South Korea’s military — agents of terror and violence in the 1970s and ’80s — spent decades scrupulously cleaning up its image to become what many people in the country came to see as a modern and disciplined force.

But that image was shattered on Thursday when the general who led a short-lived spasm of martial law this week was grilled in Parliament, a rambling appearance that cast the military as ill-prepared and disorganized from the top down.

“We were not militarily prepared because it was put into action in such a hurry,” Gen. Park An-su, the Army chief of staff, told a parliamentary hearing on Thursday. “There was confusion.”

His testimony offered the first opportunity for lawmakers to question the military about the martial law order handed down on Tuesday night by President Yoon Suk Yeol. The decree plunged the country into a political crisis, sparking widespread anger that drove thousands of protesters to the streets. Mr. Yoon was forced to reverse course after just six hours.

General Park insisted that he had not had any role in the planning: He told lawmakers he had been caught off guard, first learning of it when Mr. Yoon announced the extraordinary move on television. The military’s follow-up announcement, under his name, banned “all political activities” and public rallies and asserted control over media outlets, among other steps. But in his account on Thursday, General Park claimed he had not read it until his signature was requested.

He described being at a loss over how to proceed as commander, unsure of what steps to take beyond trying to set up a new office.

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When the Israeli military ordered evacuations in part of northern Gaza about a year ago, Zuhair Abu Odeh rushed out with his 9-year-old daughter, who uses a wheelchair, in search of a safer place.

In his haste, he ran her chair into a crack in a road, jamming a wheel and forcing them to abandon it. Mr. Abu Odeh and his sons carried his daughter, Lara, on their backs for four and a half hours until they reached Nuseirat, nine miles to the south.

“We’re living through impossible times,” Mr. Abu Odeh, 46, said in a phone interview from a makeshift shelter in Khan Younis, where the family has since fled.

The war has forced most of Gaza’s roughly two million residents from their homes, an experience defined by daily struggles to find food, water, clean bathrooms and power. But it has been particularly punishing for people with disabilities and their families.

The suffering of disabled people — the blind, deaf, physically and cognitively impaired — has been compounded by steep shortages in devices to aid them, like wheelchairs and hearing aids, and in damage to roads, sidewalks and homes with accessible features.

Until Mr. Abu Odeh found Lara a new wheelchair in February, he and his children carried her to the market, the hospital and the beach. While the chair has brought some relief, it has still been difficult to push through dirt paths in the makeshift camps set up for people seeking shelter.

“We’re barely holding on,” said Mr. Abu Odeh. “We can’t tolerate this agony anymore.”

Lara was originally diagnosed with cerebral palsy, but an orthopedist said he believed that was wrong and suggested spinal surgery could give her the ability to walk.

Her parents, who lived in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, spent days preparing paperwork and working connections to send her to the Israeli-occupied West Bank for surgery. But since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack that ignited the war in Gaza, they have made no progress because of Israeli restrictions on leaving Gaza.

“I don’t need food or any other kind of assistance,” said Manal Abu Odeh, Lara’s mother. “What I need is to bring Lara to Ramallah,” the West Bank city where hospitals have resources well beyond Gaza’s broken health care system.

Before the war, 56,000 people in Gaza were registered as living with disabilities, with nearly half suffering from a physical impairment, according to the Palestinian Authority. The United Nations said 21 percent of households in Gaza reported at least one family member having a disability before the Oct. 7 attack. While no new estimate has been released, experts believe the conflict between Israel and Hamas has permanently disabled thousands more.

Doctors have amputated people’s limbs throughout Gaza. At the end of last year, UNICEF said medical workers and U.N. staff members reported that around 1,000 children had lost one or more of their limbs; in September, the World Health Organization reported that more than 22,500 had suffered “life-changing” injuries, requiring rehabilitation “now and for years to come.”

Disabled people, humanitarian officials said, were some of the most neglected in the war.

“People with disabilities in Gaza are at the highest risk, but they’ve been forgotten far too often,” said Muhannad Alazzeh, 54, a member of the U.N. committee on the rights of people with disabilities.

In 2012, Israel ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which requires member states to take “all necessary measures” to ensure that people with disabilities are protected, including in armed conflicts. Mr. Alazzeh said Israel was not living up to its obligations to move disabled people from the line of fire, ensure the delivery of sufficient equipment and specialized medications, and help injured people leave Gaza.

In a statement, COGAT, the arm of the Israeli defense ministry that coordinates the entry of aid into Gaza, said it has permitted the entry of more than 28,000 tons of medical supplies, including medicine, wheelchairs and crutches.

It also pointed to Israel’s recent decision to allow some patients and escorts to travel through Israeli territory to access medical treatment abroad. In one of the most recent cases in November, Israel allowed more than 200 patients and their escorts to exit Gaza.

