Vasyl Pipa is not a Ukrainian soldier, but his job, at times, can be as dangerous as fighting in the trenches. As members of the White Angels, a branch of the police that evacuates civilians from the front line, he and others take extreme risks to rescue some of the last civilians who remain close to the fighting.

One of Mr. Pipa’s tasks is to evacuate civilians from Kurakhove, and from along the entire front line in the region. Traveling there is like flooring it through a thicket of life-threatening risks: Jets, drones and artillery can quickly annihilate an armored vehicle. Today, Russians control the city center, where fighting continues among the last few streets before the Kurakhove Power Station.

As the deadly Russian march forward intensifies, most Ukrainians are running for their lives. While some are loyal to President Vladimir V. Putin and welcome the white, blue and red flag hoisted here, the majority of those left behind are elderly, disabled and poor, with no means of relocating. Helping them to safety is the White Angels’ job, and as the front line shifts, its urgency is rising.

The depth of the hardship was evident this fall over seven weeks of observing the White Angels and other aid groups as they brought food and other essentials to the civilians and evacuated the ones who wanted to leave. They operated in town squares, in battered shelters and in destroyed homes.

“When we lost the armored car, damaged by a drone, we brought the people to an abandoned house,” Mr. Pipa said, recalling a recent evacuation. “The woman had a severe jaw injury, and a man was brought in with them, wounded too. The drones broke the roof and dropped the ammunition inside. Another drone was controlling the grenade dropping,” he said, adding, “We were chased.”

The White Angels finally rushed the civilians to temporary safety, scraping through rubble and under Russian bombardment, and were then able to remove the group farther from the front.

Vasyl Chupak and his brother, Viktor, had a long history of run-ins with law enforcement and had spent half their lives in prison. But this fall, Vasyl Chupak went to the Kurakhove police station voluntarily. His brother had cirrhosis of the liver and was deteriorating quickly. They knew they needed to leave before it was too late.

The police sped across town to their apartment block to find Viktor Chupak emaciated and living in squalor. An armored van took them to an ambulance, which transported them to a hospital.

Kurakhove, a small city in the southern reach of the Donetsk region, sits on the eastern edge of the Zaporizhzhia region’s defense lines. Only about 800 residents, including children, remain from a prewar population of 18,220. Those who stay live in the basements of apartment buildings without electricity, running water or heating. Every day, the city is subjected to artillery fire, mortars and drone attacks.

With people stranded and no supplies, Mr. Pipa and his colleagues delivered food and supplies to the last open shop. Nothing would reach here without their help, leaving people to survive only on scarce canned food.

The Donbas, of which the Donetsk region is part, used to be Ukraine’s most densely populated area. Cities like Avdiivka, Bakhmut and Vuhledar were home to tens of thousands of people. When these and a slew of others were destroyed, falling under Russian control, most residents fled to Pokrovsk.

The fall of neighboring areas has brought Russian forces ever closer to Pokrovsk, turning it from a safe refuge for civilians into a ghost town. By November, the population had shrunk to about 11,400, from 60,000. After the capture of the village of Shevchenko in mid-December, Russian forces are now less than a mile away.

The Russian Army has gone all-in to capture every inch of the surrounding area — a flashpoint of the war and potentially a significant prize for Mr. Putin.

“The Pokrovsk and Kurakhove region remains the most difficult along the entire front line,” said Capt. Artem Mokhnach of Ukraine, the spokesman for Operational Tactical Group Donetsk.

One day last month, under a gray and stormy sky, the heavy sound of bombing rumbled menacingly around the outskirts of Pokrovsk. The city is awash with imposing arrays of concrete “dragon’s teeth,” anti-tank fortifications. A local woman, Natalia, strolled through the concrete spikes to arrive at a shop with a meager selection of salted pork fat and pickled vegetables.

The war has hit her hard, she agreed, describing the lack of running water and heating. “But where to go?” she concluded.

Russian drones maraud throughout the city, and artillery fire is a daily occurrence. The flight range of the drones has increased from about three miles less than two years ago to about 15 miles now. They present a significant daily threat to civilians, and to humanitarian aid workers coming to help them.

These fast-flying and precise lethal weapons have been hunting and stalking the local population, the head of Pokrovsk’s military and civilian administration, Serhii Dobriak, said.

“A family was going to Novotroitske, a father, mother, and son,” he said. “They saw that it was an ordinary civilian car, a Lada. But the drone hit them on purpose. It killed the son. The mother’s arm was torn off.”

“Neither the ambulance nor the military could reach them,” he added.

On Dec. 12, a pipeline was bombed beyond repair, cutting off all gas to the town. On the same day, the Pokrovsk city administration announced the interruption of drinking water deliveries to the distribution points because the bombardments made it too dangerous. The most important thing is for civilians to leave the city, Mr. Dobriak said.

