Ramez Souri, a Christian in Gaza, says he has little to celebrate this Christmas. Fourteen months into the war, he still sleeps on the grounds of St. Porphyrius, the ancient Greek Orthodox church in Gaza City where an Israeli airstrike last year killed his three children.

“This year, we will conduct our religious rites and that’s it,” Mr. Souri, 47, said. “We’re still in mourning and far too sad to celebrate, or do anything except to pray for peace.”

Since the beginning of the war, hundreds of Palestinian Christians have huddled in two churches in Gaza City: St. Porphyrius and the Holy Family Church, a Catholic parish. They have remained in the sanctuaries despite an Israeli military campaign that has laid waste to much of the city.

But some now say the community may be in danger of losing its 1,600-year foothold in the territory. Like many Gazans, some Christians simply hope to escape the enclave after witnessing months of deprivation, loss and bombardment. For those who have already left, whether they will ever feel safe enough to return home, even after the war is over, is far from clear.

“The future of the Christian presence in Gaza is being tested,” said Kamel Ayyad, a St. Porphyrius church official who fled to Egypt in November 2023, after Hamas led its brutal attack on Israel that ignited the war. “I love my homeland — we all do — but I won’t return immediately before assessing the political and economic situation.”

Estimates of Gaza’s Christian population range from roughly 800 to more than 1,000, although hundreds are believed to have left for Egypt, Canada and Australia since the war began. They include both Catholics, who celebrate Christmas on Dec. 25, and Orthodox, who will observe the festival on Jan. 7.

The Rev. Munther Isaac, a Palestinian pastor in Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said many Christians who had once committed to staying in Gaza had seen their homes destroyed and now simply wanted to keep their children safe.

“I hope I am wrong, but I will be surprised if there was a strong Christian presence after the war in Gaza,” said Mr. Isaac. “They are telling us: ‘We just want to leave, we just want to escape this hell.’”

On Sunday, a major Israeli military body said it was willing to work on coordinating the exit of Christians to third countries. The matter places Christian leaders in a difficult position, Mr. Isaac said. “The church does not want to be responsible for emptying Gaza of the Christian community,” he said.

Before the war, many of the Christians in Gaza were successful professionals who lived in Rimal, a once prosperous neighborhood in Gaza City. They often sent their children to the day school at the Holy Family, as well as worshiping at St. Porphyrius, which is one of the oldest churches in the world.

Pope Francis, who has called for a cease-fire, has said he regularly speaks with a priest at Holy Family, the only Catholic church in Gaza.

“Yesterday, children were bombed,” Pope Francis said on Saturday, in an apparent reference to Israeli military strikes in Gaza. “This is cruelty. This is not war. I want to say it because it touches the heart.”

Like other Gazans, many Christians in the enclave say their lives have long been overshadowed by a cycle of wars with Israel and an Israeli-Egyptian blockade that tightly regulates travel and commerce. The territory’s Islamist government, led by Hamas, has also made them especially anxious.

Hamas made some overtures to Christians, such as having senior officials publicly welcome the Christian holidays. But the group’s rule has nonetheless had a chilling effect on the community, said Khalil Sayegh, a Gazan political analyst and Christian.

Before Hamas seized full control of Gaza in 2007, Christians would often place a large Christmas tree near a major square in Gaza City. Acolytes festooned in colorful uniforms marched in the streets, sharing festive music on brass instruments to bring in the holidays.

After Hamas took over Gaza, Christians observed the holidays mostly in the privacy of their homes and churches, said Mr. Sayegh, who now lives in Washington. Under Hamas “there was tolerance for Christians to worship in their churches, to march on church property,” he said. “But on the other hand, no freedom.”

That fragile dynamic was upended by the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 250 were taken hostage. Israel responded with a devastating campaign of airstrikes and a ground invasion that have killed more than 45,000 people, destroyed much of the enclave and displaced nearly two million.

Nearly a week after the war began, the Israeli military ordered a mass evacuation of northern Gaza, including Gaza City. While Christians were well integrated in their affluent Gaza City neighborhoods, several said they were too afraid to travel to the more conservative south where they were ordered to seek shelter. Instead, hundreds packed into the two churches, hoping for safety.

The community set up committees to handle food, shelter, health and other critical needs, said George Anton, a Gazan who shelters at the Holy Family Church. “We quickly understood that this wasn’t like previous wars, where the international community would intervene after a week or two,” he said

But on Oct. 19, an Israeli airstrike targeted a structure near St. Porphyrius, which the Israeli military claimed was being used by Hamas. The bombardment also wrecked a building inside the church compound where displaced people had been sheltering, killing at least 18, including women and children.

