South Korean officials on Monday began the slow, painstaking process of piecing together the many body parts found in the wreckage after the country’s worst plane crash in decades, as hundreds of relatives, waiting to receive the victims’ bodies, grew more anguished by the hour.

The families had rushed to the airport in the southwestern county of Muan where Jeju Air Flight 7C2216 had crashed on Sunday, killing 179 people. As they grappled with an incomprehensible tragedy, it became clear on Monday that they would have to wait not hours but days for their loved ones’ remains to be returned to them.

The authorities continued trying to understand why the flight, which took off from Bangkok and was headed to Muan, crash-landed, speeding along the runway on its belly before crashing into a concrete structure and bursting into flames. The crash tore the plane into so many pieces that only its tail was immediately identifiable, and the only two survivors were crew members who had been rescued from the tail.

The scale of the destruction meant that even as most of the bodies were expected to be identified by Tuesday, when the remains would actually be returned to families was another question. Officials said it could take up to 10 days for all of the bodies to be ready for transport because, with the exception of five that were more intact, most were badly charred and in pieces.

Investigators have recovered more than 600 body parts from the crash site so far, said Na Won-o, the superintendent general of the police in Jeonnam Province, where the airport is, on Monday, adding that officials were continuing to search for remains.

The sheer number of parts to take DNA samples from and piece together complicated the police post-mortems that had to be done before the bodies could be handed over, Mr. Na said.

“There are many bodies with the arms and legs broken off,” Mr. Na told families at a makeshift forum set up at one part of the departures hall of Muan International Airport. “We can identify the bodies but cannot release them yet.”

For many families, this wait has added to an immeasurable grief and disbelief. The airport where they have been camping out has echoed with the sounds of weeping. Relatives shouted at — or pleaded with — officials to work more quickly so that they could receive their loved ones’ remains.

The police planned to release bodies one at a time, but estimated that some relatives would not be able to start holding funerals until as late as next Wednesday, Mr. Na said. One man shouted that he had been told he could leave the airport Sunday night.

“You said we’d be able to go at 9 o’clock!” he said. “How many hours has it been now!”

Already, families scattered throughout the cold floor of the temporarily closed airport, laying down blankets in preparation for a long stay. Civic groups, churches and the local government provided them with tents for resting, water, toiletries, tea and snacks like tangerines, Choco Pies and instant noodle cups.

Some relatives used the makeshift forum to voice their frustration and call for accountability. In the evening, as news trickled out among relatives that the bodies were spread out on the ground and not placed in freezers as the authorities had promised to do by early afternoon, dozens of relatives surrounded officials from the transport ministry at the airport. They shouted at them, accusing them of neglect and of evading their responsibilities.

“The victims’ dignity is being seriously damaged,” said a representative of the relatives, Park Han-shin, whose brother Hyung-gon was killed in the disaster. “I am strongly criticizing the authorities.”

An official said in response that the freezers had arrived but, because of issues with setting them up, the bodies had not yet been placed inside, adding they were working as quickly as they could overnight to do so. The relatives had requested the freezers out of concern that the bodies would rot in Muan, where it has been unseasonably warm, with the daytime temperature rising to 52 degrees on Monday.

Others demanded answers from the airline. A man from Seoul who had lost his parents in the crash asked about Jeju Air’s preparedness for bird strikes, saying that it was hard to understand how something so common could have potentially led to so many deaths. (Investigators are looking at multiple factors, and causes can take years to uncover.)

Jung Suk Lee, a senior executive of Jeju Air, who was at the airport, apologized to the relatives for their losses, saying that the company had agreed to pay all direct and indirect expenses related to their funerals, including accommodation and transport.

“As a member of the executive team, as a father, and as a child, I am deeply saddened by and remorseful over your loss,” he said. He added that airline would separately handle matters of civil or criminal liability and damages related to the disaster. The government has also declared seven days of mourning, until Saturday. Many cities across the country planned to set up memorial altars.

Mr. Park, the relatives’ representative, said that they wanted the authorities to deploy more people to work in the teams managing the bodies.

“They say that the bodies are so badly mutilated that it’s taking a lot of time to recover them,” he said in tears, standing before reporters and relatives. “I’m asking the government to hire more people so we can send off my brother, our family members, quickly.”

