In October, we traveled to the Cabo Delgado Province in northern Mozambique to understand how terrorists who claim an affiliation with the Islamic State have gained a foothold and wreaked havoc on Muslims and Christians alike.

Officials in the region and in the West say they are deeply concerned that if the Islamic State affiliate known as ISIS-Mozambique is not contained, then the loosely linked Islamic State network that has been gaining ground in pockets of Africa could become a bigger global threat.

What locals call “the war” has robbed the region of what was a largely peaceful life of fishing and farming.

Nearly 6,000 people have been killed and up to half of the province’s 2.3 million people have been displaced. Finding food and shelter has become a daily struggle in a province rich with natural resources like rubies, gas and timber.

Since our visit, the country has grown only more tense. After a disputed presidential election, Mozambique has been engulfed in the worst election-related violence since a long-running civil war ended in 1992. Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets across the country to protest a result that many believe was rigged by the governing party, Frelimo. Nearly 300 people have been killed during the protests, according to Decide Electoral Platform, a civil society organization.

On top of that, Cabo Delgado and Nampula province to the south took a direct hit from Cyclone Chido in mid-December, killing as many as 120 people, displacing tens of thousands, and leaving many without food and clean water.

Amid the chaos, insurgent attacks have risen sharply in Cabo Delgado, creating new uncertainty after government officials earlier had said they had largely defeated ISIS-Mozambique.

There is little doubt that the insurgency is at its weakest, diplomats and security analysts say, down to a few hundred fighters from several thousand. That is mostly because international troops, led by the Rwandan military, have picked up the slack for Mozambique’s ill-equipped and ill-trained armed forces.

But insurgents have now broken into small groups scattered across the dense forests of a province roughly the size of Austria, turning the conflict into a game of Whac-a-Mole, security experts said. Attacks are smaller than in the past. But they were more frequent in 2024 than in 2023, and have spread to previously unaffected areas.

“The government is doing the best it can,” Valige Tauabo, the governor of the province, said in an interview.

Where the Insurgency Began

Our Cessna 206 landed on an airstrip in Mocimboa da Praia, a sleepy fishing village that was the birthplace of the insurgency. A Rwandan soldier in battle gear surveilled us from the control tower.

Because of the high risk of ambushes, we had chartered a flight from the provincial capital, Pemba, a luxury few residents can afford.

We hopped into a sedan that wove around barricades set up by the Rwandan military and made our way into the village.

In October 2017, more than two dozen insurgents raided a police station in Mocimboa da Praia and killed two officers in the first attack of the insurgency.

Back then, the group called itself Al Shabab (analysts say it is unaffiliated with the Shabab in Somalia). Researchers say it had begun forming around 2005, when the teachings of extremist clerics from neighboring Tanzania to the north began infiltrating the mosques and madrassas in Cabo Delgado.

To win recruits, the extremists told the locals that while they struggled in poverty, their land was rich in natural resources. Lucrative natural gas reserves that had attracted some $24 billion in foreign investment, including nearly $5 billion from the United States, were nearby, off the coastal town of Palma.

Resentment of the government grew with multiple reports of the Mozambican military assaulting or killing civilians in Palma.

But the insurgents’ early message quickly got lost in their brutality.

In March 2020, Islamist militants gathered village residents on a soccer field in Mocimboa da Praia and warned them not to associate with the government, or “we’re going to decapitate everyone,” recalled Sanula Issa.

Only a couple of weeks later, Ms. Issa said, she was startled awake early one morning by gunfire and shouts of, “Allahu akbar!”

She raced to the beach with her husband and three children, she said, and tried to pile into boats with others. But the insurgents grabbed her husband and decapitated him with a machete, said Ms. Issa, 33, wiping away tears with a pink head scarf.

“They are evil,” said Ms. Issa, who once cooked rice for sailors. “They ruined people’s lives — innocent people.”

But it is not as though the locals turned to the government.

“Our dislike goes both ways,” said Rabia Muandimo Issa, who is no relation to Sanula Issa. She lost her brother and sister, and her home in Mocimboa da Praia, in an insurgent attack five years ago. “We don’t see good coming either from the government or the insurgents.”

A Displacement Crisis

For most of his 20 years, Muinde Macassari had a comfortable life in a shack near the ocean, fishing with his family. But since insurgents stormed his seaside village of Quiterajo two years ago, he has been sleeping on blankets in his aunt’s yard in Pemba, sharing a tent with two relatives.

The heat in the tattered tent becomes oppressive, and rain trickles through the torn canvas.

Hundreds of thousands of people have returned to their communities, only to find that their jobs, homes and stability are now gone.

Hundreds of thousands of others, like Mr. Macassari, live displaced in unfamiliar communities.

