The archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, resigned on Tuesday after a damning report concluded that he had failed to pursue a proper investigation into claims of widespread abuse of boys and young men decades ago at Christian summer camps.

Pressure had mounted rapidly on Mr. Welby, who serves as the spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide, since the report was published last week. Helen-Ann Hartley, a senior figure in the church and the bishop of Newcastle, called on him to step aside, while Prime Minister Keir Starmer pointedly declined to back him.

Mr. Welby’s resignation brings to an abrupt end an eventful and occasionally stormy tenure, during which he became Britain’s best-known cleric, presiding over momentous public ceremonies like the coronation of King Charles III and becoming an impassioned voice on issues like migration.

But Mr. Welby struggled to hold together a church cleaved between liberals and traditionalists. Though he has not been accused of any abuse himself, he was ultimately brought down by the same type of sex-abuse scandals that have toppled leaders of the Roman Catholic Church.

“It is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatizing period between 2013 and 2024,” Mr. Welby said in a statement on Tuesday, confirming that he had sought permission from the king to resign.

“I hope this decision makes clear how seriously the Church of England understands the need for change and our profound commitment to creating a safer church,” Mr. Welby said. “As I step down, I do so in sorrow with all victims and survivors of abuse.”

The turmoil in the Church of England follows a cascade of scandals in the Roman Catholic Church where the failure to protect young people from predatory priests and the lack of proper investigations into accusations of wrongdoing have soiled the church’s reputation in several countries. While senior Catholic clerics have been convicted of sexual abuse and in some cases defrocked, no pope has resigned as a consequence of admitting a failure of accountability.

The Church of England is much smaller than the Catholic Church, which counts more than one billion adherents. Mr. Welby resigned as a result of the serial abuse by a single person, while reports put the number of Catholic clergy perpetrators well into the thousands — for individual countries alone.

Under the Church of England’s rules, managing the selection of Mr. Welby’s successor falls to a committee known as the Crown Nominations Commission. It submits the name of a preferred candidate and a backup to the prime minister, who then advises the monarch on the appointment.

That process could take several months, experts on the church said, and it is cloaked in mystery. By custom, candidates for archbishop do not promote themselves for the job, whose roots date to 597. Mr. Welby, 68, confessed to astonishment that he had been chosen as the 105th archbishop. He has held the job since 2013, and was scheduled to retire in 2026.

Mr. Welby had navigated a bitter, yearslong debate in the church over how to treat same-sex marriage. The Church of England allows priests to bless same-sex couples, though it continues to debate a more formal recognition of these unions. But it was his handling of the sex-abuse scandal that proved his undoing.

The independent review concluded that the archbishop had failed to take sufficient action following reports of “abhorrent” abuse by John Smyth, a senior British lawyer, of more than 100 boys and young men since the 1970s and 1980s.

The report, compiled by Keith Makin, a former social services director, said that over four decades, Mr. Smyth became “arguably, the most prolific serial abuser to be associated with the Church of England,” operating in three countries where he inflicted physical, sexual and psychological attacks on as many as 130 people. He died in 2018 in South Africa.

The report criticized the actions of a number of people within the church. “Despite the efforts of some individuals to bring the abuse to the attention of authorities, the responses by the Church of England and others were wholly ineffective and amounted to a coverup,” it said.

In a statement in response to Mr. Makin’s report, Mr. Welby said that he had had “no idea or suspicion of this abuse before 2013,” but that he then “personally failed” to ensure that the claims of abuse were investigated properly. Mr. Welby said in 2017 that he had met Mr. Smyth but “wasn’t a close friend of his.”

Repeating an apology he made to the reviewers, Mr. Welby acknowledged that “he did not meet quickly with victims after the full horror of the abuse was revealed” by Britain’s Channel 4 in 2017.

“I promised to see them and failed until 2020,” he said. “This was wrong.”

That television report gave details of how Mr. Smyth had groomed boys and young men at Christian summer camps, universities and at Winchester College, a top British private school, before subjecting them to savage beatings.

Mr. Smyth convinced those he abused “that the way to Christ was through suffering,” the Makin report said, adding that he subjected them to “traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks. The impact of that abuse is impossible to overstate and has permanently marked the lives of his victims.”

The report said it had found “clear evidence that the abuse perpetrated by John Smyth in the U.K.” was “‘covered up’, minimized and held as ‘secret’ from at least 1982 (and possibly earlier.)”

From July 2013, the Church of England knew, at the highest level, about the abuse, it said, while Mr. Welby became aware of the claims against Mr. Smyth in around August 2013, in his capacity as archbishop of Canterbury.

It added: “There was a distinct lack of curiosity shown by these senior figures and a tendency toward minimization of the matter, demonstrated by the absence of any further questioning and follow-up.”

The report said that Mr. Smyth could and should have been reported to the police in 2013, a step that probably would have led to a full investigation, the uncovering of the serial nature of the abuses in Britain, involving multiple victims, and the possibility of his being convicted.

On Monday, before Mr. Welby’s announcement, Ms. Hartley, the bishop of Newcastle, told the BBC: “I think rightly people are asking the question, ‘Can we really trust the Church of England to keep us safe?’ And I think the answer at the moment is ‘no.’”

In the United States, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Sean Rowe, said in a statement, “The church must be a place where people can come with the deepest wounds and vulnerabilities and be nurtured, respected, and never abused.”