Entire blocks of Myrnohrad, a city near Pokrovsk, have been destroyed and are now covered in gray concrete dust, with people’s belongings blown into the street.

“In Myrnohrad, the enemy is constantly inflicting indiscriminate fire on the city using various types of weapons,” explained Captain Mokhnach, the spokesman for Operational Tactical Group Donetsk. This mining town, adjacent to the city of Pokrovsk, which in 2020 had a population of 48,864, now has just 1,658 inhabitants, local officials said.

A black smear stained the street beside a woman selling food from a small stand. She said it was the blood of a woman who had been decapitated by a rocket that fell on the building next door. Her account was corroborated by several others, including two men who said they had witnessed it.

Viktor Shotropa, 36, of Global Empowerment Mission, a disaster relief group, tries to ensure that humanitarian aid reaches the people along the front line. Two 20-ton trucks from his agency containing about 1,500 food parcels are delivered daily to the Donetsk region to help cope with the ongoing crisis. Mr. Shotropa knows the situation well; he has delivered aid to dangerous Ukrainian cities such as Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Vuhledar.

“In Pokrovsk, the situation is just beginning,” he said. “We should prepare for the worst.”

In the Myrnohrad town square, Mr. Shotropa opened the rear doors of his armored van as people appeared, seemingly from nowhere, with bicycles, wheelbarrows, carts and baby carriages to transport the food aid boxes home. Pushing and shouting, they tried to get a box before the supply ran out or the Russian drone operators noticed the crowd.

After almost three years of evacuating people, Mr. Pipa remembers a man who died despite his efforts to save him. “It’s hard to bear when people die, ordinary people in your arms,” he said. “It’s just hard. It leaves such an emptiness inside.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel will undergo surgery to have his prostate removed Sunday after he was diagnosed with a urinary tract infection earlier in the week, his office said in a statement Saturday.

Mr. Netanyahu, 75, was examined at Hadassah Hospital on Wednesday and was diagnosed with an infection “stemming from a benign enlargement of his prostate,” the statement said, adding that he had been successfully treated for several days with antibiotics.

The complication from the enlarged gland follows several other health problems: In March, the prime minister underwent surgery to treat a hernia while his government wrestled with international criticism for its handling of Israel’s war in Gaza.

Mr. Netanyahu was also unexpectedly hospitalized and fitted with a pacemaker in 2023 after a fainting episode alerted his doctors to heart irregularities.

He had a previous hernia operation in 2013.

The latest health issue comes the same week that Israel unleashed a torrent of airstrikes on parts of Yemen controlled by the Houthis in retaliation for a barrage of missile attacks by the Iranian-backed group. After the Israeli military’s strikes, which included an attack on the international airport in Sana, the Houthis have continued to fire rockets at Israel.

Israel has been embroiled in a conflict on multiple fronts since the Hamas-led terror attack on Oct. 7, 2023, fighting the Palestinian group in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as striking targets in Syria and trading fire with Iran.

Mr. Netanyahu is also in the midst of testifying in his own corruption case, in which he is accused of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate but related cases that have divided Israeli citizens and caused years of political turmoil.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Saturday apologized for the crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines plane this past week, breaking the Kremlin’s three-day silence on the accident that killed 38 people. He did not explicitly acknowledge Russia’s responsibility for the crash.

Mr. Putin “offered his apologies” for the crash in a phone call to his Azerbaijani counterpart, Ilham Aliyev, the Kremlin said in a statement. Mr. Putin initiated the phone call, according to the statement, and told Mr. Aliyev “that the tragic incident took place in Russian airspace.”

Mr. Putin said that as the plane approached its scheduled destination of Grozny, in southern Russia, Russian air defenses had begun to repulse an attack by Ukrainian drones on the Grozny airport and others nearby, according to the Kremlin.

Aviation experts and U.S. officials believe a Russian air-defense missile may have mistakenly downed the passenger jet. The Kremlin statement stopped short of attributing the crash to a Russian missile, but in its own statement acknowledging the apology, Azerbaijan’s presidential office suggested that was indeed the cause.

“President Ilham Aliyev emphasized that the Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane encountered external physical and technical interference while in Russian airspace, resulting in a complete loss of control,” Azerbaijan’s presidential office said in the statement on Saturday. The plane “was able to make an emergency landing solely due to the courage and professionalism of the pilots,” the statement added.

Mr. Aliyev called for a thorough investigation and for “ensuring those responsible are held accountable.”

President Biden, vacationing on Saturday in the U.S. Virgin Islands, responded to a question shouted by a reporter about whether Mr. Putin should take responsibility for the crash.

“Apparently he did, but I haven’t spoken to him,” Mr. Biden said, offering a more generous interpretation of the Kremlin’s statement.

