It looks like a serene snapshot from Ukraine’s battlefield: A group of armor-clad soldiers huddled around a makeshift table scattered with food and playing cards. Some laugh or smoke, and one lounges on the ground, smiling as he scrolls through his phone.

The photograph is unlike others of the Ukrainian front that have rallied people in Ukraine over the course of the war — there is no cannon fire, no soldiers climbing out of trenches, no wounded fighters with faces contorted in pain.

Still, for the past year, the image has been widely shared online by Ukrainians and praised by government officials, who displayed it recently in the capital’s leading exhibition center because it has struck at the heart of the Ukrainian identity struggle caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The photograph — staged and taken in late 2023 by Émeric Lhuisset, a French photographer — reimagines a famous 19th-century painting of Cossacks based in central Ukraine, with present-day Ukrainian soldiers standing in for the legendary horse-riding warriors. The soldiers’ poses and expressions are the same, though swords have been replaced by machine guns.

The subject matter is at the heart of a culture war between Russia and Ukraine that has intensified since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion almost three years ago, with Ukrainians seeking to reclaim and assert an identity that Russia says does not exist.

The painting has been claimed by both Ukraine and Russia as part of their heritages. It not only depicts Cossacks, a people that both countries view as their own, but it was also made by Illia Repin, an artist born in what is today Ukraine but who did much of his work in Moscow and St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire.

It is a cultural battle long dominated by Russia. The most famous version of the painting is displayed in St. Petersburg, while another lesser-known version is in Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine. Repin has been labeled Russian in international exhibitions, frustrating Ukrainians who see him as one of their own.

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art to reconsider this classification and relabel Repin as Ukrainian.

With his photographic reinterpretation, Mr. Lhuisset seeks to further challenge Russia’s narrative by drawing a direct line between the Cossacks, who at times resisted the rule of czarist Russia, and the current Ukrainian Army.

“You can’t understand this war if you don’t understand the whole issue of cultural appropriation,” Mr. Lhuisset, 41, said in a recent interview in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. “This is a real cultural war.”

The painting — “Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of Turkey” — is familiar to most Ukrainians, with reproductions adorning many family homes. It shows a group of Cossacks from an area straddling today’s Zaporizhzhia region in southern Ukraine laughing heartily as they write a mocking reply to an ultimatum to surrender from the sultan in 1676.

The Zaporizhzhia region is now partly under Russian occupation. The rest has come under increasing Russian airstrikes in recent months.

Although historians say the depicted scene most likely never took place, the sense of defiance it conveys has resonated deeply in Ukraine.

“This painting was an element of self-identity formation for me,” said Tetyana Osipova, 49, a Ukrainian servicewoman featured in the photograph. She recalled that her grandmother had kept a small reproduction “in a place of honor” near the Christian Orthodox icons in their home, where it served as a reminder to “stand up for yourself.”

Mr. Lhuisset said he first grasped the painting’s significance when he was in Kyiv during the 2014 uprising that ousted a pro-Kremlin president. He remembered seeing protesters holding placards with reproductions of the artwork to symbolize “their willingness not to surrender, not to submit.”

Back in France, the painting slipped from his mind.

Until Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

Mr. Lhuisset was inspired by a news report about a Ukrainian border guard’s defiant and expletive-laden radio message to an oncoming Russian naval assault. The insulting reply immediately reminded him of the painting.

“For me, it was the Cossacks’ answer to the sultan,” he said. “It seemed blindingly obvious.”

He decided to capture this spirit of defiance by recreating Repin’s painting in a modern setting. He spent months negotiating with the Ukrainian military to get armed troops to pose for the photograph and to find a safe place, north of Kyiv, to stage it. Some soldiers came straight from the front line, their mustachioed faces evoking the unruly Cossacks.

“They looked like they had stepped out of the painting!” said Andrii Malyk, the press officer for Ukraine’s 112th Territorial Defense Brigade, which participated in the project.

Mr. Lhuisset wanted the photograph to be as close to the painting as possible. He meticulously arranged the 30 or so soldiers, positioning their hands and asking them to freeze in bursts of hearty laughter to echo the energy of the original scene. Objects in the painting were replaced with modern equivalents: a slouch hat became a helmet; a musket transformed into a rocket launcher; a mandolin was swapped for a portable speaker.

