After nearly three months of an intensified Israeli military campaign in northern Gaza to quell what Israel has said is a Hamas resurgence, fighting raged unabated on Monday, with each side claiming successes against the other’s fighters.

The Israeli military released a statement saying that one soldier had been killed in combat in the northern Gaza Strip and that three members of the same brigade had been severely injured in the same clash. The statement provided no additional details.

The military wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, said it had destroyed an Israeli vehicle in the northern town of Beit Hanoun, killing and wounding an unspecified number of soldiers. The militant group also said that it had targeted Israeli soldiers in another northern town, Jabaliya, killing five.

The Israeli military declined to comment, saying it does not respond to the announcements of “terror organizations.”

For its part, the Israeli military announced that it had killed and arrested “multiple” militants in an overnight operation near Jabaliya as they were trying to “flee, deploy deception tactics and conduct ambushes.” It said that action followed a “targeted operation” against a Hamas command center “embedded inside Kamal Adwan Hospital” in the same area over the weekend that led to the arrest of more than 240 militants.

Israel said its troops were “continuing to operate” in the area.

The Israeli military on Monday also released footage it said it had found in Gaza purporting to show Hamas operatives planting explosives near the Indonesian Hospital, which is in the north of the enclave. The military said its troops had been operating near there last week to “eliminate” militants “who attempted to flee the hospital,” and that it had arrested “tens” of additional fighters and “neutralized” areas rigged with explosives.

“This is another example of the Hamas terror organization’s cynical use of the population and civilian institutions in the Gaza Strip” the military said.

The New York Times was not able to independently verify the footage.

The fighting in and around hospitals in northern Gaza has raised alarms in the international community and among humanitarian organizations.

“France condemns Israeli military operations targeting several hospitals in Gaza, notably that of Kamal Adwan, which is now out of service,” France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Monday. It expressed particular concern over the fate of the hospital director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiyah. He was among the 240 people the Israeli military said it had arrested in what it called a “targeted operation” at the facility on Friday.

Israeli officials have accused Hamas of exploiting Kamal Adwan and other civilian infrastructure in Gaza for military purposes, and the Israeli military said on Saturday that the director was a “suspect” and was “being questioned regarding his potential involvement in terrorist activity” without providing evidence to support the claim.

Dr. Abu Safiyah has been vocal in his condemnation of Israeli military actions in and around the hospital and in Gaza broadly, and has documented the death and destruction he has witnessed.

“Since the beginning of the war on the Gaza Strip, our father has made tremendous efforts to support the crumbling health system,” his family said in a statement on Monday.

The statement said that Dr. Abu Safiyah had lost a son and had been injured in the war but that he had continued to serve as a “pillar of support” for civilians in northern Gaza since Israel’s renewed military campaign began there in October. It called on the international community to take “urgent and immediate action” to ensure the doctor’s release.

Agnès Callamard, the head of Amnesty International, on Monday called in a statement for Dr. Abu Safiyah’s release, saying the organization was “extremely concerned” about his fate in detention.

The director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, also called for the hospital director’s release and demanded an end to fighting in and around medical facilities.

“Hospitals in #Gaza have once again become battlegrounds and the health system is under severe threat,” he said on social media. Dr. Abu Safiyah had decried the dire situation at the hospital in a video posted to social media on Dec. 24, during which explosions could be heard in the background.

“All night, we are bombarded in this way,” he said. “We are being killed and slaughtered every day.”

The health authorities in Gaza, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants, said in a statement on Monday that the death toll in Gaza since the war began had surpassed 45,540 people. It said more than two dozen people had been killed in the last day.

With the death of the Israeli soldier in northern Gaza, the total number of Israeli soldiers who have died since the Hamas-led attack on Israel that killed around 1,200 people and set off the war in October 2023 is 825, Israel said. The figure includes those killed in the Oct. 7 attack and in fighting in Lebanon.

Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.

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?”

The government of Trinidad and Tobago, facing an alarming rise in violence, including retaliatory gang killings, on Monday declared a state of emergency. The measure empowers the military to make arrests and allows the authorities to enter suspects’ homes without warrants and deny them bail.

The state of emergency in the Caribbean country, the first for crime in more than a decade, was announced by the acting attorney general, Stuart Young, at a news conference in Port of Spain, the capital. It comes as the government has been increasingly criticized for failing to stop a wave of gang-related killings. The government reported 623 homicides so far this year in a country of 1.4 million. Last year, the murder rate was just below Haiti’s.

