Dozens of Israeli strikes pounded the Gaza Strip over the weekend as Israeli and Hamas officials continued indirect cease-fire talks through mediators in Qatar.

Israel’s military said on Sunday that it had hit more than 100 targets across the enclave over the weekend, including sites from which militants had fired at least four projectiles toward Israeli territory on Friday and Saturday. It said that the strikes had killed Hamas militants and that the military had taken measures to mitigate the risk of harming civilians. The claims could not be independently verified.

The Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Sunday that 88 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes over the last 24 hours. The ministry’s figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The Gaza Civil Defense, an emergency services agency, said that its crews had responded to multiple airstrikes on family homes on Sunday in which several people were killed and wounded.

Pressure has been mounting on both sides to reach a cease-fire agreement that would include the release of hostages held in Gaza before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office on Jan. 20. Hamas and Israel both said they were sending delegations to the Qatari capital, Doha, in recent days to meet with mediators.

The Israeli delegation remained in Doha over the weekend, according to an Israeli person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a lack of authorization to discuss the secretive talks publicly. The person said that the discussions in Doha were making slow progress and were aimed at reaching a limited deal that would see a temporary halt in the fighting and some Israeli hostages released in exchange for a number of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel.

Reflecting the abiding gap between the sides, at least in their public positions, Hamas said in a statement on Friday that the current round of talks would focus on an agreement leading to a complete cease-fire and the details for a withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. Israel had not committed to ending the war, an official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, said last week.

Roughly 100 hostages are still being held in Gaza out of some 250 people taken captive during the Hamas-led attacks in October 2023 that prompted the war. At least a third of them are presumed to be dead.

A weeklong truce in November 2023 allowed for the release of 105 hostages, but subsequent efforts to reach a cease-fire have faltered amid gaps in the two sides’ demands. Each side blames the other for the failure to reach a deal.

Israeli officials have recently said that they believe that Hamas is rebuilding its forces in Gaza. And the group appears to be recruiting new fighters faster than Israel can eliminate them.

Security officials reportedly told an Israeli parliamentary committee last week that Hamas has up to 19,000 fighters, with about 9,000 of them in organized units. Before the war, Israel estimated that Hamas had roughly 25,000 fighters, though Hamas never confirmed that figure.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in November that Israel’s military had killed close to 20,000 fighters.

In all, more than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed during the war, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

And as hopes for even a limited cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas rise again, Palestinians and human rights organizations say the humanitarian situation in Gaza is getting even more desperate.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said on Sunday that overnight Israeli airstrikes near Al-Amal Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis caused significant damage to several hospital facilities and killed one person.

Last week, Israeli forces raided the last remaining major hospital in northern Gaza, Kamal Adwan, and forced its staff and patients to evacuate. The Israeli military said that Kamal Adwan was a stronghold for Hamas and that it was carrying out “targeted operations” in the area.

The hospital had been the main provider of medical care in the northernmost stretch of Gaza amid a monthslong offensive by Israel’s military against what it says is a resurgent Hamas.

The World Health Organization said that the raid on Kamal Adwan “put the last major health facility in North Gaza out of service” — and that the remaining patients, caregivers and health workers were transferred to the Indonesian Hospital.

But on Sunday, Gaza’s health ministry said that the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza was no longer providing services to patients or the wounded, leaving the northern part of the enclave without any functioning hospitals amid the near-constant bombardment.

Aaron Boxerman contributed to this report.

For much of her life, Sumaya Ainaya spent weekend and summer nights on Mount Qasioun, which overlooks the city of Damascus, joined by other Syrians drinking coffee, smoking hookah and eating corn on the cob roasted on grills nearby.

But soon after the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011, the military under President Bashar al-Assad closed the mountain to civilians. Suddenly, instead of families and friends shooting fireworks into the sky, soldiers with tanks and artillery launchers were firing at rebel-held areas below.

This New Year’s Eve, weeks after a coalition of rebels ousted the Syrian regime, Ms. Ainaya, 56, and her family returned to Mount Qasioun with snacks, soda and scarves to protect from the winter chill — and reclaimed a favorite leisure spot.

“Thank God, we’ve returned now — we feel like we can breathe again,” said Ms. Ainaya, an Arabic literature graduate and a mother of four, standing along a ridge and pointing out several Damascus landmarks.

“We feel like the city has returned to us,” said her son Muhammad Qatafani, 21, a dental student.

Across Damascus, as in much of the country, Syrians are reclaiming, and in some cases embracing anew, spaces and freedoms that had been off limits for years under the Assad regime. There were places ordinary Syrians were not allowed to go and things that they were not permitted to say when the Assad family was in power. The country, many said, increasingly felt as if it did not belong to them.

But with the newfound sense of freedom comes some trepidation about the future under a government formed by Islamist rebels, and whether with time it might institute new restrictions and limitations.

Many Syrians are watching each decision and announcement as a harbinger of how their new rulers may govern. Last week, Syria’s de facto new leader, Ahmed al-Shara, said it could take two to three years to draft a new Constitution and up to four years to hold elections, alarming Syrians who fear they may have traded one authoritarian leader for another.

For now, there is also a level of chaos under the interim government as it races to prioritize certain state-building measures over others. With many economic restrictions and regulations gone, men and boys sell smuggled gas from large water jugs on street corners. The city’s traffic is snarled, as few police officers are on patrol, and double parking is rife, residents said.

Despite the anxiety, people are returning to or rediscovering spaces across Damascus, the capital. Protest songs that could have landed someone in prison a month ago can be heard on the street.

“We weren’t seeing the city, Damascus, or any city, in all its details,” Yaman Alsabek, a youth group leader, said of his country under the Assad regime. “The public spaces — we stopped going to them because we felt they weren’t for us, they were for the regime.”