Just meters away, Mr. Souri said he saw the building collapse. Rescuers later found the bodies of all three of his children — Suheil, 14; Julie, 12; and Majd, 11. He buried them in a plot that he sees almost every day as he wanders through the church grounds, waiting for the war to end.

The Israeli military has said that it considers the two Christian churches in Gaza to be “sensitive sites” and that it takes precautions to avoid harming them. But the airstrike on St. Porphyrius was not the last episode. In December 2023, as Israeli ground forces fought their way through Gaza City, two women were killed in the Holy Family Church, prompting condemnation from the Vatican.

The Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem said the women were killed by Israeli sniper fire. The Israeli military has said an initial investigation found that a Hamas fighter had fired at Israeli troops near the church, prompting them to target nearby “enemy lookouts,” but it did not directly say how the two women were killed.

But Christians in Gaza have continued to lean on their faith as the war drums on. Communal solidarity persists, even under the weight of hunger and displacement. They also receive support from churches around the world.

Within the relative safety of church walls, the Holy Family day school opened its doors again earlier this year, said Mr. Ayyad, the church official. Almost all of Gaza’s other schools are either shuttered, destroyed or have been converted into shelters for the displaced.

Last week, some Christians managed to make a holiday treat called burbara, a wheat berry pudding. The colorful dessert is usually associated with treasured holiday traditions when Gazan Christians invite neighbors into their homes.

This year, Gazans at St. Porphyrius poured whatever wheat, nuts and sugar they could find into large communal vats. They stewed the mixture before pouring small amounts onto plates for hundreds of hungry people.

“Even though it didn’t taste as it ought to, we wanted to do something to show that we’re still here, despite it all,” Mr. Souri said.

Roman drivers finally got some relief on Monday when, after 450 days of traffic chaos and unprintable curses, a ribbon-cutting ceremony heralded the opening of an underpass along the Tiber River near the Vatican that immediately cleared traffic from what is now Rome’s largest pedestrian area.

The new underpass is part of the makeover Rome is undergoing as it readies for the 32 million visitors the Vatican expects in 2025 for the Roman Catholic Church Jubilee — a year of faith, penance and forgiveness of sins that takes place every quarter century.

Romans have conflicting feelings about the Jubilee, which began on Tuesday evening when Pope Francis solemnly opened the Holy Door in the atrium of St. Peter’s Basilica and passed through, followed by the first of the pilgrims.

“It’s a miracle” that so many public works have been completed, said Rome’s mayor, Roberto Gualtieri.

“It’s been an ordeal,” said Martina Battista, 23, a medical student in Rome who was evicted from her apartment because her landlord wanted to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast for the Jubilee.

Mr. Gualtieri said that the Jubilee was a great opportunity to refurbish Rome and turn it into a greener, more inclusive city, with hundreds of projects planned. But if Mr. Gualtieri and Vatican officials have spent the better part of December at a flurry of inaugurations of spruced up monuments, repaved streets and new pedestrian piazzas — the upside of the holy year — the surge in pilgrims is expected to take a toll.

Construction sites for Jubilee works have left key parts of Rome bruised by detours, leading to interminable traffic jams and very grumpy citizens.

Rome has already been struggling to balance the needs of its 2.75 million residents with serving the more than 21 million tourists who passed through this year. The impact has been highest on the housing market, especially in the historic center, where many landlords have switched from multiyear leases to more profitable short rentals via platforms like Airbnb. Transportation, prices for basic goods and even garbage collection have also been affected, critics say.

Ms. Battista, the medical student in Rome who was evicted, said her frantic search for another place not far from the city center took five months. She now pays double what she did before.

Not so long ago, Rome stood out among Western Europe’s capitals as relatively affordable. But with the Jubilee looming, rental prices increased up to 20 percent in a year in some areas, and the stock of available rentals dropped by up to 35 percent, according to Idealista, an online real-estate platform.

“It’s been really difficult,” Ms. Battista said.

On Rome’s upscale Via del Corso, as tourists shopped amid the marble and Christmas lights, Anwar Hossain, 33, was selling miniature Colosseums and plastic Roman soldiers at a kiosk. Originally from Bangladesh, he has been living in Rome for about 14 years, but now, for the first time, he is afraid he will end up on the street. His landlord has refused to renew his lease for his home in the Prati neighborhood, close to the Vatican, and he has been unable to find a new one.

