President Trump on Friday ordered that all foreign assistance to South Africa be halted and said his administration would prioritize the resettling of white, “Afrikaner refugees” into the United States because of what he called actions by the country’s government that “racially disfavored landowners.”

In the order, Mr. Trump said that “the United States shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa” and that American officials should do everything possible to help “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.”

It follows Mr. Trump’s accusation on his social media site on Sunday that the South African government was engaged in a “massive Human Rights VIOLATION, at a minimum.” He vowed a full investigation and promised to cut off aid.

“South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY,” the president wrote in the post. “It is a bad situation that the Radical Left Media doesn’t want to so much as mention.”

The order was stunning in providing official American backing to long-held conspiracy theories about the mistreatment of white South Africans in the post-apartheid era.

Mr. Trump has made repeated claims without evidence that echoed those conspiracy theories. In 2018, he ordered his secretary of state to look into “the large scale killing of farmers” — a claim disputed by official figures and the country’s biggest farmers’ group.

Mr. Trump’s recent comments were in reference to a policy that President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa signed into law last month.

The law, known as the Expropriation Act, repeals an apartheid-era law and allows the government in certain instances to acquire privately held land in the public interest without paying compensation — something that can be done only after a justification process subject to judicial review.

The order from Mr. Trump came a day after Mr. Ramaphosa delivered his State of the Nation address with a defiance that appeared to be a reference to the American president’s accusations.

“We will not be bullied,” he said. The South African leader vowed to stand united in the face of what he called “the rise of nationalism and protectionism.”

“We will speak with one voice in defense of our national interest, our sovereignty and our constitutional democracy,” he said.

In addition to the halt in foreign aid, Mr. Trump ordered officials to provide “humanitarian” assistance to Afrikaners and to allow members of the white South African minority to seek refuge in the United States through the American refugee program.

Since the transition to democracy in 1994, the South African government has taken a willing-seller approach to try to transfer the ownership of more land to the country’s Black majority. The new law, with limited exceptions to that approach, came as many Black South Africans have argued that Nelson Mandela and other leaders did not do enough to force the white minority to give up wealth that had been accrued during apartheid.

South Africa’s colonial regimes were particularly brutal in dispossessing Black people of their land and forcefully removing them. Despite the efforts of postcolonial governments, the result remains clear to this day: White South Africans, who make up 7 percent of the population, own farmland that covers the majority of the country’s territory.

In an earlier executive order, Mr. Trump had demanded a three-month pause in the United States’ refugee program, blocking the admission of desperate people fleeing war, economic strife, natural disasters or political persecution. Friday’s order appeared to make white South Africans an exception to the broader halt.

While it is not clear whether he had an influence on the president’s order, Elon Musk, the billionaire who has become a close adviser to the president, is from South Africa. In 2023, Mr. Musk posted similar far-right conspiracy claims about South Africa on X, the social media platform he owns.

“They are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa,” Mr. Musk wrote.

Mr. Ramaphosa and Mr. Musk spoke by phone after that social media post, with the South African president trying to clarify what his administration has called “misinformation” peddled by Mr. Trump.

In much of South Africa, Mr. Trump’s attacks in recent days inspired a rare bit of political unity, with leftist, centrist and even some far-right activists all saying that the American president’s characterization of the land transfer law was wrong.

His comments amplified a long-held grievance among some white South Africans who claim they have been discriminated against by the Black-led government after apartheid. But Mr. Trump’s comments also angered many South Africans, who saw the law as a necessary means of redressing historical injustice.

Since 1994, when South Africa became a democracy, the country has enjoyed a close relationship with the United States. Barack Obama visited there several times during his presidency, including when he attended the memorial service for Mr. Mandela, who had been imprisoned for 27 years before becoming the country’s president.

But Mr. Trump’s actions on Friday made it clear that he does not view the relationship in the same way.

South Africa received more than $400 million in aid from the United States in 2023, almost all of which went to funding efforts to fight H.I.V. and AIDS. The government has said that American funding makes up about 17 percent of its budget for battling H.I.V.

