Outside a warehouse in southern Gaza one day this week, a small crowd of men and boys waited their turn for a bit of the humanitarian aid that Gaza — sick, starving, freezing Gaza — has desperately needed. They walked away with sacks of flour and cardboard boxes of food, many dragging their precious cargo behind them in two-wheeled shopping carts.

It was an orderly sight that had become rare in the territory since the war began more than 15 months ago. Israeli restrictions on aid, a security collapse that allowed widespread looting of aid trucks and other obstacles had combined to limit the food, water, tents, medicine and fuel that reached civilians amid an Israeli siege on the strip.

In the week since a cease-fire agreement stopped the fighting in Gaza, Palestinians in Gaza and aid officials say that more food deliveries and other much-needed items are streaming in. The question now is how to maintain the level of aid they say Gaza needs, despite many logistical challenges and uncertainties over how long the truce will hold.

The United Nations moved as much food into Gaza in three days this week as it did in the entire month of October, the interim head of the U.N. humanitarian office for Gaza, Jonathan Whittall, said in a briefing on Thursday.

Other U.N. agencies and aid groups were distributing medical supplies and fuel to power hospitals and water wells, among other types of assistance, and helping to repair critical infrastructure. Tents were set to enter soon, and bakeries were expected to start supplying bread by Friday, according to the United Nations.

Since the start of the cease-fire, civilian police officers belonging to the Hamas government have re-emerged, which appears to have restored some security and order to the enclave. The show of Hamas control, however, may complicate prospects for a durable peace in Gaza.

COGAT, the Israeli government agency that oversees policy in Gaza and the West Bank, did not respond to a request for comment, but it said in a post on social media on Friday that 4,200 aid trucks had entered the Gaza Strip over the past week after being inspected.

Throughout the war, Israel said that it was not limiting aid into Gaza and blamed humanitarian agencies for failing to distribute the supplies it admitted into the enclave after screening.

In all, anywhere between about 600 and 900 truckloads of aid have arrived in Gaza each day since the cease-fire took effect on Jan. 19, dwarfing the few dozen trucks that had been entering daily in recent months.

By Tuesday, Kholoud al-Shanna, 43, and her family had received a bag of flour from the World Food Program, the first in two months.

It was welcome. But “we’re still missing the basics,” Ms. al-Shanna said. “My kids haven’t had fresh vegetables in so long that they’ve almost forgotten what they taste like. How are we supposed to survive on just flour?”

Improvements were coming on that front, too. Before the war, Gaza was supplied with a mix of donated aid and goods for sale. Small amounts of imported fresh produce, meat and other food continued to be sold in markets until Israel banned most commercial items late last year, arguing that Hamas was profiting off the trade. Some commercial goods have entered Gaza this week, according to aid workers, bringing fresh vegetables and even chocolate bars to markets at lower prices than shoppers have seen in many months.

Distributing the aid once it enters Gaza remains a work in progress. Many roads are in ruins after 15 months of war, though Gaza municipalities are starting to clear debris. Unexploded ordnance still litters the enclave, making distribution and repairs dangerous.

About 500 trucks carrying a mix of aid and commercial goods entered Gaza each day before the war. The cease-fire agreement envisions 600 trucks entering each day, which aid officials say they will be hard-pressed to sustain on their own.

“It cannot be delivered just by the United Nations, no way,” Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, the primary lifeline for Palestinian refugees, said days before the cease-fire took effect.

UNRWA’s precarious situation is another potential hindrance: While U.N. officials say the agency is crucial to the aid effort because it forms the backbone of supply chains and services in Gaza, Israel has moved to ban the agency over accusations that it shielded Hamas militants. Aid officials say there is nothing comparable to take its place.

The biggest challenge of all is the sheer scale of the emergency. Though aid may be rolling in now, aid officials said, Gaza has been so lacking in assistance that it will take a deluge of supplies just to stabilize the population and prevent more deaths, to say nothing of eventual reconstruction.

Gaza will also need educational and psychological services and other support to begin to recover, officials say.

The number of trucks recently entering Gaza “is still a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of aid needed to catch up on what has been a massive dearth over the last year and a half,” said Bob Kitchen, the vice president for emergencies at the International Rescue Committee.