“The Jubilee ruined many families like mine,” he said.

For many Romans, already priced out of the center and exasperated with the hordes of tourists stalking flashy new limoncello and tiramisu stores, the imminent Jubilee seems a last blow to a city many struggle to recognize.

In the Piazza Navona neighborhood, many streets are named for the professions that once concentrated there: Baullari for suitcase makers; Cappellari for hats; Sediari for chairs. Now the area is a hub of souvenir shops, cafes and restaurants thronged by tourists who form long lines as they wait to photograph themselves eating pasta al cacio e pepe, a popular Roman dish.

Rome has been beloved by visitors for centuries, for its art and monuments and also its promise of a la dolce vita lifestyle. But the recent surge in visitors, and preparations for still more, is altering the city’s feel. “It’s not the city that changes the tourist, it is the tourist who changes the city, that is the paradox,” said Michele Campisi, the national president of the heritage group Italia Nostra.

The city government is aware of the challenges the Jubilee poses, but the mayor said it was not their choice to have millions more people come to the city.

“The Jubilee is not a policy choice, it’s been around since 1300,” Mr. Gualtieri said in an interview. “It exists, so the question becomes how do you handle it.”

In the months leading up to the Jubilee, Monica Lucarelli, the city official responsible for commerce, set up a board with representatives of the hotel, restaurant and retail trade associations, tasked with monitoring any “excessive” increase in prices linked to the celebration.

“We want them to raise awareness among their members not to exploit” the influx of tourists “in an incorrect way,” Ms. Lucarelli said. Still, she added, Italy is “a free-market economy” and little can be done against transgressors unless laws are broken. Besides, Rome remains “one of Europe’s least expensive capitals,” she said.

In the Esquilino neighborhood near Rome’s Termini train station, complaints about rising prices are joined by concerns about increased crime linked to the Jubilee, especially since many of the pilgrims are expected to arrive by train and stay in the neighborhood.

Security measures in the neighborhood — where petty crime is already an issue — consist mostly of periodic police sweeps that remove criminals from the streets for a few hours, Carmen Trimarchi, vice president of Luce Sia Esquilino resident’s association, complained. The influx of pilgrims “poses a real problem,” she added. “We’re very worried.”

Mr. Gualtieri, the mayor, told reporters last week that Jubilee funds had been allocated to buy new security equipment and pay for more officers. “Security will be very robust,” he said. Artificial intelligence is being used via security cameras linked to a control room to better monitor the city in real time, he added.

But some locals are already complaining about too much security linked to the Jubilee.

Shopkeepers of the Borgo Pio neighborhood fear that some of the measures put in place to better manage pilgrims, such as traffic and pedestrian barriers, will further impact business, which they say has already suffered because of two years of nearly uninterrupted construction.

“We’ve already had to endure this,” meaning the Jubilee construction, said Francesco Ceravolo, the president of Assoborgo, which represents some 100 businesses — mostly restaurants and bars — in the neighborhood.

Earlier this year, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the Vatican official in charge of the Jubilee, admitted that Romans might be “suffering a little,” but he said the result would be a more livable city. And a more ecologically sound one, too.

Walking down the avenue leading to the Vatican on Monday, Monsignor Fisichella said that after two years of preparations, “the moment” had come. “Rome is ready to welcome the pilgrims,” he said.

On a recent evening, in a brand-new office on the first floor of a commercial building where wires dangled from the ceiling and new flooring was still being laid, a group of university students were plotting a new future for Bangladesh.

A few months earlier, they were among the thousands who had risen up and overthrown Sheikh Hasina, whose 15-year rule had descended into authoritarianism, brutality and corruption.

Now, the students are determined to seize their opening — however long it may last or however messy the process may be — to rebuild Bangladesh as a robust democracy. They envision a system with free and fair elections, social justice and bulwarks against autocracy that no leader could chip away.

“Our political power is in a very fluid form right now,” said Arif Sohel, 26, a student organizer. He said he hoped to unite students and win over political parties with a pithy message: “We want a country that is stable and will progress.”

It is a daunting task for Bangladesh, a nation born in violence 53 years ago and turbulent ever since. The work has fallen to an unusual mix of unelected people in the interim government — highly trained experts with long, distinguished careers and students just embarking on theirs — who are operating under enormous pressures beyond the weight of history.

A major political party that had been suppressed under Ms. Hasina is demanding that fresh elections be held, perhaps within months, before any reforms are formalized. Weary citizens continue to suffer under high inflation, which has pushed up prices for essentials like oil and rice. Protests keep disrupting life in Dhaka, the capital. Tensions with neighboring India have soared amid reports of attacks by Muslims on Hindu minorities in Bangladesh. There are fears of a resurgence of militant Islam.