A drone hovers in the sky, a nod to the aircraft with no crew that have become conspicuous on the battlefield.

Mr. Lhuisset released the photograph a few days later on social media, and it was quickly embraced by Ukrainian media and government officials as an emblem of the country’s spirit of independence. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry posted the image on the social media platform X with the caption: “Cossack blood flows in our veins.”

To Ukrainians, the photograph served as a means to reclaim a masterpiece that they say has long been misattributed to Russia, despite its Ukrainian roots.

“Some people think of the painting as Russian, not Ukrainian,” said Eduard Lopuliak, a combat medic featured in the photograph. “It’s a way to remind them it’s our cultural heritage, not Russia’s.”

Russia, for its part, says that Repin is a Russian painter and that all of his work should be considered Russian.

The painter was born in present-day Ukraine and studied art there before moving to St. Petersburg to further his career. Oleksandra Kovalchuk, a deputy head of the Odesa Fine Arts Museum, said that Repin retained strong ties to Ukraine through friends there and by supporting Ukrainian artists. To depict the Cossacks with authenticity, he traveled across the country and worked closely with local historians, she said.

In many ways, the photograph was Ukraine’s answer to Russia’s own reinterpretation of the painting. In 2017, the Russian painter Vassily Nesterenko, a Kremlin favorite, reimagined the Cossacks in modern Russian uniforms, in a work titled, “A Letter to Russia’s Enemies.”

The project also carries a more urgent mission for Ukraine: helping it rebuild a cultural heritage devastated by nearly three years of war.

Russian bombings of museums and theaters have destroyed countless Ukrainian cultural treasures. Moscow’s occupation forces have also looted institutions like the Kherson Regional Art Museum in southern Ukraine, which lost nearly its entire collection.

To help address the loss, Mr. Lhuisset traveled to Kyiv late last year with a large print of his photograph and donated it to Alina Dotsenko, the museum’s director. “The Kherson museum today is an empty building,” he said. “To become a museum again, it needs a new collection.”

The photograph was displayed for a day in the Ukrainian House, a major cultural center in Kyiv, alongside empty frames left from the theft in Kherson. Like most of Ukraine’s artworks, it was then stored in a safe and secret location to protect it from Russian attack. It will be transferred to Kherson when the museum reopens, which is practically impossible today because it is less than a mile from the front line.

Mr. Malyk, the soldier, said he hoped to visit the museum when the war was over to show his children the image. Like the painting, he said, the photograph captures an important moment in Ukraine’s history.

“We hope it will pass down through generations,” he said.

Daria Mitiuk contributed reporting.

The Sudanese military recaptured a key city in Sudan’s breadbasket region on Saturday, chasing out a paramilitary group that the United States accused last week of genocide.

Sudan’s information minister said the army had “liberated” the city, Wad Madani, while the military said that its troops were working to “clear the remnants of the rebels” from the area.

If the army can hold on to the city, it would be its most significant victory since the war started nearly two years ago. Experts said it would most likely shift the focus of the war northward to Khartoum, the capital.

Videos circulating online showed the army entering Wad Madani, which lies about 100 miles south of the capital. Local media reported that fighters with the paramilitary group, known as the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., were fleeing the city.

The group’s leader, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, admitted defeat but vowed to soon recapture the city. “Today we lost a round; we did not lose the battle,” he said in an audio address to his fighters and the Sudanese people.

The victory brought joyous scenes in army-held parts of the country among Sudanese who hoped it might signal a turning point in a ruinous civil war that has led to massacres, ethnic cleansing and a spreading famine in one of Africa’s largest countries.

People massed on the battle-scarred streets of Khartoum, while church bells pealed in Port Sudan, the wartime de facto capital where many Sudanese have fled the fighting. Celebrations also erupted among exiled Sudanese in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The R.S.F. defeat came just over a year after the group seized Wad Madani in a victory that forced tens of thousands of people to flee and sent shock waves across Sudan. The group’s fighters went on to capture swaths of the country, far from their stronghold in Darfur in western Sudan.

But much of the most brutal fighting was in Darfur, where R.S.F. fighters massacred members of rival ethnic groups, according to human rights groups and the United Nations. Last week the United States formally determined that those killings constituted genocide, and it imposed sanctions on the R.S.F.’s leader, General Hamdan, who is widely known as Hemeti.

