One by one, the churchgoers trudged into the bare-brick cathedral in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre for the last Sunday Mass before Christmas, their clothes sodden by rain and their minds haunted by war.

There were no parties this year for the children, no music recitals and no Christmas tree in the city square. Much of the city is gone. Flattened apartment buildings. Mangled cars. Blown-out and abandoned mom-and-pop stores. After months of Israeli airstrikes, the holiday season began not with celebration, but with funerals as church members tended to their dead.

The pastor, Yaacoub Saab, did his best to lift spirits as he stepped up to the altar. “It’s a great blessing to gather and pray together,” he said. But later, out of earshot of his parishioners, he conceded that “we are finding it difficult to celebrate.”

Amid a cease-fire between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Tyre’s ancient Christian community has resigned itself to a muted Christmas this year. While most of Tyre’s 125,000 residents fled during the war, the city’s Christian quarter, nestled alongside the harbor with its winding alleyways, was one of the few neighborhoods where some people remained. For months, they survived largely on handouts of bread, cut off from the outside world as water, electricity and medicine dwindled.

Despite the reprieve from the violence in recent weeks, the community remains haunted by trauma and loss. When friends and loved ones cross paths in the street, festive greetings are the last thing on anyone’s tongue. “Thank God for your safety,” they would say.

On Sunday, after Mass was over, Charbel Alameh, 11, ran outside and jostled among friends to ring the church bells, the boys leaping into the air and pulling down with all their might on the hefty ropes. Charbel had gone months without seeing their faces. His mother, Souraya Alameh, who was pregnant, had decided to stay put when other families in the neighborhood fled. She feared having to give birth away from home in a hospital crammed with war wounded.

Like many Lebanese, the Alameh family had been caught off guard by Israel’s sudden bombing campaign in late September. The ramped-up offensive followed nearly a year of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, which began firing rockets at Israel in October 2023 in solidarity with Hamas militants in Gaza.

Faced with one of the most intense air raids in contemporary warfare, hundreds of thousands of people tried to flee, and the highways in southern Lebanon quickly clogged with miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic.

“There was nowhere for us to go,” recounted Ms. Alameh as she sat in the family’s damp, single-room home, watching intently over little Christina as she slept in her cot — a child of war born into an uncertain peace.

After months spent sheltering as Israeli fighter jets roared overhead, members of the family were desperate to claw back some sense of holiday cheer. They had already prepared and wrapped their gifts months ago, ready to cart them away in case they needed to flee. Charbel and his younger brother, Elias, had decorated a small Christmas tree in the corner and were now tucking into baklava as members of the local clergy came in to see the newborn baby.

Both boys are receiving trauma counseling at school, Ms. Alameh said. “We tried to explain as much as a child’s understanding allows,” she said, “but at the end of the war, we, the adults, needed someone to explain what had happened, too.”

Next door, the Kahwaji family’s home was devoid of decoration. Where a Christmas tree once stood there was now just a collection of empty water bottles. With running water scarce during the bombardment, family members had made a perilous journey to the neighborhood’s outskirts to fill up the containers and lug them home. They said they had survived mostly on boiled potatoes, cooked atop a simple burner affixed to a gas canister.

“We surrendered ourselves to God,” said Rita Kahwaji, gesturing to the Christian iconography that adorned the home’s peeling walls.

This was not their first war.

Ms. Kahwaji’s daughter, Nazha, or “Nana,” as her family calls her, is deaf in one ear after she was maimed as a 7-month-old baby when, they said, an Israeli strike hit a relative’s home more than three decades ago. Ms. Kahwaji herself was injured in the blast, the shrapnel still lodged centimeters from her heart.

“We’ve lived our whole life in war,” she said.

Nana Kahwaji sat on the family’s couch, her neck adorned with a small gold cross, and at times strained to hear her family speak. She had hastened to design the nativity scene at the church as soon as the cease-fire was announced, but it had done little to cheer up her normally bubbly 7-year-old daughter.

“There are barely any celebrations this year,” Nana said. “Mentally, we are unable.”

In the weeks since the truce was reached, life has begun to stutter back to normal in Tyre, where tens of thousands of residents have returned to the coastal city. Teenage girls snap selfies on the seafront. Fishermen repair their nets. Groups of friends sit in cafes gossiping over cups of bitter, cardamom-infused Arabic coffee.

The destruction, however, is not easy to ignore.

On the city’s main shopping street, businesses that once bustled in the holiday season have been pulverized, and some of those that remain have been blackened by fire. Jewelry stores, restaurants, chic swimwear outlets — many have been reduced to rubble, the torsos of shop mannequins strewed amid the rubble. In the remnants of one residential building, a sole curtain fluttered in the wintry breeze; the floors below it were collapsed like a pancake.