Mr. Park added that he had asked officials to reinforce the patrols to fend off wildlife at the crash site, and to send more refrigerated containers for temporary body storage as temperatures rose above freezing.

He also said that he would work with the authorities to ensure that families are compensated for the loss of their relatives once the cause of the crash, and who should be held responsible, becomes clear.

“Some people’s parents have gone to heaven,” he said. “How can the children live on their own?”

Just a decade ago, the small, resource-rich nation of Ecuador was embarking on a bold transition to hydroelectric power.

It was one of many South American countries betting that their abundant rivers, harnessed by dams, could satisfy growing energy needs — and help drive economic expansion, lifting millions from poverty and leading the way into a new era of prosperity.

Today, those grand designs are colliding with a warming climate.

Ecuador has been pummeled by an extraordinary drought, exacerbated by global warming, that has engulfed much of South America, drying rivers and reservoirs and putting the country’s power grid on the brink of collapse.

Since September, daily energy cuts have lasted as long as 14 hours. Highways have turned an inky black; entire neighborhoods have lost running water, even internet and cell service. One industry group says the nation is losing $12 million in productivity and sales for every hour power is out.

“My country is adrift,” said Gabriela Jijón, 46, who owns an ice cream shop outside Quito, the capital.

But Ecuador is not alone. In recent years, abnormally dry weather in places around the globe has sent rivers to extreme lows, draining hydropower resources in places like Norway, Canada, Turkey and even lush Costa Rica.

Zambia, highly dependent on hydropower, faced daily power cuts of up to 21 hours this year. Parts of China, also reliant on water for energy, suffered lengthy outages starting in 2022.

In all, more than one billion people live in countries where more than 50 percent of their energy comes from hydroelectric plants, according to Ember, a global energy research institute. Yet, as the climate warms and extreme weather events like drought become more common — and more severe — many scientists expect hydropower to become a less reliable energy source.

More than a quarter of all hydroelectric dams are in places with a medium to extreme risk for water scarcity by 2050, according to a 2022 study in the journal Water.

Ecuador is, in many ways, a bellwether for what other nations may face.

Some nations, including the United States and Ecuador’s neighbors in South America, Colombia and Brazil, have backup plans to switch to alternative sources, including fossil fuels, when hydropower runs low.

But the cost of ensuring extra energy capacity is prohibitive, and many countries are unprepared for worsening conditions, said Nicolas Fulghum, a senior analyst at Ember.

China is a growing concern, Mr. Fulghum said. In 2022 and 2023, dry conditions in the country’s southwest prompted blackouts that closed factories and severely disrupted commerce.

The country gets just 13 percent of its power from water — compared with Ecuador’s 70 percent — but because China is so large and so connected to the global economy, future droughts are likely to have “cascading effects,” Mr. Fulghum said.

In Ecuador, President Daniel Noboa, facing re-election in February, pledged recently to end power cuts this month, claiming that energy the country is purchasing from nearby Colombia, as well as other factors, would ease the power crisis.

But energy experts expect any relief to be temporary. Unless there is a deluge — about two weeks of heavy rain are needed to raise reservoir levels — regular energy outages could endure until at least 2026, said Iván Endara, a professor at the Coastal Higher Polytechnic School, an Ecuadorean university.

To truly end to the crisis, he said, years of work must be put into diversifying and building out the country’s energy sector.

The Promise of Hydropower

In 2007, a new leftist president, Rafael Correa, swept into office in Ecuador, promising to build a modernized, more socially and environmentally conscious nation.

The country had already suffered through a monthslong energy crisis in the 1990s, and then again in 2009, both prompting blackouts and caused by drought.

Responding to rising electricity demands from a growing population, and hoping to use electricity to supercharge his vision for the nation, Mr. Correa’s government invested billions of dollars to expand its energy output.

By harnessing water, not burning oil or gas, to produce electricity, this new energy matrix was supposed to help mitigate the effects of global climate change — not make Ecuador a victim of it.

Borrowing heavily from Chinese lenders, Mr. Correa’s government launched almost a dozen new hydroelectric projects, massive dams that became emblematic of the country’s transformation.