Some obstacles are gradually yielding. Israel’s evident willingness to usher in a surge of aid has resolved what aid officials and governments that donated assistance say was the biggest hurdle to getting Gaza what it needed. Saying its goal was to keep Hamas from resupplying through aid shipments, Israel had imposed stringent inspections on the assistance entering Gaza and restricted its movement once inside Gaza, frequently delaying or outright stopping delivery.

Aid workers no longer need to ask permission from the Israeli military to move around Gaza, except from south to north, speeding up the process. Before the cease-fire, many trucks designated to ferry aid to warehouses around the strip sat paralyzed for lack of fuel; now fuel is entering.

Israel still prohibits agencies from bringing in a long list of items that aid officials say are vital to the emergency response but that Israel deems “dual use,” meaning they could also be used by Hamas for military purposes. That has included everything from scissors to tent materials.

Some of those restrictions have been lifted, however, aid officials say, and talks are continuing about lifting more.

Another problem plaguing aid distribution in Gaza for months was looting, which diverted much of the aid meant for civilians.

The situation in Gaza deteriorated after the Israeli military invaded Rafah, in southern Gaza, in May, seeking to oust Hamas from what Israel said was one of its final strongholds. Hamas’s security forces fled, and organized gangs — with no one stopping them — began intercepting aid trucks after they crossed into Gaza.

International aid workers accused Israel of ignoring the problem and allowing looters to act with impunity. The United Nations does not allow Israeli soldiers to protect aid convoys, fearing that would compromise its neutrality, and its officials called on Israel to allow the Gaza police, which are under Hamas’s authority, to secure their convoys.

Israel, which has sought to destroy Hamas in Gaza, accused it of stealing aid and said the police were part of its apparatus. In the end, security broke down so badly that many aid groups kept their deliveries sitting at Gaza’s borders rather than risk the dangerous drive into Gaza.

But fears that organized looting would continue after the cease-fire have eased. Policemen are once again patrolling much of Gaza. While some people are still pulling boxes from trucks — scenes described by aid officials and witnessed by a New York Times reporter — it is now on a far smaller scale.

Palestinians in Gaza say that as aid becomes more widely available, people will have less incentive to loot.

“I’ve noticed a clear improvement — more people are getting food parcels today,” said Rami Abu Sharkh, 44, an accountant from Gaza City who had been displaced to southern Gaza. “I hope it continues until theft is eliminated completely.”

Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting from New York.

President Donald J. Trump said he would reach out to North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, raising the possibility of rekindling their bromance diplomacy five years after their first round of negotiations drew global attention but did little to reduce Mr. Kim’s growing nuclear threat.

“He liked me and I got along with him,” Mr. Trump said during an interview with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, after saying that he would reach out to Mr. Kim again in his second term. “He is not a religious zealot. He happens to be a smart guy.”

Mr. Trump’s comments, aired on Thursday night, were the first time he has expressed an intent to reopen diplomacy with Mr. Kim since taking office on Monday. During his first term, Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim made history when they held the first summit between their nations, which remain technically at war. But their relationship petered out after their three high-profile meetings failed to yield any progress.

It is unclear whether or how Mr. Kim, emboldened by a stronger alliance with Russia and his own country’s military advances, will respond to the overtures this time around. Since Mr. Trump last met Mr. Kim five years ago, North Korea’s missile capabilities have expanded and he could demand a bigger price for making concessions on his nuclear program, analysts say.

Mr. Trump had voiced interest in the North Korean leader during his campaign, saying at one point that “it’s nice to get along when somebody has a lot of nuclear weapons.” Hours after his inauguration, he also told reporters that Mr. Kim was “a nuclear power,” a shift from Washington’s longstanding refusal to recognize North Korea as such.

Officials in South Korea, a U.S. ally gripped by a domestic political crisis following the impeachment of its leader, have feared Mr. Trump’s return might put the Korean Peninsula on a diplomatic roller coaster ride again.

During his first term, Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim first exchanged personal insults and threats of nuclear war. They then shook hands and held three meetings between 2018 and 2019. At one point, Mr. Trump declared on social media that there was “no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea” and that he “fell in love” with Mr. Kim.