More than 80,000 displaced people are now crowding into Pemba, which had previously held about 200,000 residents. Aid organizations say Mozambique’s conflict does not get the assistance it needs because it is overshadowed by other global crises.

Mothers with children wrapped to their backs crowd clinics for child malnutrition treatment. Displaced people cram into the low-slung homes of family, friends and good Samaritans, using bedsheets as dividing walls.

Mr. Macassari sleeps outside because his aunt’s squat, two-bedroom concrete home is already full with 10 people.

He had been kidnapped by the insurgents, he said, forced to wash their clothes and stand guard, but says he was never sent into battle. He slept in the forest on an uncomfortable bed made of coconut tree leaves and ate just occasional portions of rice, corn and cassava.

Mr. Macassari said he understood some of the grievances the extremists preached — about the political elite riding around in fancy cars while everyone else was poor. But if the insurgents’ complaints are with the government, Mr. Macassari wondered, “why then are they killing innocent people?”

He escaped one night, using a bathroom break as an excuse, he said. He ran through the bush until he made it to a nearby village.

A Sour Homecoming

When insurgents captured Cheia Cassiano during an attack on Mocimboa da Praia in early 2020, they offered him a choice: You can join us, or we can kill you.

Over the next year, Mr. Cassiano, now 37, said the insurgents forced him to run, lift weights, fire a gun — and attack villages. They preached their message loudly: The war will not end until the end of the world; men should wear pants and women long skirts; everyone needed to pledge fealty to Islam, not the government.

“I was anxious,” Mr. Cassiano said. “Within the insurgency, when you don’t perform according to the plan, they can kill you.”

The insurgents seized control of Mocimboa da Praia in August 2020 and held it for a year, until troops from Rwanda and countries in southern Africa drove them out. It was the longest the insurgents had occupied a town over the course of the conflict.

Mocimboa da Praia emptied out during the occupation in 2020. But in 2022, residents began returning and life in many ways seems to have returned to normal. A market in the center of town buzzes at night with street vendors and growling motorcycle taxis. Fishermen gather around a sandy cove at sunrise, preparing nets and wooden boats, and drying out fish on tarps. Teams compete on dirt soccer fields.

But with just a little probing, it is easy to find deep physical and mental scars.

The steeple of the Catholic church in the center of town stands tall, but most of the building has been reduced to rubble. Next door, an elementary school is mostly gutted, with faded writing on a chalkboard reminding parents of a deadline, now years old, to enroll their children. A hospital infirmary is just a metal skeleton.

Where statues once stood of two of Mozambique’s liberation heroes, Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel, there are just broken foundations.

Many residents returned after the fighting to find empty patches of dirt where their homes made of red clay and thin logs once stood.

Mr. Cassiano, who joined the fighters after he was kidnapped, said his house had been burned down. He has rebuilt it and now sells fish for a living, but carries a visible scar of the conflict: He is missing his right hand. He said that he got into a dispute with his fellow insurgents over a bicycle he took from a village they raided. They accused him of stealing the bike from a group leader, he said, and, in accordance with their interpretation of Shariah law, chopped off his hand.

Trying to Heal

At a community center next to a displacement camp in Mocimboa da Praia, children in an art therapy workshop sometimes draw stick figures without heads, or sculpt mounds of clay into rifles.

One recent day, children sat in a circle singing, keeping the rhythm by slapping rock-filled plastic bottles on the ground.

“Children have the right to play,” they sang, “and to live as a child.”

One 12-year-old said she was only 8 when she was kidnapped by insurgents from Mocimboa da Praia and sexually assaulted multiple times while in captivity. She was once beaten for not putting on her hijab properly. She escaped into the bush with several women, and says she ate sand to stay alive.

She acted erratically when she returned home, said her aunt and uncle, whom she lives with because her parents were killed in an insurgent attack.

“I have seen people killed!” she would scream in sudden outbursts, her aunt said.

She is now back in school, and said she has begun to recover by spending time with other child survivors who gather at the center, run by the Foundation for Community Development, a local nonprofit. As we sat on the ground speaking, she stared downward, tracing the sand with a twig. The horrific things she has experienced, she said, are now motivation for her life ahead.

“I want to be a nurse,” she said, “to help other people in my community.”

Italy’s justice minister has requested the revocation of the arrest of an Iranian man sought by the United States for allegedly providing material used in an attack that killed three American soldiers, the Italian government announced on Sunday.

Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, 38, was arrested last month in Milan and the U.S. Justice Department had asked for his extradition. He was charged with illegally providing material used in a drone attack by an Iranian-backed militia on an American military base in Jordan.