While toppling the old system was swift, overhauling it will take time — and the students and the technocrats now in charge may not have that luxury.

“It’s moving, it’s moving, it’s moving,” Mahfuj Alam, the main student adviser to Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who leads the interim government, said of the progress it had made.

“It was stagnant before for two months,” Mr. Alam said, referring to the period after Ms. Hasina’s overthrow on Aug. 5, when the government was solely focused on law and order. “And right now it’s moving, and our economy is healing.”

Mr. Alam, 26, takes credit for being the strategist whose lofty ideals drove the protests. “The idea of abolition of a fascist regime and the idea of a ‘new political settlement’ was my wording,” he said. In a country with a conservative Muslim society, the students have leaned into the language of left-wing revolutionary politics.

For now, Mr. Alam said, the new government is focusing on more visible, short-term reforms like updating election rules. More deep-rooted changes, such as increasing women’s participation in government and creating new jobs for Bangladesh’s young population — nearly 80 percent of its 171 million people are of working age — will take longer.

In an interview, Mr. Yunus, an 84-year-old microfinance pioneer, said his government had the full support of the people. While he has faced criticism for being too slow with reforms, “they didn’t say ‘We don’t want you,’” he said.

It might take several years, but the students will be able to pull off what they call “Bangladesh 2.0,” Mr. Yunus said.

A ‘Moral Responsibility’

Badiul Alam Majumdar, a 78-year-old Bangladeshi economist, activist and election expert, first heard that he would be overseeing the reform of his country’s electoral system a few minutes before Mr. Yunus went on national television to announce his appointment.

It was a similar experience for Ali Riaz, a political scientist at Illinois State University, who is in charge of the Constitution reform commission.

Their panels are among six that Mr. Yunus set up in September. They are filled mostly with experts from academia, government and civil society groups, as well as student representatives, and are excluding political parties from their initial work. The commissions have until the end of December to come up with recommendations on overhauling institutions such as the police and the judiciary, as well as on reducing corruption and improving public administration.

The interim government wants to lay down big ideas, then let elected representatives decide on the details. It expects broad reforms to be enacted, given support for sweeping change from the public and the politicians who are likely to lead the next government.

Mr. Majumdar’s commission is considering measures that would allow the Bangladeshi diaspora to vote, increase turnout among female voters and update electoral rolls.

Bangladeshis haven’t hesitated to weigh in, writing hundreds of emails saying that anyone running for office must meet certain educational thresholds.

“They feel that they will be better able to understand the things that are needed to run an organization or office,” Mr. Majumdar said. “But I keep telling people that all the people who are most corrupt and the bad dudes are very highly educated.”

Across town, Iftekhar Zaman, the longtime chief of Transparency International Bangladesh, who has spent decades tracking illicit flows of money, is working to strengthen an existing anti-corruption commission.

“All that’s needed is to get the right people in the right places, remove the bad ones from the organization and create a sense of ownership” Mr. Zaman said. But he added that it was a “mammoth” task.

Mr. Riaz, the Illinois State professor, said he considered it his “moral responsibility” to help after hundreds of lives were lost in Ms. Hasina’s crackdown on the student protesters in the summer.

Working out of an office in the empty Parliament building, Mr. Riaz said his goal was to restore the Bangladeshi Constitution to how it was originally conceived, guided by ideals of “equality, dignity and social justice.”

More than a dozen amendments to the document, Mr. Riaz said, have made it little more than a lever for increasing autocratic power. He said that he welcomed debate on whether the Constitution should be rewritten or amended. But those who participated in, supported or legitimized Ms. Hasina’s “undemocratic autocratic rule,” he said, will not be invited.

“When Germany was rebuilt after the Second World War, did they talk to the Nazis?” Mr. Riaz said. “I don’t think they did.”

Pressures All Around

Gobinda Chandra Pramanik, a lawyer and Hindu leader in Bangladesh, is caught in the middle as relations between India and the interim Bangladeshi government turn bitter.

In Bangladesh, anti-India sentiments have been simmering since Ms. Hasina fled in August to India, whose prime minister, Narendra Modi, is a strong ally. On Monday, the interim government said it had formally requested that India extradite Ms. Hasina back to Bangladesh to face trial. A spokesman for India’s foreign ministry said it had received the request but otherwise had “no comment to offer on this matter.”