The Episcopal Church is one of the 42 autonomous churches that comprise the worldwide Anglican Communion, a far-flung assemblage that exists somewhat uneasily under Mr. Welby’s leadership.

There was always something improbable about his ascent to archbishop. Educated at Eton College, Britain’s most famous boarding school, Mr. Welby has said he first sensed a religious calling while a student at Cambridge University. But when he graduated, he embarked on a career as a finance executive at the French oil company Elf Aquitaine.

Mr. Welby became the treasurer of a British energy firm, Enterprise Oil, but by 1989, resigned to join the priesthood. After serving as a canon in Coventry Cathedral and dean of Liverpool, he was consecrated as the bishop of Durham in 2011. Shortly after, he was appointed to succeed Rowan Williams as archbishop of Canterbury.

Mr. Welby’s job put him at the center of history-making events. He presided over the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II and crowned her eldest son, Charles. As a member of the House of Lords, he was a fierce critic of the previous Conservative government. Its proposal to put asylum seekers on one-way flights to Rwanda, he said, was beneath a country with Britain’s human-rights tradition.

Mr. Welby’s reformist instincts — he pushed for women to be allowed to become bishops in 2014 — have alienated conservative clerics. Ten Anglican archbishops from Africa and Latin America rejected Mr. Welby as their leader. But other critics said he moved too slowly. In addition to the rifts over same-sex marriage, the Church of England has struggled with a decline in the number of worshipers at Sunday services.

“It’s a high-wire act for the Church of England because there is profound division and disagreement,” Mr. Welby said in an interview with The New York Times in 2023. “We have to deal with this as a family dispute and not a political dispute. In other words, don’t split.”

“Everybody will probably feel at the moment, I’m going both too fast and too slowly,” he added. “That’s life.”

Elizabeth Dias contributed reporting from Washington.

A former employee of the late billionaire Mohamed al-Fayed has said that she was “raped and brutally abused” and trafficked while she worked at the luxury British department store Harrods, and that his brother was aware of her trafficking.

The account, detailed in an American court filing on Tuesday, said that Ali Fayed, Mr. al-Fayed’s younger brother, may have evidence showing that Harrods was complicit in the widespread sexual abuse of company employees by its owner Mr. al-Fayed, and in its coverup.

Ali Fayed, who is 80 and has a residence in Greenwich, Conn., is a former director of Harrods and the current chairman of a 139-year-old British shirt maker that supplies the royal family.

The woman, identified in the court documents as Jane Doe because she said she fears retaliation, is a permanent resident of the United States, and made the accusations in a petition to the Federal District Court in Connecticut. The filing does not directly bring legal claims against Ali Fayed; instead, it lays the groundwork for evidence to be collected for legal disputes in other countries.

The details in the filing are the latest in a series of allegations of abuse and trafficking made against Mr. al-Fayed, who is accused of using Harrods as a hunting ground for young women after he bought the department store with his two brothers, Ali and Salah, in 1985. His alleged crimes have been compared to those of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein in their scale and systematic nature.

The document does not directly accuse any individuals of committing offenses against Ms. Doe, and offers few details of her trafficking.

The new accusations throw a spotlight on the role of Ali Fayed amid increasing public outrage over the alleged abuse, the people who are said to have enabled it, and the fact that Mr. al-Fayed never faced a public reckoning before his death last year at the age of 94.

Harrods, an iconic London department store, has for decades been synonymous with British luxury. Mr. al-Fayed, a business tycoon, owned Harrods from 1985 to 2010 and wooed British high society, including the royal family, as he rose to national prominence. His son Dodi was in a romantic relationship with Diana, Princess of Wales, when they both died in a 1997 car crash.

In September, a BBC documentary featured the testimony of 20 ex-employees of Harrods who said they were raped or abused by Mr. al-Fayed in incidents spanning decades, sending shock waves through Britain and raising questions about the culture within Harrods and the other businesses Mr. al-Fayed owned.

Ms. Doe and her lawyers claim that Ali Fayed was a witness to her trafficking and has “unique and critical evidence regarding the direction, operation, and knowledge of a more than two-decade long trafficking scheme that ensnared and irrevocably injured what is reported to be more than 100 women.”

Ms. Doe said in the court petition that she had instructed the Leigh Day law firm in Britain to pursue a civil claim there against Harrods and others who she said were responsible for, and complicit in, facilitating her abuse. She said that she is seeking evidence from Ali Fayed for use in that litigation.

She also said in the petition that she is seeking a government inquiry into the systemic failures that allowed the abuse of many women to continue for more than two decades, and to be concealed for a decade longer, allowing Mr. al-Fayed “to escape accountability.”

A judge will now review the petition, and if it is successful, Ali Fayed could be required to turn over documents and sit for a deposition.

Ali Fayed could not immediately be reached for comment.

Harrods, in response to a request to comment on the new allegations on Tuesday said, “Mr. Ali Fayed ceased to be a director when the business changed ownership in 2010.” The company acknowledged in a statement in September that it had “failed our employees” who were Mr. al-Fayed’s victims and announced that it had established a claims program to consider and resolve claims by its former employees.

Harrowing allegations of abuse by al-Fayed

Ms. Doe said in the court petition that she was hired by Harrods at age 19 in the mid-1990s to work as a salesperson, but was soon interviewed by Mr. al-Fayed and invited to work in Harrods’ executive training program and report directly to his office. She said she was given a medical examination arranged by Harrods that included an AIDS test.