“We’re still alive,” one man called down as he combed through what was left of his apartment.

At Nour and Mahdi Akanan’s toy store, the husband and wife had only recently reopened after an airstrike across the street gutted their building, destroying what they said was nearly $35,000 in stock. Now, just a flimsy piece of paper advertised their store name. They had placed outside one of the few objects to survive the blast, a saxophone-playing Santa Claus, in the hopes of enticing customers.

“The demand for toys is very little this year,” said Ms. Akanan.

The store had sold only seven items since reopening and may be forced to close, Ms. Akanan said, gesturing to a family across the way pulling belongings from the flattened building.

“Priorities,” she said. “They don’t want to celebrate anything.”

Jacob Roubai contributed reporting.

Visitors from Mexico and around the world stood for hours in a line that stretched for blocks to see a spectacle that the city of Oaxaca has hosted for more than 120 years.

The attraction? Radishes.

Every Dec. 23, the southern Mexican city, celebrated for its vibrant culture, cuisine and history, comes to a near standstill for a simple vegetable typically served in soups, on salads and with tacos.

But instead of eating the radishes, the crowds gather for the annual Noche de Rábanos competition (the Night of the Radishes), where local residents transform the root vegetable into extravagant works of art.

This year there were Nativity scenes, Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) displays, depictions of Indigenous mythology and much more.

“The material is so fun,” said María de los Angeles Aragón García, 21, a local visual arts student who competed for the first time with two friends. “It reminds me of my childhood, when they said, ‘Don’t play with your food.’ But here they say, ‘Sculpt something with your food.’”

Mexico bursts with vibrant traditions, yet few are as enchanting as this one in Oaxaca. What began as local vendors decorating their fish and vegetable stands at a Christmas market in the city center evolved into a contest back in 1897. The radish became the official medium because it was abundant and easy to mold.

“It’s part of our idiosyncrasy and our economic reality,” said Francisco Martínez Neri, Oaxaca’s mayor. “People make art or songs or poetry from whatever they have.”

Although Oaxaca has expanded from a farming town into a city with a metropolitan population of 800,000, its residents have kept the custom alive. A state decree protects the yearly event, and the city provides the radishes — 12 tons this year — free to the participants.

There are two different varieties of radishes for contestants to use, including one that grows up to seven pounds. (No, these aren’t supposed to be eaten, city officials said, because of the insecticides and treated water used to grow them.)

Some Oaxacan families have been competing for decades, passing down the craft and their carving tips from one generation to the next.

“In the beginning, you want to win because there is a prize,” said José Domingo Luría Aquino, 44, a local artist and sculptor. In the traditional radish category this year, first place won about $1,500, with cash awards extending to 20th place.

“But with time,” Mr. Luría Aquino continued, “you do it because of tradition, and it’s why we’ve instilled it in our children.”

Mr. Luría Aquino met his wife, Ileana, 39, at the contest 18 years ago, and they have competed almost every year since. “December smells like radishes to me,” she said.

The night before the event, the entire family — including their children Fernando, 14; Sofia, 11; and Alejandro, 5, — gathered in the garage of a studio to carve radishes for their display. Their entry depicted the traditional Flor de Piña (Flower of Pineapple) dance in which Oaxacan women wear radiant outfits while holding the fruit on their shoulders.

Not all families competing, though, have professional artists leading the charge.

The winner in the traditional radish category this year was Carlos David Vásquez López, a 19-year-old communications student who was home in Oaxaca from college in Chicago for the winter break.

His father, 50, is a pastor and his mother, 47, is a midwife, yet the family has won first place several times over the decades.

Although Mr. Vásquez López has been competing in the event since he was 7, this was his first time choosing the theme for the family’s entry and directing them. He picked Oaxacan food because he missed it so much while away.

“For me, for my family, it’s a chance to share a message and an idea about Oaxaca,” he said. Some of his earliest memories, he added, are of sitting around and talking as a family while making a radish display.

In the patio at his parents’ home, the family had a giant whiteboard with sketches of their plans. Mr. Vásquez López, his younger brother Daniel, 15, and his father focused on the larger structures in their exhibit: the food stands, carts and tables. His mother and aunt handled the smaller details: the traditional Oaxacan tlayudas (imagine a large crispy corn tortilla pizza), clothing or hair.

The family was racing against time. All the adult participants picked their radishes from the field on Thursday, leaving four days to prepare their entries. But radishes dry out and rot quickly when out of the ground, particularly after being carved. So the contestants try to keep them moist, submerging the vegetables in water or constantly spraying them.