One project in particular, a $2.2 billion dam known as Coca Codo Sinclair, was plagued with design flaws, critics said, as well as allegations that some officials took bribes in exchange for awarding the dam contract to the company Sinohydro.

Yet between 2007 and 2017, when Mr. Correa left office, the country’s overall energy generation capacity rose about 60 percent, according the Ministry of Energy and Mines.

Other changes included a new constitution that eventually placed the energy sector almost entirely under state control — something critics later said led to mismanagement and inefficiency.

Most of the growth came from hydroelectricity, with some increases in fossil fuels, wind and solar capacity.

Then, when Mr. Correa left office, the capacity to generate electricity fell flat.

The former president, in an interview from his current home in Belgium, said climate change was “not the problem” at the root of Ecuador’s energy crisis.

Instead, he blamed the three governments that followed his for failing to maintain hydro and thermoelectric power plants, and faulted them for not building out other energy sources, leading to decreased capacity and the inability to keep producing electricity in adverse conditions.

“I have never seen such rapid destruction of a country in times of peace,” he said.

(Mr. Correa left Ecuador in 2017, and was convicted in 2020 on corruption charges unrelated to energy projects.)

In interviews, two of the three presidents that succeeded Mr. Correa — Lenin Moreno and Guillermo Lasso — said that they did invest in expanding capacity, noting that energy projects often take years to come online. But both noted that they faced economic headwinds that Mr. Correa did not — first, falling oil prices that greatly contracted the country’s economy, which is highly dependent on petroleum exports.

Then came the pandemic. Mr. Lasso described his challenge as: “Do I buy vaccines or do I invest in thermoelectric plants?”

But Mr. Moreno, who took office in 2017, said the “principal” problem was the country’s “excessive focus on hydroelectric energy” which “left the system extremely vulnerable to climate change phenomena.”

Mr. Lasso, who took office in 2021, cited something else: He called Ecuador’s political culture a main driver of the crisis, describing it as shortsighted and prone to neglecting long-term solutions to major challenges — including energy security.

Representatives for the current president, Mr. Noboa, declined to comment.

The Effects of Everyday Outages

The lesson in Ecuador, said Mr. Fulghum of Ember, is not that nations should abandon hydropower, but that they should invest heavily in alternatives — preferably clean energy alternatives like wind and solar — that can compensate for water shortages.

He cited Brazil and Chile as nations that have done just that.

In Ecuador, power cuts began last year, then became daily occurrences in September, shutting businesses and sending entire industries into crisis.

Uncertainty has gripped the country, exacerbated by a booming narcotrafficking industry that has fueled violence.

Just a few years ago, Ecuador was making great strides in reducing poverty.

Now “everything that was achieved in those years of prosperity is being lost,” said Mónica Rojas, dean of economics at the University of San Francisco in Quito.

Those affected by the energy crisis include educational institutions like the Triangle Foundation, in Quito, which provides schooling and job training to people with Down syndrome, moving them into employment.

Many families are poor, and in some cases students become the primary breadwinners. Nancy de Maldonado, a founder, said getting a child into the program is “the biggest lottery” a family can win.

Yet the organization budgeted $3,000 for energy costs this year, far short of the $15,000 needed to pay for diesel to power a donated generator. Tuition may need to be raised, shutting out some of the poorest families.

In Salcedo, a town south of Quito, Ms. Jijón, the ice cream shop owner, is not the only one struggling to keep products cold.

The town lives or dies on ice cream — it has become famous for selling layered cream-and-fruit pops invented by Franciscan nuns.

But when energy cuts began, Helados de Salcedo, one of the town’s biggest companies, immediately lost tens of thousands of dollars worth of product, with employees watching it melt before their eyes.

Then the small shops that sell their ice creams stopped ordering — store owners couldn’t keep them cold.

By November, Paco Hinojosa, 58, the company’s general manager, figured they could survive “another three months.”

Perhaps those most deeply affected are the poorest Ecuadoreans, with no safety net.

In northern Quito one evening, the last glimmer of daylight shone in Katherine Mantilla’s bedroom. On her bed, propped on cinder blocks, Ms. Mantilla, 19, cradled her newborn daughter, Kenya, in her arms.