His organization, Sanad Team for Development, has begun to organize youth efforts to help clean the streets and direct traffic. “When Damascus was liberated and we felt this renewed sense of ownership, people came out to rediscover their city,” he said.

After last month’s stunning sweep by the rebels, icons of the Assad regime were torn down. Children play on the pedestals and plinths that once held towering statues of Mr. al-Assad, his father and his brother. Murals cover spaces where pro-regime slogans were emblazoned.

On a recent gray and drizzly day, it was standing room only in the auditorium that had been the headquarters of the ruling Baath party, which represented the Assad family’s totalitarian grip on political discourse. Hundreds of people gathered to hear a Syrian actress and activist, Yara Sabri, speak about the country’s thousands of detained and missing prisoners.

“We all decide on what it will look like and what we want it to be,” Ms. Sabri said of the country’s future.

Weeks ago, she had been in exile because of her activism. Now, a Syrian flag, with its new colors, hung over the lectern at which she spoke. Above the building’s entrance, the old Syrian flag and the Baath party flag were partly painted over.

Salma Huneidi, the event’s organizer, said the choice of venue was deliberate. “We consider this a victory,” she said. “This was a place that we couldn’t do any activities, and now we are not only holding activities, but important ones that expose the previous regime.”

An event to discuss the writing of a new Syrian Constitution was also held in the building recently.

“Syria feels bigger, the streets feel bigger — gone are the images that used to irritate us, the slogans that used to irritate us,” Ms. Huneidi said. “We used to feel so restricted before.”

Even the utterance of the word “dollar” could land someone in prison under Mr. al-Assad. Foreign-currency exchanges, which were banned for years under the Assad regime, have sprung up seemingly everywhere. Men walk through markets yelling: “Exchange! Exchange!” A seller hawking warm winter porridge offered stacks of Syrian pounds in exchange for crisp $100 bills.

Mohammad Murad, 33, sat in his car on a street corner, wearing a beanie with the colors of the new Syrian flag. A sign in his window said, “Dollars, euros and Turkish.”

Mr. Murad had long worked in currency exchange, but after the previous regime banned foreign currencies, his business went underground. If a customer needed dollars or euros, Mr. Murad said, he would go to the person’s house, bills hidden inside a sock.

In the new Syria, he said, he stands in line at the central bank to exchange $1,000 for stacks of Syrian pounds. When potential patrons come to his window to inquire about the exchange rate, he assures them he is offering the “best price.”

Across the street, the shelves of a small corner store look very different from only a few weeks ago, when shop owners had to smuggle foreign brands and hide them from most customers.

“I would only sell those brands to my regular customers that knew I sold smuggled goods, not to just anyone coming in,” said the owner, Hussam al-Shareef.

Syrian-made products now mingle openly with brands from Turkey, Europe and the United States. Customers walk in and freely ask for “Nescafe, the original.”

Three years ago, a police officer came into his shop and saw six Kinder chocolate eggs in a glass case in the back. Mr. al-Shareef was fined 600,000 Syrian pounds, or roughly $50, and sentenced to a month in jail. He has been fighting it in court ever since.

Back on Mount Qasioun, a man was peddling illegal fireworks smuggled from Lebanon. Hours later, they would light up the sky to ring in 2025.

Ali Maadi, 35, was busy setting up a stand to sell drinks, snacks and hookahs. Before the war, his family had a small but comfortable rest area along the mountain’s ridge. When he returned more than a week ago, he found that Syrian Army soldiers had used it as an outpost and had broken everything, including the bathrooms. He plans to slowly rebuild.

From two speakers in the back of his Peugeot, he was blasting a mix of Syrian protest and folk songs. The lyrics of one song said:

We want to adore, we want to love

We want to walk the path

We want to learn to be men and love Damascus

From our hearts and see Damascus up close.

Nearby, Aya Kalas, 28, and her soon-to-be fiancé, Khalid al-Qadi, 26, sat at a picnic table enjoying the view. She was 15 the last time she came to the mountain, she said.

“Any place you were banned from, you want to come back to it,” said Ms. Kalas, a beautician.

Damascus, where Ms. Kalas has lived her entire life, feels unrecognizable at times, she said. “There were entire streets you couldn’t walk along because a military officer or official lived there,” she said.

“We feel like seeing the country anew; we feel like tourists,” Mr. al-Qadi said. “It feels like it’s ours again.”

Zeina Shahla contributed reporting.

The shop used to sell flowers and gardening gear to visitors from just down the road, where a tiny breakaway region of Moldova has for more than 30 years stood defiantly apart, with support from Russian troops.

Since the halt of gas from Russia on New Year’s Day, however, the store has been selling mostly electric heaters to freezing residents of Transnistria, the self-declared microstate in eastern Moldova.

The cheaper models have already sold out, a saleswoman said, but higher-end heaters are selling fast, as 350,000 inhabitants of Transnistria endure an energy crisis that has shut down factories, left Soviet-era apartment blocks without heating and hot water and raised questions about the survival of their go-it-alone, Russian-speaking enclave.

The situation is so bad that the region’s president, Vadim Krasnoselsky — who leads an entity unrecognized by all other countries, including Russia — tried to reassure his people on Thursday, “We will not allow a societal collapse.”

“It is difficult,” Mr. Krasnoselsky said, enumerating thousands of businesses, schools, farms and homes that were struggling without heat. Citizens have shown “great responsibility,” he said, by “going out into the forest to collect dead wood” to burn at home.

The crisis began on Jan. 1, when Russia’s energy giant Gazprom stopped pumping natural gas through Ukraine, its remaining major export route to Europe, after Ukraine refused to a renew a five-year gas transit deal.

In most places once dependent on Russian gas, like Hungary, the shutdown’s consequences were softened by alternative suppliers from the West. But Transnistria, a tiny sliver of territory built on unswerving loyalty to Russia, faces an existential crisis.