The United States also imposed sanctions on seven companies in the United Arab Emirates that it accused of trading gold and buying weapons on behalf of the R.S.F.

In recent months, the tide of the fight appeared to turn as the R.S.F. ceded territory in Khartoum and in parts of the east of the country. The military launched a counteroffensive in the area around Wad Madani, culminating in the recapture of the city on Saturday.

Still, it was too early to say if the victory would fundamentally change the course of the conflict. Since the first shots were fired in April 2023, the momentum of the fighting has swung back and forth, sometimes wildly.

The army and the R.S.F. were once allies, and their leaders joined to mount a military coup in 2021. But in the war between them, they have enjoyed the backing of different foreign powers.

The R.S.F. is supported by the United Arab Emirates, a wealthy Gulf sponsor that has supplied it with weapons and powerful drones, mostly smuggled into Sudan from neighboring countries.

The Sudanese military has obtained or bought weapons from Iran, Russia and Turkey. Both sides mine the country’s vast reserves of gold to finance the fight.

For ordinary Sudanese, the war has brought only misery, death and destruction, killing tens of thousands of people, scattering 11 million from their homes and setting off one of the world’s worst famines in decades.

The global authority on hunger, known as the I.P.C., reported last month that famine had spread to five areas in Sudan and was expected to reach another five in the coming months. In all, 25 million Sudanese suffer from acute or chronic hunger.

Both sides have committed atrocities and war crimes, according to the United Nations and American officials, although only the R.S.F. has been accused of ethnic cleansing.

The bungalow was built for a Dutch trader in colonial times, but it has become part of modern Singaporean lore. It was where Lee Kuan Yew lived for decades, where he started his political party and where he began building Singapore into one of the richest countries in the world.

Mr. Lee had said that he wanted the house to be demolished after he died rather than preserved as a museum, with the public “trampling” through his private quarters.

But the wording of his will left the property’s fate in limbo and caused a rift between his three children — one that reflects an intensifying debate over Singapore’s semi-authoritarian political system.

Now, an extraordinary voice has joined those who complain that the city-state’s prosperity has come at the cost of a government that lacks accountability: one of Mr. Lee’s own children.

“The idea that one good man at the center can control this, and you just rely on his benevolence to ensure that everything is right, doesn’t work,” Lee Hsien Yang, the youngest child, who wants to honor his father’s wishes for the house, said in a recent interview with The New York Times from London.

After Lee Kuan Yew’s death in 2015, the eldest child, by then Singapore’s prime minister, argued that his father’s instructions for the bungalow were ambiguous. His siblings wanted it demolished, though one continued to live in the house, and as long as she did, its fate remained unresolved.

Then, after her death in October, the dispute resurfaced — and escalated sharply. Lee Hsien Yang, called Yang by his parents and siblings, announced that he had obtained political asylum in Britain because he feared being unfairly imprisoned in Singapore over the disagreement.

Yang said his brother — Lee Hsien Loong, who stepped down in May as prime minister — had abused his power in the conflict over the house.

Yang, 67, described what he called a pattern of persecution by the Singapore government in recent years. In 2020, his son was charged with contempt of court for criticizing Singapore’s courts in a private Facebook post. That year, his wife, a lawyer who had arranged for the witnesses at the signing of the patriarch’s will, was barred from practicing law for 15 months. Then the couple faced a police inquiry about lying under oath. In 2022, they left Singapore.

In October, Yang announced that Britain had granted his asylum request, ruling that he and his wife “have a well-founded fear of persecution and therefore cannot return to your country.”

Singapore’s government rejected the claims, saying that the couple was free to return home. It said it was accountable to voters and an independent judiciary. Yang, it added, was engaged in “an extravagant personal vendetta” against his brother, Loong.

Loong, 72, who now holds the title of senior minister, declined to comment because he has recused himself from the matter of the house.

For Yang, the yearslong dispute is proof that there are “fundamental problems in the way Singapore is governed and run.”

Yang acknowledged that his father had detained opposition politicians and union leaders, but said that he “had the best interests of the country at heart.”

The People’s Action Party has governed Singapore with a tight grip for nearly 70 years. And years after the founding father’s death, it continues to praise his legacy.

This, some analysts say, has left Singapore at a crossroads.