The day before the competition, Mr. Vásquez López and his family worked into the wee hours. He said he didn’t get to sleep until 4:30 a.m. Monday and his father until 6 a.m. They woke up soon after to head to the city center and set up their stand. The judges came by around noon and the gates opened for the public from 2 p.m. until midnight.

Any resident of Oaxaca state is allowed to compete and for free. The city spent roughly $65,000 on this year’s event, including buying the radish seeds and hosting children’s workshops, said Ángel Norberto Osorio Morales, the city’s tourism secretary. Officials view it as an important promotional tool for the city — an estimated 10,000 visitors came to the event in 2022 — as well as for Oaxacan customs and creativity.

“It’s impressive how this tradition among Oaxacans keeps reinventing itself every year because no figures are the same,” he said. “It keeps surprising us.”

This year there were more than 100 entries, including the smaller competitions where displays are made mostly from a local flower or corn husks. In the radish categories, participants are allowed to use other materials, such as wood or grass, but they have to be organic and the majority of the stand has to be made from the star of the night: radishes.

Día de los Muertos and Nativity scenes were the most common themes on Monday. Two submissions came from inmates at penitentiaries in the state. Four children — and their teacher — participated from a local public culinary school.

Over the decades, city officials said, the event has not only exhibited Oaxacan culture but society at large. When humans first landed on the moon, in 1969, and during the Zapatista uprising, in 1994, for example, the displays those years reflected those events.

When the winners were declared on Monday night, Mr. Vásquez López was shocked to find that his entry had triumphed. After accepting his certificate and ceremonial check, he embraced his family, including a cousin who clinched third place. Overwhelmed with joy, his mother cried.

“The satisfaction I feel is that I brought the same spirit that I saw in my parents when I was little,” Mr. Vásquez López said.

He vowed to defend his title next year.

For much of the last two years, Vladimir Kara-Murza barely used his voice. A political activist and vehement critic of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, he was confined to a harsh isolation cell in a Siberian penal colony.

Now, he is using his voice as often as possible.

Since being traded to the West in August in the biggest prisoner exchange since the Cold War, Mr. Kara-Murza, 43, has been lobbying Western leaders to take stronger action against Mr. Putin. At the same time, he is trying to give opposition-minded Russians at home and abroad reasons for hope.

Mr. Kara-Murza said the need for more prisoner swaps had been among his main arguments to world leaders, including President Biden, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France.

“While people are listening, I feel a responsibility to speak because I feel a responsibility toward all the others who are still left back there,” he said, referring to the hundreds of political prisoners in Russia. “We need to have more of these exchanges.”

He has promoted this cause even though he has maintained that he was released from Russia against his will.

“It has always been a question of principle that a Russian politician has to stay in Russia,” he said. “Because what moral right do I have to call on my fellow Russian citizens to stand up and resist the dictatorship if I wasn’t prepared to do it myself?”

Many of the others who were released have spent some time decompressing and getting used to their freedom. Mr. Kara-Murza immediately got to work.

“The hardest part was that there was no re-acclimating, because I went from solitary confinement in a strict regime prison in Siberia to traveling around to four or five different countries every week,” Mr. Kara-Murza said in a video interview from his study in the Washington area.

In his calmer moments, he still wonders if it has all been a dream.

“Frankly, it still feels completely surreal,” he added. “It feels like I’m watching some kind of a film. It’s a really good one, but it still does not feel real.”

“I still get this feeling sometimes that, you know, at 5 a.m. tomorrow, I’m going to wake up from the Soviet national anthem blasting on my radio,” he said. “I have to attach my bunk bed to the wall, and then we start again.”

He was referring to a practice in the punishment cells he was held in: From 5 a.m. until 9 p.m., the beds must be folded against the wall, forcing the prisoner either to sit on the floor or stand the entire time.

Finally, this holiday season, he will get to take his first vacation — at the beach — with his family in three years.

Like Aleksei A. Navalny, the prominent activist who died in prison last February, Mr. Kara-Murza is believed to have been poisoned twice, once in 2015 and again in 2017. The F.B.I., at the behest of Congressional lawmakers, investigated his resulting illness as a case of “intentional poisoning” but blood tests by an American weapons research laboratory and hundreds of pages of F.B.I. files were not released to him.

His supporters say it was punishment for his active lobbying in the West for sanctions against Kremlin-connected elites.

Mr. Kara-Murza suffers from polyneuropathy, a nerve condition that affects his ability to feel his extremities. It is believed to be a side effect of the poisoning.