Dorin Recean, the prime minister of Moldova, which has long demanded that the region give up its claims of statehood, accused Russia of inducing an “impending humanitarian crisis.”

“By jeopardizing the future of the protectorate that it has backed for three decades in an effort to destabilize Moldova, Russia is revealing the inevitable outcome for all its allies — betrayal and isolation,” Mr. Recean said on Friday.

Distracted by the war in Ukraine and more cautious about investing resources, Russia has shown an increased willingness recently to cut its losses, most notably in Syria, where it stood on the sidelines last month as rebels toppled Moscow’s closest ally in the Middle East.

Alexandru Flenchea, a former deputy prime minister of Moldova who was responsible for trying to reintegrate Transnistria, said that Russia was not yet ready to abandon the region, valuing its use for exerting military and political pressure over Moldova.

Russia’s desire for leverage, Mr. Flenchea said, grew more acute in October when Moldovan voters narrowly endorsed changing the Constitution to lock the country’s exit from Moscow’s sphere of influence, aligning more closely with the West.

But, Mr. Flenchea added, Russia’s readiness to let Transnistria freeze without gas or its major source of revenue — the sale of electricity to Moldova from a gas-powered power station — suggested that the region was in serious trouble.

“The whole model in Transnistria relies on free Russian gas. No free Russian gas, the whole thing collapses,” he said. “But I don’t think Russia will let this happen soon. It still needs them.”

Others see Transnistria’s travails less as a sign of Russian retreat than of its determination to divert Moldova from its pro-European course.

Also cut off from Russian gas, Moldova has over the past week shifted to more expensive alternatives, including electricity from Romania. This saved Moldova from going cold but doubled the price of electricity for consumers, which could carry a heavy political price for the pro-Western government in elections this year.

Russia’s goal, said Vladislav Kulminski, a former government official now with the Institute for Strategic Initiatives, a Moldovan research group, “is to keep us in a gray zone by getting an election result that will bring to power a different government.”

”Everything has been thrown up in the air,” he said. “We don’t know what shape it will take when all the pieces fall to the ground.”

A retro police state with its own currency and passports — and a successful soccer team financed by local tycoons — Transnistria has an expansive security service, reinforced by Russians, and it has worked hard to control what people hear about.

Transnistria’s media outlets, echoing Russian talking points, blame Ukraine, the United States and Moldova’s government for the gas cutoff. Whispers that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia might also be to blame are taboo.

The media blitz seems to be working.

“Putin would never abandon us,” said Grigory Kravatenko, a resident of Bender, an industrial town bordering Moldovan-controlled territory.

Asked whether Transnistria might be better off less aligned with Moscow, he added: “We are not for Russia. We are not for Moldova. We are not for Ukraine. We are for ourselves and we are all suffering.”

Cooking stoves kept working for a while after the Jan. 1 cutoff, thanks to gas that was still in the pipes. But now they, too, are spluttering.

A Transnistria resident who gave only her first name, Yulia, walking on Friday with her infant daughter down an abandoned railway track, said she was sure that Russia would soon come to the rescue. “Of course they won’t let us die,” she said.

Victor Ceban, an Orthodox Christian priest responsible for parishes along the zigzagging border, said he avoided talking about who was responsible. “Whatever you say to one person you become somebody else’s enemy,” he said.

In some places, the border is marked with concrete barriers manned by Russians in fatigues. But it is so unclear in other places that it is easy to stray into Transnistria. Waved through a checkpoint this past week by a soldier with a Russian flag on his shoulder, journalists asked people at a bus stop if they knew of Transnistria’s problems.

“Of course we do. This is Transnistria,” an elderly woman said.

Mr. Ceban, the priest, walking from home to home on Friday through the Moldovan-controlled village of Varnita, offered blessings ahead of Orthodox Christmas and prayers that his mostly geriatric flock would not suffer long without heat.

When Transnistria, the most prosperous part of Moldova when both were part of the Soviet Union, first broke away to form a renegade state in the early 1990s, the region boasted it would become a Russian-speaking version of Switzerland — a proudly independent haven from the turmoil gripping Moldova, which was deeply impoverished.

The breakaway region became a template for what has since been a drive by Russia to keep its influence in former Soviet lands by supporting separatists: first in Moldova, then in Georgia and in eastern Ukraine. In all three countries, local militants backed by Russian muscle declared their own microstates.

The deployment of Russia troops in Transnistria, originally as peacekeepers but still there decades after the fighting stopped, ensured that Moldova could never retake the territory by force and doomed diplomatic efforts.

Just as important to Transnistria’s survival, however, has been Russian gas, provided virtually free to keep a steel plant and other industries working — and to fuel the power station selling electricity to Moldova.

Moldova’s secretary of state for energy, Constantin Borosan, said that, before the current crisis, electricity generated in Transnistria had met about three-quarters of his country’s demand and provided about half of the separatist region’s budget.

“These people lived on subsidized gas from Russia,” he said. “Now it looks as if Russia has abandoned them.” He noted that Gazprom had ignored suggestions from Moldova that it could, using an alternate export route under the Black Sea, still get gas to Transnistria — if the Kremlin wanted.

“I don’t know what is going on in the head of Putin,” he said.

Whatever Russia’s intentions, it is causing widespread pain not only in Transnistria, but also to residents of Moldovan-controlled territory.

Alexandru Nichitenco, the mayor of Varnita, a village surrounded by Transnistria and dependent on its energy, said that most of its 5,100 inhabitants could no longer heat their homes. They faced disaster, he said, especially if the usual winter temperatures — typically many degrees below freezing — grip the country.

He said he did not blame Transnistria: “They can’t do anything. Moscow controls everything over there.”

Veronica Ostap, a mother in Varnita struggling to keep her family fed without a working stove, said she was waiting for her pay next week to buy an electric kettle. She was keeping one room warm with an electric heater so that her three young boys can sleep.