On Sunday evening, IRNA, Iran’s state news agency, reported that Mr. Abedini had reached Tehran. Despite repeated requests for confirmation, Italy has not yet announced that it freed the man or that he left the country.

The Italian ministry’s request, which was filed to a court, came only days after Iran freed an Italian reporter, Cecilia Sala, who had been arrested in Iran three days after Mr. Abedini was detained. She was arrested on accusations of violating the laws of the Islamic Republic, though the Iranian government never provided details.

While the Italian government never confirmed any connection between the two cases, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said last week that Ms. Sala’s release was the result of a diplomatic “triangulation” with the United States and Iran.

On Sunday, the Italian Justice Ministry said it had not had the grounds to extradite Mr. Abedini. A U.S. Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

IRNA, citing the judiciary’s media center, reported on Sunday that Mr. Abedini’s arrest had been a misunderstanding that was resolved with diplomacy between Iran and Italy and cooperation between Iran’s and Italy’s intelligence services.

In Sunday’s government statement, Italy’s Justice Ministry said that according to the extradition treaty between Italy and the United States, a person could be extradited only for crimes that are punished in both countries. Mr. Abedini’s case, they said, did not fit the criteria.

One of the crimes that he is accused of — conspiring to export sophisticated electronic components in violation of U.S. export control and sanctions laws — is not punished in Italy, the ministry said.

Italy’s Justice Ministry also said that it had not received evidence to justify another accusation leveled against Mr. Abedini: that he provided material support to a foreign terrorist organization. The Justice Ministry said that it knew only that Mr. Abedini produced and traded technologies with Iran that had potential, but not exclusive, military use.

Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting from Brussels, and Devlin Barrett from Washington.

Struggling to raise funds for the restoration of his cathedral’s antique organ, a priest from St.-Flour, a small town in France’s heartland, came up with a creative solution. He turned one of the bell towers into a curing workshop where farmers could hang their hams to dry.

For nearly two years, after being blessed by a local bishop, pork legs swayed in peace in the dry air of the cathedral’s north tower, bringing in much-needed funds and delighting charcuterie lovers. Then an inspector for the organization that oversees France’s architectural heritage stepped in.

After noticing a grease stain on the floor of the bell tower, as well as other infractions, the inspector ordered that the hams be taken down. They were a fire hazard, he said in a report in December 2023, according to cathedral officials. When the cathedral refused to remove the hams, the dispute escalated all the way to the country’s minister of culture, Rachida Dati.

The battle over the St.-Flour hams was widely derided as an example of how overzealous officials can quash innovative local initiatives. It also spoke to a larger issue that aging churches across France have been grappling with as they face costly reparations: Who is going to pay to maintain the country’s vast religious heritage?

After the French Revolution, church properties were seized by the state, which eventually took responsibility for overseeing most of them. But the central government and local municipalities have struggled to fund the maintenance of the country’s cathedrals and churches.

The restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, which was ravaged by a devastating fire in 2019, was funded by about $900 million in donations. But religious buildings in the rest of the country have been largely left to fend for themselves.

Across France, an estimated 15,000 religious buildings out of 45,000 are classified as historical monuments, according to the Culture Ministry. More than 2,300 of them are in poor condition, and 363 are considered endangered, the ministry said.

“The situation is alarming,” said Hadrien Lacoste, the vice president of the Religious Heritage Observatory, an independent nonprofit group. “There’s a drop in religious practice,” he added, “and there’s a drop in demographics in rural areas.”

Despite a decline in church attendance, towns like St.-Flour, which has a population of about 6,400, see their cathedrals and churches as defining elements of their identities and feel a strong need to maintain them.

“We’ve realized that each of our churches is a little Notre-Dame, that the village without the church is like Paris without Notre-Dame,” said Mathieu Lours, a French historian who specializes in religious architecture.

In France — as has been the case elsewhere in Europe — decaying churches are often transformed into gyms, restaurants, hotels or housing.

In St.-Flour, a renaissance church adjacent to the cathedral was deconsecrated and is now a market and a cultural venue.

Maintaining the cathedral itself was seen as an essential, if costly, town effort. St.-Flour is at the heart of Cantal, an area of France known for its green hilly landscapes and its local cheese. From a distance, the cathedral, at the top of rocky outcrop, looms over the town like a fortress.

“You know the saying, all roads lead to Rome?” said Patrice Boulard, the meat producer in charge of climbing the tower’s 145 steps to suspend the hams there. “Well, here in St.-Flour, all roads lead to the cathedral.”

The idea for the curing workshop in the bell tower was the brainchild of Gilles Boyer, who was at the time the cathedral’s rector, after funds that were supposed to be provided by the authorities for repairing the church’s 19th-century choir organ never materialized.