While he was incarcerated, Mr. Kara-Murza lost 55 pounds. Eventually his feet and ankles were so swollen from his condition that he could not put on his boots. Before falling asleep each night, he said, he would lie on his bed with his legs lifted up, to let the blood flow back toward his core.

“Human beings get used to anything,” he said. “So in any conditions, you sort of find things that you can do to make things a little better.”

Although such frailty would be grounds to release many convicts, he refused to let his lawyers make the state of his health public.

“My point was that I should be released because I’m innocent, not because I have a health problem,” he said.

He spent at least 315 days in solitary confinement, in contravention of Russia’s own rules. According to the United Nations, more than 15 consecutive days in solitary confinement is considered torture. The only other opposition politician subjected to such an intense regime of solitary confinement was Mr. Navalny, an inspirational leader to the Russian opposition and a fierce critic of Mr. Putin.

Mr. Kara-Murza, who speaks fluent English, comes from a long line of Kremlin opponents. One of his great-grandfathers was a Latvian social democrat and revolutionary executed as an “enemy of the people” in 1938, at the height of Stalin’s “Great Terror.” His grandfather, a journalist and historian, was arrested in 1937, and forced to do hard labor in the Russian Far East.

Mr. Kara-Murza’s father, Vladimir, became an independent journalist as democracy was starting to emerge in Russia in the 1990s, and the son followed in his footsteps, starting his journalism career when he was 16. In 1999, while still a teenager, he interviewed the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, and he soon got involved in politics as Mr. Nemtsov’s aide.

It was the same year that another man sharing his name and patronymic, Vladimir Vladimirovich — Mr. Putin — rose to lead Russia.

As a young adult, Mr. Kara-Murza remained active in both journalism and politics in Russia, working alongside Mr. Nemtsov and producing a documentary series about the Soviet dissident movement. His extensive studies of those who defied the Kremlin during the Soviet era helped sustain him while he was in prison, he said.

“It was just absolutely mind boggling how everything is exactly the same,” he said. “I mean, down to the last details, down to the way the cell is organized, the way you’re taken to the courtyard for the prison walk, the way prison guards speak to you.”

Rereading Gulag memoirs in his cell was a source of solace, he said. “My education as a historian perhaps never came as useful to me as it did when I was in prison,” he said. “Because I know that we’ve had all this in Russia before, and we know that it ended, and we know how it ended.”

“And this one’s not any different,” he added, referring to the Putin era.

Out of prison, Mr. Kara-Murza knows he cannot feel 100 percent secure.

On Aug. 1, as he was about to be freed, one of the Russian security service agents escorting the prisoners told him and Ilya Yashin, another activist who was released, that they should not allow themselves to feel safe in the West.

“He told us, ‘Remember, Krasikov can come for you any time,’” Mr. Kara-Murza said. It was a reference to Vadim Krasikov, the assassin who killed a Kremlin opponent in Berlin and was sent back to Russia as part of the same exchange.

“I just try not to think about it because — first of all, because I know that what I’m doing is right,” he said.

Mr. Kara-Murza became well known in Washington because of his lobbying for the so-called Magnitsky sanctions against human rights abusers in Russia. He grew so close to Senator John McCain, a champion of those sanctions, that he was a pallbearer at his funeral.

Since 2017, Mr. Kara-Murza has been a regular columnist for the Washington Post, and this year he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for columns written while he was in prison.

Mr. Kara-Murza hopes opposition leaders can find common cause with the incoming Trump administration. He praised Senator Marcio Rubio of Florida, whom President-elect Donald J. Trump has nominated to be his secretary of state, for advocating for political prisoners in Russia, Belarus and other repressive countries.

He said his top priority is holding the Kremlin elite accountable for the atrocities they committed inside and outside of Russia, but he has steadfastly rejected the assertion, common in Ukraine and elsewhere, that all Russians bear responsibility for Mr. Putin and his aggression.

“We were protesting Putin from the beginning, from the year 2000, while Western leaders on both sides of the Atlantic were looking into his eyes and seeing his soul, pushing reset buttons with him, rolling out red carpets, inviting him for summits, buying oil and gas and so on,” he said.

“So if people want to talk about collective responsibility in Russia,” he said, “let’s not forget about the collective responsibility of Western leaders who were aiding and abetting and enabling and appeasing Putin throughout his first many years in power.”

Desi Bouterse, the brutal former dictator turned populist president of Suriname who was convicted of murdering some of his political opponents, has died. He was 79.

Ronnie Brunswijk, the country’s vice president, who was Mr. Bouterse’s former bodyguard and later his rival, confirmed the death in a post on Facebook. The post said Mr. Bouterse had died on Tuesday, but did not say where or give a cause. News media in Suriname, a small South American nation, reported that Mr. Bouterse had been suffering from an undisclosed illness.