A Baptist Christian, she thanked God for keeping the temperature around zero, at least during the day. “The Lord is trying to help us,” she said.

Ruxanda Spatari contributed reporting from Chisinau, Moldova, and Nataliya Vasilyeva from Berlin.

There are, the hit man said, many ways to kill.

A string tied between two sticks strangles with a tug of the wrists. A butcher’s blade, long and thin, slices into the heart.

Edgar Matobato said he fed a man to a crocodile, but only once. Mostly, he said, he ended people’s lives with a trusted weapon: his .45-caliber Colt M1911 pistol.

“For almost 24 years, I killed and disposed of many bodies,” Mr. Matobato said of his time with a death squad in Davao City, in the southern Philippines. “I am trying to remember, but I cannot remember everyone.”

“I’m sorry,” he added.

We were sitting in the outdoor kitchen of Mr. Matobato’s secret refuge in the Philippines. A fierce rain sent water skittering into the room. Mosquitoes followed. He slapped one dead, its body oozing someone else’s blood.

Mr. Matobato was in hiding. He has been for a decade, ever since he confessed to his crimes and divulged who ordered the bloodletting: Rodrigo Duterte, the mayor of Davao City, who later became president of the Philippines.

Mr. Matobato, now 65, says he killed more than 50 people for the man he called “Superman,” pulling in a salary from City Hall of a little more than $100 a month and receiving envelopes of cash for successful hits. He rarely hid his identity as he kidnapped and killed, he said, because working for the mayor gave him impunity.

Mr. Matobato knew that breaking the omertà of what came to be known as the Davao Death Squad made him a marked man. He was given sanctuary by priests and politicians, who hoped his confessions might be used to one day hold his former boss to account.

When I first met him last year, Mr. Matobato was waiting for the International Criminal Court, or I.C.C., to take him as a witness in its inquiry into whether Mr. Duterte committed crimes against humanity. In 2018, international prosecutors began investigating Mr. Duterte, who was president from 2016 to 2022, for overseeing extrajudicial killings, in Davao City and later across the Philippines, he justified as part of a law-and-order campaign against illegal drugs and other societal ills. No exact tally exists of how many people were victims of his drug war — a killing spree that included far more than drug pushers and petty criminals — but low estimates are at 20,000.

By the time we met, Mr. Matobato had a new name and a new job shearing sheep and feeding chickens — no killing anymore, he said. At least two other members of the Davao Death Squad had already made their way overseas to be witnesses for the I.C.C. He was aching for his chance, too.

His declining health added urgency. Though Mr. Matobato cannot read, he understood the irregular jags of his electrocardiogram, signs of a troubled heart.

For people in the Philippines who are keen to bring Mr. Duterte to account, the testimony of hit men like Mr. Matobato is crucial. But they also recognize that granting these killers any kind of legal protection, much less forgiveness, is a necessary evil.

While another former hit man says he secured immunity in exchange for his testimony at the I.C.C., Mr. Matobato told me he was not seeking the same. If the I.C.C. wanted to punish him for the killings he had committed, so be it.

“For almost 24 years, I killed for Duterte — 24 years, 24 years,” Mr. Matobato said, repeating the number like a mantra.

“I will face what I did,” Mr. Matobato said. “But Duterte, he must be punished by the court and by God.” He just hoped his recounting of his crimes would lead the former president to prison.

‘Chop-chop’

At 5 feet 2 inches, Mr. Matobato is used to being underestimated. He grew up poor, his father killed by Communist rebels, he said. Barely able to write his own name, he worked as a security guard before a policeman offered him the chance in 1988 to join a group of enforcers cleaning up a crime-ridden city.

Their corps was eventually called the Heinous Crimes Unit. Mr. Matobato said he was a “force multiplier,” a low-ranking hit man often drawn from the ranks of security guards or dropouts from rebel militias.

“This is no joke,” Mr. Matobato said. “I may be small, but I know how to kill very well.”

Over many months, I checked hundreds of details in Mr. Matobato’s recollections with testimony from several others who said they had also been members of the Davao Death Squad. While there were small points of divergence, the vast bulk of their memories matched.

The Duterte Death Squad developed its own code and methods. “Trabajo” meant a hit. A towel emblazoned with the words “good morning” hanging over the shoulder of a spotter would signal the positioning of the target to be killed. Brown packing tape kept the victims’ screams from posing a distraction.

The men often worked at the Laud quarry, on the outskirts of Davao City, each cave and hideaway swathed in tropical green. There, the squad dismembered and buried hundreds of bodies over a quarter-century, according to statements from five men who said they were members of the group. Mr. Duterte sometimes presided over the torture, executions and grave digging, they said.

Mr. Matobato said that at the quarry, which was owned by a policeman who was a founding member of the Davao Death Squad, he specialized in body disposal. He grew practiced at the geometry of butchery, turning a human into a package of flesh and bones fit for a compact burial space. It was also important, he said, that the corpses not be easily identifiable.

Mr. Matobato said he would slice through the thorax, remove the vital organs and lop the limbs. Then he would cut off the head and place it in the cavity the innards had occupied. He would pour engine oil over the butchered body to stanch the smell.

Cutting off the ears, he said, was for no real reason. But once he started, it was sometimes hard to stop.

“Yes, ma’am,” Mr. Matobato told me, his hand mimicking each motion of dismemberment. “I was very good at chop-chop.”

After busy days at the quarry, Mr. Matobato and the other hit men would often drive to the Vista View restaurant. They took over a favored cabaña overlooking the Laud quarry. They feasted on seafood and halo-halo, a kind of Filipino ice cream sundae.

At least once, though, Mr. Matobato ate at the quarry. According to Mr. Matobato and one other member of the squad, the hit men set up a barbecue. Mr. Matobato sliced a chunk of thigh from a fresh corpse. They grilled and ate the flesh, each bite tightening the bond between the hit men, Mr. Matobato said.