The national security minister, Fitzgerald Hinds, who also attended the news conference, said the killings had become an epidemic and public health concern. The police responded to 33 double, eight triple, four quadruple and one quintuple homicide this year, he added.

No curfew will be set during the state of emergency, nor will people’s movements be restricted, Mr. Young said, unlike during the Covid-19 pandemic, as the government wanted to minimize the effects on economic activity. But people suspected of crimes can be stopped and searched by the police or army soldiers, he added.

The Caribbean nation has struggled with the presence of criminal groups for more than 25 years, but the past decade has seen a surge in the escalation of violence by street gangs, said Alex Papadovassilakis, an investigator for Insight Crime, an organized- crime research group with main offices in Washington and Medellín, Colombia.

Experts estimate that there are 186 gangs with more than 1,750 members in Trinidad and Tobago.

“We’re not talking sophisticated gangs; we’re talking small and deeply territorial street gangs that engaged in mostly street level drug dealing, arms trafficking and other criminal activities,” Mr. Papadovassilakis said in a telephone interview. “They are extremely violent.”

Tit-for-tat killings have also contributed to the death toll, he said. The previous record for the number of homicides was in 2022, he noted. The authorities reported 599 people killed that year.

Two gang-related reprisal killings using high-powered weapons took place last weekend, Mr. Young said. On Saturday, a man was gunned down as he walked out of a police station in the eastern part of Port of Spain. And on Sunday night, six people were shot at in Laventille, outside the capital, with five of them killed.

Mr. Young said the gangs were using AR-15s and AK-47s.

Vernlyn Hernandez, who lives in the north coast village of La Cuevas, said, “The state of emergency should have been called after the New Year.”

Attillah Springer, who runs an organization that works with at-risk youth in Port of Spain, said that while many people across the country were probably relieved that the government took action, others were worried, particularly because the authorities released relatively few details.

“They said there will be no curfew, ‘but we just want to suspend certain parts of the Constitution to address gang warfare and gang membership,’” she said.

“Quite a few people who work in these communities believe that it seems that what this state of emergency is going to do is kill young Black men, and that’s a frightening aspect,” she added.

The measure allows suspects to be held without charge for 48 hours and is aimed at gang members, but innocent people are likely to be swept up, Ms. Springer said.

“There are also hundreds, thousands, of young Black men who will just be going about their business who are going to be potential targets,” she said.

Derek Ramsarooj, a political analyst in Port of Spain, said while residents might welcome the state of emergency if it results in a drop in crime, the results were not likely to last unless the government addressed the societal causes for gang violence.

Countries like Trinidad and Tobago have also seen serious spikes in crime because of their position between cocaine-producing countries in South America and the major consumer country up north, the United States, Mr. Ramsarooj said.

“Our challenge cannot be curbed through a state of emergency,” he said. “A state of emergency may be a bandage on a national sore.”

The situation has been worsened by Trinidad’s proximity to Venezuela, experts say, which allows criminals easy access to high-powered weapons. In April last year, the Caribbean Community of nations held a symposium on crime, and one of the recommendations was to engage the United States government about the guns from American manufacturers that were illegally entering Caribbean countries and fueling violence and gang activities.

A former national security minister and retired police commissioner from the opposition party, Gary Griffith, also said that the state of emergency would not solve rising crime.

He noted that the government now in power had criticized a similar measure tried by the opposing People’s Partnership coalition administration, which lasted 106 days in 2011, saying it reeked of a double standard and hypocrisy. That state of emergency had been limited to a few crime hot spots in the country.

“A state of emergency is and should not be used as a crime-fighting tool,” he said. “It is a stopgap measure.”

Weeks after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, Hasan Raad went from a decent job and a comfortable life to unemployment and displacement.

The 28-year-old content creator had finished building his production studio in the capital, Beirut, and was saving to buy a secondhand Mustang convertible. As war enveloped the country, he began using his savings to help friends and family and for donating to the displaced. He could not get into his studio for weeks, and his clients, including celebrities, furniture brands and restaurants, dried up.

Then, an Israeli airstrike hit his family’s apartment building south of Beirut, leaving them homeless.

“We came out of this war with nothing,” Mr. Raad said on a recent afternoon while sitting near the crumbled home. “We are starting from zero.”

Lebanon, a small Mediterranean nation still scarred by a 15-year civil war that ended in 1990, has trudged from one devastating crisis to another in recent years. A debilitating economic meltdown beginning in 2019, aggravated by the coronavirus pandemic, cratered the currency and evaporated investments. A blast at the Beirut port in 2020 killed more than 200 people and caused billions of dollars in damage.