Kenya was born in October, a month into the energy crisis, with breathing problems. Doctors had sent her home with an oxygen tank and instructions to use it at regular intervals. But Ms. Mantilla had lost her income.

She used to sell sandwiches at traffic stops, making $8 a day. Then the stoplights went out, and people just raced through intersections, paying no mind to the young women with armfuls of snacks.

Now, Ms. Mantilla had no money to refill the oxygen tank — not even enough to buy a flashlight.

At night, she said, she was gripped by a fear that Kenya’s chest would stop rising and she wouldn’t notice.

“If she stops breathing,” said Ms. Mantilla, “if she changes color, how will I see it?”

At least five babies have died from the cold in Gaza in the past week, health authorities there say, as winter worsens the toll on a population traumatized by 15 months of conflict.

Jumaa al-Batran, less than three weeks old, died in intensive care on Sunday after he and his twin brother, Ali, were rushed to Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza, the territory’s health ministry said.

The twins and their parents had been living in a tent in a camp for displaced people in the city of Deir al Balah. “I woke up and found my son stiff like a block of wood,” Nora al-Batran, their mother, said in video published by Anadolu, a Turkish news agency. “I tried to shake him awake, but there was nothing. The child was stiff, blue, dark blue in color from the cold.”

Ali, who like his brother was born premature, was in critical condition and on a ventilator in the hospital’s intensive care unit because of the effects of hypothermia, according to Dr. Wisam Shaltout, head of the hospital’s neonatal unit. “Conditions inside tents in this cold weather make it next to impossible for babies like Ali and his brother to survive,” he said in a phone interview.

Dr. Shaltout said an earlier report from the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, Wafa, that Ali had died was inaccurate. But he added that even if Ali recovered, there could be long-lasting damage to his brain or other organs.

“What breaks my heart is that if Ali survives this, we will give him back to his parents who will take him back to the cold tent that almost killed him and that killed his twin brother,” Dr. Shaltout said.

Humanitarian conditions have deteriorated in Gaza, where the Israeli military’s bombardment and attacks have displaced 90 percent of the population at least once, according to United Nations agencies. Since the war started on Oct. 7, 2023, with a raid on Israel by the Gaza-based militant group Hamas that killed 1,200 Israelis, more than 45,300 Palestinians have been killed, according to the health ministry, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its statistics. At least 17,492 of those killed were children, the ministry says.

Born into war, Gaza’s youngest are now struggling with the cold.

Tens of thousands of displaced Gazans are living in ramshackle encampments along the coast, with little more than tents and tarps to protect them from the cold and rain. The tents, once so difficult to obtain they were considered a luxury, have largely disintegrated after a year of exposure to the elements, leaking and providing little protection from the biting wind, humanitarian organizations say.

There is almost no electricity in the enclave, and not enough fuel to keep generators going. There is a shortage of blankets and warm clothing, and little wood for fires.

“Children in Gaza are cold, sick and traumatized,” said Rosalia Bollen, a UNICEF spokesperson who recently visited Gaza’s camps for the displaced. “Many still wear summer clothes. With cooking gas gone, many are searching through rubble for scraps of plastic to burn.”

On Friday, with weather forecasts warning of falling temperatures, the Palestinian Civil Defense emergency service urged Gazans, especially those in tent encampments, to take extra precautions. It recommended drinking warm fluids, wearing layers and exercising to generate body heat. Parents should closely monitor children’s body temperatures and keep infants bundled up, it said.

But with more heavy rain expected in the coming days, and lows in the mid-40s Fahrenheit, those measures may not be enough to ward off suffering from the cold.

Ms. al-Batran, the mother of Ali and Jumaa, said she had done her best, but needed more help. “I wrapped him in many layers, but it was in vain,” she told Anadolu, speaking about Jumaa. “There is no sheltered place. There’s no heating. Not enough clothes, not enough blankets.”

Abu Bakr Bashir and Nader Ibrahim contributed reporting.

Already 30 minutes behind schedule, the pilot flying the Jeju Air jet with 181 people on board was preparing to land at his destination in southwestern South Korea on Sunday morning when the control tower warned him about flocks of birds in the area.

