whether any new additions had been made to the resources already present. The military provided a map showing that nine areas had been added to the zone.

Aid agencies have said that supplies are desperately needed to offset the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, especially in the north, where Israel has stepped up military operations against the militant group Hamas.

The Israeli military’s announcement came as the 30-day deadline set on Oct. 13 by the Biden administration is set to expire. In one of the starkest American warnings since the war began, the administration said that failure to provide more aid to Gaza’s 2.2 million residents before that deadline “may have implications for U.S. policy,” including on the provision of the military assistance upon which Israel depends.

The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Sunday that the United States would this week evaluate “what kind of progress” Israel had made on allowing aid into Gaza. Speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Mr. Sullivan said President Biden would then “make judgments about what we do in response.”

It remains unclear whether the expansion announced by Israel’s military would lead to any improvement in conditions inside the humanitarian zone, also known as Al-Mawasi — a coastal area of southern Gaza that was sparsely populated before the war but is now overcrowded with displaced families. The area, designated as safe for civilians by Israel’s military earlier this year, has frequently been damaged by Israeli strikes and lacks sufficient medical services. Israel’s military has said that its strikes target Hamas militants and that it takes steps to avoid civilian casualties.

Israel has since issued evacuation orders that affected parts of the humanitarian zone, effectively shrinking the already overcrowded area by more than a fifth.

Israel has repeatedly ordered Palestinians in other areas of Gaza to evacuate to the humanitarian zone, despite protests from aid groups that the area lacks adequate shelter, water, food, sanitation or health care.

The Biden administration’s deadline is set to expire just days after a United Nations-backed panel warned that famine was imminent in the northern Gaza Strip and that action was needed “within days, not weeks” to alleviate the suffering in the enclave.

Here’s what else is happening:

• Evacuation orders: In southern Lebanon, where Israel is fighting the Iran-backed militia group Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, the Israeli military issued evacuation orders on Monday for more than 20 towns and villages.

  The warnings, the first such orders in nearly a month, were issued via social media and called on civilians to evacuate their homes “immediately” and to move north above the Awali River. The river effectively demarcates southern Lebanon, which Israel invaded last month in a bid to destroy Hezbollah’s border infrastructure. The U.N. refugee agency said last month that over a quarter of Lebanese territory was now under an Israeli evacuation order.

Myra Noveck and Euan Ward contributed reporting.

President Donald J. Trump pulled out of the 2015 nuclear pact between Iran and world powers, imposed tough economic sanctions on Iran and ordered the killing of its top general. And Iran, federal prosecutors said on Friday, plotted to assassinate Mr. Trump before November’s election.

Yet despite that charged history, many former officials, pundits and newspaper editorials in Iran have openly called for the government to engage with Mr. Trump in the week since his re-election. Shargh, the main reformist daily newspaper, said in a front-page editorial that Iran’s new, more moderate president, Masoud Pezeshkian, must “avoid past mistakes and assume a pragmatic and multidimensional policy.”

And many in Mr. Pezeshkian’s government agree, according to five Iranian officials who asked that their names not be published because they were not authorized to discuss government policy. They say Mr. Trump loves to make deals where others have failed, and that his outsize dominance in the Republican Party could give any potential agreement more staying power. That might give an opening for some kind of lasting deal with the United States, they argue.

“Do not lose this historic opportunity for change in Iran-U.S. relations,” wrote a prominent politician and former political adviser to Iran’s government, Hamid Aboutalebi, in an open letter to Iran’s president. He advised Mr. Pezeshkian to congratulate Mr. Trump on winning the election and set a new tone for a pragmatic and forward-looking policy.

Still, critical decisions in Iran are made by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and he banned negotiations with Mr. Trump during his first term. In Iran’s factional politics, even if Mr. Pezeshkian wanted to negotiate with Mr. Trump, he would have to get Mr. Khamenei’s approval.

And many conservatives, including some in the powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps, oppose any engagement with Mr. Trump. The U.S. Justice Department has said that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps hacked Mr. Trump’s campaign computers and spread disinformation online in an attempt to influence the presidential election. On Friday, federal prosecutors in Manhattan revealed an effort by Iran to assassinate Mr. Trump.

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, called the those charges a “fabricated” scenario in a post on X on Saturday. He said Iran respected the American people’s choice in electing their president, and that the path forward for Iran and the U.S. begins with mutual “respect” and “confidence building.”