“He would come home with blood on his clothes, but he always said it was from cock fights,” said Joselita Abarquez, Mr. Matobato’s common-law wife. “I had to wash a lot to get the clothes clean.”

On one occasion in 2009, Mr. Matobato crouched in a limestone outcropping, not with a curved carving blade, but with his Colt. He said he had been given orders to shoot dead a woman who was going into the Laud quarry to find evidence of extrajudicial killings.

Mr. Matobato said he didn’t question the hit. This many years in, he admitted, he knew he was no longer just killing “trash,” as he referred to petty offenders.

“When we started, we were proud that we were neutralizing criminals, drug pushers, thieves, making Davao safe,” Mr. Matobato said. “Then it changed, but we kept following Superman’s orders.”

The hit list came to include businessmen who challenged the interests of Mr. Duterte’s sons, politicians whose spheres of influence pressed against Mr. Duterte’s, journalists who pointed out Mr. Duterte’s public prescience in who would soon turn up dead. On that day in 2009, the list also included Leila de Lima, the head of the Philippine Commission on Human Rights, who had been leading a monthslong investigation into the rising body count in Davao City.

Armed with a search warrant, Ms. de Lima and her team pinpointed a couple of places in the Laud quarry where another hit man had confessed to her that human remains were buried.

At the first spot, they shoveled and found bones and a skull. By that time, the sun was setting. There was no time to explore the other suspected mass grave, near where Mr. Matobato hid with his gun cocked.

“We waited, but she never came,” Mr. Matobato said. “We failed in our mission.”

Not long after her Laud quarry investigation, Ms. de Lima’s tenure at the human rights commission ended. Her Davao City findings languished. An associate of Mr. Duterte’s said that the skeletal remains her team found were those of Japanese soldiers from World War II.

But Mr. Matobato didn’t forget Ms. de Lima. When in 2014 he decided to confess his crimes and go into hiding, the woman who had been on his kill list helped arrange his escape and public confession.

Waiting for Confession

Two years later, in 2016, under the guidance of Ms. de Lima, Mr. Matobato gave his Senate testimony about the Davao Death Squad. He spoke of witnessing Mr. Duterte shoot a weapon. His performance was halting. Some senators grilled him in English, a language he barely spoke.

Mr. Matobato’s handler on the death squad, Arturo Lascañas, a senior police officer, was called as a defender of Mr. Duterte. In crisp English, Mr. Lascañas rejected Mr. Matobato’s accusations entirely.

After the hearing, Mr. Duterte was elected president with a resounding mandate. Mr. Matobato remained in hiding. For one five-year stretch, he and his wife were confined to a house, unable to leave because of the perceived threats from the president of the Philippines.

“We ran out of tears,” Ms. Abarquez said of that period of isolation. “We almost went crazy.”

Mr. Matobato said he wanted only to stay in a darkened room. Images of those he killed floated past his closed eyes. The memory of the young ones, the girls, especially, made him feel like he had to throw up, a queasiness that had never affected him during all those years in Davao.

One night while sequestered in that house, he tied some linens together and decided to hang himself.

“I couldn’t live with myself, with all that I had done,” he said.

But he found he couldn’t kill himself, either.

A year after the Senate inquiry, Mr. Lascañas made his own public confession. His health was failing, and he was seeking absolution, he said. Everything Mr. Matobato had said at the hearing was true, Mr. Lascañas finally admitted. He had been Mr. Matobato’s boss. He had executed hits as a leader of the Davao Death Squad. And he had been personally instructed by Mr. Duterte to kill.

Not too long ago, Mr. Lascañas quietly left the Philippines and came under the protection of the I.C.C. Mr. Matobato acknowledged that Mr. Lascañas could neatly diagram the complex hierarchy of the death squad, Mr. Duterte sitting at the very top. He knew that Mr. Lascañas’s sworn statement was many pages longer than his own. Still, Mr. Matobato had confessed first, and he could not understand why the I.C.C. didn’t want him, too.

“I am ready to tell all my crimes,” Mr. Matobato said.

By then, Mr. Matobato and Ms. Abarquez had secretly moved into a Catholic Church compound, under the protection of priests. They had more space and animals to tend, fruit trees to nourish them, too. Mr. Matobato took video calls with I.C.C. investigators.

“I told them everything about what I did on Superman’s orders,” he said. He raised his hand to his head in a salute.

In the spring, there were rumors that Mr. Matobato would follow Mr. Lascañas into overseas exile under the court’s protection. But the weeks kept slipping by.

“I have to be patient,” he told me, sighing. “I am good at following orders.”

Nervous energy kept Mr. Matobato’s legs jiggling, his toes barely reaching the ground. Even though Mr. Duterte left the presidency in 2022, the family’s continued grip on power — his daughter is vice president, his son is Davao City mayor, and Mr. Duterte himself is making noises about wanting to reassume the mayoral position — made Mr. Matobato all the more desperate to leave the Philippines.

I was preparing to visit Davao City with the photographer Jes Aznar, and Mr. Matobato told me he was worried for us, the muscles in his jaw twitching. The extrajudicial killings in Davao have not stopped. In one spate earlier last year, seven bodies were found on city streets.

“With Superman, life is cheap in Davao,” Mr. Matobato said. “One bullet, two bullets.”

He formed a pistol with his fingers and pointed at my heart, before laughing, although not for very long.

A culture of fear still pervades in Davao City. I met with a mother who lost three children to the drug war, one in 2013, one in 2016 and one in 2023. We spoke for hours, and she trembled as she described each son who was killed: Vivencio Jr., 19, who was watching basketball when the gunmen pulled up on motorcycles; Veejay, 21, who was taken into an unmarked van and shot dead as he tried to escape; and Harry Jay, 32, whose corpse with two bullet wounds she claimed from the hospital.