But thousands of other people in need of treatment have been unable to leave, including some suffering from life-threatening conditions. Sharaf al-Faqawi, the Gaza area manager for Humanity & Inclusion, an organization that supports disabled people, said he and his colleagues have placed around 2,000 people on waiting lists for devices like wheelchairs, crutches and walkers.

“We often feel incapable of providing what people need,” Mr. Al-Faqawi said.

Constantly relocating has been exhausting. For blind people, it has at times felt impossible.

Doaa Jarad, 25, and her sister, both of whom have visual impairments, were sheltering on a stairwell in a school in Rafah when Israeli airstrikes suddenly pounded the area. Amid the chaos, she pleaded with people for help, but nobody came to their aid.

“Everyone was looking out for themselves,” said Ms. Jarad, who lived in the northern city of Beit Hanoun before the war. “We wanted to go down the stairs, but all the people on our floor were rushing down them.”

When everyone was gone, they tried to walk to a safer place while avoiding knocked-over tables and chairs, she said. The bombing eventually stopped, but it was one of the most harrowing moments for the Jarads over the past year.

Surrounded by the horror and destruction of war, even going to the bathroom has become a long and nauseating experience for displaced people.

Many disabled people struggle to get onto the toilet seat. Makeshift bathrooms, which have become common, often lack accessibility features like extra space for someone in a wheelchair to transfer to a toilet seat, or bars to help them balance.

Ali Jebril, 28, who is paralyzed from the waist down, said the stalls are often so narrow that he can barely fit with his wheelchair, if at all.

“It’s a nightmare,” said Mr. Jebril, who has been living in a tent in central Gaza. “Gaza wasn’t built for people like me before the war, but now it isn’t built at all for us.”

Mr. Jebril, originally from Gaza City, has been paralyzed since a neighbor drove his car into him when he was 6. Before the war, he was a top wheelchair basketball player and worked at an oceanside restaurant.

His wheelchair has gradually fallen into disrepair, with punctured tires and the seat’s frame coming undone. He often requires strangers’ help to move. But he said it can be frightening to ask for assistance. Israel has frequently targeted militants in civilian spaces, sometimes dropping bombs weighing hundreds of pounds to kill them.

“You can’t know if your neighbor is a safe person or not,” he said. “But what can I do?”

The hardest part, Mr. Jebril said, was thinking back to his life on the basketball court and at the restaurant in Gaza City.

“I had so much that I hoped for in life,” he said. “But now, I’m going from tent to tent and city to city. I’m living through a torturous struggle to survive.”

When the president of France speaks at the reopening on Saturday of the fire-ravaged Notre-Dame Cathedral, the jewel in the heart of Paris, it should by rights be a delicious moment of glory.

Few had believed it was possible to repair the 860-year-old monument in the short time-frame President Emmanuel Macron announced the day after the 2019 disaster.

Glory, however, is eluding the French leader as he presides over a country in profound crisis, with a fallen government, no budget and so much political division that there seems no clear path forward. Increasingly, Mr. Macron is hearing not professions of gratitude but demands for his resignation.

“I don’t see what can happen to put him back up on his horse,” said Vincent Martigny, a political science professor at the University of Nice, Côte d’Azur. “He has the smell of a never-ending ending.”

Many blame Mr. Macron for the country’s current political mess. After his party was trounced in the European elections last June, he shocked his cabinet and the country by calling for snap elections for the 577-seat National Assembly. The result, he promised, would offer the country some “clarification.”

Instead, voters elected a messy, deadlocked Parliament, with seats divided into three camps — none with a clear path to pass bills — and two emboldened extremist parties, both of whose leaders are challengers for the president’s job.

“Macron is a victim of his own narcissism,” said Alain Minc, a political essayist and long-term informal adviser to French presidents. “He was in denial of reality.”

The result was the overwhelming vote by opposing lawmakers on Wednesday to bring down the government of Mr. Macron’s prime minister, Michel Barnier, just three months into its tenure. That gave it the distinction of being the shortest-lived government in the history of France’s Fifth Republic, formed in 1958.

Mr. Barnier will stay on in a caretaker role for now, the French presidency announced on Thursday. But Mr. Macron is under pressure to quickly name a new prime minister who might offer the country some stability. Whomever he chooses, few believe a new government will manage to navigate the minefield of a bitterly divided Parliament.

“We are looking at years of stalemates,” said Jean-François Copé, a former conservative budget minister and supporter of the just-fallen government. Mr. Copé was the first of a growing number of centrist voices to call for Mr. Macron’s resignation. “It’s just a catastrophe,” he said.

Mr. Macron’s term lasts until 2027, and he has called the idea that he might resign early “political fiction.”