Banking and tourism have been the major economic drivers of Lebanon’s economy before and after the civil war, but both have suffered in recent years.

Lebanese banks remain largely insolvent, have accumulated billions in losses and impose limitations on withdrawals and transfers. The tourism sector has been pummeled by the war, which has triggered travel bans and compelled tourists to leave or cancel bookings.

The war between Israel and Hezbollah, the armed Lebanese group, escalated in September, worsening the already precarious situation. Experts say the war, now suspended in a fragile truce, may have crippled any chance of a swift economic recovery.

After the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel that ignited the war in Gaza, Hezbollah began targeting Israel with strikes in solidarity with Hamas, setting off back-and-forth attacks between the two. Civilians on both sides were displaced.

Vowing to end a year of the cross-border attacks, Israel launched a ground invasion and intensified its bombardment. The invasion was aimed at crippling Hezbollah’s forces and infrastructure.

More than 3,700 people have been killed, and nearly 16,000 others have been wounded since October 2023, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, which does not differentiate between combatants and civilians in its count. An estimated 1.3 million people were also forced from their homes in Lebanon before a cease-fire deal was announced in late November.

Israel leveled hundreds of buildings. Shelling has prompted the burning of olive, banana and citrus farmlands. Restaurants and other businesses have closed, leaving thousands without jobs. The World Bank estimates that the war has cost $8.5 billion in damages. The conflict cut the nation’s gross domestic product by 6.6 percent this year, the bank said this month.

To further complicate matters, a global financial crime watchdog placed Lebanon in October on its “gray list” over concerns about money laundering and terrorist financing. The move, economic experts say, could make it difficult for the Lebanese diaspora to send remittances home.

“One in three Lebanese was already in poverty” before the war, said Jean-Christophe Carret, the World Bank’s country director for the Middle East department, which includes Lebanon. “Those numbers were bad.” The conflict, he said, made “them worse.”

Caring for the displaced and repairing the war’s damage will place an additional burden on Lebanon’s hollowed-out economy.

This is particularly true of the Dahiya, the densely populated neighborhood south of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway that Israeli warplanes pounded.

On a recent morning, excavators removed debris and mangled vehicles from a landscape of flattened structures. Some stores replaced shattered windows and mounted new signs. The cacophony of scooters and cars sometimes drowned the din of the Israeli drone buzzing above.

For Mr. Raad, whose family has called the neighborhood home for generations, the semblance of normalcy was a welcome reprieve. Hezbollah had begun taking assessments and registering families in the area with the promise of paying them funds for reconstruction, he said. But it was still unclear when that money would arrive, he said.

“This is still a big mess,” he said. A home belonging to Mr. Raad’s family in southern Lebanon was also destroyed in Israeli strikes.

For the Lebanese, the latest crisis has meant dealing with another painful episode in their nation’s history.

Lebanon’s economy blossomed after the civil war because of remittances from overseas Lebanese and investment from Arab nations. Then, a monthlong war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006 caused immense displacement and damage that was repaired with billions in aid and loans from Gulf States and Iran.

But endemic corruption, economic crises, the Beirut explosion and the collapse of the government reversed those gains. A caretaker government now runs Lebanon, and any economic overhauls, along with the international loans they could help generate, are on pause.

A return to war has put those changes even more out of reach.

The Independent Task Force for Lebanon, a group of Lebanese economists, warned in a report published in October that around 50,000 registered businesses — 60 percent of the country’s total — had been disrupted by the conflict, either by physical damage, employee displacement, supply chain interruptions or a lack of customers. The World Bank estimates Lebanon’s commerce sector has lost $1.7 billion over the past year.

When Khodor Issa, an operations manager at the Barzakh bookstore and cafe along the commercial Hamra Street in Beirut, returned to Lebanon four years ago after living in China and Colombia, he was hopeful that his country had turned a corner. But crises soon began multiplying, and the latest war, he said, has whittled away at whatever meager success he has built.

Less than a third of the usual participants come in when he holds events at the bookstore, Mr. Issa, 39, said. To attract customers, he has begun doing more online marketing and offering discounts. To scrape by, he has reduced salaries for his staff members and pleaded with his landlord to delay rent payments.

“There’s so much uncertainty, and it’s confusing,” he said. “We are in survival mode.”

After decades of conflict and corrupt governments, the Lebanese pride themselves on their ability to overcome hardship. But that pluckiness is being tested like never before, said Hani Tawk, a priest and chef.