Reza Salehi, a conservative analyst in Tehran close to the country’s hard-line political faction, said in an interview that negotiation with Mr. Trump would be politically challenging for Iran’s new government. Conservatives have already voiced their disapproval, saying any engagement would be a betrayal of Gen. Qassim Suleimani, whose assassination Mr. Trump ordered in 2020.

Hamshahri, a conservative newspaper run by Tehran’s municipal government, ran front page photos of Mr. Trump in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs with the headline: “The return of the killer.” Still, even Mr. Salehi said: “I’m going to go against this position and say that Trump will benefit Iran compared to his predecessor.” He added: “He is into making deals; he is into ending wars and against starting new ones.”

Even those who want to engage with Mr. Trump say that the country’s foreign policy for a Trump era will largely depend on how Mr. Trump approaches Iran and the Middle East, as well as who he selects for his administration, according to the five officials. Mr. Trump recently said that he does not seek to harm Iran, and his main demand was that the country not develop nuclear weapons. But at another point during the campaign, he appeared to give Israel a green light to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites. He said that Israel should “hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later.”

And on Sunday in a video statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he had spoken to Mr. Trump and “we see eye-to-eye on the Iranian threat in all its aspects, and on the dangers they reflect.”

Brian Hook, who served as a representative for Iran during the first Trump administration, told CNN on Thursday that Mr. Trump “has no interest in regime change,” but he also “understands that the chief driver of instability in the Middle East is the Iranian regime.”

One of the first decisions that Iran must make is whether to follow though on promises to launch a massive revenge attack on Israel. Last month, Israel struck missile bases and air defense systems around Iran’s critical energy sites after Tehran launched a wave of ballistic missiles at Israel to avenge the killing of several senior commanders and top regional allies.

Mr. Trump has been a staunch supporter of Israel. A potential war between Iran and Israel could quickly escalate tensions with an incoming Trump administration and derail any chances of better relations.

The five Iranian officials said that many of Mr. Trump’s stated foreign policy goals — ending the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, ending the war in Ukraine and an “America First” agenda — appeal to Iran.

Ending the wars in Gaza and Lebanon could help avert a wider war between Israel and Iran, which supports Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Ending the war in Ukraine could take pressure off Iran for supplying weapons to Russia. And Mr. Trump’s domestic policy could mean less interest in other countries’ affairs.

Mohammad Javad Zarif, the former foreign minister and current vice president for strategic affairs in Iran, said in a statement on X that he hopes Mr. Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance would “stand against war as pledged, and will heed the clear lesson given by the American electorate to end wars and prevent new ones.”

Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a former vice president, said in an interview from Tehran that his advice would be “to turn the threat of Trump into a good opportunity and start active diplomacy.”

“Trump likes to take personal credit for resolving a crisis, and one of the main crises now is the one between Iran and the America,” he said.

Two competing strategies are being discussed in Iran’s policy circles, Mr. Abtahi said. One calls for Iran to proceed defiantly and strengthen its proxy militias in the Middle East to deter the United States and Israel. The other calls for negotiating with Mr. Trump, which is gaining traction among some conservatives, largely because they don’t see an alternative for resolving Iran’s economic problems.

For more than two decades, Iran’s diplomacy with the United States has been predicated on the American political party in office, loosely centered on the idea that Republicans are more hostile to diplomacy while Democrats are more open to it.

Iran refused to engage with Mr. Trump after he imposed a “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran during his first term. The country bided its time, hoping that the next Democratic administration would lift sanctions and return to the nuclear deal that Mr. Trump had abandoned.

Those moves never materialized. The Biden administration and Iran never returned to the deal, and sanctions remained in place.

The five Iranian officials familiar with Iran’s foreign policy planning, two of them from the foreign ministry, said the country’s experience with the Biden administration was frustrating and led many to conclude that a deal with a Republican administration would yield longer lasting results.

The two officials from the foreign ministry said that Iran has been preparing for a potential Trump presidency for months, with the ministry creating an informal working group on the topic as far back as March.

Mr. Pezeshkian has acknowledged that any hope for economic relief is tied to improving relations with the West.

“For us, it does not matter who has won the election in America because we rely on our own internal strength,” Mr. Pezeshkian said on Wednesday, according to Iranian media reports. At the same time, “we will not have a limited and closed outlook in developing our relations with countries,” he added.

Analysts in Iran and the United States said that Mr. Trump would most likely require Iran to stop arming and funding the militant groups fighting Israel as part of any deal to lift sanctions. Mr. Khamenei, the supreme leader, has repeatedly said that Iran’s support for those groups will continue.

Rahman Ghahremanpour, an analyst in Tehran, said Iran does not have many options. Maintaining the status quo for another four years is not tenable. The economy is tanking under sanctions and mismanagement, inflation is skyrocketing and domestic discontent remains high.