Ms. Doe said in the court filing that she was then taken by Mr. al-Fayed aboard a Harrods helicopter and Harrods private plane, and was trafficked, raped and “brutally abused” over a “substantial period of time” while being subject to surveillance.

Ms. Doe said she interacted with Ali Fayed on multiple occasions in this period, detailing in the filing that he joked about her working as a secretary, and that she heard him making arrangements for a woman to be made available to him in London.

She said that during this period she was shown explicit Polaroid photographs of other women or girls who she believed were physically and sexually abused. She said that she told an unnamed member of the Fayed family about the trafficking, and that he said he knew of others. A medical examination performed after her escape confirmed signs of physical abuse, according to the filing.

The court petition states that Ms. Doe was forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement that forbade her to share information about her employment or abuse, including to law enforcement.

The story tallies with a number of other public accounts of abuse by Mr. al-Fayed given by women who once worked for him, and is notable because of the claims that his brother had knowledge of the abuse.

At least 21 separate allegations against Mr. al-Fayed were made to London’s Metropolitan Police Service between 2005 and 2023, the police confirmed last month, and a number were passed on to England’s Crown Prosecution Service, but no charges were ever filed.

Shirt maker to the King

Ali Fayed has held stakes in a number of companies over the years, his business interests often overlapping with his more prominent brother’s.

In 1986, he bought Turnbull & Asser, a luxury men’s wear retailer whose shirts and suits are worn by King Charles III. Charles granted the company a “royal warrant” in 1980 while he was Prince of Wales, enabling it to promote the fact that it supplies the royal family, and he wore a Turnbull & Asser shirt on his coronation day. Ali Fayed is listed as chairman and a director in Britain’s official register of companies. Turnbull & Asser, when reached by phone, declined a request for comment, but said it would pass along a request to Ali Fayed’s team.

Linda Singer, a lawyer at Motley Rice who is representing Ms. Doe, said that Ali Fayed “is uniquely positioned to testify to who knew what and who did what.”

She added that the evidence will assist not only a potential claim by Ms. Doe in Britain, but also claims made by other Harrods survivors, “to help ensure that all of those who participated in, aided, and concealed this decades-long trafficking enterprise can be held to account.”

Ms. Singer represented the U.S. Virgin Islands in litigation over claims that JP Morgan Chase facilitated the activities of Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who died by suicide in 2019. The bank agreed to pay $75 million to settle the claims.

Mexico’s government on Monday signaled that it planned to hit back with trade restrictions of its own if President-elect Donald J. Trump followed through on his threats to impose sky-high tariffs on Mexican exports to the United States.

“If you put 25 percents tariffs on me, I have to react with tariffs,” Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s economy minister, told a radio interviewer on Monday. “Structurally, we have the conditions to play in Mexico’s favor,” he added.

The disclosure by Mr. Ebrard, who is poised to be one of Mexico’s top negotiators with the Trump administration, showcases the rising tensions between the countries in the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election.

During his campaign, Mr. Trump vowed to immediately place 25 percent tariffs on all goods from Mexico unless that country’s government halted the flow of migrants and drugs to the United States. If Mexico fails to respond to Mr. Trump’s satisfaction, he said, he could raise such tariffs to as high as 100 percent.

Such moves could send shock waves through the economy of Mexico, which is exceptionally dependent on trade with the United States, exporting about 80 percent of its goods to its northern neighbor.

But an array of sectors in the United States, including farmers and manufacturers of semiconductors and chemicals, also relies on exporting to Mexico, which last year eclipsed China to become the largest trading partner of the United States. Complex supply chains also intertwine the economies of both countries, especially in the automotive and agricultural industries.

Altogether, U.S. exports to Mexico accounted for nearly 16 percent of overall American exports in 2022, according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

“A tariff war doesn’t end well,” said Valeria Moy, the general director of the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, an economic research institute. “The United States stands to lose — and Mexico stands to lose even more.”

“The answer to tariffs is not more tariffs; it’s to sit down and negotiate,” Ms. Moy added.

That seems to be the strategy of Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who has not echoed her minister’s claims. Instead, she has said her government is eager to meet with Mr. Trump’s transition team before he takes office.

“It is important to get in touch, to know what they are thinking and to move forward in coordination as much as possible,” she told reporters on Monday. Ms. Sheinbaum and Mr. Trump had their first telephone call last week, which Mexico’s president described as “very cordial.”

The renewed tensions hark back to the start of the first Trump administration, which began using tariffs on imports from Canada, China, Mexico and the European Union. In 2018, shortly after Mr. Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on steel and 10 percent tariffs on aluminum, several countries taxed various other products from the United States. Mexico was among them.

Enrique Peña Nieto, then Mexico’s president, launched a two-pronged retaliation. He slapped 25 percent tariffs on imports of 51 steel products from the United States. He also set tariffs on several other imported goods — whiskey, pork, cheese, apples, cranberries, potatoes and ham.

An estimated $2.6 billion worth of U.S. agricultural exports to Mexico were affected, according to a report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

When Mr. Peña Nieto’s successor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, took office in 2018, Mr. Trump again said he would apply escalating tariffs on all Mexican imports until the flow of “illegal immigrants coming through Mexico and into our country” stopped.

Although Mr. López Obrador promised a humanitarian approach to the country’s migration policy, which he fulfilled during his first few months in office, Mexico eventually started to militarize its immigration enforcement amid pressure from the United States — and at the cost of the migrants’ rights, according to advocates and rights organizations.