Two minutes later, at 8:59 a.m., the pilot reported a “bird strike” and “emergency,” officials said. He told the air traffic control tower at Muan International Airport that he would do “a go-around,” meaning he would abort his first landing attempt and circle in the air to prepare for a second attempt. But he apparently did not have enough time to go all the way around.

Instead, just a minute later, the veteran pilot — with nearly 7,000 flight hours in his career — was approaching the runway from the opposite direction, from north to south. And three minutes later, at 9:03 a.m., his plane, Jeju Air Flight 7C2216, slammed into a concrete structure off the southern end of the runway in a ball of flames.

All but two of the 181 people on board were killed, most of them South Koreans returning home after a Christmas vacation in Thailand. The crash was the worst aviation disaster on South Korean soil and the deadliest worldwide since that of Lion Air Flight 610 in 2018, when all 189 people on board died.

As officials were racing to investigate the crash, a central question has emerged among analysts: What happened during the four minutes between the pilot’s urgent report of bird strike and the plane’s fatal crash?

Footage of the Boeing 737-800 landing at the airport showed it skidding down the runway without its landing gear deployed. As it hurtled along on its belly, engulfed by what looked like clouds of dust, smoke and sparks, it did not seem able to slow its speed before slamming into the concrete structure 820 feet after the end of the runway.

“A big question is why the pilot was in such a hurry to land,” said Hwang Ho-won, chairman of the Korea Association for Aviation Security.

When pilots plan to do a belly landing, they usually try to buy time, dumping extra fuel from the air and allowing time for the ground staff to prepare for the emergency, Mr. Hwang said. But the Jeju Air pilot apparently decided that he didn’t have such time, he said. “Did he lose both engines?” Mr. Hwang said. “Was the decision to land in such a hurry a human error?”

Officials recovered the plane’s “black box,” an electronic flight recorder that contains cockpit voice and other flight data that would help the investigation of aviation accidents. The device was partially damaged, so it could take time to recover the data, said Ju Jong-wan, a director of aviation policy at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.

With the investigation still at a preliminary stage, officials were careful not to make any pre-emptive declarations on questions arising from the crash, including whether both of the plane’s engines were out when it was landing. But experts who have watched the footage of the landing said the plane appeared to experience a fatal combination of factors that made the crash far worse than it could have been.

The Muan airport normally has a 9,200-foot-long runway. But when the Jeju Air plane was landing, only 8,200 feet of it was usable because of construction work underway to extend the runway. (Still, this is long enough for landing 737-800s, officials say.) On Sunday, the plane also missed the usual touchdown zone and instead touched down farther along the runway than normal.

As it landed, the plane’s pilot also appeared unable to control both its engines and landing gear, depriving him of two of the plane’s three key means of slowing down: the landing gear brake and the engines’ reverse thrusts, aviation experts said. They said the plane also did not appear to have activated its wing flaps, another means of cutting down speed.

The plane went so fast that it overshot the runway and rammed straight into a concrete structure surrounded by an earth mound. The structure was built to install the so-called localizer antenna, which helps enable the pilot to maintain the correct approach path.

Mr. Ju said that such a concrete structure was found in other airports in South Korea and abroad. It was built according to regulations but the government planned to investigate whether the rules should be revised in the wake of the Jeju Air crash, he said. Some experts, including Mr. Hwang, said that if there had been no such concrete structure or if the antenna had been installed on a more easily breakable mount, the plane might have avoided tragedy.

But they also stressed that the plane’s trouble began before it hit the structure.

“Engine trouble doesn’t necessarily mean landing gear trouble; the two are not necessarily related,” said Paek Seung-joo, a professor of public safety at Open Cyber University of Korea. “But in this case, both appear to have happened, forcing the plane to decide to do a belly landing in a matter of minutes.”

Even if the plane had lost one engine to a bird strike, the pilot still could have been able to operate a hydraulic pump to lower the landing gear with the power from the other engine, said J. Y. Jung, an aviation expert at Khyungwoon University in South Korea.

And analysts said if both engines were lost, the pilot could still manually lower the landing gear. But given the hurried way the pilot attempted to land, he might not have had enough time, they said.

“Questions like these won’t be answered until they examine the plane’s flight data recorder,” Mr. Jung said.