“I was elected twice by the French people,” he said this week during a state visit to Saudi Arabia, where he spent some of his time brokering deals for French businesses. “I’m extremely proud, and I will honor this trust with all my energy to serve my country until the very last second.”

But it is clear that Mr. Macron’s position is greatly weakened.

Elected in 2017 as France’s youngest president, then just 39, Mr. Macron promised to bring a fresh, middle-ground approach and business-friendly policies to the country.

But his equivocating “at the same time” approach came to irk many, and his highly personalized, top-down style of government — which was generally dismissive of the powerful lower house of Parliament, where his party at first held a strong majority — earned him the derogatory moniker “Jupiter.”

In the 2022 parliamentary elections, Mr. Macron’s party and its allies lost many seats, emerging with only a relative majority. Then last summer, after the snap election, they lost even more.

That forced Mr. Macron to name a prime minister from the mainstream conservative party, not from his own, and build a fragile coalition between his allies and the remnants of the traditional conservative party.

Although Mr. Barnier said he spoke to the president daily, he also made it clear he was his own person, and took positions like proposing a temporary tax on big businesses and the super rich that clearly broke with Mr. Macron’s pro-business stance.

Since the summer, Mr. Macron’s once-broad portfolio has been winnowed to what the Constitution and tradition officially set out: the handling of foreign affairs and the command of the army. National columnists have written about his near-disappearance and sulky withdrawal. People in his own party have been cited in newspapers as saying that he is increasingly isolated.

The hugely successful Paris Olympics offered Mr. Macron a brief reprieve — some called it an “enchanted interlude” — during which he became his nation’s fan-in-chief. It showed his compatriots what the country is capable of when it dreams big. But it was not long before the jubilation was replaced by political rancor and classic French pessimism.

In his entourage, officials pointed out what they say is the paradox of the Macron criticism: After years of accusing the president of acting like Jupiter and railroading Parliament, detractors now blame him for the mess made when he left the lawmakers alone.

A friend of Mr. Macron’s and former lawmaker in his party, Patrick Vignal, said the president was feeling bruised last summer by his party’s poor election results. But he said he believed Mr. Macron would regain his élan, particularly if he ventured outside of Paris and connected with people on a new grand project.

“He’s a warrior,” Mr. Vignal said from the southern city of Montpellier. “He still has three years. Making him resign would serve no one, and I believe he can return to the field, just as he did during the Yellow Vests crisis.”

The Yellow Vests were motorists who blocked roundabouts across the country to protest, initially, a gas tax and, eventually, their broader sense of abandonment. The protests posed the biggest challenge of Mr. Macron’s first term, and in response he faced the protesters head-on, touring the country to talk to citizens in town hall-style events. He called it the Great National Debate.

The Yellow Vest crisis was an all-time low for Mr. Macron’s popularity. Polls show his approval rating is now close to that same level, and calls for his resignation are increasing like a drumbeat — not just from the extreme left and the far right, whose self-interest is clear, but also from moderate voices.

Some of the arguments are structural. Constitutionally, the Fifth Republic was devised to run with a strong president overseeing a strong majority in Parliament, argued Mr. Copé, the former Conservative minister who is now the mayor of Meaux. Without that, and with compromise in French politics considered weakness, stalemates become inevitable, he argued.

“There is no other alternative but for Macron to resign,” Mr. Copé said.

Others noted that replacing Mr. Macron would not change the makeup of the lower house of Parliament, which is fixed by the Constitution until at least next July, when new elections can be called.

“We would still be without a budget, without a government,” said Benjamin Morel, a lecturer in public law at Panthéon-Assas University in Paris. “It would be the same old mess, and French political sociology is such that it’s not even clear today, in the event of another parliamentary election, that we’d have a majority again.”

If not glory, the reopening of Notre-Dame should at least offer Mr. Macron a brief respite. He has called the moment, like the Olympics before it, “a jolt of hope.”

But the Olympics, like all glory, was fleeting.

“The reopening of a church is not enough to save him,” said Mr. Martigny, the political analyst. “He will need a miracle.”

Fernando Santos da Silva’s surname — shared by 150 relatives — is an heirloom from a grim chapter of Brazil’s history.

Like millions of others in Latin America’s most populated country, he inherited it from his ancestors who were once enslaved, likely named after their captors.

With its painful roots, Silva was long a source of shame even as it became Brazil’s most common surname.

But today, the name is treated in a starkly different light.

“Silva is a symbol of resistance,” said Mr. Santos da Silva, 32, an antiques vendor from Rio de Janeiro. “It’s a connection, both to the present and to my ancestors.”