When Jes and I arrived at the Laud quarry, at a shooting range that operates on the fringes of the property, we were followed by two men, one of whom filmed us on his cellphone. We left quickly, wondering whether we were imagining a threat. But when we later showed the two men’s photos to Mr. Matobato, he confirmed that they were members of the Davao Death Squad.

The Escape

The day started with a farewell to the sheep, goats and chickens that Mr. Matobato had cared for while in hiding. His turn to flee the Philippines and tell of his crimes had finally come.

The family — Mr. Matobato, his wife and his two stepchildren — loaded a van with suitcases packed with Filipino snacks and Catholic talismans. Over his shoulder, Mr. Matobato carried a black laptop case, the same one in which he used to keep his Colt pistol. He has never owned an actual computer.

Mr. Matobato had managed to obtain a new identity with a new passport and a new job description: gardener. He practiced saying his new name, first, middle and last, but the syllables came out funny, with a question mark hanging over them. His thick hair had been shaved, and he wore large glasses and a gray goatee. A mask covered part of his face.

Still, Mr. Matobato, with his compact but coiled energy, worried that he was recognizable. One of the sons of the owner of the Laud quarry had worked as a police officer at the airport in the Philippine capital, Manila. The priests and politicians arranging Mr. Matobato’s escape worried that he was being targeted for a hit.

The throng of travelers at the airport disoriented Mr. Matobato. It had been a decade since he had been in a crowd. Back when he killed in Davao City, he said, he never bothered to conceal his identity. He could shoot someone in broad daylight and stroll away. Now, he was desperate not to be seen.

As he waited in line at immigration, Mr. Matobato’s lips moved soundlessly. He was not praying, he later said, but repeating his new name. The immigration officer had no questions, and Mr. Matobato’s new passport received an exit stamp. As the plane took off for Dubai, he cradled a figurine of the Virgin Mary in his hands. This time, he said, he was invoking God. Flying filled him with fear.

Shortly after the flight’s takeoff, he downed a beer but he was still jangly, he said. He was in the middle seat of a middle row in economy class. Next to him slept two Catholic priests who had negotiated his long escape from the Philippines.

Mr. Matobato diverted his attention by watching “The Beekeeper,” a movie about a hit man.

“Very good,” he told me, giving two thumbs up. “Very realistic.”

At the Dubai airport, Mr. Matobato, who had eaten everything served to him on the nine-hour flight, was still hungry. The priests led him and his family to a Five Guys for hamburgers. A server from the Philippines smiled at the clergymen and offered them free fries. Mr. Matobato chewed his burger in silence, taking big bites and wiping his fingers clean. Then he put his face mask back on.

“I don’t think anyone recognizes me, but you can never be sure,” he said, his eyes scanning the restaurant. “Superman is powerful. He has his spies everywhere.”

On the next flight, another long-haul, Mr. Matobato watched more movies about hit men. Bullets flew on the screen. At the duty-free shop in the country that is his new home — The New York Times is not identifying his whereabouts for his security — Mr. Matobato gazed at the fully stocked liquor aisles. There was Johnny Walker in blue and black and green and double black — more labels than he had ever seen, he said. He glanced at the priests, and one picked up a bottle for a celebration.

“The pursuit of justice is long and arduous, but with Edgar out of the Philippines, we are one big step closer to bringing Duterte to account,” said the Rev. Flaviano Villanueva, who helped form a kind of church witness protection program for penitent members of the Davao Death Squad. “We have to tell the world, tell the Filipino people that ours is not a society that accepts wanton violence, that ignores extrajudicial killings, that glorifies a president who boasts about murder.”

For speaking out against the violence of Mr. Duterte’s drug war, Father Villanueva and another Catholic priest were tried for sedition. They were acquitted after Mr. Duterte left office.

In a car for another drive to another safe house, Mr. Matobato fell asleep within minutes. It was as if a decade’s worth of tension in his body had uncorked.

Over the next few days, Mr. Matobato would experience the dislocation of being a permanent exile. He did not understand the language, the people or the culture. Still, he was free to walk around, unmasked and unrecognized. At a superstore, he maneuvered a large shopping cart through the aisles, staring at the unfamiliar foods. He prayed at a cathedral. He went on walks with his wife, just the two of them. They held hands.

“I know what he did is wrong, but he is my husband,” Ms. Abarquez said.

On that first night in his new home, drinking Johnny Walker Blue Label decanted in plastic cups, Mr. Matobato said he felt free for the first time in decades. Superman’s men, he said, could not come after him anymore. He raised his glass. Tears trickled down his face.

His family went to bed, jet-lagged and disoriented. But Mr. Matobato did not want to sleep. Killings once submerged in his memory surfaced.

“Did I tell you about the time we killed the girls?” he asked me.

He had, back when we were in the Philippines. That was the first time I had seen Mr. Matobato cry. Sitting with his wife, he had described how he and other death squad members kidnapped three young women around 2013. They were told the women were drug dealers, but Mr. Matobato didn’t think they were. The hit men bundled the women into a van.

At a quiet bend, where Gold Street meets Ruby Street, several men stayed in the back of the van and raped the women, Mr. Matobato said. He said his role was to act as lookout, standing outside the vehicle to ward off any passers-by. The women were killed in the van, then their bodies were swathed in packing tape and dumped in a patch of forest, Mr. Matobato said.

“They were so young,” he said. “They weren’t criminals. I don’t even know their names.”

Ms. Abarquez had been listening to her husband speak. She stood up and walked away.

There were so many unidentified corpses that turned up in Davao City back then that I was not able to confirm with certainty Mr. Matobato’s account. One police officer said there were at least three instances of multiple female bodies found in Davao City around 2013.

It’s like that with many of the extrajudicial killings, both in Davao City and nationwide. Evidence is hazy. People are still afraid to talk. In the end, it’s unlikely that most of the death squad members will ever face prosecution.