Such moves by Mexico eased tensions with Mr. Trump, who backed off in 2019 on plans to impose tariffs on all goods from Mexico. Mr. López Obrador and Mr. Trump had a smooth relationship throughout the remainder of Mr. Trump’s first term as Mexico increased enforcement of U.S. immigration restrictions and the United States largely refrained from interfering in Mexico’s domestic affairs.

When reporters asked Mr. Ebrard, the economy minister, last week about how the government should respond to Mr. Trump’s threats, he pointed to his own experience at that time and said, “With cold blood and intelligence.”

A prizewinning building, once celebrated as Britain’s “best,” will be reduced to rubble if the university that owns it has its way.

The Centenary Building, once the glass-and-concrete triumph of the University of Salford, outside the northern city of Manchester, was the inaugural winner of the Royal Institute of British Architects Stirling Prize in 1996. The prize recognizes the best new building in Britain.

Barely 29 years later, the building has become a white elephant. Its critics say it is too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, and too noisy all year. Its “aging infrastructure means it no longer meets modern standards and requirements,” the University of Salford said in a brief statement, adding that it has “been vacant for a third of its built life.”

But the decision to level it has pitted preservationists against pragmatists. Architecture buffs are rushing to get the Centenary Building listed as a historic site, which could spare it from the wrecking ball.

The university, on the other hand — along with the Salford City Council and a real-estate developer called the English Cities Fund — wants to demolish the building to make way for a $3.2 billion new city district to be known as the Crescent. The school, with more than 26,000 students, and its partners see the project as a key to fostering economic growth in the area.

Opponents of the plan include the Twentieth Century Society, an organization aimed at preserving Britain’s design heritage. “This is a sophisticated piece of modern architecture, with clear opportunities for adaptive reuse,” the society said in a statement, urging the university to reconsider. “It acted as catalyst for previous regeneration in the area, and could do so again.”

When the Centenary Building was completed in 1995, it was a celebrated for its wide interior spaces with indirect sunlight. When commissioning the building, the university called for a structure that would be a “fusion of design and technology,” according to the architect’s brochure. The Stirling Prize jury described it as “a dynamic, modern and sophisticated exercise in steel, glass and concrete.”

At the time, the building’s architects, Hodder+Partners, experimented with natural ventilation as an early energy-saving technique, forgoing the need for air-conditioning, Stephen Hodder, the head architect, said in an interview. Now, the building’s fluctuating temperature is one of the main complaints against it.

But it’s a design flaw that could easily be fixed by retrofitting the Centenary Building with new, more sustainable fixtures, Mr. Hodder said. “It shouldn’t be retained simply because it won a certain prize,” he said, arguing instead that it should be retained out of a responsibility to reduce its carbon footprint with sustainable design.

The Stirling prize catapulted to fame his then-fledgling architecture firm of six people. Hodder+Partners went on to win another prize, the Civic Trust Award, in 1998. Today, it employs 30 and enjoys the prestige of a major firm.

When Mr. Hodder received the commission, the building was a 1960s-era academic structure with an interminable corridor and barely any natural light. He envisioned that the new design would mimic a mall or medieval street, with classrooms and laboratories opening up onto an atrium.

His instructions were to build quickly and affordably. Midway through, the plans had to be adjusted from housing the department of electrical engineering to the faculty of art and design. As the glass, steel and concrete went up, the university’s leadership at the time decided the building’s unveiling would also mark the centenary of the school’s founding.

In the years since, however, the university has centralized its campus, and academics and students have abandoned the building. The university rented it out for several years but it has also stood vacant. Critics have characterized its rapid construction as rushed and shoddy

Efforts to turn the building into a school, with Mr. Hodder’s help, came to nothing, he said. He has also abandoned hopes that it could be used a community health center.

“I’m trying to detach myself from the importance of that building to this practice,” Mr. Hodder said, adding that he learned about its planned demolition from news reports.

While Mr. Hodder says he has not joined any campaigns to save the building, the Twentieth Century Society is trying to whip up momentum. Last month, the society caught wind of the plan to demolish the Centenary building, said Oli Marshall, the society’s director of campaigns. The society and its trustees are among those seeking a historic site designation.

The university and its development partners — the City Council and real estate development company — did not respond to questions about why the building could not be repurposed.

The Twentieth Century Society sees its bid to have the building granted protected status as a test case for prizewinning architecture. If buildings that have been lauded for their contribution to British architecture “only have a shelf-life of 30 years, what does that say about the current state of British architecture?” the group said in its statement.

A week after Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition fell apart over next year’s budget, his party and the main opposition, the conservative Christian Democratic Union, have agreed to hold a snap election on Feb. 23.

The agreement, which The New York Times confirmed on Tuesday, comes as all parties have fired up their campaigns for an early election, which will come about seven months before it had been scheduled.

Last week Mr. Scholz fired his finance minister, Christian Lindner, leader of the pro-business Free Democratic Party. The move effectively dissolved the coalition and sent shock waves through Germany.

Mr. Scholz had announced likely elections in March, but the opposition pushed for an earlier date, arguing that the chancellor would be unable to do much between now and then with a minority government and did not have enough passive support in Parliament to pass any new laws.

The date for the new election comes as German leaders gird for an intense campaign over how to restart an ailing economy — and prepare for President-elect Donald J. Trump’s second term in office.

On Sunday, during his first televised interview since the end of the coalition, Mr. Scholz said that he intended to campaign for a second term.