The Embraer 190 airliner was traveling from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Grozny, but was diverted from its path. It eventually crashed in Aktau, Kazakhstan, after crossing the Caspian Sea. More than half of people on board were Azerbaijani citizens. Seven Russians and six Kazakhs died in the crash.

Of the 67 people onboard, 29 survived.

Mr. Putin said Russia had opened a criminal investigation into the crash, according to the Kremlin, and was hosting Azerbaijani investigators in Grozny. The Kremlin’s statement tried to project a united front among the three nations most affected by the crash.

“The relevant agencies of Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are closely cooperating on the site of the catastrophe,” the Kremlin statement read.

On Wednesday, the day of the crash, Russian authorities initially said that the plane had been diverted because of fog, and that birds had caused the crash. But survivors described a banging noise outside the plane and fragments entering the cabin, injuring an arm of a flight attendant.

Mr. Aliyev’s more accusatory, strongly worded statement on Saturday presents the first challenge from Russia’s allies to Moscow’s attempts to control the narrative.

Both Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have long tried to build economic ties to the West and shed the Russian colonial legacy — without antagonizing the Kremlin. The two former Soviet states have taken a neutral stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, benefiting from growing trade with Russia without directly supporting Kremlin’s war aims.

Still, the Kremlin’s apology without accepting responsibility complicates these countries’ efforts to maintain friendly relations with Russia without appearing weak to their citizens and the world, analysts said.

The Kremlin’s acceptance of responsibility is particularly important in Azerbaijan because Mr. Aliyev apologized to Mr. Putin for the Azerbaijani military’s erroneous downing of a Russian military helicopter in 2020. At the time, Azerbaijan swiftly took responsibility and offered compensation for the accident, which claimed the lives of two Russian servicemen.

Mr. Aliyev most likely expected a similar response now from the Kremlin, said Zaur Shiriyev, an Azerbaijan expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a policy research organization.

Mr. Putin’s statement “is a textbook example of a non-apology apology,” Mr. Shiriyev said in an email interview. “There was no direct acceptance of responsibility, no offer of compensation, and no commitment to hold those responsible accountable.”

Neither Kazakhstan nor Azerbaijan have an incentive to allow the plane crash to sink relations with an unpredictable and militaristic neighbor, foreign policy experts said. But the Kremlin’s tardy and partial apology could breed resentment in these countries, with long-term potential consequences for Russia’s influence in the former Soviet Union, the experts added.

“There aren’t that many countries that are on good terms with Russia now,” Rasim Musabayov, an Azerbaijani lawmaker, said in a phone interview on Friday. “If Moscow doesn’t make the right steps in this situation, the list might get shorter.”

The government of Kazakhstan has been more cautious than Azerbaijan’s, with officials there refusing to assign blame thus far.

International law states that because the plane crashed on Kazakhstan’s territory, it will have to disclose the findings of the investigation. But the Kazakh government faces particular risks in provoking the Kremlin, said Luca Anceschi, a professor of Eurasian Studies at the University of Glasgow, in Scotland.

The landlocked Central Asian nation’s economy remains dependent on neighboring Russia, which ships most of its energy exports. And the Kazakhstan government’s gradual efforts to assert national language and culture in public life have drawn periodic ire from Russian ultranationalists, who have called on the Kremlin to protect Russian speakers there. Mr. Putin has used similar claims to justify his invasion of Ukraine.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, has pursued a careful policy on neutrality, deepening economic ties to Russia and attending Mr. Putin’s summits, while delivering humanitarian aid to Ukraine and refusing to recognize Russian annexation of Ukrainian land.

Kazakhstan has also benefited from the West’s sanctions on Russia after the invasion. Its exports to Russia rose 25 percent in the first year of the war, as Russian companies sought alternative channels for buying foreign goods. Azerbaijan’s total trade with Russia rose 24 percent in the same period.

Mr. Tokayev will most likely try to prevent the plane crash from upsetting this delicate neutrality before expected Ukraine-Russia peace talks promised by President-elect Donald J. Trump, who takes office in January, Professor Anceschi said. Kazakhstan’s main goal is to protect its interests in a new regional order that would emerge after the war, he said.

No Russian official has commented on the growing evidence that the plane was damaged by Russian air defenses. On Friday, though, the head of Russian civil aviation authority acknowledged that a Ukrainian drone attack had forced the Grozny airport to close on the morning of the crash.

Hours after the crash, Mr. Putin spoke to journalists at a summit at St. Petersburg, which was attended by Mr. Tokayev of Kazakhstan. Mr. Aliyev of Azerbaijan was supposed to be there but turned his plane around in midair after learning of the crash. Mr. Putin fielded nearly a dozen innocuous questions from carefully vetted reporters without mention of the crash.