“We do not want more sanctions and more instability,” Mr. Ghahremanpour said. “But at the same time, a comprehensive deal with Trump has to give us some wiggle room to save face domestically and justify it. That will be the big challenge.”

Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting from Belgium.

The Israeli military issued new evacuation orders for more than 20 towns and villages in southern Lebanon on Monday, the latest indication that its conflict with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah is deepening, despite what appeared to be intensifying efforts to reach a cease-fire.

The widespread warnings across the country’s south, the first such orders in nearly a month, were issued via social media and called on civilians to immediately evacuate their homes and move north above the Awali River, farther from the Israeli border. The river effectively demarcates southern Lebanon, which Israel invaded last month in a bid to destroy Hezbollah’s infrastructure and stop it from firing rockets and missiles into Israel.

The latest conflict between Israel and Hezbollah began last year when Hezbollah started its cross-border assaults in support of Hamas in Gaza, forcing tens of thousands of Israelis to leave their homes in northern Israel. It has significantly escalated in recent weeks and triggered a humanitarian crisis in Lebanon. Nearly 3,200 people have been killed, and more than a fifth of the Lebanese population has been displaced.

Israel’s new foreign minister, Gideon Saar, signaled on Monday that renewed U.S.-brokered diplomatic efforts were underway to stem the conflict.

“There is progress,” said Mr. Saar, speaking at a news conference. “The main challenge eventually will be to enforce what will be agreed.”

The head of Hezbollah’s media office, Mohammed Afif, said on Monday that the group had not yet received any proposals on a cease-fire deal in Lebanon, but that there had been “contacts between Washington, Moscow, Tehran and other capitals” on the issue since the election of former President Donald J. Trump last week.

“Nothing official has reached Lebanon or us,” Mr. Afif said at a news conference in the Dahiya, the area adjoining Beirut where the armed group holds sway.

When the civil war in Syria threatened his village more than a decade ago, a farmer and his family fled to neighboring Lebanon.

The farmer, Ali Kheir Khallu, 37, found work there growing oranges and bananas. Life was hard, he said, but at least he felt safe.

That feeling vanished last month as Israel ramped up its war with Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militia, heavily bombing sites that it said belonged to the group. When the bombs fell near Mr. Kheir Khallu’s house, he packed up his family, left behind the new lives they had built in Lebanon and fled back to Syria, where they are now struggling to start over, yet again.

“You want to make up for all that you have lost,” he said. “But you are still in shock.”

As the war in Lebanon expands, more than 1.2 million people — one-fifth of the population — have been displaced from their homes, the government says.

While most have sought safety in other parts of Lebanon, more than 470,000 people, mostly Syrians, have crossed into Syria in the last six weeks, aid groups say.

Since Syrian rebels tried to topple the government in 2011, President Bashar al-Assad has fought to stay in power, with his forces bombing and besieging opposition communities and repeatedly using chemical weapons. The war drew in Russia, the United States, the jihadists of Islamic State and other forces, displacing about 12 million residents, or more than half the country’s population.

More than 1.1 million Syrians registered as refugees in Lebanon, most of them deeply impoverished and in Lebanese communities that wanted them to leave. Some of these refugees have now decided to try their luck in their own shattered country rather than under the bombs in Lebanon. But they must navigate Syria’s tattered economy, damaged communities and a government long known to trample on human rights.

Mr. al-Assad’s authoritarian government controls most of Syria’s major cities, but large parts of the country are dominated by either Turkish-backed armed groups in the northwest or a Kurdish-led militia supported by the United States in the northeast.

Human Rights Watched warned recently that Syrians returning home could face repression by the government, including forced disappearance and torture.

Mr. Kheir Khallu and other returning refugees spoke to The New York Times in the village of al-Rai in northern Syria during a visit facilitated by the Turkish authorities who oversee the area.

His uncle, Abdel-Majid Dahdou, 48, has also recently returned from Lebanon and said that Syrian war and the passage of time had transformed their village, Celame. Shelling damaged his house and looters cleaned it out, he said, leaving him to now borrow mattresses and blankets for his family.

When he left years ago, rebels were fighting the Syrian government. Now, Turkey supports the local security forces and provides basic services.

But the new Turkish-backed authorities there have refused to recognize his Syrian government identity card, he said, meaning that he cannot enroll his children in school or connect his house to the electric grid. So while trying to figure out how to get a local ID, he charges his cellphone at a relative’s house.