Whenever you meet a Brazilian, there’s a good chance that Silva is tucked somewhere in a lengthy, melodic last name. If not, they certainly have a friend or relative who has the name. (Most Brazilians use the surname of both their mother and father.)

Silva is found in the name of the nation’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and its most celebrated soccer player, Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior. It’s also shared by some five million other Brazilians, from movie stars and Olympic medalists to teachers, drivers and cleaners.

Exactly how Silva spread across Brazil — one in 40 Brazilians has the name — is the subject of some debate. But historians agree that much of its popularity is linked to slaveholders who gave the name to many enslaved people who then passed it down to future generations.

Marked by its colonial roots, the name was for decades synonymous with poverty and oppression in a majority Black country that only abolished slavery in 1888, and where deep racial and economic inequalities persist.

Few Brazilians embraced the name in the past. Many prominent figures, including Ayrton Senna da Silva, a Formula One driver in the 1980s and ’90s, quietly dropped Silva from their names.

But as Brazil rethinks how its brutal past helped shape the country’s identity, more and more well-known people are spotlighting their surname, conveying the idea that there’s nothing shameful about being a Silva.

Celebrities like the mixed-martial arts fighter Anderson Silva and a popular musician who goes simply by Silva fill many Brazilians with admiration and transform the name’s image.

“Today, we are in all kinds of places,” said Rene Silva, an activist from one of Rio’s largest slums and the host of a television program showcasing the success stories of people, both famous and ordinary, with the name. “It shows that we are fighters — and we are winning.”

The name’s ubiquity was on full display on a recent afternoon in a busy notary public in Rio de Janeiro.

Behind a counter, Tiago Mendes Silva, a 39-year-old clerk who inherited the name from both his parents, stamped and sealed documents.

“There’s always a Silva or two around,” said Mr. Mendes Silva, one of the notary’s seven employees with the name.

On the other side of the counter, Juscelina Silva Morais, a 59-year-old cafeteria worker, handed over a document she needed legalized. “This name is part of our story,” she said. “It’s as Brazilian as it gets.”

Mr. Santos da Silva, the antiques vendor, was also there with his partner, Tamiê Cordeiro, filing for a marriage license. “I’m not a Silva yet,” joked Ms. Cordeiro, 27. “But I will be soon.”

Some historians trace the name Silva back to the Roman Empire, where there is a record of a general with the name. Others link it to noble families in the Iberian Peninsula, a region now home to Spain and Portugal, during the reign of the Kingdom of León, which formed in the 900s.

Derived from the Latin word “selva,” or wilderness, the name became common in the 11th and 12th centuries among those who lived and worked near forests in that region.

“There are many possible origins,” said Viviane Pompeu, a genealogist who runs a firm that helps Brazilians trace their ancestry. “But we notice that the root always comes from a place in the woods, in the jungle.”

The name arrived in Brazil with colonization, with the first record dating to a Portuguese settler in 1612. Notaries began tracking names about a century later and, since then, nearly 32 million Brazilians have been registered as Silva, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the national association of registrars.

Scholars say African slaves arriving in Brazil by ship were sometimes baptized by priests who gave the name Costa (“coast” in Portuguese) to those headed to coastal cities and the name Silva to those destined for plantations in the country’s wild forested regions.

Wealthy landowners named Silva also often gave the surname to people they enslaved, sometimes slipping in the preposition “da” (“of” in Portuguese) to label them as property.

“John of Silva — he belonged to someone from the family Silva,” explained Rogério da Palma, a professor at the State University of Mato Grosso do Sul and the author of a book on racism in post-abolition Brazil.

Even after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of Silvas kept swelling. Freed slaves registering for documents for the first time sometimes took the name of the landowners who had once enslaved them and continued to employ them in exchange for room and board.

“It was a way of belonging,” Dr. Palma said. “It was also loyalty he had to that slave-owning family.”

More than a century later, echoes of this past surfaced in Daniel Fermino da Silva’s own family tree.

A history buff, Mr. Fermino da Silva, 45, spent more than three years searching for traces of his ancestors in archives and libraries. He eventually discovered a family history deeply “intertwined with the history of Brazil.”

On his mother’s side, he descended from wealthy landholders from São Paulo who had once enslaved people. On his father’s side, records from the 1700s showed that his Silva ancestors had been enslaved some 500 miles away, in the mineral-rich state of Minas Gerais.

“I see my family and my ancestors as heroes,” Mr. Fermino da Silva, an engineer from the southern city of Londrina, said, referring to his father’s family.

It’s less clear how Brazil’s president, the son of illiterate farmers from the country’s impoverished northeast, inherited the nation’s most popular name.

During colonial rule, the region where Mr. Lula was born saw an influx of Jewish refugees and other migrants fleeing religious persecution in Portugal. Seeking new identities — and anonymity — historians say many new arrivals swapped their names for Silva.