Far-right white Afrikaners applauded Mr. Trump’s attacks on South Africa’s government in recent days.

Ernst Roets, the executive director of the Afrikaner Foundation, which lobbies for international support of the interests of Afrikaners, said that while the government was not seizing land, it was trying to create a legal and policy framework to be able to do so.

The expropriation law opens the door to abuse, Mr. Roets said, because the government “can justify a lot of things under the banner of public interest.” But even Mr. Roets and his group had not called on Mr. Trump to broadly cut aid to South Africa, instead seeking targeted actions against government leaders.

After Mr. Trump first commented about land confiscation, the South African government tried to broker a conversation between its foreign minister and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, according to Ebrahim Rasool, South Africa’s ambassador to the United States. But the Trump administration did not respond, he said.

The European Union spent last year drawing up secret plans for what the bloc would do if President Trump made good on his threats of imposing higher tariffs on European goods and services.

Now, as those threats go from hypothetical to potentially imminent, its plans are coming into broad focus.

Hit specific, politically sensitive sectors — like products made in Republican states — with targeted tariffs meant to inflict maximum pain. Don’t escalate into a tit-for-tat competition if it’s avoidable. Do move quickly and decisively, potentially using new tactics that could hit service providers like big Silicon Valley technology firms.

It’s a rough playbook — described broadly by three diplomats who requested anonymity because the plans were still being discussed — that Europe would prefer not to use. The first goal is to avoid a trade war by offering to negotiate and dangling carrots, including more European purchases of American gas, which Mr. Trump has been pushing for. E.U. officials have warned that a trade war between the bloc and the United States would be a self-defeating disaster that would cost both sides and benefit geopolitical rivals like China and Russia.

But Mr. Trump has kept the continent in his cross hairs, saying this week that the bloc would “definitely” face tariffs and “pretty soon.” If appeasement fails, Europe is broadcasting that it is ready to hit back.

“We are prepared,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said during a news conference this week in Brussels, when asked whether she was ready to fend off tariff increases from the new U.S. administration.

The commission, the bloc’s executive arm, has remained tight-lipped about what products it might hit with higher tariffs even when it meets with ambassadors and other diplomats from E.U. countries, said the three diplomats, who were briefed on the broad ideas developed by the so-called Trump task force. The bloc has 27 member countries, and plans that are shared too widely are likely to leak, eliminating their strategic advantage.

But several guiding principles are increasingly clear, said two of the diplomats, the result both of work by the commission’s task force and of experience gleaned from Mr. Trump’s first term. The diplomats requested anonymity to discuss politically sensitive matters.

The first idea is that tariffs would most likely be targeted, whether that means placed on certain industries or geography-tied products. In 2018, for instance, Europe reacted to steel and aluminum tariffs by hitting American whiskey with a large tariff, which hurt Kentucky’s bourbon industry and, thus, a constituency critical to Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican who was then the Senate majority leader.

A second idea is to stagger the response, kicking in or ratcheting up retaliation only if certain triggers are met or dates passed, two of the diplomats said. Moving deliberately provides more leverage, one diplomat said, and avoids an immediate and painful trade effect.

The third is that responses would not necessarily be tit-for-tat, according to all three diplomats. If Mr. Trump orders a 20 percent across-the-board tariff on Europe, that does not mean that Europe must respond with a 20 percent across-the-board tariff on the United States. The E.U. still wants to abide by global trade rules upheld by the World Trade Organization, which could suggest a more surgical approach.

One option on the table is the use of an “anti-coercion instrument,” a relatively new legal framework that would allow the bloc to rapidly target large American service providers — like big technology companies — with tariffs.

In force since 2023, the tool allows the E.U. to use “a wide range of possible countermeasures” like higher customs duties or import limits when another country harms European industry in an attempt to put pressure on the government and bring about political or policy change. The idea is to allow the bloc to respond to manipulative political pressure swiftly and sternly.