Mr. Bouterse was a divisive figure in the former Dutch colony of Suriname: a national hero to some and a brutal dictator to others.

Born to a poor family in Suriname’s sugar belt on Oct. 13, 1945, he dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Dutch Army.

Mr. Bouterse seized power in a military coup in 1980 — five years after the country’s independence from the Netherlands — and ruled Suriname through terror. In 1982, fearing a countercoup, he ordered his soldiers to round up, torture and execute 15 prominent dissidents. The victims included journalists, professors, lawyers and others.

The killings, which have become known as the “December Murders,” traumatized the country and prompted the Netherlands to suspend economic and military cooperation with its former colony.

Mr. Brunswijk, his onetime bodyguard, led a guerrilla war against Mr. Bouterse that started in 1986. The bloody civil war ultimately led to the end of Mr. Bouterse’s rule and helped usher in democracy.

Suriname held its first post-coup elections in 1987 and returned to civilian rule in 1988.

Mr. Bouterse stayed on as the head of the army until he resigned in 1990, saying that he didn’t feel the Surinamese government sufficiently backed the military.

As a civilian, he got rich through timber and gold dealings while remaining a major force in Suriname’s politics. He formed the National Democratic Party, which over time grew from a military clique into the country’s first major multiethnic political movement.

But the shadow of the “December Murders” continued to loom: In 2007, Suriname’s military court initiated a case against Mr. Bouterse and 24 other defendants. Mr. Bouterse that year said he accepted “political responsibility” for the killings, but denied direct involvement.

The trial would last for more than 15 years, and during that time Mr. Bouterse reinvented himself as the country’s populist champion. In 2010, he won a national election and swept back into power as president.

Rather than playing down his checkered past — which included a 1999 conviction in absentia in the Netherlands for smuggling cocaine into the country — Mr. Bouterse celebrated it.

After assuming the presidency, Mr. Bouterse also began to remake Suriname’s governing institutions. He put his wife on the payroll for her duties as first lady and appointed his son to a counterterrorism unit. He showered supporters with cheap houses and food, spending that left the country practically bankrupt and forced the government to raid banking reserves to import food.

Mr. Bouterse also shifted Suriname’s alliances away from the Netherlands, its former colonial ruler, toward China and nearby Venezuela.

He was re-elected president in 2015 to a term that included a murder conviction for his role in the December 1982 killings. Mr. Bouterse — who had earlier been granted immunity by Suriname’s parliament for any crimes he might have committed, including the December Murders — appealed the conviction.

His decades-long hold on power in Suriname ended in 2020 when Chan Santokhi, a former police chief and leader of the opposition, defeated him in an election.

Last year, a Surinamese court upheld Mr. Bouterse’s 2019 murder conviction — the final ruling in a 16-year legal process — and sentenced him to 20 years in prison.

But Mr. Bouterse never served time.

This January, instead of surrendering to the authorities, Mr. Bouterse went into hiding.

“He’s not going to jail,” his wife, Ingrid Bouterse-Waldring, told reporters at the time.

Mr. Bouterse apparently remained a fugitive until his death.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Bouterse’s survivors include two children, Dino and Peggy.

After a vicious cyclone this month razed slums housing many undocumented immigrants on the French island territory of Mayotte, Safina Soula did not shed a tear.

As the leader of an advocacy organization representing people from Mayotte, Ms. Soula staunchly supported an operation that the French authorities started last year to destroy the slums and deport undocumented immigrants, most of whom come from the nearby Comoros islands.

She hailed the cyclone as “a divine Wuambushu” — using the name of the slum clearance operation, and added, “Now the state must react quickly and forbid the reconstruction of these shantytowns.”

Cyclone Chido, which struck on Dec. 14 and killed at least 39 people, is inflaming already dangerous tensions over immigration on Mayotte, an archipelago off Africa’s eastern coast. After the disaster, France’s interior ministry said that nearly a third of Mayotte’s 320,000 residents were undocumented immigrants. Locals are calling for the government to ramp up efforts to deport them.

Many Mahorais, as locals are known, have long blamed immigrants for committing crimes and straining resources. Mayotte, where nearly 80 percent of the residents live in poverty, is the poorest place in France.

The people of Mayotte and Comoros share a common ancestry. However, in a decisive referendum in 1974, Mayotte was the only part of the Comoros archipelago that voted to remain part of France.