Some scholars believe that might be how Mr. Lula ended up as a Silva. But genealogists have struggled to trace his roots with any certainty.

“It’s a big mystery,” said Fernando Morais, Mr. Lula’s official biographer, who has tried to piece together the president’s family history.

The president doesn’t seem to mind. A former union leader with a fifth-grade education, Mr. Lula considers himself “just another Silva,” according to Mr. Morais. “It’s the name of the people.”

Among the elite, though, Silva often tells a story of privilege. At least four Brazilian politicians and lawmakers, including a former president, had ancestors with the name who had links to slavery, according to data compiled for The New York Times by Agência Pública, a nonprofit investigative outlet that recently mapped the ancestry of Brazil’s most powerful people.

In popular culture, the experience of the average Silva was long embodied by a popular 1990s funk song about a working-class man who falls victim to the violence ravaging Rio’s poor, mostly Black suburbs. “It’s just another Silva whose star doesn’t shine,” the lyrics say.

Hearing the song always moved Marcelle da Silva Oliveira, 36, whose father was killed by drug traffickers in a working-class Rio neighborhood when she was young. But, for years, she was ashamed of the surname.

“I would say, ‘I don’t know any Silva who made it in life,’” said Ms. da Silva Oliveira, a domestic worker.

But Ms. da Silva Oliveira’s view eventually shifted and she has passed the surname down to her own six children.

“We lived through so much, so much humiliation,” she said. “Our name is a sign of survival.”

Syrian rebels stormed into the city of Hama on Thursday as government forces withdrew, bringing the rebels one step closer to the capital Damascus, the seat of power of President Bashar al-Assad.

The swift advance on Hama, one of Syria’s largest cities, and the retreat of government forces were confirmed by both the rebels and the government. The advance came just days after the rebels extended their control over Aleppo, a major hub in northern Syria.

In a video circulated by the rebel group leading the offensive, their leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, jubilantly calls for the rebels to push on toward other Syrian cities, including the capital.

“The people of Homs, prepare yourselves,” he said in the video, which his group said was filmed on Wednesday. “The people of Damascus, the people of Dara’a, the people of Deir al Zour. Victory for all, God willing.” The New York Times could not independently confirm the authenticity of the video or when it was filmed.

The sudden rebel advance has shifted the front lines in Syria’s 13-year-old civil war for the first time in years, adding a new layer of unpredictability to a conflict that has ravaged the country, opened voids exploited by jihadist groups, drawn in world powers including Russia and the United States and created a long-term refugee crisis for neighboring countries.

Hama is one of the few major Syrian cities where rebels had yet to seize significant control during the civil war, which began with a popular uprising aimed at ousting Mr. al-Assad in 2011.

The city’s name is synonymous with one of the most notorious massacres in the Middle East. In 1982, security forces serving the president’s father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad, massacred thousands of people there during an anti-government uprising led by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Analysts have attributed the rebels’ surprise success to the cumulative attrition of the war on Mr. al-Assad’s forces and to the fact that foreign allies who have intervened powerfully on his behalf — notably Russia, Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah — are now preoccupied with their own crises.

Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, is recovering from a war with Israel that killed many of its leaders and displaced many of its supporters. And Russia — which dispatched its military to bomb rebel areas, turning the war’s tide in favor of Mr. al-Assad years ago — has diverted its attention toward its invasion of Ukraine.

The rebels behind the offensive are a combination of forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which evolved from an affiliate of Al Qaeda that was notorious early in the war for suicide attacks on government troops. The group says it has cut ties with the global terrorist organization, but it is still classified as a terrorist group by the United States and other countries.

Other groups backed by Turkey and based in Syrian territory just south of the Turkish border have also joined in the fight.

While the rebel advance has taken the Syrian government and many regional observers by surprise, the rebels in the north have been preparing for it for some time and even talked openly about it.

Sam Heller, a fellow at the Century Foundation who studies Syria, said that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s position as the de facto government in Idlib Province, which abuts the Turkish border, gave it an opportunity to collect fees on trade and other services in the area. At least some of that money seems to have gone to military preparation to expand, he said.

“They have been bottled up in Idlib but with space to organize and to train, and they have accrued a lot of resources from trade and economic activity in that area,” he said. “And it seems that they have invested that responsibly.”

The rebels announced on Thursday that they were entering Hama, one of Syria’s largest cities. A rebel commander, Lt. Col. Hassan Abdulghany, said in a social media statement that government forces were in “a significant state of confusion,” with soldiers and commanders abandoning their posts.

In a video statement posted on social media, Mr. al-Jolani, the leader of the rebel offensive, said his forces had entered Hama “to cleanse that wound that has persisted in Syria for 40 years,” referring to the authoritarian rule of Mr. al-Assad and his father before him.