Russian state television has largely ignored the crash in news bulletins and analytical shows. Although Russian state news agencies initially focused on the bird theory and the fog, they have stopped reporting on the topic as evidence of missile damage has piled up.

Instead, pro-government journalists and social media channels on Friday distributed a propaganda video clip showing Russian air defenses shooting down Santa Claus’s flying sled. “We don’t need anything foreign in our skies,” an actor playing the Russian version of Santa Claus tells an air-defense serviceman in the video.

To Alexander Baunov, a Russian political expert at Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, Russia’s long initial silence weakened Mr. Putin’s attempts to present himself as a champion of developing countries against American hegemony.

“We are seeing in real time a test of the so-called multipolar world about which Moscow talks so much,” he wrote on the Telegram messaging app on Friday. Russia’s allies will note that Mr. Putin’s policy means in practice “the right of big and powerful nations to act with impunity and arrogance against the less big and more dependent ones,” he added.

Ivan Nechepurenko and Milana Mazaeva contributed reporting from Tbilisi, Georgia.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a close adviser to President-elect Donald J. Trump, shocked many in Germany last week by endorsing its far-right Alternative for Germany party, which is under surveillance by domestic intelligence for being extremist.

This week, Mr. Musk entangled himself even more in the country’s snap election, explaining in a newspaper opinion essay why he believes the far-right party is the “last spark of hope” for Germany.

“The traditional parties have failed in Germany,” Mr. Musk wrote in comments published online by the daily Welt on Saturday. “Their policies have led to economic stagnation, social unrest, and the erosion of national identity.”

Mr. Musk’s opinion piece comes as Germany girds itself for an intense winter election after Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition collapsed in November. On Friday President Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany officially announced the disbandment of Parliament and set Feb. 23 as the date for new elections.

With four mainstream and three extremist parties on the left and right vying for seats in Parliament and government participation, polls are favoring the conservative Christian Democratic Union. However, the AfD, with its anti-immigrant platform, is polling in second place, with roughly 20 percent.

Mr. Musk’s commentary was printed in the Sunday edition of the Welt, a conservative daily owned by the Axel Springer media group, which also owns Politico in the United States. Many of the paper’s journalists protested the printing of the commentary, according to reports. Eva Marie Kogel, who had been the paper’s head of opinion, resigned from her post after the printing, she confirmed on X.

In an apparent acknowledgment that Mr. Musk’s thoughts on the AfD could be controversial, the paper printed a response by Jan Philipp Burgard, the editor in chief-designate on the same page.

“Musk’s diagnosis is correct, but his therapeutic approach, that only the AfD can save Germany, is fatally flawed,” he wrote.

Mr. Musk, who was heavily involved in supporting Mr. Trump in the American presidential campaign, has been known to meddle in foreign political campaigns as well. He has engaged and supported right-wing causes both in Italy and the United Kingdom in recent months.

The provocative potential in Germany from Mr. Musk’s support of the AfD partly reflects the party’s political stance, considered so far right as to be anti-democratic. All other political parties in Germany have precluded working with the AfD.

When news broke that members of the AfD took part in a meeting with an Austrian extreme-right personality, who has called for deporting migrants en masse, tens of thousands of Germans took to the streets in protest this year. This spring and summer, Björn Höcke, a state leader of the party, was twice convicted of having used banned Nazi-era slogans during campaign stops. Sections of the party, including its entire youth wing, are considered extremist by domestic intelligence.

In his commentary Mr. Musk dismissed any criticism that the party could be too far-right by pointing to the private life of the party’s lead candidate. “The portrayal of the AfD as far-right is clearly wrong considering that Alice Weidel, the leader of the party, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!” he wrote.

For the AfD the endorsement is viewed as a potential boon, even if it is too soon to tell whether Mr. Musk’s initial posting on X had an effect on the party’s polling. The party has been posting portions of the text on social media.

For the past several weeks, Fadia Nasser, a widow sheltering in Deir al Balah in central Gaza, says she has subsisted on nothing but a small sandwich of herbs for breakfast and a tomato she shares with her daughter for lunch.

Eleven miles away in a tent camp in southern Gaza, Said Lulu, who used to run a small coffee kiosk in Gaza City, says he is suffering in pain from kidney disease but has no access to the clean water doctors say he must drink to keep it from getting worse.

And Ola Moen, in Beit Lahia in the enclave’s north, fears going outside because of frequent airstrikes. But she doesn’t feel she has a choice: She says she spends her days scouring pharmacies for burn cream and painkillers for her 9-year-old nephew, whose legs were broken and burned by an Israeli airstrike in October.

Even as mediators try to secure a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, Palestinians and human rights organizations say the humanitarian situation is getting more desperate.