“I would like to be re-elected,” Mr. Scholz said in the hourlong interview on German public television. Mr. Scholz said he believed his Social Democrats would do well, though they are currently polling at around 16 percent. “No one should expect the election to turn out the way everyone has pictured it,” he said, conceding an uphill battle.

For decades, German political parties have had to find coalition partners to ensure a majority in Parliament. If Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats do not improve their vote share significantly, they could only become a junior party in a coalition, meaning Mr. Scholz would not get a second term as chancellor. (He succeeded Angela Merkel of the Christian Democrats, in 2021.)

In the week since Mr. Scholz’s announcement, another of his coalition partners, Robert Habeck, the Green economic minister, who has been pushing for the transformation toward green sources of energy, announced his own run for the chancellery. While the move was widely expected, it is yet another sign that parties are getting ready for a fast and intense campaign.

For his part, Mr. Lindner of the Free Democratic Party, which currently polls at three to four percent, has told reporters that he’s looking to win at least 10 percent of voter support in the election. On Tuesday, he said he hoped his party would become a junior coalition partner in the next government, which could enable it to pass his changes.

Since the coalition fell apart, Mr. Lindner has claimed that he was let go by Mr. Scholz because he was not willing to authorize extra spending that would have been unconstitutional under Germany’s strict borrowing limit.

The fight over scheduling the new election began in earnest even before Mr. Scholz’s new minority-government cabinet was sworn in last week.

Friedrich Merz, the current leader of the Christian Democrats, had demanded Mr. Scholz bring a vote of confidence to Parliament this week, which would have triggered a new election, possibly in January. But members of Mr. Scholz’s party warned that calling the election too early could lead to problems.

Warning from Ruth Brand, the federal election commissioner, that preparations for the election could not be rushed and that Germany might not have enough paper for the ballots needed, seemed to bolster Mr. Scholz’s case for elections in March.

“When determining the election date, we must take concerns and advice from the practical side of the election organization seriously,” said Johannes Fechner, a parliamentary leader of the Social Democrats.

Mr. Scholz’s chief of staff, Wolfgang Schmidt, argued that holding elections during the Christmas season would mean that all subsequent elections would have to be held then, too.

“What would the results of a survey be that asked, ‘Do you want to have a general election every four years at Christmas in the years to come?’ ” he asked rhetorically in a post on X.

But after less than a week of intense pressure, resistance broke down and Mr. Scholz indicated during his interview Sunday that he was not sticking to his March timetable. “If that’s how everyone feels, it’s not a problem for me bring the confidence vote before Christmas,” he said. If Mr. Scholz fails his confidence vote in Parliament — which is likely — in the middle of December, it would set the stage for the Feb. 23 election.

When Israeli forces first swarmed into Gaza last year, they targeted North Gaza, an area stretching across densely packed urban centers and small strawberry farms near the border with Israel.

The military said that hardened Hamas fighters were hiding among the civilians there, so it struck residential neighborhoods, hospitals and schools turned shelters. It was one of the deadliest moments of the war.

Now, almost exactly a year later, it is all happening again.

North Gaza is the center of a renewed Israeli offensive that, over the past five weeks, has unleashed some of the Israeli military’s most devastating attacks yet. In an effort to stamp out what the military has called a Hamas resurgence, troops, tanks and armed drones have hammered the area almost daily, displacing 100,000 residents and killing likely more than 1,000 others, according to the United Nations. (Those statistics do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.)

There are so many corpses, multiple residents and a local doctor said, that stray dogs have begun to pick at them in the streets.

“Life over the past four weeks, if I can sum it up, is a people being exterminated,” said Islam Ahmad, 34, a freelance journalist from North Gaza who described helping bury neighbors in a mass grave.

The return of fighting to the northernmost reaches of the Gaza Strip shows how Israel’s approach has led to a bloody carousel of sorts, with the Israeli military chasing Hamas fighters in circles — and civilians often caught in the crossfire.

Two Israeli security officials compared it to cutting the grass, using a phrase that has circulated among Israeli officials for years, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Each time Hamas cells regrow, they say, Israeli forces will come back to cut them down.

This sort of cyclical combat reflects Israel’s murky strategy in a war now in its 14th month. Israel has eliminated much of Hamas’s senior military leadership, killed thousands of its fighters and collapsed many of its tunnels — yet Israel has shown no sign of letting up.

That is in part because Israeli forces have avoided holding much ground and Mr. Netanyahu has not committed to a viable postwar plan. Hamas has filled the resulting power vacuum.

North Gaza is the northernmost of Gaza’s five governorates, just north of Gaza City. Israeli forces left after pummeling the region last year. In May, they returned for an intense bout of fighting and recovered the bodies of seven hostages seized in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel last year. Then they left again. Hamas fighters regrouped, and now, once more, the military is back.

The goal this time is to isolate Hamas fighters in North Gaza from others in Gaza City, according to a senior Israeli security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe military tactics. Israel captured 500 suspected Hamas fighters and killed another 750 in North Gaza last month, the official said. He said the military had encouraged civilians to evacuate but did not track civilian casualties. He said forces planned to remain for at least another month.

Gadi Shamni, a retired general who once commanded Israeli forces in Gaza, said full occupation would demand tremendous resources, but the current approach is a temporary fix, with ugly consequences for residents.

“As soon as you evacuate those alleys and streets, Hamas will regain control immediately,” he said. “The main problem here is that the government of Israel, and Netanyahu himself, is trying to bypass the real solution of finding an alternative to Hamas” to govern Gaza.