“Are we able to move on?” said Ja Ian Chong, who teaches political science at the National University of Singapore. “Or are we still stuck with this relatively brittle, big-man kind of approach to politics?”

Lee Kuan Yew transformed a colonial outpost into an economic powerhouse in a generation. He made no bones about intervening in the lives of Singaporeans and prioritized the community over the individual — a notion that some observers say points to the irony of the family feud.

He “understood that the government would have to preserve the house if it decided that was in the public interest,” Loong wrote in a 2016 letter to Lawrence Wong, who was part of a government committee created to consider options for the property, and is now prime minister.

That panel concluded that the bungalow had historical significance, and that Lee Kuan Yew had been amenable to its preservation. But polls indicate that most Singaporeans want it torn down. In October, the government said it was again studying whether to preserve the circa 1898 house.

‘The Best Combination’

For decades, Lee Kuan Yew’s family appeared to be as orderly as the state he ran. His wife, Kwa Geok Choo, was in charge of the household at 38 Oxley Road, in one of Singapore’s most expensive areas.

In the 1950s, Mr. Lee and a group of friends set up his political party, the P.A.P., in the basement dining room. Most of the house was spartan. The furniture was old and mismatched; the family bathed by scooping water from earthenware vessels. Even after the sons had married and moved out, they gathered every Sunday for family lunch.

Visitors were quick to notice that only one child’s photographs were displayed: Loong’s.

“He got the best combination of our two DNAs,” Mr. Lee would tell local journalists. “The others have also combinations of both, but not in as advantageous a way as he has. It’s the luck of the draw.”

“He was the apple of my mother’s eye, and she had ambitions for him,” Yang said of Loong. “I was never antagonistic with him, neither did I have any jealousy or envy of him.”

In 2004, Loong became prime minister. Yang at the time was the chief executive of Singapore’s state-owned phone company and said that he harbored no political ambitions. That would change.

Demolition Debate

After Mr. Lee’s wife died, he continued to live in the house with his daughter, Dr. Lee Wei Ling, a neurologist. Mr. Lee died in March 2015, and his children gathered at the bungalow the following month for the reading of his will.

The house was left to Loong, but Ling could continue to live there. Once she moved out, the house was to be torn down. And if for some reason, the house was not demolished, he did not want it to be open to the public.

Loong was blindsided and would later say publicly that he did not know about this final will. When the will was being discussed, he became “aggressive” and “threatening,” his sister wrote in a previously undisclosed email to a friend in May 2015. She added that Loong told his younger siblings that if they pursued the demolition clause, the government would intervene and declare the house a national monument.

It was the last time Loong spoke with Ling and Yang, according to Yang.

The next day, Loong raised the matter in Parliament. He said that he wanted to see his father’s wishes carried out, but that “it will be up to the government of the day to consider the matter.”

A few months later, it appeared that the siblings had reached a resolution. Yang bought the house from Loong for an undisclosed price.

But soon, the government formed a committee to explore options for the house. That marked the start of Yang’s troubles with the state.

New Opposition Party

Loong told the panel that he was “very concerned” that the demolition clause in the will was “reinserted under dubious circumstances.” He asked whether there was a conflict of interest for Lee Suet Fern, Yang’s wife, who had organized the signing of the will.

To the younger siblings, it appeared that the committee was “conducting an inquisition into the will,” Yang said, pointing out that a court had declared it as binding.

In a joint statement in 2017, Yang and Ling said that they did not trust their brother as a leader. They said that Loong and his wife were milking “Lee Kuan Yew’s legacy for their own political purposes,” and harbored dynastic ambitions for their son.

Loong responded in Parliament, saying that he did not give instructions to the committee and that his only dealings with the panel were his responses to their requests in writing.

He has denied grooming his son for office.

Then the government accused Yang’s wife of professional misconduct over the will. A disciplinary tribunal ruled against her, saying she and her husband had built an “elaborate edifice of lies” during the proceedings.

A three-judge panel then ruled that Yang’s wife, Ms. Lee, gave “a contrived and ultimately untrue account of her role” in the will, and suspended her for 15 months for misconduct. But it also ruled that she had not been acting as Mr. Lee’s lawyer, and that he had been content with his will.

For Yang, the People’s Action Party had lost its way. He joined the Progress Singapore Party, a new opposition group, and considered running for president, a ceremonial post.