In a recent YouTube video, Ms. Hasina accused Mr. Yunus of being involved in the “genocide” of Bangladeshi Hindus, a claim also made by right-wing Indians who support the New Delhi government.

Mr. Pramanik dismisses such accusations as “political,” saying Hindus were not systematically singled out in the violence that killed hundreds of Bangladeshis after Ms. Hasina’s overthrow. He hews closely to the Yunus government’s message, hoping Hindus, who make up about 9 percent of the population, will have a seat at the table in the country’s rebuilding.

Yet tensions between the two countries have flared. Last month, for example, Bangladesh’s interim government charged a Hindu monk with sedition, saying he had disrespected the national flag. India said Bangladesh had targeted a religious leader making legitimate demands for protection of Hindus.

In the interview with Mr. Yunus, he said that Ms. Hasina — and, along with her, India — was the “single biggest destabilizing factor” for Bangladesh. “You want to keep her, go ahead,” he said. “But you must make sure she doesn’t interfere with our politics.”

Government officials in both countries have since sought to cool things down. Earlier this month, India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, met with Mr. Yunus in Dhaka. Though he noted that India was concerned about reports of attacks on Hindus and other minorities, he said that ties between the two countries were about more than a “single political party,” referring to Ms. Hasina’s Awami League.

The country’s other major party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, or B.N.P., has been another major source of pressure on the interim government.

The party — run by Tarique Rahman, the son of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, Ms. Hasina’s arch nemesis — has chafed at being shut out of the commissions seeking to reimagine Bangladesh.

The B.N.P. says Mr. Yunus has been too slow in offering a road map for elections or implementation of reforms. Last week, Mr. Yunus said that elections could be held between the end of 2025 and the middle of 2026, depending on the extent of the reforms proposed.

Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, the B.N.P.’s secretary general, said in an interview that “elections should be held as soon as possible because an unelected government will face a lot of problems.” He was alluding to the growing number of clashes and protests in Dhaka and other cities, including over wages for auto rickshaw drivers.

Double-digit inflation is an additional strain. On a recent morning, around 100 citizens lined up in front of a government truck in Dhaka that was selling oil, rice and vegetables at subsidized rates.

“You can’t take as much as you want from here,” said Naseema, a tailor. But “if I had to buy it from the market, it would cost double.”

Individual Futures

In a corner of the abandoned Parliament building in Dhaka, a hefty tome on Sheikh Mujibur Rahman lay in a pile of garbage, its pages warped by water. Across town, about 35,000 books celebrating the life of Sheikh Mujib — Ms. Hasina’s father and the man long considered Bangladesh’s founding leader — have been locked away.

During the uprising, students demolished or defaced thousands of statues that Ms. Hasina had erected of her father. “Students said he is not a deity,” said Mr. Riaz, the leader of the Constitution reform commission.

But the anger that fueled once-unthinkable scenes of vandalism has cooled. Students have begun to think again about studies and careers.

Some, like Nishita Zaman Niha, the only female student member of one of the commissions, want to pursue higher education abroad, if given a chance. Even Mr. Alam, the main student adviser to Mr. Yunus, said he wanted to eventually get back to his interests in language and history.

For now, though, they are focused on remaking politics into a force for good.

“What we are trying to do is to create a new platform for politics in Bangladesh,” said Asiful Hoque Robin, a student at Independent University, Bangladesh. “If not for us, for the next generation.”

The reports, often accompanied by grainy footage, are frequent: Hindu temples vandalized and set on fire in Bangladesh, minority Hindus targeted and killed.

Many of the attacks are real, with the mob rage serving as a warning of how Bangladesh could spiral into violence in the vacuum opened by the overthrow of its authoritarian leader last summer.

Others are forgeries, pushed by supporters of the ousted prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, to discredit Bangladesh’s interim government. The fabrications have also been spread by broadcast and social media in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi is an ally of Ms. Hasina and is sheltering her as she plots her return.

Caught between the authentic and the exaggerated, Bangladesh’s Hindus, who make up about 9 percent of a population that is overwhelmingly Muslim, are gripped with fear.

“Smiles are rare, and businesses are struggling,” said S.K. Nath Shymal, the president of the Bangladesh National Hindu Grand Alliance in the coastal city of Chattogram, the center of some of the worst recent tensions.

The New York Times visited the sites of many of the reported attacks in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, and in Chattogram, the country’s second-largest city.

Hindu residents confirmed episodes of vandalism and mob violence, particularly after the arrest of a Hindu monk in November and the death of a Muslim lawyer during a protest by the monk’s supporters.