“At night, we sit in the dark,” he said.

Other Syrians said they had also found it hard to return.

Mohammed Najjar, 42, left his home and housewares store in the town of Azaz on the Turkish border in 2013 to go to Lebanon, where he sold clothes at an outdoor market and worked as a day laborer in agriculture. His family registered as refugees with the United Nations, he said, but stopped receiving aid years ago.

Then work grew scarce as Lebanon sank into a deep economic crisis that began in 2019, compounded by the coronavirus pandemic.

So when Israel began bombing near where his family lived, he said, he decided to head home.

“It was war. There was no money, and we worried about the children, how to pay the rent, where we would live,” he said. “So we decided it was safer to come home.”

He returned with his brother’s wife, Hamida Brimo, who had gone to Lebanon at age 10 and come home a 22-year-old mother of three. She got married in Lebanon, but her husband did not make the move to Syria with her and their children, she said, because he feared being forced to serve in the Syrian Army.

She said she didn’t know when she would see her husband again, but she hoped that at least she and her daughters would be safe in Syria.

“We came back, but we don’t know how our lives here will be,” she said. “We have to return and start over.”

Leaders from across the Arab world gathered on Monday in the capital of Saudi Arabia for a summit that came at a delicate moment for the kingdom, which has signaled a rapprochement with Iran after a violent, decades-long rivalry.

The meeting was officially convened to discuss the fighting in Gaza and Lebanon, where Israel’s military is battling Iran-backed militant groups. It takes place amid heightened regional tensions and the prospect of a hawkish Trump administration on Iran.

Saudi Arabia had been preparing to recognize Israel, but the wars in Gaza and Lebanon cooled that prospect. Now, the kingdom and its allies find themselves warming to Tehran. Last month, the foreign ministers of Gulf States met for the first time as a group with their Iranian counterpart. On Sunday, the Saudi and Iranian military chiefs met in Tehran — further signaling a thaw in relations as Iran considers a response to Israeli attacks on its territory.

Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, emphasized the relationship in his opening remarks at the event, a joint summit of the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation on Monday.

“We call on the international community to compel Israel to respect Iran’s sovereignty and not to attack its territory,” he told the audience in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

Saudi Arabia and Iran have been locked in a long battle for regional dominance, a rivalry shaped by the competing branches of Islam each country embraces. Iran’s network of regional proxies — which includes Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon — has long been a particular source of concern for Saudi Arabia.

While Hamas and Hezbollah have been weakened by the Israeli military’s operations in Gaza and Lebanon, Iran still arms and supports the Houthis in Yemen — a group that has been implicated in attacks on the kingdom.

“The issue that we’ve had, and that was the basis for the divergence in our relationship, was Iran’s regional behavior, which from our perspective has not contributed to stability,” the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, said last week. “We are having very, very clear and honest conversations with the Iranians.”

Not everyone at the summit on Monday in Riyadh appeared keen to pursue further alignment with Iran. Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, demanded that countries stop “interfering in its internal affairs by supporting this or that group” — an implicit reference to Iran’s longtime support of Hezbollah.

Analysts said that in addition to signaling greater warmth toward Tehran, Saudi Arabia could also be using the summit in Riyadh as an opportunity to send a message to the incoming Trump administration. President-elect Donald J. Trump has said he will “stop wars” when he takes office, noted Hasan Alhasan, a senior fellow for Middle East policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“Saudi Arabia could be trying to position itself as an attractive and credible choice for the Trump administration to work with if Trump follows through with his pledge to broker a deal to end the war, especially given the fact that diplomatic efforts led by other regional mediators, notably Qatar and Egypt, have failed to bear fruit,” Mr. Alhasan said.

The students would emerge on their bikes, in the tens of thousands, seemingly out of nowhere. Like a flash mob on wheels, they rode for hours in the night, by the light of streetlamps, sometimes bursting into verses of the Chinese national anthem. Some carried Chinese flags.

They were making the 40-mile journey from the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, to the neighboring city of Kaifeng, a cycling trip that can take up to five hours one-way. Why? For the sake of it.

It isn’t clear when the craze really took off, but by early this month, it was drawing hundreds of riders seemingly every night. At first it had been celebrated online and even by the People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, which described the night rides as “a symbol of youthful energy and the joy of shared experiences.”

But over the weekend, after the number of riders swelled to the tens of thousands in a country where officials are increasingly wary of impromptu crowds, local authorities shut it down, citing traffic and safety concerns.