The situation on the ground, by some measures, is even more dire than a year ago. Infrastructure is crumbling, humanitarian aid is severely restricted, and many emergency workers and aid groups have left. On Friday, a U.N.-backed panel said that famine was likely “imminent” within northern Gaza.

The Palestinian Civil Defense, the emergency service run by Hamas’s interior ministry, said it had officially halted rescue operations in the region last month because of the intense threat.

The Palestinian Red Crescent, one of the few aid groups still operating there, said that no ambulances could reach the hardest-hit parts of North Gaza. When a woman recently called for rescue after a relative lost a limb, the dispatcher provided instructions over the phone on how to treat the amputation, the spokeswoman said.

Hosam Al Sharif, 46, a father of four in Jabaliya, said that at the start of the latest siege, help was available. Now, he said, people with “any minor injury will bleed until they die.”

Hospitals are also teetering, leaving many treatable patients to die. On Oct. 30, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiyah, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Jabaliya, issued an urgent plea saying that the hospital lacked surgeons but had multiple victims needing surgery.

Over the next five days, the hospital was bombed three times, according to Dr. Abu Safiyah.

Gazan health officials said Israeli forces had bombed the hospital. The World Health Organization said one Israeli strike had destroyed medical supplies that it had delivered just days earlier.

The Israeli military said in a statement that it had not bombed the hospital. In one case, the military said, it struck a target about 330 feet from the hospital. In another, it blamed an explosive device planted by militants. In a third case, it said it had no information. Hamas exploits civilians “by embedding terror infrastructure within, beneath and near sensitive sites, as in this case with the Kamal Adwan Hospital,” the statement added.

Dr. Abu Safiyah told The New York Times last week that the hospital’s staff was still besieged. “We urgently appealed to the world, international and humanitarian organizations,” he said. “We didn’t get a response.” He said he did not witness militants in the hospital but would treat any victim.

The United Nations has said that Israel has cut off nearly all humanitarian aid to North Gaza. A U.S. deadline for Israel to allow more aid expires this week.

Mr. Ahmad, the journalist, said North Gaza had been relatively calm for months. Then fighting exploded again in October.

On Oct. 29, he said, he heard a loud explosion before dawn. When he went to investigate, the street was littered with mangled bodies, he said.

The Israeli military said it had bombed a five-story building because forces had spotted a militant on the roof. There were also, according to local officials and residents, dozens of families sleeping inside. The Gaza Health Ministry said that 93 people were killed, including many children. The Israeli military disputed that number.

Mr. Ahmad, who took photos of the aftermath for Agence France-Presse, said he had also counted 93 bodies as they were carried on donkey carts to a mass grave.

“We stacked every three bodies on top of one another,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of honoring the dead.” They lacked enough sand, he said, so they laid tiles on the grave to keep the dogs out.

Fewer than 95,000 people remain in the region, a fifth of its prewar population, according to the United Nations. Israeli officials said there are far fewer. The relentless bombing has fueled fears among Palestinians that Israel is intent on depopulating northern Gaza permanently.

Since the start of the war, Israel has urged Gazans to migrate south for their safety — even though it has also repeatedly bombarded the south. The Israeli government has acknowledged having studied a plan put forth by a prominent former general to expel the remaining 400,000 people in the broader northern Gaza region and force Hamas to surrender there by cutting off food and water.

Gideon Saar, Israel’s foreign minister, said Monday that residents could return to northern Gaza after the war.

In Beit Lahia, a farming community, residents were trying to rebuild earlier this year. Yousef Abu Rabee, a farmer, returned in February to plant crops to feed his neighbors, including eggplant, squash and fava beans. An American farmer helped him raise $90,000. He provided seedlings to 50 farms and posted videos to Instagram showing him and others sowing fields, including in craters left by missile strikes.

“We’re trying to grow food on our land, or what is left of our land, in order to save ourselves and our fellow people in the north,” he said in a video posted last month. Several days later, another video showed the fruits of his work: a field of sprouting crops.

About a week later, according to a family member and a friend, he was killed in a strike.

Iyad Abuheweila contributed reporting from Istanbul, Abu Bakr Bashir from London and Natan Odenheimer from Jerusalem.

Russian lawmakers on Tuesday voted to ban the advocacy of child-free lifestyles, in a move that is part of a broader effort by the Kremlin to reverse a falling birthrate and promote the country as a bastion of traditional values that is battling a decadent West.

The State Duma, or lower house of Parliament, unanimously approved a bill that would ban any form of “propaganda” promoting the “refusal to have children.” That would include material on the internet, in media outlets, in movies and in advertising that portrays child-free lifestyles as attractive.

Violators would be subjected to fines of up to about $4,000 for individuals and $50,000 for legal entities.

The bill has been broadly endorsed by the Kremlin and is expected to receive approval from the Federation Council, the upper chamber of Parliament, and then be signed into law by President Vladimir V. Putin.

In September, speaking about the proposed legislation, Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, called demography “one of the main challenges” for Russia.

“Everything that needs to be done to increase birthrates must be done,” Mr. Peskov said. “And everything that obstructs that must disappear from our lives.”

Separately, Russian lawmakers on Tuesday also passed a bill that would ban adoption of Russian children by citizens of countries where gender transition is legal.