Those talks, however, ended without an agreement on how to roll back North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs or when the United States should ease sanctions imposed on the country. Mr. Kim vowed not to engage Washington in dialogue again and has doubled down on building and testing nuclear-capable missiles.

Now, South Korean analysts and officials fear that Mr. Trump might make a deal with Mr. Kim in which North Korea would give up its long-range missiles, but not all its nuclear weapons, in exchange for sanctions relief.

Mr. Trump’s recent statement describing North Korea as a nuclear power clashed with a long-held agreement between Washington and Seoul that North Korea should never be accepted as such.

“We cannot grant North Korea nuclear power status,” South Korea’s Defense Ministry said in a statement after Mr. Trump’s comment.

Despite Mr. Trump’s flattering comments about Mr. Kim, it was unclear whether the dictator would warm to the idea of a renewed courtship. Following the collapse of the first round of meetings, Mr. Kim has championed a new “multipolar” global order, signing a mutual defense pact with Moscow last year and sending weapons and an estimated 12,000 troops to help Russia in its war against Ukraine.

Despite suffering heavy casualties in the war against Ukraine, North Korea was preparing to send more troops to Russia, the South Korean military said on Friday.

China has long been the only major buffer between North Korea and American-led international efforts to tame its regime’s military ambitions. In return for helping Russia in its war against Ukraine, Mr. Kim has recruited Moscow as another major ally to shield his country from U.S. pressure.

North Korea had not commented on Mr. Trump’s election or inauguration until on Wednesday, when its state media carried a two-sentence report.

The regime did, however, launch missiles off its east coast in the days before the inauguration. And it is preparing to launch more missiles, according to South Korea’s military, including long-range ballistic missiles powerful enough to reach the continental United States, which tend to annoy American defense officials the most.

North Korean state media reported Friday that the nation’s parliament had this week adopted budgets for the year that would ”ensure the acceleration of the significant change in the national defense capabilities.”

Mr. Kim will likely wait until a Workers’ Party meeting in June or another parliamentary gathering in September to react to Mr. Trump’s overture, said Hong Min, a senior analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul.

“He will react after gauging the Trump administration’s seriousness, intention and calculations behind its North Korea approach,” Mr. Hong said.

One year has passed since Moscow accused Kyiv of shooting down a Russian military plane carrying dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war. Ukraine opened an investigation, but has yet to release its findings, leaving questions about who was killed, and why.

The crash of the IL-76 transport plane in the Belgorod region of Russia, near the border with Ukraine, set off a series of recriminations at a delicate moment for Kyiv, as it lobbied for Western aid to build up its depleted weapons stocks.

Russian officials called it a “terrorist” act and convened an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council. Ukrainian officials did not admit or deny shooting down the aircraft, and said they could not confirm that Ukrainian prisoners were onboard.

American officials later assessed that Ukrainian forces had used a U.S.-made Patriot missile to shoot it down, thinking the plane carried Russian missiles and munitions.

“We have many questions about the situation,” Sofia Sobolyeva, who believes her father was on the plane, said in a recent interview.

With the families of the prisoners still awaiting answers, here’s what we know about the crash one year on.

Conflicting Accounts

Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Jan. 24, 2024, that one of its military transports had been shot down while en route to Belgorod for a prisoner swap. It said that the plane was carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war and that no one survived the crash.

Initially, Ukraine asserted its right to target Russian military transport planes in the border area, which had been a staging ground for the 2022 invasion and was used to mount attacks after that.

At the time of the crash, deadly Russian missile strikes had been pounding Kharkiv, just across the border in Ukraine, and Kyiv stressed the need to hinder those attacks.

Soon, though, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency hinted at the possibility of a tragic mistake, not directly acknowledging that Ukraine had downed the plane but offering explanations for how it might have happened.

One Ukrainian official said the IL-76, often used to carry freight, had previously been used to deliver ammunition and missiles, suggesting that it was a legitimate target.

The agency acknowledged a prisoner swap had been planned for Jan. 24 — but said Russia had not warned Ukraine that prisoners were being flown to Belgorod’s airport, as was the case in previous exchanges. Russian officials disputed that account, saying Ukraine’s military had been notified.