Back in his new home, I told Mr. Matobato that he had already described the deaths of the three young women to me. His eyes glistened.

“In my nightmares, I see the girls, and they are screaming,” he said. “They were so young, so innocent. They didn’t deserve to die.”

Mr. Matobato swallowed more whiskey. Then he smiled, his teeth small and white.

“I haven’t told you about these ones before,” he said. “You can write it down.”

For an hour, and then another, he related more killings he said he committed. My hand hurt from writing down every death, every instrument of killing: a knife, a .45 Colt, a rope, a heave into the sea.

Mr. Matobato sipped his Johnny Walker. He was still awake. Absolution eluded him. So he told me one more story, just one more, of a man he says he killed for Superman.

Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.

The air is laced with cigarette smoke and Cantonese profanities as half a dozen taxi drivers hang out by their fire-engine-red cabs on a quiet corner of the gritty Prince Edward neighborhood of Hong Kong.

It is the afternoon handover, when day shift drivers pass their taxis to those working the night shift. They are surrendering wads of cash to a taxi agent, a matriarchal figure who collects rent for the vehicles, manages their schedules and dispenses unsolicited advice about exercising more and quitting smoking. The drivers wave her off.

There may be no harder task in this city of more than seven million than trying to change a taxi driver’s habits. Often grumpy and rushing to the next fare, cabbies in Hong Kong have been doing things their way for decades, reflecting the fast-paced, frenetic culture that has long energized the city.

But taxi drivers are under pressure to get with the times. Their passengers are fed up with being driven recklessly, treated curtly and, in many cases, having to settle fares with cash — one of the strangest idiosyncrasies about life in Hong Kong. The practice is so ingrained that airport staff often have to alert tourists at taxi ranks that they need to carry bills.

The government, both because of the complaints and to revitalize tourism, has tried to rein in taxi drivers. Officials ran a campaign over the summer urging drivers to be more polite. They imposed a point system in which bad behavior by drivers — such as overcharging or refusing passengers — would be tracked and could result in the loss of licenses.

In early December, the government proposed requiring all taxis to install systems to allow them to accept credit cards and digital payments by the end of 2025, and to add surveillance cameras by the end of 2026.

Predictably, many taxi drivers have opposed the idea of closer supervision.

“Would you want to be monitored all the time?” said Lau Bing-kwan, a 75-year-old cabby with thinning strands of white hair who accepts only cash. “The government is barking too many orders.”

Hold On to Your Seats

The new controls, if put in place, would signal the end of an era for an industry that has long been an anomaly in Hong Kong’s world-class transportation system. Every day, millions of people commute safely on sleek subways and air-conditioned double-decker buses that run reliably.

Riding in a taxi, by comparison, can be an adventure. Step into one of Hong Kong’s signature four-door Toyota Crown Comfort cabs and you will most likely be (what is the opposite of greeted?) by a man in his 60s or older with a phalanx of cellphones mounted along his dashboard — used sometimes for GPS navigation and other times to track horse racing results. Pleasantries will not be exchanged. Expect the gas pedal to be floored.

You will then reflexively grab a handle and try not to slide off the midnight-blue vinyl seats as you zip and turn through the city’s notoriously narrow streets. Lastly, before you arrive at your destination, you will ready your small bills and coins to avoid aggravating the driver with a time-consuming exit.

“When they drop you off, you have to kind of rush,” said Sylvia He, a professor of urban studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who, like many residents of this city, feels conditioned to walk on eggshells around a cabby. “I don’t want to delay their next order.”

To many cabbies, the impatience and brusqueness is a reflection of their harsh reality: when scraping by in a business with shrinking financial rewards, no time can be wasted on social niceties. Lau Man-hung, a 63-year-old driver, for instance, skips meals and bathroom breaks just to stay behind the wheel long enough to take home about $2,500 a month, barely enough to get by in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

“Some customers are too mafan,” said Mr. Lau using a Cantonese word that means causing trouble and annoyance. “They like to complain about which route to take. They tell you to go faster.”

An Industry’s Fragile Economics

Driving a cab used to be a decent way to make a living. But business has gotten tougher, made worse by the fallout of mainland China’s economic slowdown. The city has had trouble reviving its allure with tourists, while its bars and nightclubs, once teeming with crowds squeezed into narrow alleyways, now draw fewer revelers.

Even before the downturn, some owners of taxi licenses were struggling. Taxi licenses are limited by the government and traded on a loosely regulated market. Some owners suffered huge losses after a speculative bubble drove prices up to nearly $1 million for one license a decade ago, then burst.

Today, licenses are worth about two-thirds of their decade-ago high. Many businesses and drivers who own licenses are focused more on recouping losses than on improving service.

Tin Shing Motors, a family-owned company, manages drivers and sells taxi license mortgages and taxicab insurance. Chris Chan, a 47-year-old third-generation member of the company, says Tin Shing is saddled with mortgages bought when licenses were worth much more.

To chip away at that debt, Mr. Chan needs to rent out his taxis as much as possible. But he struggles to find drivers. Many cabbies have aged out, and young people have largely stayed away from the grueling work. Profit margins have dwindled, he added, especially with the cost of insurance almost doubling in recent years. Uber, despite operating in a gray area in Hong Kong, has also taken a chunk of customers away.

“It’s harder and harder to make money,” Mr. Chan said.

At the bottom are the drivers, about half of whom are 60 and older. Many cannot afford to retire. They have to make about $14 an hour to break even after paying for gas and the rent of their vehicles. To them, cash in hand is better than waiting days for electronic payments to clear.

A Blue-Collar Job Professionalizes

Tension between the public and taxi drivers plays out with mutual finger pointing. When the government introduced the courtesy campaign last year, a driver told a television reporter that it was the passengers who were rude.