But they also said that the cases of forged or exaggerated information had muddied the real threat to them.

Mr. Shymal said that all sides were “exploiting us.”

At home, Bangladesh’s interim government, led by the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, often downplays the threat to minorities to show it is in control. The Yunus government says it is committed to protecting minorities and points to 70 arrests related to 88 attacks over the past three months.

Across the border in India, the threat is being exaggerated to score political points among right-wing Hindus as well as to pave a path for Ms. Hasina’s restoration.

Before now, Islamic extremists were pushed to the margins by Ms. Hasina’s police state. With her gone and an unelected interim government in place, the extremists have returned more openly.

In the widespread political violence that followed her departure, hundreds of people, including several Hindus, were killed. Community leaders said the killings of the Hindus were largely related to their political affiliation, not their religion.

But tensions have increased in recent weeks with the arrest of a Hindu monk, Chinmoy Krishna Das, who was accused of denigrating Bangladesh’s flag as he protested for the protection of Hindus.

The monk’s supporters gathered at the court in Chattogram during his bail hearing, clashing with the police. During the unrest, a Muslim lawyer was hacked to death in unclear circumstances.

Since then, mobs have arrived in neighborhoods where Hindus live, vandalizing temples and targeting homes. In court, lawyers for the monk were heckled by other lawyers and stopped from defending him, his team said.

“The local lawyers used phrases like ‘throw him out,’ ‘push him down,’ ‘beat him up,’” said Rabindra Ghosh, 75, a senior lawyer who arrived from Dhaka. “Hearing such words from lawyers, wouldn’t I be a bit terrified?”

He added, “The current situation has shifted from political to religious tensions.”

On the outskirts of Dhaka, a family-run Hindu temple was vandalized and set on fire in the predawn hours of Dec. 7. The owner, Ratan Kumar Ghosh, said the local news media had minimized the attack.

In Chattogram, the premises of three temples were vandalized recently, their gates and windows smashed with rocks.

“After the Friday prayers, some people started saying, ‘Go capture and slaughter Hindus,” said Tapan Das, 75, the owner of a house that contains one of the temples.

“I sent everyone back to their homes,” Mr. Das said. “As the procession came, they banged on the gate and threw stones.”

At another temple in Chattogram, it was clear that a mob attack had taken place, but accounts of the unrest were inconsistent.

Indian broadcast media ran grainy footage on Nov. 27 saying the temple had been set ablaze. Ms. Hasina put out a statement saying that a “temple was burned in Chattogram.” But leaders of the Hindu community in Chattogram rejected those accounts, with a temple priest saying that a mob had vandalized two lion statues outside the temple gate.

An early sign of the politicization of Hindus’ plight came in the days after Ms. Hasina’s fall in August, when an office of her party, the Awami League, was burned. A temple known as Navagraha Bari stood nearby. Videos spread across Indian social media falsely asserting that the temple had been attacked.

“Some individuals recorded a video of that fire and spread it, claiming that the Navagraha temple was on fire,” said Ujjal Bishwash, 52, a resident of the area. But “there has been no incident of fire at our temple to date.”

Until last year, most Cambodians had lived under only one leader. Hun Sen ruled as prime minister for nearly four decades, tightening his iron grip over the country and systematically silencing the opposition, activists and independent media.

When Mr. Hun Sen appointed his oldest son, Hun Manet, as his successor, there was a sliver of optimism that civil liberties would improve. The new leader had attended universities in the United States and Britain, where he was exposed to a more liberal approach to elections and human rights.

But since he took power in August 2023, those hopes, however meager, have been dashed.

In recent months, the Cambodian authorities have locked up environmental activists on what critics say are trumped-up charges. They detained Mech Dara, a respected journalist, for nearly a month, in what was seen as an attack on press freedom. And they have cracked down on dissent from Cambodians overseas, securing deportations from Thailand and Malaysia.

“The space for expression has been at a low base, probably since 2014, and is shrinking further,” said Marc Thayre, the British deputy ambassador to Cambodia.

That sentiment was echoed by a United Nations official.

“We were hoping this next generation of government would be more liberal,” said Vitit Muntarbhorn, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Cambodia. “Now it looks as though there is no sign of liberalization at all.”

While Mr. Hun Manet has often spoken of the need for independent media and civil society in Cambodia, his government has moved in the opposite direction. His father, Mr. Hun Sen, also remains in the picture — as the head of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party and the nation’s Senate.