“I ask God that it be a conquest in which there is no revenge, but rather a conquest full of mercy and love.”

The Syrian military issued its own statement, saying its forces had fought for several days to repel the rebels in battles that had killed many combatants on both sides. But on Thursday, the rebels broke through, the statement said, so the military withdrew to avoid battles inside the city that would endanger civilians.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group based in Britain, said the rebels had taken over the police command headquarters, an air base and the central prison, from which they had freed hundreds of people.

While the rebel advance remains far from Damascus, its speed has unnerved some of Syria’s international allies.

The Chinese embassy in Damascus issued a statement saying “the overall security situation is deteriorating further” and advised Chinese citizens to leave the country as soon as possible.

Jacob Roubai contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.

Several of Venezuela’s leading opposition figures, facing arrest warrants, have been in hiding at the Argentine diplomatic residence in the capital, Caracas, for more than eight months, where they have sought asylum.

Now, four months after July’s tainted presidential election in which President Nicolás Maduro declared victory without providing any evidence, the authorities are cutting off the residence’s access to electricity, water and food, according to Tomás Arias, a lawyer for the opposition group.

The six people played various key roles for the Venezuelan opposition, including helping to organize its presidential campaign.

The move by the Venezuelan authorities reflects a ratcheting up of antagonistic measures by the autocratic government that analysts say is meant to deliver a clear message that Mr. Maduro, who is scheduled to be inaugurated next month, intends to stay in power.

Mr. Maduro, who has a long history of rigging elections in his favor, analysts say, declared victory against Edmundo González, a diplomat who had the backing of the country’s popular opposition leader, María Corina Machado.

The president has not released the official vote tallies to back up his claim, while those released by the opposition show that Mr. Gonzalez was the clear winner.

The Venezuelan authorities have used intimidation tactics before. Since the July election, police officers have periodically appeared outside the diplomatic residence in bullet-resistant vests and face masks, sometimes cutting off electricity but then restoring it.

The last time was in September, days before Mr. González fled the country. Once he was gone, the officers left.

Some experts say that this time the authorities are trying to force Ms. Machado, who is also in hiding, into exile.

“It’s an attempt to send a clear message that no one from the opposition is safe anywhere in Venezuela,” said Tamara Taraciuk Broner, an expert on Venezuela at the Inter-American Dialogue, a research organization in Washington.

This time, the police are not only cutting off the electricity, but also destroying the fuses so the residence is no longer connected to the power grid, Mr. Arias, the lawyer for the group, said. The police also cut off water, preventing water trucks and food deliveries from gaining access to the residence, he added.

“What has intensified is the humanitarian issue,” said Mr. Arias. The police, he added, are “turning the embassy into a prison.”

A senior U.S. diplomat, Brian A. Nichols, called on the Maduro government in a post on X on Wednesday to allow the six “refugees” to leave the country and denounced the “hostile tactics.”

The Venezuelan government did not immediately respond to requests by email and text messages for comment. Diosdado Cabello, one of Mr. Maduro’s most powerful allies, called the opposition’s accusations of harassment a “farce” on his television show.

The activists sought asylum at the residence, nestled between the diplomatic residences of Russia and North Korea, after the attorney general issued warrants for their arrest in March.

Days later, the Venezuelan Supreme Court banned Ms. Machado from running in the presidential election, and the opposition party threw its weight behind Mr. González.

The United States and other nations, including Argentina, have recognized Mr. González as the election’s legitimate winner.

Days after the vote, Mr. Maduro ordered Argentine diplomats to leave the country, and Brazil assumed responsibility for the embassy.

The Venezuelan government has unleashed a wave of repression against anyone challenging its declared victory, arresting about 2,000 people and charging most with terrorism. Human rights groups have described it as Venezuela’s most brutal campaign of aggression in recent decades.

While demonstrators turned out in large numbers after the election, the government backlash has made most Venezuelans reluctant to speak out. A demonstration called by the opposition last Sunday to demand the release of political prisoners had limited attendance.

Many who did show up covered their faces. Some demonstrators said their imprisoned relatives were sick and having suicidal thoughts.

“We are not going to accept that they give us only corpses to bury,” said Diego Casanova, explaining that his brother has been imprisoned for four months.

Ms. Machado has also accused the authorities of harassing her mother with armed hooded agents showing up at her Caracas home with sirens blaring.

The national legislature last week passed a law making it a crime punishable by up to 25 years in prison for supporting international sanctions against the government.

Carlos Blanco, a strategist for Ms. Machado, sees the tightening of the noose around the diplomatic residence as a sign of desperation by the Maduro government.

“Support for Maduro is really minimal,” he said. “What Maduro has left is pure and hard repression.”