In the 14 months since Israel launched its invasion of Gaza in response to the Hamas-led terror attack on Israel, military bombardments have turned cities into rubble-filled wastelands and 90 percent of the population of about 2.1 million has been displaced at least once. Winter is adding to the misery. A doctor at a hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, said that four infants in tent encampments had died from the cold in the past week.

Israel says that its target is Hamas and that it does everything possible to limit the loss of civilian life. But the increasingly dire humanitarian situation has prompted a particularly scathing chorus of condemnation from the United Nations and international human rights organizations.

Here is a closer look at three parts of Gaza’s humanitarian crisis.

Food

Yaser Shaban, a 58-year-old civil servant for the Palestinian Authority who is living with six people in a tent in Gaza City, is dependent on the limited supplies of food — beans, lentils and pasta — brought in by humanitarian organizations.

When those run out he begs for food or uses his few remaining shekels to buy items from the market at vastly inflated prices. Fruit and meat are out of reach, he said. And eggs, at 15 shekels, or $4, each, are a rare treat. “I am not looking for delicious, healthy or luxury food,” he said. “The goal is to only beat hunger.”

The United Nations warned in November that 1.95 million people were at risk of famine and that absent a dramatic increase in food aid, people would start dying of hunger. On Dec. 24, it said deliveries of humanitarian aid were still inadequate, particularly in the north, where Israel has ordered evacuations and severely restricted access. Israel is pressing a renewed offensive there in an effort to stamp out what it has called a Hamas resurgence, unleashing some of its military’s most devastating attacks yet.

Georgios Petropoulos, a senior U.N. official based in the southern city of Rafah, noted that even when Israeli authorities allow shipments of humanitarian aid in, they sometimes strip the deliveries of vital components, such as the fuel needed to run generators in hospitals and shelters. Israel says that the fuel cannot be sent to areas where militants are active.

“From where we are in Gaza, it looks like the aid system has been weaponized,” Mr. Petropoulos said. “Every day as an aid worker in Gaza, you’re forced to make horrible decisions: Should I let people die of starvation or the cold?”

On Dec. 5, Amnesty International accused Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza, citing prevalent hunger, the risk of famine and the inaccessibility of aid as contributing factors. Israel rejected the claim, and the Israeli authority that coordinates the flow of goods to Gaza said on social media that the group’s accusation that it is obstructing aid deliveries and precipitating famine “deliberately and inaccurately ignores the extensive humanitarian efforts made by Israel,” and listed recent deliveries of food, fuel and medical supplies.

There is little question that aid delivery has been reduced to a trickle, both because of Israeli restrictions and concerns about looting. To Ms. Nassar, what matters is that she still does not have enough to eat. She said that there is food in the market — most often smuggled in, or looted from humanitarian aid convoys — so, to outsiders, “it may not look like famine.”

“But when food is so expensive that most people cannot afford it, is it still available?” she asked.

Water

Mr. Lulu, the former coffee seller, has no regular access to a tap for water. He lives in a tent camp in Rafah, in southern Gaza, and the water there is delivered by the tank-load to a central area, where residents wait in line for hours to fill up their jars and buckets, at 2 shekels, or 50 cents, a gallon.

But the quality is dubious: smelly, cloudy and flecked with debris. “The only good thing about it,” he said, “is that it is less bad than the seawater.” He knows that drinking the water will exacerbate his kidney problems, but bottled water is unaffordable.

It wasn’t always that way. Gaza has water treatment plants, desalinization facilities and three pipelines channeling fresh water from Israel. But in a report released on Dec. 19, Human Rights Watch said Israel was intentionally depriving Palestinians in Gaza of adequate access to safe water for drinking and sanitation.

The pipelines were turned off and damaged from bombing at the start of the war and only partially reopened a month later, the report found. Israel’s restrictions on fuel imports have virtually halted desalinization activities. Water and sanitation infrastructure has sustained extensive damage, the report found. Israel also prevented the importation of equipment and chemicals, such as chlorine, needed for purifying water, saying those items risked being used by Hamas.

As a result, Gazans have little access to clean water. The report recorded 669,000 recorded cases of acute watery diarrhea since the war began, and more than 132,000 cases of jaundice, a sign of hepatitis. Both diseases spread via contaminated water.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense said in response to the report that Israeli pipelines were sending millions of gallons of water into the Gaza Strip and that Israel had helped repair damage to the water infrastructure caused by Hamas. Human Rights Watch noted that water from the pipelines was insufficient to offset the decrease in water production from other sources.

Ms. Moen says she spends two hours a day waiting in line to buy drinking water — at 19 shekels a gallon, or more than $5, in north Gaza. And she still has to boil and filter it. “At least I don’t see worms in it,” she said. “That is our criteria now.”

Medicine

When Ms. Moen’s house in Beit Lahia was hit in October, most of her immediate family died. Others were injured and are still in need of medical treatment. But painkillers, antibiotics and medicine for chronic diseases like diabetes are impossible to find.