The diverging claims illustrated the persistent lack of clarity that has become a defining feature of the war. Both sides have pushed their preferred narratives over nearly three years of fighting, and have been reluctant to disclose or acknowledge setbacks.

Investigators have found DNA matches for more than 50 of the 65 bodies Russia said were on board, but it still was not possible to say whether they were the same bodies said to have been found at the site of the crash, according to a report published on Friday by the Media Initiative for Human Rights, a Ukrainian group investigating war crimes.

It has spent the better part of the past year trying to provide some clarity amid the dearth of official information.

Calls for Investigation

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine called for his country’s intelligence agency to determine what had happened and for an international investigation into the crash. He accused Russia of “playing with the lives of Ukrainian prisoners, the feelings of their loved ones and the emotions of our society.”

Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency opened an investigation into the incident.

Russian officials said the plane had crashed in a snowy field near a settlement in the Korochansky district. No independent groups were able to visit the crash site; Ukraine requested that the Red Cross and United Nations be granted access.

Satellite images and unverified Russian video captured what appeared to be the crash site and debris of a plane in the area Russia described, but it was not possible to identify passengers from the imagery.

Ukrainian officials asked for patience from citizens while they investigated Moscow’s claims.

Identifying the Victims

Prisoner exchanges have occurred regularly throughout the war, even amid bitter fighting. But the Ukrainian authorities typically do not disclose, even to families, the names of those set to be released before exchanges.

The Russian authorities did not identify the victims of the crash when they announced it. But the names of 65 prisoners of war allegedly onboard were shared on social media by the editor in chief of RT, the Russian state media broadcaster,

A few days later, the Ukrainian government agency that oversees prisoners of war confirmed that the names on the list matched those who were set to be exchanged on the day of the crash. But the agency said it did not have evidence to confirm that those prisoners were aboard the plane, or even that they were dead.

That was around the time, Sofia Sobolyeva said, that her family received a phone call from the military requesting a meeting. Ms. Sobolyeva’s father had been in Russian captivity since March 2022 — shortly after the start of the war — and his name was on the list.

“They gathered us and explained the situation but did not answer any questions,” she said. The authorities pledged to investigate “quickly,” she said, and asked relatives to submit DNA.

A Break in the Case

The case dropped from the headlines for months. An exchange of remains in early November was the first sign of a potential break.

The International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed that it was present for a Nov. 8 transfer of remains. Russia said the transfer included the remains of 65 killed in the downing of the IL-76, but that claim could not be independently verified.

“I.C.R.C. did not take part in the identification process,” the agency said this week in response to questions, adding that it stood ready to assist the authorities with technical support.

Ms. Sobolyeva said that the families of the 65, who had formed a WhatsApp group, learned about the transfer and were told by the Ukrainian authorities that “time was needed for DNA expertise.”

Outstanding Questions

Ukraine’s general prosecutor and security service did not respond to questions from The New York Times about the status of the investigation or whether any remains had been identified.

But there appears to be little dispute over who downed the plane.

Russia’s defense ministry had accused Ukrainian forces of launching missiles from the nearby Kharkiv region of Ukraine that struck the aircraft. American officials briefed on the incident later said that Ukraine used a Patriot air defense missile to down the plane.

Some relatives of those believed to have been on the plane attended the presentation of the report on Friday. Some women came with children and others were holding portraits of their loved ones. Many of them cried as they listened.

The Media Initiative for Human Rights conducted its own investigation because relatives were “drowning in the number of requests they send out” to Ukrainian officials, said Tetyana Katrychenko, the head of the group.

“We are left alone with our tragedy because there is no organization in our country that would take care of us,” said Oksana Lozytska, whose 25-year old son at the time Roman could have been on the plane.

While Ukraine has not formally accepted responsibility, Ms. Sobolyeva said that’s beside the point now.

“Logically, we understand that Ukraine shot it down,” she said, even though “officially we have nothing.

What she’s less sure about is whether the families will ever have answers to their other questions — like how it happened, and why.

She described her father as a kind man with “golden hands” — able to fix anything that broke — who loved gardening.

“There was a lot of stress and tears, but I still can’t understand what happened,” Ms. Sobolyeva said one recent evening.

“Now,” she added, “I just wear his black hat, so I feel warmer — both mentally and physically.”