In many ways, Hong Kong’s taxi drivers embody the high-stress, no-frills culture of the city’s working class. Their gruffness is no different from the service one gets at a cha chaan teng, the ubiquitous local cafes that fuel the masses with egg sandwiches, instant noodles and saccharine-sweet milk tea. Servers are curt, but fast.

“People tend to have one bad experience and remember it for the rest of their life,” said Hung Wing-tat, a retired professor who has studied the taxi industry. “Consequently, there is an impression among the public that all taxi drivers are bad when most of them just want to earn a living. They don’t want any trouble.”

Indeed, there are cabbies like Joe Fong, 45, who sees no value in antagonizing his customers and has tried to adapt to his passengers’ needs.

“Why fight?” Mr. Fong said. “We need each other. You need a ride and I need your money.”

Mr. Fong maximizes his income by splitting his time between driving a private car for Uber and a cab for a taxi fleet called Alliance. Mr. Fong has five cellphones affixed to his dashboard. He welcomes electronic payments, and he did not raise an eyebrow when Alliance installed cameras in all their taxis last year.

“I’m not like those old guys,” said Mr. Fong, who drives one of Hong Kong’s newer hybrid taxis made by Toyota, which look like a cross between a London cab and a PT Cruiser. “The world has changed. You have to accept it.”

Olivia Wang contributed reporting.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy visited President-elect Donald J. Trump on Saturday at his Florida golf club for an informal meeting.

The trip to the club, Mar-a-Lago, came only a few days before Ms. Meloni is set to welcome President Biden for an official visit to Italy and the Vatican from Jan. 9 to 12.

On Saturday, she appeared in the grand ballroom at Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Trump, according to pool reports, said he was having dinner with Ms. Meloni, whom he called “a fantastic woman,” adding, “She’s really taken Europe by storm, and everyone else.”

They, along with some potential members of the future Trump administration, including the nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and for Treasury, Scott Bessent, then watched a screening of a film titled, “The Eastman Dilemma: Lawfare or Justice.”

Ms. Meloni and Mr. Trump have expressed mutual appreciation in the past, and her trip is one of the first few visits by a foreign leader to the president-elect’s estate in Florida since his election in November. The meeting reinforces the hopes of Ms. Meloni’s supporters that the conservative Italian prime minister will become Mr. Trump’s go-to ally in Europe.

Much of that role would involve mediating tensions between other European leaders and Mr. Trump, who has threatened to start a trade war with the continent, as well as to reduce American backing for some NATO countries and for Ukraine in its war with Russia.

The agenda of the meeting was unclear on Saturday night, but observers expected the two leaders would discuss those issues.

Another possible topic of discussion, according to observers, was the detention in Iran of a prominent Italian reporter, Cecilia Sala. It happened a few days after Italy arrested, at the request of the United States, an Iranian suspected of providing drone components to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Iran has routinely detained foreigners and dual citizens to trade them for money and people.

One person briefed on the meeting said Ms. Meloni had pressed aggressively for it.

She also has a good relationship with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a close adviser of the president-elect’s, which her supporters hope will bolster her international standing once Mr. Trump becomes president.

Since being elected, Mr. Trump has welcomed to Mar-a-Lago Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, a champion of “illiberal democracy,” as well as Argentina’s firebrand right-wing president, Javier Milei. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada became the first Group of Seven leader to visit Mr. Trump in Florida since the election, after a threat to impose tariffs on Canada.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Chile’s president visited the South Pole on Friday in a bid to fortify his country’s territorial claims to part of Antarctica, as competition in the region is growing bit by bit.

Gabriel Boric, the president, and a delegation of officials visited Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, a U.S. research base; the first time, his office said, that a Latin American president in office has set foot on the freezing continent.

Mr. Boric called the trip “a landmark” and “a confirmation of our claim of sovereignty in this space.”

At the other end of the world, the Arctic has drawn notice with climate change making the region more important for global trade, opening up access to its natural resources and intensifying military competition there. Antarctica, by contrast, remained comparatively under the radar.

But more than a century after explorers raced to plant flags in the frigid polar desert, countries are once again starting to openly vie for influence in the region.

The area is governed by the Antarctic Treaty System, which mandates that “Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only.” The Cold-War era pact and subsequent agreements aimed to make Antarctica a military-free zone and manage competing territorial claims.

For decades, the system largely succeeded in establishing an international consensus for the region, according to a 2023 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based research institute.

Many nations have long-established or new facilities on Antarctica conducting scientific research, some of which could also be used to explore the region’s strategic and commercial potential. Competition to do so has quietly intensified in recent years, and looks likely to continue doing so, according to the report.

The Antarctic’s harsh environment and the treaty system have constrained access to its resources, but the region has a rich marine environment and potential reserves of oil, gas and minerals. The barren landscape is also a good spot for countries to place technology with military applications.

Russia has increased efforts to build monitoring stations for GLONASS, its version of the Global Positioning System, which has experts say also have military use. At least three Russian stations were already operating in Antarctica in 2015.

China in 2023 announced plans to build new satellite stations in Antarctica, another project with potential military applications.

The treaty bans mining in the region, protecting small reserves of iron ore, coal and chromium. Estimates vary greatly, but the region could also hold vast reserves of oil and natural gas. To the dismay of environmentalists, China and Russia are pursuing loosened restrictions on krill fishing.

Facets of the treaty that involve environmental protections will be up for review in 2048, but could be undermined before then.

Some signatories of the Antarctic treaty have also staked territorial claims — a number of which overlap — while others do not recognize the territorial claims of other countries. Chile is one of the few countries claiming territory, and it has installed a permanent settlement called Villa Las Estrellas.

Chile sought to strengthen its territorial claims in May 2024, holding a meeting with defense officials in the Antarctic as a symbol of sovereignty amid tension over Russia’s reported geological surveys in the Weddell Sea, an Antarctic region off South America’s southernmost tip.

Simon Romero contributed reporting.