She fears getting sick or injured. Going to a hospital is out of the question, she said. They are unclean, reek of death and blood, and lack the most basic supplies.

Few are functioning properly. The Israeli military forced patients and staff members on Friday to leave one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza, saying it was a stronghold for Hamas. Fighting has raged around the facility, Kamal Adwan, for nearly three months.

On Saturday, the Israeli military said that it had arrested roughly 240 militants in and around Kamal Adwan over the past couple of days and found weapons in and around the hospital. It added that the director of the hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiyah, was detained for questioning and, without providing evidence, said he was suspected of being a militant.

On Dec. 19, a report from Doctors Without Borders described repeated Israeli military attacks on Gaza’s civilians and medical infrastructure, along with the “systematic denial of humanitarian assistance,” as “clear signs of ethnic cleansing.” Israel’s foreign minister slammed the report as “blood libel.”

Ms. Moen doesn’t need a report to tell her what is going on in Gaza, she said. Nor does she think it will make a difference.

“It’s been over a year of mass killing, starvation, displacement and misery, and no one seems to care,” she said.

Syria’s new administration has stepped up its campaign to track down and arrest members of the ousted Assad dictatorship, signaling that it would act with a heavy hand against people it claims are challenging its ability to impose law and order.

Sana, the state-run Syrian news agency, reported on Saturday that “a number of remnants of the Assad militias” had been arrested in the coastal Latakia region in western Syria. Weapons and ammunitions were confiscated, the report added.

The new administration, which has tried to assert authority over Syria since an alliance of rebels toppled President Bashar al-Assad three weeks ago, has indicated that pursuing loyalists of the Assad dictatorship who are undermining its authority is a top priority.

But a human rights organization has raised alarms about the way the transitional government was going after Assad loyalists, saying it was carrying out arbitrary arrests of supporters of the old regime.

Over the past few days, Sana also has reported that government security forces were pursuing members of the Assad regime in the regions of Tartus, Homs and Hama.

On Wednesday, an attempt to arrest Mohammed Kanjou al-Hassan, the former director of military justice under Mr. al-Assad, set off deadly clashes in the Tartus area — part of the heartland of Mr. al-Assad’s Alawite minority. Security forces were ambushed by loyalists of the former government in the area, according to the Britain-based war monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Fourteen members of the government forces were killed, according to Mohammed Abdel Rahman, Syria’s interim interior minister.

While some reports have said Mr. al-Hassan was later arrested, media officials in Syria’s transitional government still had not confirmed that as of Saturday, and his whereabouts remain unclear.

The media office of Syria’s interim interior ministry said security forces were pursuing members of the Assad regime “to secure” the country’s territory, suggesting they were undermining the security situation. It said the campaign was only launched after loyalists of the former government had failed “to hand over their weapons and settle their affairs” within a specific time frame.

On Saturday, Lebanese authorities repatriated 70 Syrian officers and soldiers who served in Mr. al-Assad’s military after they illegally entered Lebanon on Friday, according to the Syrian Observatory.

An official in the new Syrian administration confirmed Lebanon returned military personnel from the ousted regime to Syria, without specifying a number.

Former Syrian officials and military personnel have fled Syria for neighboring Lebanon and Iraq in hopes of avoiding arrest or retribution.

Rami Abdulrahman, the director of the Syrian Observatory, said he was receiving reports from his group’s activists in Syria that government security forces were carrying out random arrests of supporters of Mr. al-Assad’s regime, while largely failing to take action against top military leaders.

“We need transitional justice, not revenge justice,” he said in a phone interview on Saturday. “The new Syria should be a state of justice, democracy, equality, and law.”

The media office for the interior ministry pushed back against Mr. Abdulrahman’s comments, asserting that security forces had not arrested supporters of Mr. al-Assad’s regime but rather armed loyalists of the old government who carried out attacks against the new administration, and their accomplices.

The new authorities, Mr. Abdulrahman said, should publish a list of all the people suspected of having perpetrated war crimes against Syrians and work with families in towns and villages to arrest them. He said they should then be given a fair trial.

The new government is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist group that ruled over parts of northwestern Syria before Mr. al-Assad’s fall.

Ahmed al-Shara, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has sought to reassure Syria’s minorities, including Alawites, Christians and Druse. But some members of those communities have expressed fears that they could be persecuted.

Syria’s new leaders, Mr. Abdulrahman said, were holding a unique opportunity to build a state that serves Syrians.

“We want the people of Syria to have a new image of Syria,” he said. “We don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the criminal Bashar al-Assad’s regime.”

Reham Mourshed contributed reporting.

When the bombs started falling, they were almost beautiful — like the purple blossoms of the banana tree, Manwara and her sister Shamshida would recall later.