The nighttime escapades started in June when four college friends in Zhengzhou decided to bike to Kaifeng to eat a type of soup dumpling that is the city’s specialty, Chinese news media has reported. Soon, hordes of college students were making the trip, too, helped by easy access to shared bicycles that are cheap and ubiquitous in many Chinese cities.

The students, seemingly attracted by a sense of spontaneity and adventure, posted photos and videos of their own journeys online with the caption: “Youth has no price tag.”

The buzz around the night rides drew Bin Li, a third-year engineering student at a university in Henan who boarded a train to Zhengzhou on Thursday with nothing but the clothes he was wearing.

His leap of faith paid off. Everything he needed — water, food, a bike and even companionship — materialized along the route. At the starting point, he met another college student. They set out just before midnight, and the two strangers became impromptu riding partners for the five-hour journey that followed.

“It didn’t feel that long because I was talking with all these strangers we met along the way,” he said. “When so many people came together to do something as one, there was a real sense of community.”

The night unfolded like a rolling street festival, with cars in adjacent lanes occasionally slowing down to blast music for the riders. Some people even set off fireworks along the route. At one point, a rider appeared with a national flag strapped to his back, spontaneously prompting the crowd to break into the national anthem, “March of the Volunteers.”

“You could hear how exhausted people were, but they were still trying their best to sing,” Mr. Li said. “With the national flag waving in front and everyone singing the anthem behind it, there was this really powerful energy, truly incredible.”

Mr. Li arrived in Kaifeng around 4 a.m. on Friday and followed the crowd to a Song dynasty theme park. The bike Mr. Li rented for the journey cost him 26 yuan, or about $4.

At first, officials had encouraged the craze, which was seen as good for business and tourism. The theme park in Kaifeng, along with many other popular tourist attractions, changed their schedules to open early and offered free admissions to students. Volunteers distributed free breakfast at the gate.

The city also set up additional bike docking sites, and traffic police were dispatched to escort the students on their journeys. Many students would spend a day or two in Kaifeng, then take the train back, state media has reported.

But the welcome quickly turned into criticism.

On Friday night, photos and videos showed bikes filling up a multilane road between the two cities, with cars squeezed to the sides and the crowd stretching for miles. By then, the trend had spread beyond college students, drawing participants of all ages from cities across the country.

Among them was Fen Shen, a 32-year-old construction contractor in Zhengzhou. Watching the youthful energy sweep through his city, he felt an urge to help even if he did not want to bike himself.

“I felt inspired by the atmosphere,” Mr. Shen said. “It’s just so good to be young — there’s no pressure, you can just pick up and go whenever you feel like it.”

He joined online groups to coordinate rides and help out-of-towners locate available bikes for rent around the city. But his participation was short-lived. By Friday night, many would-be riders gave up after finding that rental bikes were already taken.

The next day, both cities announced that on Saturday night, they would close the lanes for nonmotorized vehicles — that is, bikes — on the road the students had been using. Some bike rental companies that operate in Zhengzhou announced that their bikes would lock if residents attempted to take them out a designated zone within the city.

When Mr. Shen went to the usual starting point on Saturday, the scene had changed. Police officers and security guards were stationed at several intersections, blocking access to the highway, he said.

“While the youth were carousing, more and more people were beginning to worry about the hidden dangers of the large gathering of bikes,” the Kaifeng Public Security Bureau said in a social media post on Saturday.

What if an ambulance needed to use the road but couldn’t get through, the post asked, or what if a bicyclist in the crowd fell but was unable to escape the congestion?

“You don’t need to bike in a large group or late at night,” the bureau added. “Why not set off during the day?”

The change in tone reflects the delicate balance Chinese authorities face when managing spontaneous youth movements, said Dali Yang, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies Chinese politics.

On one hand, officials saw the students’ enthusiasm as a way to drive broader excitement about a smaller city like Kaifeng. But they may have underestimated the pent-up energy of young people, Mr. Yang said, including students from other parts of the country, at a time when many are still carrying the emotional weight of the pandemic, when college campuses were locked down.

“Instead of trying to find a way to channel the students’ energy, the stability-obsessed authorities simply decided the easiest way is to limit their access and mobility,” he said.

Mr. Li, the engineering student, said his university is now warning students not to join the night rides.

“These are the only years in my life where I don’t have to worry about other things, so I have to make memories that will last,” he said. “Once I start working, there will no longer be a chance to do this.”

On Chinese social media, people posted messages saying that their universities in Henan were restricting students from leaving campus without permission, but the measures could not immediately be verified.

Some also posted messages and videos saying that the restrictions would not stop them — instead of riding, they would simply walk.

Shawn Paik contributed video production.