After the 2020 explosion, Mr. Tawk founded Mariam’s Kitchen — named after his mother — to prepare and distribute hot meals. After the war began, they went from feeding 1,500 people a day to 5,000 a day, he said. The facility has been offering medical and counseling services, and Mr. Tawk spends hours every day listening to people’s harrowing stories about the war.

“I don’t know if any country in the world has been tried like Lebanon,” Mr. Hani said on a recent afternoon as he drove to buy vegetables and fruits from a market.

“We are trying to distribute hope and love with these hot meals.”

Mr. Carret from the World Bank said Lebanon could pull through with help from richer countries, but he noted that this time, Arab nations probably would not rush to help rebuild as they did after 2006. It is the end of the era of the blank check, he said, and “going forward, reforms will be critical for financing to flow again to Lebanon.”

A new government that earns confidence from donor countries “can make a difference between a recovery that lasts a couple of years and one that takes decades,” Mr. Carret said.

To the Lebanese, a recovery that takes decades is not a recovery at all.

Mr. Issa, the bookstore manager, says he is already considering leaving. But Mr. Raad, the content creator, is adamant that Lebanon will ultimately endure.

“This war will not break me or us,” he said. “We will rebuild, repaint and make it better.”

Dayana Iwaza and Jacob Roubai contributed reporting.

Russia has ground through repeated waves of soldiers in Ukraine. It lost some of its most experienced troops at the very start of the invasion, then shipped off tens of thousands of convicts without seeming to care whether they survived.

Now, still desperately seeking sufficient manpower to maintain pressure on Ukraine, Russia has expanded recruitment even more. Men (and women) no longer have to be convicted of a crime — under new laws, any suspects detained by the police are informed that pending charges will disappear if they volunteer. The military also is taking anyone with large, unpaid debts; recent immigrants caught in repeated dragnets; and even corrupt officials.

In one recent example from St. Petersburg, two men were arrested on charges of smuggling about 200 kilograms (440 pounds) of cocaine from Peru, worth roughly $30 million, in the roof of a container filled with more than 5,000 cases of mangoes, according to the press service of the St. Petersburg court system. The charges were dropped after the two signed contracts to serve as riflemen in an assault company, the court said.

Local papers nationwide are full of cases of suspected murderers, rapists and thieves who are headed off to war after signing contracts instead of facing trial.

“They can kill people or rob a bank or commit any other crime and then go to the front,” said Ruslan Leviev, a Russian military analyst. The government is “desperate for a lot of people,” he said. “There is a huge rate of casualties on the front line.”

Trying to avoid a draft, the Kremlin has pushed through a series of legal measures in recent months to widen the pool of potential soldiers. The effort has become especially important as Russia seeks to push back Ukrainian lines in advance of an anticipated move by President-elect Donald J. Trump to end the war when he takes office Jan. 20.

Under a law signed by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia this October, the process of joining the military can start from the moment a criminal case is opened. The recruitment of criminals that started in 2022 was limited to those already sentenced to penal colonies.

Chronic debtors across Russia have been the focus of a concentrated campaign from the Federal Bailiff Service. A new law that went into effect on Dec. 1 forgives up to 10 million rubles (nearly $100,000) in debts and suspends enforcement proceedings if they agree to fight. That includes countless men with hefty arrears on alimony payments.

The authorities have also been raiding markets, warehouses and railroad stations, or anyplace where they might catch immigrants who recently received Russian citizenship but have not registered for military service. Ordered to provide paperwork at their local draft office, some find themselves whisked off to war.

It is difficult to know the scale of recruitment through these various means because no national tally is available. The military had been recruiting through more traditional avenues — what outside intelligence agencies estimated at 30,000 people monthly — by paying ever larger bonuses to civilian volunteers, but analysts believe the numbers are waning. Offering amnesty is also a cheaper alternative.

“Volunteers from civilian life are quite expensive given all the payments that they have been promised,” Mr. Leviev said. “Criminals do not get the same incentives.”

Olga Romanova, the head of Russia Behind Bars, a nongovernmental organization that defends prisoners’ rights, said that the Russian state was severing the connection between crime and punishment, which could have dire long-term consequences on crime rates.

Were the writer Dostoyevsky alive today, she said, he might have to revise the plot of his novel “Crime and Punishment.” Even if the police found Rodion Raskolnikov holding an ax dripping blood, all he would have to say is “I want to go to the front,” she imagined, and the police would respond, “OK!”

Debates about the consequences of signing contracts instead of facing trial unspool at length online.