Scrutiny has also fallen on the risk of bird strikes. Migrant birds travel along the western coast of the Korean Peninsula because its tidal flats provide them with ideal resting and feeding places. The Muan airport was surrounded by such places and was more prone to bird strike than other airports in South Korea, according to government data about bird strikes. Officials said they would investigate whether the airport had implemented government recommendations for keeping birds away.

Officials said they would also look into whether Jeju Air cut corners on safety while trying to maximize profit. Jeju Air is the biggest of South Korea’s nine low-cost carriers and is among the most aggressive in attracting passengers. Its planes put in more hours than its competitors’, officials said. Within the 48 hours of its crash in Muan, the Jeju Air plane had made a dozen trips within South Korea or to China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Japan.

The government also said it would conduct safety inspections of all Boeing 737-800 aircraft operated by the country’s airlines. They made the statement after a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 passenger jet departing from Gimpo Airport in Seoul on Monday, for the southern island of Jeju, reported a landing-gear issue after takeoff and returned to Gimpo.

Jeju Air said that the problem was fixed while the plane was in the air after the pilot consulted with the maintenance crew on the ground.

“But the pilot still wanted to return to the airport for a checkup for safety,” Song Kyong-hun, a Jeju Air executive, said.

Dominique Pelicot, the 72-year-old who admitted to drugging his wife for years in France and inviting dozens of men to join him in raping her, will not appeal his conviction on aggravated rape and other charges, his lawyer said on Monday.

But the horrific story, which galvanized women in France and beyond to speak out against spousal violence and rape culture, is far from over. Seventeen of the 50 other men found guilty in the case have appealed, according to the lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, and more appeals could be filed before a court-established deadline of Monday night.

During the trial, Mr. Pelicot had said he expected the five-judge panel to give him the maximum 20-year sentence for his crimes against his now former wife, Gisèle Pelicot. The judges did so on Dec. 19, when all the verdicts and sentences were announced.

With the revelations of his crimes, Mr. Pelicot became one of France’s most notorious sexual predators.

On Monday, Ms. Zavarro said in an interview with French public radio that Mr. Pelicot believed that an appeal would constitute a “new ordeal” for Ms. Pelicot, “whom he has always indicated in the proceedings was not his adversary.” She also said that she did not want her client to run the risk of new charges and a harsher sentence, which would be a possibility if he were to appeal.

The 50 other defendants, most of whom were found guilty of rape, received sentences from three to 15 years. Six of them walked free because they had already served most or all of their jail time before the trial.

Under French law, the men who appealed their convictions will now have the right to a new trial, this time before a nine-person jury. Prosecutors have options when it comes to what that trial could look like, including that they could choose to try only the men who appealed or could choose to try all 51 men again.

The court has not confirmed the identity of the 17 men who filed an appeal nor the nature of the appeals; either the sentence or the verdict or both may be appealed.

More than 30 of the defendants admitted to having sex with Ms. Pelicot but said that they had never intended to rape her. Most of them blamed Mr. Pelicot for tricking them into believing that they would join the Pelicots for a consensual threesome and that Ms. Pelicot would be pretending to sleep or had taken sleeping pills herself. Some of the defendants said they thought Mr. Pelicot had drugged them, too, a charge he denied.

On Monday morning, Carine Monzat, a lawyer for one of the men found guilty, said in a text message that she was still reviewing the court’s decision on her client and had filed his appeal to keep his options open. She said that they could decide to withdraw it eventually.

In choosing to have her trial, and her identity, made public, Ms. Pelicot was lauded as a feminist icon and a model of courage for women who have suffered sexual violence. In brief remarks to reporters shortly after the verdicts, she paid homage to “the victims, unrecognized, whose stories often remain hidden. I want you to know that we share the same struggle.”

In a phone interview on Monday, one of Ms. Pelicot’s lawyers, Stéphane Babonneau, said that Ms. Pelicot was aware that the guilty verdicts and sentencings had been “only a first step.”

Ms. Pelicot, he said, respects the right of the men to appeal. “Clearly she would have preferred it not to happen,” he said. “But if she has to take part in a second trial, she will. She’s serene about it.”

He added: “She is ready to face it if she has to, and she is better armed for it today because she knows what to expect.”