The activists inside the diplomatic residence declined to be interviewed, citing security concerns, but in interviews with The New York Times shortly after the July election, some described living in a state of constant anxiety.

“Today we are here,” said Claudia Macero, who led communications for Ms. Machado’s party. “Tomorrow I do not know where we are going to be.”

Still, they said at the time that they had reached a sort of peace knowing that despite the uncertainty and turmoil, they had followed their consciences and did everything they possibly could to restore democracy to their homeland.

“If this is the price I have to pay for doing the right thing,” said Pedro Urruchurtu, who oversaw international affairs for the opposition campaign, “then here I am.”

Isayen Herrera contributed reporting from Caracas, Venezuela.

Ukrainian officials are visiting the United States this week to seek continued American support, and met with members of Donald J. Trump’s transition team to appeal to a president-elect who has pledged to bring a quick end to Ukraine’s war with Russia.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andriy Sybiha, said at a NATO meeting in Brussels on Wednesday that Andriy Yermak, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s powerful chief of staff, had made the visit for meetings that are “important for establishing relations, including with the leaders of the new administration.”

Mr. Yermak and Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova, met on Capitol Hill on Wednesday with JD Vance, the vice president-elect, and Representative Mike Waltz of Florida, Mr. Trump’s pick for national security adviser, said a person with knowledge of the meeting who spoke on condition of anonymity. Also present was a representative for Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who is the president-elect’s choice for envoy to Ukraine and Russia.

Yulia Svyrydenko, Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister, was also in the U.S. this week. She spoke of her country’s energy investment opportunities at an Energy Transition Forum in Washington, in which she appealed to American businesses for investments such as oil and gas extraction, she said on social media.

With Ukraine’s war effort showing signs of exhaustion and its forces losing ground daily, there are fears in the country that the period leading up to Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 could be exceedingly violent as Russia tries to capture more land before any talks are held.

Ukraine’s leadership has been trying to court Mr. Trump and his team since before the election, and an added sense of urgency is compelling Ukraine’s government to seek their support even before he takes office.

Some Ukrainian officials, including Mr. Zelensky, have presented the American election result as an opportunity for a new strategy in the war, but other Ukrainian politicians and political experts have expressed fear that it will mean reduced military aid.

On Tuesday, Speaker Mike Johnson dealt a blow to Ukraine’s war effort by refusing to allow a House vote on the Biden administration’s request for $24 billion in additional aid.

That echoed moves by him and other Republicans last winter to hold up a Ukraine aid package for months, although the Pentagon said this week that it was sending Kyiv an additional $725 million in military assistance from its stockpiles. That tranche that will be the largest that the United States has sent to Ukraine since a $1 billion shipment was announced in April.

Several Ukrainian officials have been looking for opportunities to reach out to Mr. Trump’s incoming administration. Oleksandr Merezhko, the chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Policy, said in an interview that he was planning a trip to Washington this month. “I would like to meet those people who are close to Trump — it is important,” he said.

Kim Barker, Jonathan Swan and Anastasia Kuznietsova contributed reporting.

The roommate of a prominent gay activist in Kenya was convicted on Wednesday of murdering him, almost two years after the grisly killing shocked the East African nation and spread chilling fear among its gay community.

The activist, Edwin Chiloba, was found dead and stuffed into a metal box by the roadside in Uasin Gishu County in the country’s west in January 2023, an episode that prompted international calls from activists and rights groups for Kenya to better protect its L.G.B.T.Q. community.

On Wednesday, a high court judge said that Jackton Odhiambo, a 25-year-old freelance photographer and roommate of Mr. Chiloba, had planned the killing. The two were last seen walking on the staircase to their shared apartment after a night out. Afterward, witnesses heard cries coming from the apartment, which subsided after a short while.

DNA evidence collected from the scene showed that Mr. Odhiambo had sexual intercourse with Mr. Chiloba before killing him, said the judge, Justice Reuben Nyambati Nyakundi of the Eldoret High Court. But an examination of the evidence did not reveal Mr. Odhiambo’s motive for the killing.

“I went for an expedition, and I could not find what could have been the motive of causing the death of your dear friend,” Justice Nyakundi said.

Mr. Odhiambo’s sentencing was scheduled for Dec. 16. Mr. Odhiambo had pleaded not guilty to the killing when he was first arraigned in court.

Mr. Chiloba was known across Kenya as a model, budding fashion designer and a vocal proponent of civil rights for gay people. His killing shocked the country, where consensual gay sex is still criminalized by law and is punishable by up to 14 years in prison. (In his ruling, the judge described the physical intimate relationship between Mr. Odhiambo and Mr. Chiloba as “a sexual act against nature according to our laws.”)