In 2022, the police asked to interview him and his wife, saying they had lied in the misconduct proceedings. The couple agreed to be questioned at a later date, but soon left Singapore. It was not until 2023 that a minister revealed in Parliament that they were being investigated by the authorities.

In October, Yang organized Ling’s funeral from afar. Loong was not invited.

The walls of 38 Oxley Road are now cracked, and rust has eroded part of the gate. When a reporter rang the doorbell on a recent Sunday, a housekeeper answered and said nobody was home.

The flight recorder of the Jeju Air passenger jet that crashed last month, killing ​179 people, stopped recording for​ its last four minutes, South Korean officials said on Saturday, a significant setback for investigators.

Data extracted from the so-called black box, consisting of the ​cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, is generally crucial in investigations of aviation accidents. Officials in South Korea, who have been working with the United States’ National Transportation Safety Board​, have said that the ​flight data for the plane’s last four minutes​ would be ​especially important in this crash.​

But on Saturday, South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said that for reasons ​not yet determined, the black box of the Boeing 737-800 had stopped recording then.

“We plan to investigate why the data was not recorded,” the ministry said in a news release. ​It also said that other data and analysis would be used to try to understand what happened in last month’s disaster.

Jeju Air Flight 7C2216​, coming from Bangkok with 181 people on board, was preparing to land at Muan International Airport in southwestern South Korea at 8:59 a.m. on Dec. 29 when ​its pilot reported, “Mayday, mayday, mayday,” and, “Bird strike, bird strike,” according to officials. The pilot also told the air traffic control tower that he was “going around,” meaning he would abort his first landing attempt and circle in the air to prepare for a second one.

But he apparently did not have enough time to make a full circle. Instead, the plane approached the runway from the opposite direction and landed on its belly, without its landing gear deployed. Seeming unable to control its speed, it overshot the runway. Four minutes after the Mayday emergency report, the plane slammed into a concrete structure off the southern end of the runway and exploded into flames.​

The Ukrainian authorities on Saturday announced the capture of two North Korean soldiers in Russia, saying they were the first to be taken alive since Pyongyang sent troops to assist Moscow’s war effort.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said the two soldiers, who were wounded, were captured in the Kursk region of western Russia, where Ukrainian troops have been fighting to hold on to territory seized during a surprise cross-border incursion last summer.

In a post on various social media channels, Mr. Zelensky said the soldiers had received medical care, as required by the Geneva Conventions, and had been taken to Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, for interrogation.

Ukraine’s domestic intelligence service, the SBU, said one of the soldiers was captured on Thursday. It did not provide details on where, or say when the second was taken prisoner, but said they were the first North Koreans fighting against Ukraine in Kursk to be captured.

Their capture, the SBU said in a lengthy statement, provides “indisputable evidence of North Korea’s involvement in Russia’s war against our country.”

The Kremlin has not directly confirmed that North Korean troops are fighting alongside Moscow’s forces.

Interrogations are being carried out through Korean translators in coordination with South Korea’s intelligence service, according to the SBU. South Korea’s embassy in Ukraine did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither Russia nor North Korea had any immediate comment.

Ukraine’s intelligence agency and Mr. Zelensky both shared photographs and videos of the two soldiers, showing one with bandages around his jaw and the other with bandaged hands.

According to the rules governing treatment of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, governments are supposed to protect a prisoner of war from being made into a “public curiosity,” a concept that is sometimes interpreted as not presenting them in any public setting.

Fierce fighting has raged in Kursk as Russian forces try to rout Ukrainian troops and drive them back across the border. Bolstered by more than 11,000 North Korean soldiers, Russian troops have regained roughly half of the territory they lost in the area.

But Ukraine has hung on to more than 150 square miles of land inside Russia. The White House has said North Korea’s forces are suffering heavy casualties.

Last month, the Biden administration said more than 1,000 North Korean soldiers had been killed or wounded fighting Ukrainian troops in Kursk over the course of a week — with some choosing suicide over surrender.

South Korean intelligence officials have said that the deployment of North Korean troops was so rushed — with soldiers thrust into battle after learning a smattering of military terms, like “open fire” and “artillery” in Russian — that it could take time for them to properly integrate with Moscow’s forces.

The capture of the two soldiers could provide Ukraine with valuable intelligence on Russia’s military operations in Kursk and the interplay with North Korean soldiers.