Last month, the European Parliament called for the “immediate end of repression and harassment of civil society and political prisoners in Cambodia,” adopting a resolution to review its trade agreements with the country.

It remains to be seen what the economic ramifications of the review will be. But the government is already dealing with a drop in funding from China, its staunchest ally. Beijing, which has lent billions of dollars for infrastructure projects in Cambodia, is now facing an economic slowdown at home.

“This economic pressure may indeed encourage the Cambodian government to become more open to working with activists and civil society groups,” said Ruos Sarat, who works on environmental issues for the Cambodian Center for Human Rights.

In July, 10 members of the environmental group Mother Nature Cambodia were charged with offenses included “plotting” against the government over protests they had organized. Half of them are now serving prison sentences of six to eight years.

Mother Nature was founded in 2012, with Cambodia in the midst of a huge infrastructure investment phase. The group has called out projects and practices — including dams, coastal construction and sand dredging — that it says disregard environmental regulations and unlawfully enrich developers and politicians. With in-person protests likely to lead to arrests, it is now focusing on online activism.

These young activists are putting out their message in short and shareable social media clips. They are finding traction on Facebook, which is immensely popular in Cambodia, where about two-thirds of the population is under 30.

Over the summer they were in action in Sihanoukville Province, roughly three hours southwest of Phnom Penh, the capital. Mean Lisa, one of the new leaders of Mother Nature, made a video about a river that was being polluted by a nearby palm oil factory. Between takes, she scrolled through the video script to rehearse. The screen illuminated the word “Khmer” tattooed across her index finger.

“It reminds me who I am doing this for,” said Ms. Mean Lisa, 22. “I am Khmer. Many Cambodians are Khmer. I work for my people.”

Less than a month after the video was posted, the factory was fined 40 million Cambodian riels, or nearly $10,000.

“It is hard to celebrate making a difference when our friends are still in jail,” Ms. Mean Lisa said. “I don’t know what will get them out. All we can do for now is make sure they are not forgotten.”

Demonstrators have also seemingly had other successes.

In August, dozens of people were arrested for criticizing a regional development plan between Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam that was pitched as a way to increase cross-border trade. They were concerned that Cambodia was giving land concessions to Vietnam, a neighbor with whom the country has a fraught history. A few weeks after the mass arrests, Mr. Hun Manet announced his country’s surprise withdrawal from the project.

Still, the flurry of arrests has made many observers wary.

“Asking for accountability, sooner or later, will get you in trouble in Cambodia because accountability is the enemy of corruption,” said Sophal Ear, a Cambodian-American political scientist who specializes in governance issues in Cambodia and whose family fled Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge takeover. “Accountability is the enemy of everything that is wrong in Cambodia.”

In October, Mr. Mech Dara, the journalist, who won awards for his work exposing scam compounds, was detained for three weeks in connection with social media posts that criticized various injustices in Cambodia.

In November, six activists — including Ouch Leng, a winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize — who were investigating logging inside a national park were detained on accusations of trespassing. Earlier that month, Koet Saray, who spoke out against the forced eviction of hundreds of people to make way for a rubber plantation, was sentenced to four years in prison.

“Activists no longer know what is acceptable and not acceptable,” said Mr. Thayre, the British diplomat. “That unpredictability is very dangerous.”

The Houthi militia group in Yemen fired a missile at Israel on Tuesday, hours after Israel’s defense minister suggested that his government would seek to kill its leadership, highlighting the difficulty Israel faces in confronting the Iran-backed militants as they ramp up their assaults.

Sirens wailed in Tel Aviv and other parts of central Israel early on Tuesday morning, and loud booms could be heard as far away as Jerusalem as the country’s aerial defenses repelled the attack. The Israeli military later said the missile had been successfully intercepted outside of its territory; there were no reports of casualties.

The Houthis, who act as the de facto government in much of northern Yemen, have been firing on Israel in solidarity with their Palestinian allies since shortly after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that prompted the war in Gaza. In a self-declared attempt to enforce an embargo on Israel, they also began launching missiles and drones at cargo vessels crossing the Red Sea, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, significantly disrupting international trade.

“From the Houthis’ perspective, the attacks in the Red Sea have been successful,” said Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemeni research fellow at the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, the London research institution. “Even if there’s no direct harm, they are a big win for them.”

Houthi missiles and drones have managed only to penetrate Israel’s defenses on a few occasions. But experts say their attacks have bolstered the group’s regional clout even as Israel has focused its firepower on weakening other Iran-backed groups, like Hamas and the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah.