From the outset, the police said they were not treating Mr. Chiloba’s killing as a domestic violence case or a homophobic hate crime.

A few days after his body was discovered, a government pathologist said Mr. Chiloba had died from suffocation. Socks were stuffed into his mouth, and a piece of jeans was wrapped around his mouth and nose.

When residents and a caretaker complained of a foul smell stemming from the apartment, Mr. Odhiambo said it was coming from the sewer, Justice Nyakundi said. Later, as Mr. Odhiambo planned to get rid of the body, he used Mr. Chiloba’s mobile phone to pay for transactions, including the purchase of the metallic box, the judge added.

“You had such hatred, you had such ill will, you had such revenge and vengeance to your trusted friend that you made sure that his killing would shake Uasin Gishu County and that his killing would shake the entire world,” Justice Nyakundi said.

Kenya’s National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission welcomed Mr. Odhiambo’s conviction on Wednesday, saying that the ruling marked a significant step toward justice for Mr. Chiloba’s family and friends.

“This verdict marks a long-awaited moment of accountability, offering a glimmer of justice for Edwin and a reminder that no act of violence against LGBTIQ+ resident of Kenya will go unchallenged or unchecked,” the group said in a statement.

Jimmy Gitaka contributed reporting from Eldoret, Kenya.

Amnesty International on Thursday became the first major international human rights organization to accuse Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza, drawing a rebuke from Israeli officials who denied the claim.

Amnesty’s contention, outlined in a 296-page report, comes as the International Court of Justice, the principal court of the United Nations, is reviewing similar allegations by South Africa, claims that have been at the heart of difficult debates about the war around the world.

“Israel committed and is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” the Amnesty report said.

“Israel’s unlawful conduct throughout its military offensive resulted in unprecedented harm to Palestinians in Gaza that resulted in the massive scale of killings and serious injuries over an extremely short time,” it added.

Lawyers say that genocide is among the most difficult crimes to prove in international law because it requires demonstrating the specific intent to destroy a group, “in whole or in part,” something that Israeli leaders have persistently denied is their intent in Gaza.

In a rare move, the Israel chapter of Amnesty International protested the findings of the report, saying “the majority” of local members “holds that the claim that Israel is committing a genocide is not sufficiently substantiated.”

Still, the local chapter said that it was worried “serious crimes” were being perpetrated in Gaza and that the killing and destruction in Gaza was at “catastrophic proportions and must cease immediately.”

The chapter later said that four members of its board resigned over differences of opinion on the report. The organization didn’t clarify whether those who resigned were in favor or against the report.

More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war, according to the Gaza health ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians. Nearly two million people have been displaced and cities have been reduced to rubble.

Amnesty International said it took into account acts by Israel between October 2023 and July 2024, including what it described as “repeated direct attacks on civilians” and extensive restrictions on humanitarian aid.

Israel says that it is waging a war against Hamas in Gaza and not civilians. It has also blamed the United Nations for mismanaging the delivery of aid and accused Hamas of looting it.

In a statement, the Israeli military said that it “takes all feasible measures to mitigate harm to civilians” during its operations, including “providing advance warnings to civilians in combat zones whenever feasible.” Allegations of intentional harm, the military said, were “unfounded.”

The genocide accusation is acutely sensitive for Israel, which was founded in 1948 in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Many Israelis argue that it is Hamas that should face charges of genocide after its attack on Oct. 7, 2023, when about 1,200 people were killed in Israel and about 240 were taken captive, according to Israeli officials.

While the Amnesty report didn’t focus on the Oct. 7 attack, it said militants from Hamas and other armed groups conducted “deliberate mass killings, summary killings and other abuses, causing suffering and physical injuries.” It said war crimes committed by Hamas would be the subject of a separate report.

Under a convention adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 in the wake of the Holocaust, genocide is defined as carrying out certain acts of violence with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

In the case before the International Court of Justice, South Africa has argued that inflammatory public statements made by Israeli leaders are proof of intent to commit genocide. Part of Israel’s defense is to show that whatever politicians may have said in public was overruled by executive decisions and official orders from Israel’s war cabinet and its military’s high command.

Amnesty International said it used the 1948 convention to make its determination that Israel was committing genocide and it warned against narrow interpretations of what constitutes intent.

Janina Dill, the co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, said the Amnesty report was not necessarily an indication that the International Court of Justice would reach the same conclusion.

She said Amnesty appeared to be using a standard for establishing whether Israel had intent to commit genocidal acts that was closer to a “preponderance of evidence,” whereas the International Court of Justice has held a higher bar in past cases.

“The report is critical and important to establish the facts of what has happened in Gaza, but I don’t think it is decisive for how we should expect the I.C.J. case to unfold,” she said.