Their family was on the run, escaping the mortar fire that drove them from their home in Hari Fara, one of the last refuges for Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority. They left their village in August, only to be hit by a rain of bombs released from drones. The strikes killed their parents. Their other three sisters, missing, are presumed dead.

They were among thousands of ethnic Rohingya families fleeing their villages this summer amid a new wave of targeted violence, a horrible echo of the ethnic cleansing by Myanmar’s military that killed thousands and exiled hundreds of thousands in 2017.

This violence was not at the hands of the military, though. Instead, it was from a pro-democracy rebel group that was raised to fight the army. The rebels’ political aim may be different, but the persecution they are inflicting on the Rohingya — airstrikes, mass arson, sexual violence — is torn from the government’s old playbook.

No matter who is in control in Myanmar, it seems, it is the Rohingya who suffer.

“Everyone hates us, but I don’t know why,” said Ms. Manwara, 19. “It’s our curse.”

After years of civil war, the military junta that overthrew a democratic, civilian government in 2021 has lost control of about two-thirds of the country’s territory. Yet the victories by the armed resistance — a patchwork of militias fighting in the name of restoring democracy and of securing better rights for the minorities they represent — offer no moral certainty.

The Arakan Army, the mightiest in the rebel alliance, stands accused of massacring the Rohingya, including the parents of Ms. Manwara and Ms. Shamshida, in a display of ethnic chauvinism that traces one of Myanmar’s many fault lines.

Over the years, more than a million Rohingya have been expelled from Rakhine State to neighboring Bangladesh. Effectively stripped of their citizenship, they are the world’s largest stateless population.

Now, another wave is fleeing. The Arakan Army, drawn from an ethnic Rakhine population, is using its victories against the junta to target the Muslim minority, according to testimony from scores of recent arrivals.

The rebel group’s attacks on the Rohingya have been so brutal that Rohingya armed groups formed to oppose the military regime have now joined with the army — the same force that terrorized them for decades — in fighting the Arakan Army.

“Myanmar is plumbing the depths of a human rights abyss,” said James Rodehaver, the head of the U.N. human rights team monitoring the country.

The fate of Hari Fara, the sisters’ hometown and one of dozens of Rohingya villages emptied in recent months, shows the speed with which catastrophe has struck Myanmar’s most vulnerable population.

On military-guided tours of Rakhine State in 2018 and 2019, I passed though Hari Fara, noting its tidy shop houses and vegetable plots.

After previously traveling through villages ethnically cleansed by the military and ethnic Rakhine mobs, the display of regular Rohingya life — men strolling to the mosque, women haggling over fish, children playing on cellphones — felt like a mirage.

Today, these residents of Hari Fara are gone. Many homes are destroyed, another Rohingya repository erased.

“Hari Fara was very big and busy, but I don’t know what’s left now,” said Anwar, a pharmacist whose shop was on the main street. “I fear it’s all gone.”

It started with a single, ominous killing.

In February, Mujib Ullah, Hari Fara’s chairman, was walking back from prayers when men on a motorcycle fatally shot him. Locals blamed the Arakan Army, which was scoring battlefield victories against the junta in its quest for ethnic Rakhine autonomy.

Arakan Army scouts came, demanding recruits. Dozens were taken away, including Omar Ali, 19.

Soon after, Rohingya Salvation Organization soldiers arrived in Hari Fara. The fighters, who sneaked in wearing women’s burqa robes, said that times had changed: The Rohingya needed to fight alongside the Myanmar military, not against them, because the Arakan Army was a bigger threat.

About 150 recruits from the area were conscripted, including Omar’s brother, Hassan Ali, 17. At an emptied school, he learned to load an AK-47. He was sent to the front lines against the Arakan Army, escaping a month later.

“I didn’t like shooting guns,” Hassan told me. And he feared he might shoot Omar, conscripted by the other side.

In mid-July, the Arakan Army ordered residents of Hari Fara to leave home for their safety. Some figured they could outlast these troubles, just as they had escaped earlier violence.

Within days, the boom and crackle of rocket launchers, mortars, small-arms fire — it was hard to know which, it was so loud — neared Hari Fara, all fired from the direction of Arakan Army positions.

Then the drone strikes started.

Sajida was beside her husband, their 3-year-old son tucked between them, when what sounded like daytime insects swarmed the night.

The drone bomb killed her husband. Bomb fragments ripped the flesh from Ms. Sajida’s flank, and her son’s body was sprayed with shrapnel, medical records show. But they survived.

As villagers fled Hari Fara in early August, mixed among them were armed men in black, whom they assumed were Rohingya militants. The Arakan Army has said that it targets only Rohingya soldiers.