The intensifying focus on the Houthis comes as the Israeli military continued a relentless ground and air campaign in northern Gaza while under increased pressure from both the international community and the Israeli public to end the fighting in the enclave.

On Tuesday, the Israeli military released the findings of an investigation into the deaths of six hostages found with shotgun wounds in a Hamas tunnel in the Gazan city of Rafah in late August. The findings concluded that while the hostages — Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and MSG Ori Danino — had been “brutally murdered” by Hamas, the Israeli military’s “ground activities in the area, although gradual and cautious, had a circumstantial influence on the terrorists’ decision to murder the six hostages.”

It was the second report this month from the military to find that its activities in Gaza had most likely influenced Hamas’s decision to kill captives, conclusions that have fueled debate in Israel over the wisdom of a military campaign that has endangered the hostages.

The Hostages Families Forum, which represents relatives of the captives, said in a statement on Tuesday that the findings highlighted the urgent need for a cease-fire deal with Hamas to end the fighting in Gaza and return the remaining hostages in exchange for the release of some Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons.

“The investigation published tonight proves once again that the return of all hostages will only be possible through a deal,” the group’s statement said.

The group said earlier on Tuesday that Hanna Katzir, who had been abducted from her home in Nir Oz during Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, and released after 49 days, had died, but did not reveal the cause. Carmit Palty Katzir, her daughter, said in the statement: “Her heart could not withstand the terrible suffering since Oct. 7th. Each day in captivity endangers the lives of our loved ones.”

The Israeli military’s report was released shortly after the office of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said an Israeli negotiating team would return to Israel from Qatar “after a significant week” of negotiations with mediators for Hamas over a cease-fire deal. Mr. Netanyahu previously said he could give no timeline for an agreement.

The Houthi attacks on Israel, meanwhile, appear to be growing more frequent, although most have not led to serious casualties. Since the beginning of December, Houthi militants have fired rockets and drones at the country at least eight times.

Early on Saturday morning, a missile from Yemen landed in Tel Aviv after air defenses failed to intercept it. And last week, a school in Ramat Gan, a Tel Aviv suburb, was damaged after a missile fired from Yemen was partly intercepted, the Israeli military said.

In response, Israeli warplanes have struck Yemen, targeting power plants in Sana, the Houthi-run capital. The United States has also conducted a series of bombing raids against targets in Yemen in an attempt to compel the militants to stop the attacks, though the Houthis have vowed to continue as long as Israel keeps up its war in Gaza.

Analysts say the strikes by Israel, the United States, and Britain, have so far had a limited impact on the group, and it is far from clear what these powers can do to decisively stop the Houthis from occasionally shooting rockets and drones at adversaries in the region.

“What we’ve done so far — I don’t want to call it a complete failure, but our operational successes have not yet brought the desired results,” said Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli military intelligence officer and research fellow at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. “And our options aren’t good, either.”

The Houthis are unlikely to abandon their newfound leverage even if there is a cease-fire in Gaza, according to analysts. Simply by firing a ballistic missile every few days, setting off air-raid sirens across Israel, the Houthis could have a profound psychological and economic impact on the country, said Mr. Citrinowicz.

Israeli leaders have begun pledging more serious action. On Monday, Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, threatened to assassinate Houthi leaders in an attempt to force the militants to come to terms. Over the past year Israel has killed many of its adversaries’ top commanders, including the leaders of Hamas and of Hezbollah.

“We will inflict a devastating blow to the Houthi terrorist organization in Yemen,” Mr. Katz said. “We will hit its strategic infrastructure and behead its leadership.”

The Houthis are farther removed from Israel than Hamas and Hezbollah are — often more than 1,000 miles from Israeli territory — and have survived numerous efforts to quash them since rising to power in Yemen’s decade-long civil war.

Yemen is also much bigger than Lebanon or Gaza, making the Houthis and their military infrastructure a much more diffuse target, two experts said.

The United States and Britain consider the Houthis to be a terrorist group. As part of its proxy war with Iran, Saudi Arabia led a military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen in an attempt to restore the country’s government, deepening the humanitarian crisis there.

The Houthis have also survived years of bombing by the coalition led by Saudi Arabia, during which time its ambitions appear to have grown, according to Elisabeth Kendall, an expert on Yemen at Cambridge University.

“They have had 20 years of holding at bay some of the biggest defense spenders in the Middle East,” said Ms. Kendall. “The biggest dilemma is that it looks impossible to influence the Houthis without military pressure, but it’s hard to see how military pressure can work.”

Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting from Tel Aviv.