In recent years, people on Mayotte have attacked the homes of immigrants and stood in front of hospitals and immigration offices to block immigrants from entering. Mahorais have voted in large numbers for far-right, nationalist politicians, who have lobbied for tougher immigration laws specific to Mayotte. Among their demands is ending birthright citizenship for children born to non-French parents on the islands.

After the cyclone hit, France’s interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, gave a television interview saying that France needed to take a more aggressive stance against illegal immigration as part of the reconstruction efforts. He suggested using drones to monitor and stop the boats bringing migrants illegally from Comoros, accusing its government of “pushing populations toward Mayotte to create a kind of illegal occupation.”

On Tuesday, the French government announced that it was restoring boat service between Mayotte and Comoros — and that Comorians could use it to return home, free of charge.

France’s prime minister, François Bayrou, said on Tuesday that he expected the final death toll from the cyclone to remain in the dozens. While surveying the demolished shantytowns, the top French official in Mayotte at first announced that hundreds, if not thousands, had likely perished.

Immigrants in Mayotte have described living a precarious existence long before the cyclone hit. They say they are constantly stopped by the police. Many have been deported multiple times. After each deportation, they take a dangerous 43-mile journey on a rickety boat from Comoros to reunite with their families in Mayotte.

Residents, and even a senior government leader, said they feared that fighting could break out between migrants and Mayotte natives over the island chain’s depleted resources after the cyclone ravaged some communities.

Sylvie Zein, a 37-year-old doctor from mainland France, said that a few days after the storm, she was near the mosque in the village where she had been living — Mtsamboro, in the northern part of the country — when residents became alarmed at the sight of about 20 immigrants standing near the beach with machetes. The village director announced over a loudspeaker, “Go to your homes because they are coming,” Ms. Zein recalled.

“You have people with nothing and you have people with everything,” she said. “These people, in the beginning, didn’t like each other. So now the tensions, it’s much worse.”

In the decades since the 1974 referendum, Mayotte and Comoros have taken divergent paths. Despite Mayotte’s poverty, French support has meant it is better off economically than Comoros. Many Mahorais express resentment that Comorians, who rejected France, now seek refuge and economic opportunities in a French territory.

“Comorians chose to be independent, and Mayotte decided to continue its adventure with France,” said Ambdilwahedou Soumaila, the mayor of Mamoudzou, the capital of Mayotte. “Now each must take responsibility for their choice. We believe that Comorians should stay there.”

In a visit to Mayotte last week, President Emmanuel Macron of France caused an uproar with a profanity-laced defense of his government’s assistance to Mayotte, saying that it was better off than other islands in the Indian Ocean.

“You are happy to be in France, because if it wasn’t France, let me tell you, you’d be 10,000 times” worse off, Mr. Macron told a crowd of locals, using an expletive. “There is no other place in the Indian Ocean where we help people this much.”

Some aid organizations have criticized France’s treatment of migrants on Mayotte, where citizenship and residency rules for foreign nationals are stricter than in the rest of France.

The United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, said French officials routinely placed children on Mayotte in immigration detention with their families, despite condemnation of the practice by the European Court of Human Rights. Of the 3,211 children placed in detention in France in 2021, all but 76 of them were on Mayotte, UNICEF said.

When the government has demolished shantytowns, citizens have been relocated, but undocumented immigrants have not, UNICEF said. And some undocumented children are refused enrollment in schools. .

Still, many Mahorais believe the government is too accommodating of immigrants and have fought for stricter laws.

Ms. Soula’s group, the Collective of Citizens of Mayotte, has blocked the entrance to the office of the prefect, France’s top official in the territory, since October to prevent immigrants from going there to acquire legal documents. They believed government officials were granting residency permits to foreigners too freely, she said.

But the migrants say that the opposite is true, and that they live in fear, facing police stops so aggressive that they have sometimes led to Mahorais accidentally being deported.

Two days before the cyclone arrived, a 34-year-old woman from Comoros, who is not being identified to protect her identity, was deported to Comoros, leaving behind her five children, all of whom were born on Mayotte. It was the third time she had been deported since she moved to Mayotte in 2009.

She cried day and night, she said, worried that her children would not survive the vicious 120-mile-per-hour winds in the tin shack where they lived on a steep hillside. But the day after the storm passed, her 14-year-old daughter, her eldest child, called her in tears and said they had all survived.

Four days later, the woman said she paid 300 euros, about $312, to cram into a kwassa-kwassa, a wooden boat, for the treacherous 11-hour journey to return to Mayotte illegally. She arrived at 3 a.m. last Friday, happy to be reunited with her children.

“They’re always sending me back to Comoros like it’s a game,” she said. “There’s a day that I will die at sea.”

Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.