Terrified Rohingya streamed toward the border where the Naf River divides Myanmar from Bangladesh. They carried sacks of rice and family photos. Some rolled wheeled suitcases until the road ran out. Then they balanced the luggage on their heads. Children stumbled along with Disney backpacks. Their parents clutched USB cords and headphones, diapers and squawking chickens.

The riverbank swelled with crowds of people desperate to cross. Then the drones swooped again.

Those strikes killed at least 150, according to United Nations estimates. The mud turned purplish from blood, witnesses said. It was one of the deadliest attacks since Myanmar’s civil war began and came, witnesses and the international investigators say, from positions controlled by the Arakan Army.

U Khaing Thu Kha, an Arakan Army spokesman, denied that the armed group killed civilians.

“There is war in Rakhine, it is not only Muslims who are suffering,” he said, asking why international groups “only talk about Muslim human rights and are silent about the human rights of Rakhine people?”

The sisters — Ms. Manwara and Ms. Shamshida, who was heavily pregnant — fled their home in Hari Fara a few days later. Their parents were killed by a drone bomb along the way.

The sisters ran together, but at some point, their tightly held hands loosened. Then another hand, strong and male, grabbed Ms. Manwara. She was dragged away, she said, and raped by soldiers in Arakan Army uniforms.

Ms. Shamshida’s water broke while crossing the Naf to Bangladesh. As the boat nosed onto the riverbank, she staggered off and dropped into the mud. Among the grasses, she gave birth to a baby girl.

Since September, Ms. Manwara, Ms. Shamshida and their younger brother, Anwar Halek, have been living in a corner of a tarpaulin shelter in Camp 26 of 33 Rohingya settlements in Bangladesh.

More than a million Rohingya live in this narrow finger of Bangladesh pressed against Myanmar. Lacking official refugee status, they cannot build proper houses and are ineligible for school or health services.

The camps in Bangladesh have exploded with violence in recent months, as armed groups battle for dominance. At least 70 people have been shot dead this year, according to local monitors.

The situation has galvanized thousands of Rohingya to pay traffickers for passage across the Bay of Bengal to Malaysia and Indonesia, in hopes of manual labor jobs. Dozens have drowned or died since the sailing season began in September. The United Nations refugee agency said that arrivals to Indonesia in October were up 700 percent compared with the year before.

Not all passengers are willing. Four Rohingya boys were playing soccer in September when a man offered them jobs in Bangladesh. Instead, they were kidnapped and loaded into the hold of a crowded boat, the ceiling so low they could barely sit up. As the waves sloshed, they vomited in a plastic bag passed between captives. They relieved themselves in plastic bags, too.

Off the southern coast of Myanmar, the boat was eventually apprehended by the Myanmar Navy.

About 120 people were packed inside, Myanmar state media documented. The captives, including the four boys, blinked in the light but were too weak to do much more. Two other boys had been thrown overboard after dying.

After 25 days away, the boys made it back to their camp in Teknaf, Bangladesh.

“I’m scared to go out anymore because I think I will be snatched again,” said Abdel Hossain, 13, one of the four boys. He no longer plays soccer.

Abduction is a constant fear in the camps. Children are enslaved as servants or prostitutes. Boys and young men are kidnapped by Rohingya militias and delivered to the Myanmar junta to fight the Arakan Army. In May, Rohingya soldiers grabbed conscripts at gun- or knife-point.

Jubair, 14, was walking in the camp when a scrum surrounded him, telling him that his family would be killed if he did not go with them.

The militants gathered about 80 captives in an empty shelter, the walls of tarp and palm leaf thin enough for their screams to echo through the warren of tents. But no one came to rescue them.

The conscripts were taken over the Naf River to a military camp in Myanmar. Bangladeshi border guards watched them board the boat, three conscripts said. Jubair was taught how to pull the pin of a grenade and to assemble a land mine.

“I tried to learn, but I was shaking all the time,” he said.

After 20 days of training, eight draftees, including Jubair, stole out at night. One man stepped on a mine. The rest kept running and made it back to Bangladesh.

Now, Jubair is under threat of another conscription.

“I don’t want to go back to fight,” he said. “But I don’t want my family to die.”

Near his tent, the Naf moved slowly between Myanmar and Bangladesh. Shells traced parabolas, as R.S.O. soldiers battled the Arakan Army. This month, the Arakan Army claimed significant territory from the military, including Hari Fara.

Ms. Shamshida has not left her tent since September, except for latrine visits. Her newborn suffered from jaundice and fever. At 20 days, the baby died.

Ms. Shamshida barely speaks now. When she does, the words come out garbled. She rocks back and forth, her arms cradling a missing baby.

Ms. Manwara holds her sister’s hand and strokes her hair.

“We want to go home to Hari Fara,” she said. “But everything has changed.”

Saiful Arakani contributed reporting.