A food lover who once managed a restaurant in Paris, Mr. Boyer had already set up beehives on an unused terrace of the cathedral to produce honey for sale. The bell tower was also unused space. Why not use it for hanging hams, a specialty of the region, he wondered?

“It all started as a joke,” he said, “but it wasn’t so dumb after all.”

Altitude, a local charcuterie cooperative made up of some 40 pig breeders, loved the idea, partly for the marketing potential, but also for what they believed to be the special quality of the air and conditions in the tower for curing hams.

“It creates a link between business and heritage, between a product and its terroir,” said Thierry Bousseau, the company’s communication manager.

The project was approved by both state and church authorities, and the first batch of hams was put on sale in markets, in the church and online in the spring of 2022, for about $150 each, about $50 more than what an average local artisanal ham would fetch. The profits, once Altitude recouped its costs, were given to the cathedral.

Overall, about 300 hams have been sold, and more than $12,000 was spent to finally restore the organ, Mr. Bousseau said.

The project was called “Florus Solatium,” a tribute to the town’s supposed founder, a fifth-century saint called Florus whose relics are kept in the cathedral. According to legend, the saint miraculously escaped bandits by reaching the top of the cliff, where residents welcomed him with a traditional local ham. “Quid solatium!” he was said to have exclaimed. “What a solace!”

Most of the maturation process for the hams takes place in Altitude warehouses in a nearby town. But Mr. Boyer, the former rector, is convinced that the three months they spend attached to the tower’s wooden beams, exposed to the wind and to the bell’s vibrations, is what gives the meat its special quality.

“Most hams are dried in places where the hygrometry is always the same, the ventilation is always the same,” said Aurélien Gransagne, the chef at Restaurant Serge Vieira, a nearby Michelin-starred restaurant, referring to the humidity in the air. In the bell tower, he added, “you have fluctuations, and that’s what makes a product special.”

The thick, rosy flesh, is as good as the best prosciutto from Italy or jamón from Spain, he said. Mr. Gransagne’s restaurant offers diners rose-shaped slices of the meat alongside other appetizers — and a bit of storytelling about its provenance.

Given the success of the tower-cured hams, Jean-Paul Rolland, who took over as rector from Mr. Boyer in 2022, said he decided to put his foot down when the heritage architect declared the project dangerous.

“The building is dedicated to religious practice,” he said, “so it’s not up to the administration to tell us what we can do or not inside.”

The grease stain probably appeared on the age-old parquet floor long before the hams were brought up, he said.

“It’s like the landlord telling a tenant that he is not allowed to change a painting’s place in the living room,” Mr. Rolland added.

He did make some small changes, like placing carpets on the floor of the towers and barring access to visitors. But the hams would continue to hang, he said.

In October, Ms. Dati, the culture minister, announced a decision: The hams will stay, provided a “detailed study” will have examined the “administrative, material and organizational conditions” for the hams to be matured safely, her office said in an email. That process is still continuing.

Whatever the eventual decision, the hams have become something of a cause célèbre in a country that values the gastronomic offerings of small producers as much as the country’s religious heritage. St.-Flour made national headlines, and sales of the hams have been brisk. The Élysée Palace in Paris has a standing order for hams every three months, and served slices of it at a buffet in June, Altitude says. (It is not clear if President Emmanuel Macron tried some, and the Elysée did not respond to requests for comment.)

Still, not everyone in St.-Flour is happy with the idea of turning the church into something of a marketplace.

“There were bees, now there’s hams. What’s next, cheese?” asked Roger Merle, 68, the owner of a clothing store in the town.

There seem to be no limits to the dark revelations laid bare by the downfall of Syria’s 54-year Assad regime.

Prisons have emptied, exposing the instruments of torture used on peaceful protesters and others considered opponents of the government. Stacks of official documents record thousands of detainees. Morgues and mass graves hold the gaunt, broken-bodied victims, or at least some of them.

Many others have yet to be found.

For these and many other atrocities, Syrians want justice. The rebel alliance that overthrew President Bashar al-Assad last month has vowed to hunt down and prosecute senior regime figures for crimes that include murdering, wrongly imprisoning, torturing and gassing their own people.

“Most Syrians would say they can only achieve closure to bring this dark 54-year era to an end when they bring these guys to justice,” said Ayman Asfari, chairman of Madaniya, a network of Syrian human rights organizations and other civic groups.

But even assuming that the new authorities can track suspects down, accountability will be hard to achieve in a country as vulnerable, divided and battered as Syria. The experiences of other Arab countries whose despotic regimes collapsed testify to the challenges: None of those countries — not Egypt, not Iraq, not Tunisia — succeeded in securing comprehensive, lasting justice for the crimes of earlier eras.