Russian officials have been increasingly conflating demographic issues with their ideological conflict with the West. They have portrayed Russia as a bulwark of traditional Christian values that is opposed to immoral Western states.

Speaking about the bills on Tuesday, Vyacheslav Volodin, the head of the Duma, said that “the West’s policy toward children has been ruinous.”

“We must do everything so that new generations of our citizens grow up oriented toward traditional family values,” Mr. Volodin wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

Over the past years, Russia has been suffering from a continuous demographic decline as a much smaller generation of women — born amid the chaos and poverty that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union — has entered childbearing age. Not counting Crimea, which it annexed a decade ago, Russia’s population is about 145 million, somewhat smaller than it was in 1991, when the U.S.S.R. broke up.

The number of deaths has exceeded the number of births in Russia since 2016. However, Russia was able to keep its overall population steady because of migrants, most of them from countries of Central Asia, coming to Russia to work. But those numbers have been shrinking because of hardening attitudes toward migrant workers in Russian society, and declining wages in dollar terms, compared with other destinations for migrant workers.

The decline has been further exacerbated by the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, where Russia has lost up to 150,000 soldiers so far, according to estimates by Western governments and Russian researchers.

The situation in Russia also reflects the broader demographic trends in Europe and beyond. For instance, Russian fertility rates per woman have been higher than in many developed countries, including Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, Japan and South Korea.

Alexey Raksha, an independent demographer, estimated that Russia’s overall population would shrink by 500,000 this year. Russia is also likely to experience a decline in average life expectancy, according to Mr. Raksha.

But Mr. Raksha said that the ban on propagating child-free lifestyles won’t have any effect on Russia’s birthrate.

“This is a political thing that has very little to do with demography,” said Mr. Raksha in September when the bill was introduced.

In 2022, only 2.4 percent of Russian women and 3.5 percent of Russian men said they did not want to have children, according to a survey conducted by the Russian state statistics service.

According to Ilya Grashchenkov, an analyst of Russian politics based in Moscow, by banning child-free lifestyles Russian authorities want to “demonstrate their understanding of traditional values.”

“Since it is impossible to describe them comprehensively,” he said, “they do it by contrasting them with the Western ones.”

The authorities in Amsterdam said on Tuesday that they expected to make more arrests in connection with what they have called antisemitic assaults on Israeli soccer fans in the city last week, as well as related confrontations and incendiary behavior by both sides.

In the city government’s first detailed report on the events, the police said that 62 people had already been arrested in connection with the violence, including 10 people who lived in Israel.

Most of the arrests were for minor offenses, the authorities said: Forty-five people were issued fines for disturbing the peace, unruly behavior or being unable to show identification when requested by police officers. Nearly a dozen more cases remain under investigation. Four Dutch suspects are still being held on more serious charges, including two teenagers who are accused of assault and violence against the riot police.

The authorities did not specify why the Israeli residents had been arrested.

Officials said that they were still investigating whether the attacks had been organized.

“What happened over the past few days is a toxic cocktail of antisemitism, hooligan behavior, and anger over the war in Palestine and Israel, and other countries in the Middle East,” Amsterdam’s mayor, Femke Halsema, wrote in the report. The findings were to be presented to the City Council on Tuesday.

The report offered only a few new details about the attacks and about the inflammatory behavior and vandalism by some Israeli fans surrounding a soccer match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax Amsterdam last Thursday.

It defended both the mayor’s decision to allow visiting fans to attend the match and the police response once violence broke out on Wednesday. Officials say that 1,200 police were deployed to keep the peace on Wednesday and Thursday, and that at least 500 officers were still on the streets after midnight those days.

Still, the report concedes that officers struggled to prevent attacks on Maccabi fans on Thursday night after the match, which were carried out by assailants who quickly fled on electric bikes, scooters and on foot. They also did not stop what the report describes as some Maccabi fans using sticks to commit acts of vandalism in the city center.

The report details how, after the events of Wednesday night, the city tried to appeal to both UEFA, soccer’s governing body in Europe, and the Israeli government, to remind fans that the event was a sports match and should “not be mixed with politics.”

The report also described how tensions remained high in the city — and how threats persisted to its Jewish and Muslim communities. Officials said that a man was thrown out of a taxi at 3 a.m. over the weekend for being Jewish. A synagogue received a bomb threat, which turned out to be false.

There were calls online to attack mosques, officials said, and another attempt to burn a Palestinian flag. On Wednesday, before the match, a group of Maccabi fans stole and burned a Palestinian flag in central Amsterdam.

“Antisemitism can’t be answered with other racism: The safety of one group cannot be at the expense of the safety of another,” Mayor Halsema noted.

The report adds that city authorities took special precautions ahead of the game, though the match itself was not considered especially high risk. None of the intelligence or terrorism watchdog groups that the city consulted had raised the threat level, the report said.

The authorities highlighted that the match had coincided with the 86th anniversary of Nazi pogroms, which were officially commemorated in the city’s Portuguese Synagogue. It also noted that authorities permitted a pro-Palestinian demonstration close to the stadium that day.

Tensions started on Wednesday, both on social media and on Amsterdam’s streets. The report notes videos showing supporters engaging in “racist and hateful chants” against Arabs. The police arrested four people on suspicion of daubing pro-Palestinian graffiti at the soccer stadium, which is outside the city center, at around 11 p.m.

Later that evening, about 50 Maccabi supporters, some with their faces covered, gathered in a downtown area. They pulled down a Palestinian flag hanging from a building.