At least 56 people have been killed in Mozambique since Monday, a nongovernmental organization said on Wednesday, as police officers and protesters clashed in the latest wave of unrest over a presidential election that demonstrators claim was rigged by the governing party.

At Maputo Central Prison, which housed 2,500 inmates, more than 1,530 prisoners escaped, a police commander, Bernardino Rafael, said at news conference on Wednesday. Thirty-three prisoners were killed and 15 others wounded in a confrontation with guards trying to prevent detainees from fleeing, he said.

“Within the next few hours,” Mr. Rafael said, “150 of the escapees were recaptured by the authorities.”

Tensions escalated this week after the nation’s top court on Monday upheld the result of the election in favor of Daniel Chapo, the candidate for Frelimo, which has governed Mozambique since it gained independence from Portugal in 1975.

The political unrest comes as the southern African country is working to recover from Cyclone Chido. Mozambique’s death toll from the storm has risen to 120 since it made landfall more than a week ago, according to the country’s National Institute for Natural Disasters.

The death toll has nearly quadrupled from initial reported figures as rescue workers reach isolated rural areas. Most of those who died were in the province of Cabo Delgado, where hundreds of thousands of people had already fled their homes after years of attacks by an insurgent group backed by the Islamic State. The storm has affected more than 450,000 people in the country, the natural disaster institute said.

The protests erupted after the country’s election in October, and human rights groups say that Mozambique’s security forces have responded with excessive force, including firing live rounds and rubber bullets into crowds. The total death toll since Monday was unclear, but more than 150 people have died in the unrest since the election was held.

The top opposition candidate, Venâncio Mondlane, has asserted that he won the election. He has called for a national shutdown and for Mozambicans to take to the streets in protest. Mr. Mondlane said in a livestream on Tuesday that he was open to dialogue, “but only with international mediation.”

“I will do what the people tell me to do,” he said. “I am with the people.”

Protesters responded to the ruling by burning tires and blocking roads with trash and streetlights. The deaths have occurred across seven provinces, according to Plataforma Decide, a civil society monitoring group that has been tracking incidents related to the election.

Interior Minister Pascoal Ronda, speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, said hundreds of buildings had been looted or vandalized, including police stations, schools, hospitals, courts and homes.

“These acts pose a direct threat to stability, public safety and the values of our young democracy,” Mr. Ronda said. “Defense and security forces must act firmly to restore normalcy and hold those responsible accountable.”

He said that two police officers were among the dead and that the authorities had made dozens of arrests in connection with the violence. Plataforma Decide said on Wednesday that at least 102 had been detained.

Four prison breaks occurred on Wednesday in Mozambique: three in the provinces of Maputo and Matola, and one in Zambézia. Mr. Rafael, the police commander, said that in Matola City, 29 detainees fled after a prison break, including people arrested in connection with terrorism in northern Mozambique.

Around 1 p.m. Wednesday local time, he said, protesters surrounded Maputo Central Prison, chanting and demanding the release of detainees. They then broke through the prison wall from the inside, he said, and a confrontation with prison guards ensued, resulting in deaths and injuries.

He said the police were “committed, using intelligence efforts, to recapture those who escaped,” but he warned that “we expect an increase in crimes in the Maputo area in the coming days.”

Much of the public’s anger stems from widespread irregularities in the election process — including voter registration and vote counting — that were identified by independent observers. Demonstrators argue that those irregularities helped to tip the poll in favor of Mr. Chapo and Frelimo.

Despite the concerns, the Constitutional Council, Mozambique’s highest court, certified the results on Monday, saying that Mr. Chapo had won 65 percent of the vote and Mr. Mondlane 24 percent.

In central Maputo, the capital, a large group of protesters surrounded a police car and heavily armed forces on Tuesday evening, demanding the release of protesters who had been detained for throwing objects at the police. Another group of protesters joined in. Outnumbered, the officers opened the back of the police car and freed two young men, to the cheers of many.

Apparently fearing shortages in the coming days, people formed long lines at gas stations in Maputo, some carrying plastic containers. Supermarkets in central Maputo were running empty of supplies, and smaller markets were facing shortages and rising prices. In the city center and suburbs of Maputo, mountains of rubbish were piling up.

Residents are increasingly concerned that criminals may begin targeting homes. Many neighborhoods have created “vigilante” groups via WhatsApp, with some holding emergency in-person meetings on Wednesday.

The chaos spells further problems for the troubled economy of Mozambique, a coastal nation of 33 million people.

The government was already struggling to address high unemployment and poverty, and the Islamic State-backed insurgency in the northern part of the country has left several thousand dead and derailed lucrative natural gas projects. Much of the nation is shut down at a time when things are usually bustling with the festive holiday season. Several airlines have canceled flights to Maputo.