Syria faces some distinctive hurdles. The country’s new de facto leaders come from the country’s Sunni Muslim majority, while the senior ranks of the deposed regime were dominated by Alawites, a religious minority. That means prosecutions for Assad-era abuses could risk fueling Syria’s sectarian tensions.

The justice system was for years little more than a tool for Mr. al-Assad, making it ill equipped to handle sweeping, complex human rights violations. Many thousands of Syrians could be implicated, more than can possibly be prosecuted, raising questions about how to handle lower-level officials.

And after years of war, sanctions, corruption and mismanagement, it is an enormous task just to sort through the damage while transitioning to a new government.

Nine in 10 Syrians live in poverty. Cities lie in ruins. Homes have been destroyed. Tens of thousands of people were unjustly detained for years or decades. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the fighting. Many are still missing.

Syrians will need time and many discussions to design a sound accountability process, said Nerma Jelacic of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, which has been gathering evidence against Syrian regime figures for years.

“These are things that take time, and they never happen overnight,” she said.

But there is enormous pressure on Syria’s new leaders to begin punishing the old, and the transitional authorities in the capital, Damascus, have promised to do so.

“We will not relent in holding accountable the criminals, murderers and security and military officers involved in torturing the Syrian people,” Ahmed al-Shara, Syria’s de facto leader, said in a post on Telegram in December. He added that they would soon publish “List No. 1” of senior officials “implicated in the torture of the Syrian people.”

Hunting down such figures will be difficult, if not impossible. Mr. al-Assad has found refuge in Russia, which is unlikely to give him up. Many of his top associates have melted away, with some reportedly in hiding in Lebanon or the United Arab Emirates.

Still, Syrian human rights groups in exile began laying the groundwork more than a decade ago, gathering evidence for prosecutions that were mounted in other countries — and someday, they hoped, in their own.

But Fernando Travesí, executive director of the International Center for Transitional Justice, which has worked with such Syrian groups, cautioned that, before beginning prosecutions in Syria, the authorities should first earn citizens’ trust by building a state that meets their needs.

Doing so would avoid the missteps of a country like Tunisia, where a lack of economic progress in the years after the 2011 Arab Spring revolution left many people embittered and disenchanted. By 2021, Tunisians had turned on their fledgling democracy, throwing their support to a president who has grown increasingly authoritarian. Efforts to bring members of the feared security services and regime cronies to justice are now functionally suspended.

“Any process of truth, justice and accountability needs to be coming from institutions that have some legitimacy and credibility with the population, otherwise it’s a waste of time,” Mr. Travesí said. Providing crucial services, he added, would encourage Syrians to view government as “not a tool for repression; it’s taking care of my needs.”

The transitional government can take basic yet vital steps such as helping refugees who left years ago obtain new identification, adjudicating what should happen to property that was stolen or occupied during the war, and providing stable electricity and running water. It will need to deliver humanitarian aid and economic improvements, though those may only be possible with the help of other countries.

And it must do all this in an evenhanded way, or Syrians might see accountability efforts as selective or politically driven. After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003, the United States-led occupation and successive governments purged and blacklisted even junior functionaries in the former ruling party without due process, which analysts said undermined faith in the new system.

“The only way to heal the wounds with the other communities is to make sure they’re fairly represented,” Mr. Asfari said.

The Syrian authorities are signaling that they understand. They have vowed repeatedly to respect minority rights and have promised amnesty to rank-and-file soldiers who were forced to serve in Mr. al-Assad’s military. Most government employees have been allowed to stay on to keep institutions running.

Any prosecution “has to be a good process, otherwise it’ll look like score-settling,” said Stephen J. Rapp, a former international prosecutor and former U.S. ambassador for global justice who has worked on Syrian abuses for more than a decade. “And that can play a key role in reconciling a society and defusing efforts to settle scores, for instance, against the children of parents who committed these crimes.”

In an added complication, some of the documents that will be crucial to mounting any prosecutions have been damaged in the chaos following Mr. al-Assad’s downfall, with regime prisons and intelligence agency archives ransacked, looted or burned, said Ms. Jelacic of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability.

Because Syria remains under wartime sanctions, her group and others trying to safeguard these papers for future use in court cannot operate across much of the country, further jeopardizing their efforts.

The wartime mass graves and torture devices are only the most glaring evidence of abuses overseen by Mr. al-Assad and his father, Hafez.

Nearly every Syrian, in some sense, has been wronged by the former regime. So it is not enough to prosecute individuals for crimes committed during the civil war, say veterans of justice efforts in other countries that underwent political transitions.

Mr. Rapp called for a “larger truth-telling process” that could help “really begin to understand the system of state repression that was Syria for the last 54 years, and this machinery of murder that was Syria” since 2011.