When one woman asked whether her husband should sign a military contract, another participant in a discussion group on Vkontakte, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, noted that her man would earn money and scrub his criminal record clean. Then the person added, “But I recommend you look for a new husband immediately, it is unlikely to end well.”

An opposition activist and former prosecutor signed a contract because he rated his chances of being killed at the front lower than in prison, given his past work locking up criminals, according to Ms. Romanova.

“Russian prisons are one of the most horrible places in the world,” she said in an interview. “The conditions are terrible. Usually, people chose the war because in prison you are no one, you have no rights. In the war, you can at least do something, make some decisions.”

Another source of volunteers has been politicians and state employees jailed on corruption charges. In Vladivostok, the largest Russian city on the Pacific Ocean, two former mayors as well as the director of municipal funeral services, plus several regional officials, have all announced that they want to serve in exchange for getting out of jail.

Oleg Gumenyuk, the mayor from 2018 to 2021, was convicted on bribery charges, as was his predecessor, Igor Pushkarev, mayor from 2008 to 2017. Igor Babynin, identified in the Vladivostok news media as “the king of the funeral business,” was found guilty of bribery and embezzlement.

Some politicians end up in Cascade, nicknamed the “luxury” battalion, which allows the well-connected and well-heeled to avoid combat, analysts said. “All their pictures show them eating lunch, or posing with rifles,” Mr. Leviev said. “Their uniforms are clean and new, like they just came from the shower.”

Some politicians have died at the front, especially if they ended up in the Storm Z assault units made up of former prisoners, but they tend to be the exception.

Using the war as a “laundry” to clean reputations has been criticized. “A thief who stole from the state should be in prison,” wrote Aleksander Kartavykh, a military blogger on Telegram. Murderers and rapists might atone for their sins with blood, he said, but not corrupt officials: “With a murderer there is confidence that he will really fight, but with an official, without oversight, there is no such confidence.”

Immigrants who recently acquired Russian citizenship, usually laborers from former Soviet republics in Central Asia, have also been targeted for recruitment. Local newspaper reports nationwide describe enforcement raids that sweep up scores of potential immigrant soldiers.

In the Sverdlovsk region, a man from Tajikistan who recently had acquired a Russian passport said a rumor ran through his community that it would be revoked if he did not register. At the draft office, he said that he and some colleagues received a list of needed documents.

When he returned a couple of weeks later with the paperwork, every immigrant there was handed a summons for military training. He was only let go later because three buses proved insufficient to take all the men, said the man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

Police officers in many regions earn an incentive bonus of about $100 for every suspect they sign up, Ms. Romanova said, while in wealthier Moscow the amount is $500.

Court records indicate that one suspect in five being arraigned becomes a soldier, she said, but they can sign up any time during the judicial process. Overall, Russia has about 106,000 spots in its penal colonies, and although previous recruitment drives reduced the prison population by about half, she said, the authorities are now trying to rapidly fill the vacant spots in hopes that suspects would rather fight.

Those who refuse, however, often face investigators who vow to let them rot in jail.

Years ago, Andrey Perlov could walk faster than any man on earth, winning the gold medal for Russia in the 50-kilometer race walk at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

Mr. Perlov, 62, does not walk much these days, stuck in a prison cell in Novosibirsk, in Siberia, since March, charged with embezzling about $30,000 from the soccer club where he was general manager.

Investigators have not presented any evidence publicly, said Alina Perlova, his daughter, instead repeatedly prolonging his detention while pressuring him to go to Ukraine. The Novosibirsk Regional Court could not be reached for comment.

“For them, the best option is for him to go to war,” Ms. Perlova said in an interview. “The case would be closed, and nobody would be responsible for making the mistake of putting him in jail.”

Investigators have threatened to keep him locked up for a year or two as the case crawls along, she said, adding that their basic attitude is, “Let him go to the front at age 62 — no matter, he is an athlete.”

If the Kremlin showers current medalists with cash and gifts like foreign luxury cars, in those early days of the Russian Federation, President Boris Yeltsin gave Mr. Perlov a watch and the money to buy a local Lada car, Ms. Perlova said. His family, including his wife and a son, subsisted on his $1,000 monthly pension, plus the small fees that his daughter earns translating Chinese literature. Now his accounts are frozen.

Occasionally, her father wavers, thinking that he should go to war so his family can get money, despite the danger and that signing would be tantamount to admitting guilt.

“I keep saying, ‘Dad, no, please, we will find a way,’ ” Ms. Perlova said.

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.

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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.