In its statement on Sunday, Ukraine’s intelligence agency said one of the captured soldiers told interrogators that he thought he was being sent to Russia for training — not to fight Ukraine. That soldier, according to the SBU, was carrying a Russian military ID card.

Mr. Zelensky alluded to that point in his nightly address on Sunday, saying that “Russians issue their documents to these Koreans, but they will not deceive anyone.”

Ivan Nechepurenko and Anastasia Kuznietsova contributed reporting.

In his first official visit to Syria to meet with the new government there, the Lebanese prime minister on Saturday called for a way for the two countries to enable masses of Syrian refugees in Lebanon to head home.

The prime minister, Najib Mikati, met in the Syrian capital of Damascus with Ahmad al-Shara, the leader of the new Syrian government, on Saturday afternoon, according to the Lebanese prime minister’s office. Mr. al-Shara leads Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist group that spearheaded the lightning offensive that toppled the decades-long rule of Bashar al-Assad, the former Syrian president, last month.

At a news conference in Damascus, Mr. Mikati said both countries should quickly resolve the matter of the more than one million refugees that Lebanon took in as a result of the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011. While some have since returned, many others still remain in Lebanon.

“It has become urgent today — in the interest of both countries — to deal with this issue as quickly as possible and return the displaced to a Syria that is thankfully recovering,” said Mr. Mikati, adding that he believed Mr. al-Shara supported the effort.

Mr. al-Shara said the two leaders had discussed “outstanding issues” including border security, but did not make any comment about the return of refugees. He said committees would be set up to examine how to sort out various problems, but he urged Syrians to lower their expectations for a speedy overhaul of the impoverished country.

“We have a lot of problems in Syria,” Mr. al-Shara said. “We won’t be able to solve them all at once. We have to divide them up and look for solutions to each one.”

Mr. Mikati’s visit to Damascus came after the election of Joseph Aoun as Lebanon’s president this week after two years in which the office lay vacant. Mr. Aoun will soon begin consultations on nominating a new prime minister next week.

In Syria, Mr. al-Shara faces the challenge of imposing order on a country that has been devastated by 14 years of civil war that split it into multiple warring regions and spurred a proliferation of armed groups. He has sought to quickly re-establish a sense of normalcy at home, urging civil servants back to work and students back to school.

Lebanon, like other countries on Syria’s borders, fears that its internal chaos could spill over into its territory. Last week, at least five Lebanese soldiers were wounded in clashes along the Syrian border after Syrian militants fired at Lebanese soldiers. The Lebanese military said its troops were trying to shut down an illegal border crossing in the area.

Mr. Mikati spoke by phone with Mr. al-Shara after the incidents. During the call, Mr. al-Shara pledged that “the Syrian authorities are doing everything necessary to restore calm on the border and prevent the matter from recurring,” Mr. Mikati’s office said at the time.

Further underscoring those challenges, Syrian state media announced on Saturday that its security forces had arrested people accused of belonging to the Islamic State who had planned to commit a major attack in Damascus.

The two men had planned to use explosives inside the Sayeda Zeinab mausoleum, a holy site particularly venerated by Shiite Muslims on the outskirts of Damascus, according to SANA, the government-controlled outlet.

While an international coalition led by the United States has largely beaten back ISIS in its former bastions in Iraq and Syria, the group is still active in some areas, and continues to inspire attacks online.

Here’s what else is happening in the region:

• Gaza cease-fire talks: Israeli security chiefs will soon head to Qatar for high-level talks on a truce that would free the hostages held in Gaza, the Israeli government said on Saturday night. The office of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said he had ordered David Barnea, the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, to lead a delegation to Doha, the Qatari capital, for negotiations. Qatar and Egypt have been mediating between Israel and Hamas with help from the United States. The negotiations have been seemingly deadlocked for months, but Israeli and U.S. officials have expressed cautious optimism about reaching a deal in the coming weeks.

• Rockets from Gaza: Over 15 months in the war between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian militants are still firing munitions from the Gaza Strip, although both Israeli and U.S. officials say the group’s military capacity has been significantly degraded. Air-raid sirens went off in Kerem Shalom, an Israeli border community, on Saturday after a rocket launch from southern Gaza; the Israeli military said it was successfully intercepted.