One model could be the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, which heard testimony from victims and perpetrators of rights violations, offered reparations to victims, and in some cases granted amnesties.

Ms. Jelacic said Syria would need a broader reckoning with the Assad regime’s legacy that “doesn’t contribute to the divisions, but that it contributes to healing.”

Before trials begin, experts said, Syria should overhaul its police and court systems and build a legal framework to handle rights violations, perhaps creating a special tribunal to prosecute the most serious crimes. An equally urgent priority is finding out what happened to the estimated 136,000 people who remain missing after being arrested by the Assad regime and identifying bodies uncovered in mass graves.

But Syria cannot wait too long to prosecute former regime officials. Slow-moving official justice leaves room for angry people to take matters into their own hands, which could set off cycles of violence and deepen sectarian divisions. Already, scattered revenge killings and threats against minorities who were favored by the Assad regime have been reported.

After Tunisia’s revolution, lengthy delays in bringing cases against former security officials added to citizens’ sense that their new democracy was bankrupt.

Lamia Farhani, a Tunisian lawyer who has long sought justice for her brother’s fatal shooting while he protested the previous regime in 2011, said that her country’s disillusionment had permitted the current president, Kais Saied, to dismantle its democracy.

“We had a nascent democracy that failed at the first storm,” she said. “And all this happened because there was no real reconciliation.”

Israeli security and policy chiefs arrived in Qatar on Sunday for high-level talks about a proposed cease-fire deal in Gaza that would see hostages released in the final days of President Biden’s term and before Donald J. Trump takes office.

Biden administration officials have been pressing for a deal that would become part of the departing president’s legacy, and Mr. Trump has warned that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if Hamas does not release the hostages before he is inaugurated on Jan. 20.

Lower-level negotiations have been underway in recent weeks after months of deadlock.

While some progress has been made, disagreements remain on several key points, including the timing and extent of Israel’s redeployments and withdrawal from Gaza and its willingness to ultimately end the war, according to several officials and a Palestinian familiar with the matter. They were speaking on the condition of anonymity because the talks are being held in secrecy and they were not authorized to discuss details publicly.

Representatives of the departing and incoming U.S. presidents have been cooperating on the issue, the Biden administration has said, while Qatar and Egypt are mediating between Israel and Hamas.

Brett M. McGurk, Mr. Biden’s Middle East coordinator, was already in Doha, Qatar’s capital, putting together the final details of a text agreement to present to the two sides, Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, said Sunday on “State of the Union” on CNN.

“We are very, very close, and yet being very close still means we’re far because until you actually get across the finish line we’re not there,” Mr. Sullivan said.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken referred to months of efforts to reach a deal, saying in an interview on “CBS Sunday Morning” that “we’re very close to a cease-fire and hostage agreement.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr. Biden spoke by phone later Sunday. The two leaders discussed the current negotiations in Doha for a cease-fire and hostage release deal, according to statements from the White House and Mr. Netanyahu’s office. Mr. Netanyahu “thanked President Biden and President-elect Donald Trump for cooperating in this sacred mission,” according to the prime minister’s office.

Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s intended Middle East envoy, met Mr. Netanyahu in Israel on Saturday. On Friday, Mr. Witkoff was in Doha and met the Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani, for talks that focused on efforts to reach a cease-fire in Gaza, according to Qatar’s Foreign Ministry.

Mr. Netanyahu’s office announced late Saturday that he had discussed the issue with Israel’s security chiefs and with negotiators from both the departing and incoming American administrations. He also instructed Israel’s top negotiators — including David Barnea, the head of the Mossad intelligence agency — to leave for Qatar with the goal of advancing a deal, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said.

Disagreements between Israel and Hamas remain the fundamental issue of the permanency of any cease-fire, with Mr. Netanyahu still unwilling to declare an end of the war as part of a three-phase agreement that Mr. Biden laid out last May.

Israel is insisting on a vaguer formula that leaves room for ambiguity and for a resumption of fighting at some point, according to the Palestinian familiar with the matter and two Israeli officials. Another official familiar with the matter said the Americans were supposed to provide mediators with a guarantee that the United States would work to bring the war to an end, though Israel has not agreed to any exact phrasing.

Hamas is also demanding detailed maps from Israel showing where it will withdraw to, but Israel has not provided them, according to the officials and the Palestinian familiar with the matter. They added that disagreements remain about the timing of an Israeli troop withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor, a strip of land abutting Gaza’s border with Egypt, although the two Israeli officials said the sides were close to resolving this point.