The group then split up. The police report said that a number of the Maccabi supporters took off their belts and used them to attack the exterior of a cab. The report does not say if anyone was in the vehicle.

Around the same time, the report said that a call had gone out on a chat group used by cabdrivers to gather at a casino where 400 Israeli supporters were present.

On the day of the match, the city appealed to taxi drivers and ride-share providers asking them “not to seek confrontation and not to be provoked.”

Officials reported there were more confrontations around 1 p.m. Thursday, the report said, when a large group of Israeli fans gathered on Dam Square, in the center of Amsterdam. Fireworks were launched — the report does not say by whom — but the police were mostly able to keep the groups apart.

Around midnight, after the match, the report said, clashes intensified. A group of Maccabi supporters gathered back on Dam Square, some armed with sticks; some of the fans committed acts of vandalism, the report added.

Around this time, small groups of men spread throughout city center and carried out assaults on individual Israeli supporters who were not part of the big group of fans. The police, the report said, struggled to stop them, because the assailants would “briefly attack Maccabi supporters and then disappear again.”

In a special council meeting following the release of the report, Sheher Khan, a prominent Muslim member, accused Ms. Halsema of not paying enough attention to the actions of Maccabi supporters. The mayor defended her response.

“Terrible things were said” by the fans, said Ms. Halsema, “but going on a ‘Jew hunt’ goes a step further. That means going through the city in an organized fashion, keeping each other informed, asking people their passports, seeing if they meet the criteria the perpetrators think fit Jews, and then beating them up. That is unacceptable.”

Ms. Halsema also said that “quite a lot has been shattered” in both the city’s Jewish and Muslim communities, and said the divisions between those communities were not characteristic of the city.

“I hope we will find the way up again,” she said.

Seventeen years after Amanda Knox, the American exchange student, was arrested and charged with killing her roommate in Perugia, a picturesque university city in central Italy, some of its citizens are outraged that their city is once again being dragged into a tragedy that they would prefer to forget.

This month, when cast and crew arrived there for a two-day shoot for a Hulu series about the case — a show for which Ms. Knox and Monica Lewinsky are executive producers — Mayor Vittoria Fernandi felt obliged to write a heartfelt letter of apology to the city for the hurt caused by their presence.

One resident, honoring the memory of Meredith Kercher, the slain roommate, draped a sheet from a balcony with “Respect for Meredith” painted in bold red letters. A council member questioned on social media whether the mayor should have allowed the production to shoot in Perugia, where the crime has long overshadowed the city’s “history, art and beauty.”

An editorial in the daily newspaper La Nazione wrote, “Perhaps Meredith and Perugia would have deserved more respect without having to sacrifice the dignity of a murdered student and a brutalized city to business.”

It hardly mattered that after spending four years in prison, Ms. Knox was acquitted for the death of Ms. Kercher, a 21-year-old student from England who was murdered in the house they shared.

People forget “that she, too, is a victim in this case,” said Luca Luparia Donati, the director of the Italy Innocence Project, who is representing Ms. Knox in a slander case.

Ms. Knox, who was 20 at the time of the killing, was twice convicted with her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, of Ms. Kercher’s murder, but they were cleared in 2015. The only person definitively convicted of the crime, Rudy Guede, was released in 2021 after serving 13 years of a 16-year sentence.

Yet for many locals, as well as Italians nationwide, Ms. Knox may never shake off an image crafted in court, and magnified by the world’s media, as a diabolical, sex-crazed woman who murdered Ms. Kercher during what prosecutors initially described as a sex game gone wrong.

She has since rebuilt her life in the United States as an advocate for people incarcerated for crimes they did not commit and a campaigner for criminal justice reform. But the events of Perugia have never been far behind, and she has repeatedly tried to have her voice heard.

She exhaustively laid out her defense in a 2013 memoir, she participated in a 2016 true-crime documentary on Netflix, and she has written podcasts about it. The series currently being filmed for Hulu is co-produced by the company she formed with her husband, Christopher Robinson.

Mr. Sollecito and Mr. Guede have also both written memoirs, and Giuliano Mignini, the case’s lead prosecutor, has written a book about the trial.

While Ms. Knox may be trying to set the record straight, Ms. Kercher’s sister, Stephanie Kercher, said in a statement quoted by the British news media this week, “Our family has been through so much, and it is difficult to understand how this serves any purpose.”

A producer for the series did not respond to a request for comment. Apart from a few days in Perugia, much of the shooting will take place in other parts of Italy and in a film studio elsewhere in Europe.

Perugia is eager to overcome the sinister moment in its 2,400-year history.

Paolo Mariotti, the president of a downtown business association, noted that “Perugia is a provincial city” not accustomed to such headline-grabbing crimes or the attention they bring. It is also a university city that has drawn exchange students from around the world, he said, and the killing hardly sent a message that they would be safe there.

In her letter, Mayor Fernandi said that City Hall was powerless to stop such a production from filming in Perugia, and that she hoped the series would show the city in its best light.

“I wanted to give Perugia a chance for redemption, an opportunity to show itself, even if part of a tragedy, for what it is,” she wrote in a letter published in several newspapers last week. “Yet in trying to protect the image of the city, for a moment I lost sight of people, and their pain which remains raw.”

Mr. Mariotti said it would have been opportune for the Hulu production to shoot in another city in Umbria, the region where Perugia is situated. “They are medieval, ancient, with narrow streets,” he said. “Wherever they shot would have been identical.”