Israeli warplanes bombed ports and a power plant in Yemeni territory controlled by the Houthis on Friday, the Israeli military said, in the latest attempt to force the Iranian-backed militant group to stop firing at Israel and commercial ships in the Red Sea.

Israel has escalated its strikes on the Houthis in recent weeks in response to repeated attacks by the Yemeni militia, which has been launching missiles and drones against Israel in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza. The United States and Britain have also struck Yemen repeatedly in an effort to secure international waterways from Houthi attacks, including new American strikes on Wednesday.

But it was far from clear whether Israel and its allies could successfully compel the Houthis to end their attacks on Israel and on ships through a bombing campaign. Months of Israeli and American airstrikes have failed to deter the well-equipped militia from conducting attacks.

The Israeli military said it had bombed the Hezyaz power station near Sana, the Houthi-controlled capital, and the Red Sea ports of Hudaydah and Ras Isa. The power station is not far from where thousands of Yemenis had gathered in a weekly rally in solidarity with Palestinians, and Ras Isa is Yemen’s main oil export terminal.

Experts have warned that attacking ports like Hudaydah, a major conduit for essential supplies in northern Yemen, could further worsen what is already one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Rocked by civil war for more than a decade, millions of people in Yemen face the threat of malnutrition, according to the United Nations.

The Israeli military said it had struck targets at sites that were being used by the Houthis for military purposes. More than 20 aircraft took part in the operation, which required in-flight refueling, and dropped about 50 munitions, said an military official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity in accordance with military protocol.

One worker at the Hezyaz power station was wounded, according to al-Masira, the Houthi-affiliated broadcaster. There were no other immediate reports of serious casualties.

“The port of Hudaydah is paralyzed and the port of Ras Isa is ablaze,” Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, said in a statement. “The message is clear: Anyone who harms Israel will be struck tenfold.”

The Houthis, who control much of western Yemen, are more than 1,000 miles from Israeli territory and have survived numerous efforts to defeat them since they rose to power in a civil war that began in 2014. The United States designates the Houthis as a terrorist group, and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, U.S. allies in the region, intervened in the civil war to fight against the Houthis.

Since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 prompted the Gaza war, the Houthis have fired hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel. They have also hampered global shipping by firing at passing commercial freighters in a self-declared effort to enforce a blockade on Israel.

Over the past two months, the Houthis have stepped up their attacks, sending Israelis across central Israel rushing for bomb shelters late at night as air-raid sirens blare. On Thursday, Houthi militants fired three drones at Israeli territory; the Israeli military said it intercepted them all.

Israel has bombarded Yemen several times in response — sending its jets more than 1,000 miles to do so — but has struggled to decisively subdue the Houthis.

After the strikes on Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, said that “the Houthis are paying, and will continue to pay, a heavy price for their aggression against us.”

But Israel’s options against its faraway enemy are limited. Israel’s security establishment has never prioritized Yemen and for years did not intensively focus on gathering intelligence on the Houthis, experts say.

The Houthis rarely expend their munitions in massive barrages, instead firing a missile or a drone at a time. They could likely maintain that pace for a long time, military experts say. Even if there were a cease-fire in Gaza, the Houthis might continue firing in an attempt to leverage their newfound significance on the regional stage, they say.

On Friday, Mr. Katz threatened to kill Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the group’s leader, as well as its other commanders.

“No one is immune,” Mr. Katz said. “We will hunt you down and destroy the terror infrastructure which you built. Israel’s long arm will reach you, wherever you are.”

Israel’s intelligence agencies spent months hunting for Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, in the relatively small enclave of the Gaza Strip. Experts say it would be much more difficult to locate Houthi leaders in the much larger and less well-surveilled territory of Yemen.

Here are other developments in the region:

• An Israeli airstrike on Friday in southern Lebanon killed at least two people, according to the country’s health ministry, a day after Lebanon elected a new president amid resurgent hopes of peace and stability. The attack, which Lebanon’s state-run news agency said targeted a vehicle, comes with just over two weeks to go until a cease-fire agreement expires between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Amid accusations of cease-fire violations by both sides, Lebanon has reported to the U.N. Security Council that Israel had launched over 800 “ground and air attacks” since the cease-fire came into effect in November.

Johnatan Reiss, Euan Ward, Stephen Castle and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.