These two officials added that the sides were close to a compromise that would allow Israel to carry out military operations during the first phase of the deal up to a kilometer inside Gaza, or almost two-thirds of a mile. Israel had wanted the ability to maneuver up to 1.5 kilometers into Gaza, they said. The Palestinian familiar with the matter said Hamas had wanted any incursions limited to within 500 meters of the border.

Nearly 100 hostages who were seized during the Hamas-led attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, remain in Gaza, out of roughly 250 who were taken. Israel believes at least a third of the remaining hostages are dead.

Israel and Hamas have both shown signs of wanting to resolve the outstanding issues, as pressure mounts from the United States and the Israeli public. Last week Hamas representatives indicated that the group had approved an Israeli list of 34 hostages to be released in the first stage of an agreement.

But Israel said last week that it had not received any information from Hamas regarding the status of the hostages appearing on the list, which includes those it considers the most vulnerable and urgent cases: women and children, men over 50 and several sick or injured hostages.

Hamas has also agreed to Israel’s request to include 11 contested individuals on the list of hostages to be released in the first phase of a deal. Israel classifies these as civilians, but Hamas considers them soldiers, according to the two Israeli officials and the Palestinian. Israel is weighing Hamas’s demand that the 11 be treated as soldiers who would be exchanged for a higher number of Palestinian prisoners than those released for civilian hostages.

Israel has demanded a list from Hamas of which hostages remain alive. Without that, Israeli officials say, there can be no agreement on how many Palestinian prisoners Israel would be willing to release in exchange for them. As of Sunday morning, Israel had not received a list of hostages who are still alive, according to one of the officials familiar with the matter.

The body of one of the hostages whose name appeared on the list of 34 — Youssef Ziyadne, 53, an Arab citizen of Israel — was located last week by Israeli forces in a tunnel in Gaza along with the remains of his son, Hamza Ziyadne, who was also captured during the 2023 attack.

The Israeli military brought the remains of both men back to Israel for burial.

Mr. Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, said that Mr. Biden stressed that the main obstacle to a deal had been Hamas.

“We are not by any stretch of the imagination setting this aside,” Mr. Sullivan said. “There is a possibility this comes together. There’s also a possibility, as has happened so many times before, that Hamas in particular remains intransigent.”

Peter Baker contributed reporting from Washington.

Taiza Carine da Costa got her first taste of gambling when she was just 9.

She grew up in the rundown fringes of Rio de Janeiro, where her godparents would send her down the block, a few coins in hand, to bet on a popular lottery that, though illegal, has been a staple of life in Brazil for over a century.

The habit stuck and, as an adult, she would bet daily on the game, in which players place wagers on animals represented by sets of numbers. Like many Brazilians, whenever she dreamed of a creature, she saw it as a sign to bet on the lottery, known as “jogo do bicho” — or animal game — in Portuguese.

“If I dream, I bet,” said Ms. Costa, 37, a clothing vendor.

But, lately, Ms. Costa is turning to a different game of chance that is at her fingertips around the clock: a digital slot machine offering big rewards if she can draw three matching symbols.

Tigrinho, or Little Tiger in Portuguese, mimics a popular Chinese slots game and has led the way as mobile betting apps have exploded in popularity since Brazil legalized digital gambling in 2018. Ms. Costa plays Little Tiger every day, and her gambling — and her losses — has picked up as a result. She estimates she has lost roughly $80,000 over two years on the app.

“It’s hard to stop,” she said.

Online betting games, from digital casinos to soccer wagers, have sparked a fever in Latin America’s largest nation, fueling a fierce debate — like elsewhere in the world — over how to regulate the booming industry and shield lower-income people who often pile on debt or lose big chunks of meager earnings betting.

The gambling frenzy is also threatening Brazil’s animal lottery, which has links to murderous mobs and has been an unshakable part of popular culture since it was created in Rio de Janeiro in the 1800s and took off across the country.

While decades of crackdowns have failed to stamp out the lottery and the criminal gangs that run it, the analog game now appears to be in the throes of an existential crisis as fewer Brazilians are willing to physically place bets with a local bookie.

Digital alternatives — offering bigger jackpots and infinite chances — now draw over $23 billion in wagers each year, about 10 times that of the animal lottery, according to the Legal Games Institute, a nonprofit that studies gambling in Brazil.

While the analog game has six draws per day, online gambling is nonstop.

“The Brazilian gambler now has a casino in his pocket,” said Magno José Santos de Souza, the institute’s president.

The animal lottery, on the other hand, “hasn’t been able to renew its base,” said Luiz Antônio Simas, a Rio historian who has written a book about the game.

The game was created in the 1890s by a baron seeking to draw more visitors to his newly created zoo in the Vila Isabel neighborhood of Rio. People with admission tickets were entered into a raffle, with an animal drawn at the end of each day.