The months of upheaval have also threatened stability across the region, and South Africa has sought to fortify its border with Mozambique to prevent any of the violence from spilling over.

South Africa’s foreign minister, Ronald Lamola, traveled to Mozambique last week to meet with Mr. Ronda. They discussed ways to tackle disruption at the ports of entry between the countries, which has affected trade and supply chains and threatens food and energy security, according to the South African government.

“South Africa calls on all parties to commit to an urgent dialogue that will heal the country and set it on a new political and developmental trajectory,” South Africa’s foreign ministry said in a statement released on Tuesday.

Lynsey Chutel contributed reporting.

A U.S. diplomat on Tuesday slammed a new report on food security in the Gaza Strip that said famine was “highly likely” in part of the enclave, with the criticism fueling confusion and controversy over a humanitarian crisis that has drawn significant international attention.

The report, released on Monday by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a food security initiative known as FEWS Net, cited recent food supply data and population estimates to suggest that northern Gaza, where Israel has renewed its military campaign over the last three months, was reaching famine conditions.

In response, Jack Lew, a diplomat serving as the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said on Tuesday that FEWS Net’s report was “irresponsible” and relied on “outdated and inaccurate” population data, making it a poor predictor of food security issues.

“At a time when inaccurate information is causing confusion and accusations, it is irresponsible to issue a report like this,” Mr. Lew said. “We work day and night with the U.N. and our Israeli partners to meet humanitarian needs‚ which are great.”

The dispute highlights the difficulties with data collection in Gaza that have hampered humanitarian efforts since the war began. Israel’s bombardment of the enclave, which began after a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has forced repeated mass displacements and made it extremely difficult for aid groups to track civilians, determine their needs and, critically, gain an understanding of how much shifts in population data may reflect displacements or deaths.

Israel has said that it works hard to facilitate supplies to Gaza but that aid groups have often failed to deliver assistance because of widespread looting and lawlessness. The Biden administration warned Israel in October to let more aid in or face restrictions on military assistance. In November, it said that Israel had made important changes to improve the supply flow but that more still needed to be done.

Mr. Lew’s objection to the FEWS Net report came down to a difference in estimating the size of northern Gaza’s population. The report estimated that 65,000 to 75,000 people were still living there. Mr. Lew argued that only 7,000 to 15,000 civilians lived in the area, meaning that fewer resources would be necessary to sustain them. He said his range was based on two separate sets of data: one from the United Nations that estimated 10,000 to 15,000 civilians in the area, and another from Israeli authorities estimating 5,000 to 9,000.

The Israeli authority that coordinates the flow of goods to Gaza, known as COGAT, did not respond to requests for comment on the new food security report. But in a statement on social media on Monday, the Israeli agency disputed an unnamed recent report that it said “deliberately and inaccurately ignores the extensive humanitarian efforts made by Israel in the northern Gaza Strip” and “creates a false representation for the international community.”

FEWS Net said on Tuesday that it had relied on U.N. figures from mid-November to compile its report and that it would update its findings based on more recent numbers. But it did not withdraw the assessment.

Regardless of the population size in northern Gaza, OCHA, the U.N. agency for coordination of humanitarian affairs, said on Tuesday that the humanitarian supplies reaching the area were insufficient to support the remaining civilians there. It accused Israeli authorities of denying most U.N. attempts to coordinate humanitarian access to the area in December and expressed alarm over violence in and around hospitals.

The U.N. agency said that a hasty evacuation and military strikes on or near three hospitals in recent days had left one facility with almost no staff members on site and caused panic and damage in the other two.

The Israeli military said on Tuesday that it had conducted a “limited operation” against militants near the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza after fighters had planted explosives in the area. The hospital was evacuated before the operation, according to the military.

Five militants were killed in the attacks, the military said, and multiple other militants were later arrested, it said, including one involved in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. Israel has accused Hamas of exploiting civilian populations and infrastructure in Gaza in violation of international law and says it makes efforts to mitigate civilian harm.

Such attacks have been deliberately relentless, part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated strategy to wear Hamas down and create conditions for a cease-fire deal. But he has not given any timeline for a deal even as the Palestinian death toll rises and evidence mounts that Israeli military actions have most likely contributed to the deaths of hostages in Gaza, according to the military’s own probes.

Authorities in Gaza do not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths. Based on their figures, more than 3,780 people have been killed in Gaza since October of this year, and more than 45,000 have been killed since the start of the war. Many of those killed in northern Gaza and throughout the enclave have been civilians, though it is unclear precisely what proportion they make up of the total death toll.