The lottery soon became more popular than the zoo itself, and similar games of chance began popping up across the city. Fearing the game would hurt government lotteries, the authorities banned it three years after it was created.

But the lottery’s advance was unstoppable. Before long, bookies taking bets outside bars and newspaper stands became a fixture across Brazil, with the game reaching even the most remote corners of the Amazon rainforest.

By the 1970s, the animal lottery had grown into a multimillion-dollar business fueling bloody disputes among Rio’s mafias, as they wrestled for territorial control. The gambling bosses eventually divvied up the city — and the country — into zones.

To protect their illicit dealings, lottery kingpins bribed judges, politicians and police officials. In working-class areas of Rio, they won hearts and minds by buying local soccer teams, funding lavish Carnival parades and handing out Christmas presents.

“They built this playful, fun facade,” said Fabio Corrêa, a public prosecutor in Rio de Janeiro who leads a group combating organized crime. “They wanted to create this image of good Samaritans.”

Over the years, the authorities repeatedly tried to crack down on the mafia-run lottery and, in 1993, they finally had a breakthrough: A judge sentenced 14 lottery bosses to six years in prison. But, before long, many of the game’s most powerful kingpins were out, free to expand their empires.

On a recent afternoon in the neighborhood of Vila Isabel, the birthplace of the animal lottery, three bookies — each manning a different corner — took bets from regulars. Few of them looked younger than 50.

“I always bet on the pig or the tiger,” said Germano da Silva, 71, a retired publicist. Digging into his wallet, he pulled out an old ticket that won him $450 the week before. “My children don’t know how to play,” he added. “Whenever they want to bet, they come to me.”

For newcomers, the lottery’s rules can seem daunting. Players bet on combinations of two-, three- or four-digit numbers, which are linked to any one of 25 animals, from a cow to a monkey. Wagers start at a few cents, but payoffs can reach into the thousands of dollars.

Most animal lottery players, though, are not placing bets in the hopes of getting rich, according to Mr. Simas, the historian. “They want to win a little money for a beer at the end of the day,” he said. “Playing the game is part of street culture.”

In Brazil, a deeply superstitious country, bets in the animal lottery have long been drawn from dreams, lucky animals or the dates of big life events like birthdays, deaths or marriages.

“Each person has their favorite play,” said Nena Coelho, a 60-year-old secretary who was betting on the dog, inspired by a stray that had followed her friend home.

While most gambling, including casinos and slot machines, is barred in Brazil, lawmakers legalized digital games but delayed drafting concrete oversight rules. Experts say the lag has opened the door for thousands of unregulated platforms, some of them fraudulent, to flood Brazil.

This echoes the experiences of countries like Britain and the United States, where legislators, eager to capture tax revenues, were quick to legalize digital gambling but were later left racing to impose regulations, said Lia Nower, director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University.

“Most legislators don’t have a real awareness that this is potentially addictive,” Ms. Nower said.

Digital games were an instant hit in Brazil, a nation of 203 million with one of the world’s highest rates of internet use. Platforms promising a fast path out of poverty quickly gained popularity among low-income people in a country marked by deep inequality.

Colorful and childlike, the apps were often promoted by social media influencers who told followers that they could win tens of thousands in cash on sites that turned out to be rigged. (Some were later arrested, accused of tricking fans into betting on unauthorized platforms.)

Brazil’s government estimates that nearly a quarter of the population started gambling online over the last five years. Brazilians now spend about $3.5 billion each month on online wagers, with sports betting making up a huge segment in soccer-crazy Brazil, according to figures from the country’s central bank.

Rushing to bring the sector under control, the Brazilian authorities began enforcing a new law this month requiring betting companies to pay a fee and comply with federal rules on fraud, responsible marketing and money laundering.

The animal lottery remains illegal, but the shift to digital betting has opened new revenue streams.

Lottery bosses are using legal betting sites to launder money amassed from illicit activities like the animal lottery, the authorities say.

“They are infiltrating the digital space,” Mr. Corrêa said. “They want to give an air of legality to activities that, at the end of the day, are illegal in origin.”

But even as many move on from the animal lottery, there are still those who are not quite ready to let go.

Matheus Resende, 30, remembers his father teaching him how to calculate odds and craft bets. “He’s the Google of the animal lottery,” said Mr. Resende, a beverage distributor from Rio.

These days, Mr. Resende is one of millions of Brazilians placing digital wagers on soccer games. Still, he has a soft spot for the animal lottery and, every week, he stops by his local bookie too.

He knows about the game’s criminal links, he says, but he’s still sad to see it fading away.

“It’s a family tradition,” he said. “So there’s a certain nostalgia there.”

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.