The Financial Times initially reported that the commission could use the tool to hit service providers, including large Silicon Valley technology companies, in response to American tariffs. Two of the diplomats confirmed that using the tool was being discussed, though far from a sure plan.

They said that moving forward with the tool might be too drastic of an option because Europe’s ultimate goal is not to inflame an all-out trade war.

For now, it is impossible for Europe to solidify a reaction plan. The simple reason: Nobody knows what Mr. Trump is going to do.

“They want to do a deal — I think they’re very uncertain still about what the true objectives are,” said Jörn Fleck, senior director with the Europe Center at the research group The Atlantic Council.

Also, E.U. leaders have at times struggled to get Washington on the phone. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has been invited to meet with foreign ministers but has not done so, though he has had a call with the bloc’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas. Ms. von der Leyen has not met with Mr. Trump since the inauguration in January.

Even though Mr. Trump has not said what tariffs on Europe would look like, he has repeatedly said he wants Europe to buy more American cars and farm products, in addition to gas.

That has left Europe offering incentives in an effort to fend off the trade war before it begins. Officials have been clear that they are willing — even poised — to buy more American fuel. Officials are already trying to find a way to diversity their energy sources as the continent weans itself off Russian gas.

“We still get a lot of LNG from Russia, and why not replace it by American LNG,” Ms. von der Leyen said in the days after Mr. Trump was elected, referring to liquefied natural gas.

European officials have also said they are likely to buy more American defense products as they ramp up bloc-wide military spending. Higher military expenditures are, in part, a response to Mr. Trump, who has insisted that European nations spend more on NATO.

And when it comes to Greenland — an autonomous territory of Denmark, an E.U. member, that Mr. Trump wants to annex for its strategic importance — Europeans have emphasized that they are open to investing more in the island.

“I totally agree with the Americans that the High North, that the Arctic region, is becoming more and more important when we’re talking about defense and security and deterrence,” Mette Frederiksen, the prime minister of Denmark, said in Brussels this week. “And it is possible to find a way to ensure stronger footprints in Greenland.”

Above all, European leaders have been trying to remind America of how important the relationship between the E.U. and the United States is, both economically and for global peace.

Not only is the E.U., when treated as a bloc, America’s most important trading partner. It is also a major importer of American services, and, as officials have repeatedly emphasized in recent days, European companies employ millions of Americans.

“A lot is at stake for both sides,” Ms. von der Leyen said this week.

But she added that “we will always protect our own interests — however and whenever that is needed.”

Ana Swanson contributed reporting.

President Trump touted the 2020 Abraham Accords that established formal ties between Israel and four Arab countries as one of the biggest foreign policy achievements of his first term.

Now he is pursuing his long-desired goal of getting Saudi Arabia to join the accords — but he may have just dealt himself a serious setback. Mr. Trump’s proposal to transfer all two million Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip and then rebuild the enclave as the “Riviera of the Middle East” has antagonized some of the very people he needs to seal the deal.

The Gaza idea was swiftly rejected by Arab countries, among them Saudi Arabia. The Gulf powerhouse released a pre-dawn statement right after Mr. Trump floated the proposal on Tuesday evening alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Washington.

The kingdom made clear that it is standing by its demand that a Palestinian state first be established before it will normalize relations with Israel. The precondition, which the Saudis have insisted on for the past year, is “nonnegotiable and not subject to compromises,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.

The statement directly contradicted Mr. Trump, who had just told reporters in Washington that Saudi Arabia had dropped the precondition. One senior Saudi royal said what the American leader was proposing would be tantamount to an “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza.

By proposing to “clean out” Gaza, Mr. Trump has earned little but suspicion and anger in Arab countries. Efforts by the American administration to soften the stance, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggesting that Gazans would be relocated only temporarily, have done little to mollify them.

The issue of Palestinian statehood is at the heart of the controversy over Mr. Trump’s Gaza proposal. For many Arabs, displacing Palestinians is anathema because it would shred their hopes for an independent state.

Egypt and Jordan, the countries Mr. Trump has suggested could be persuaded to take in Gazans, have publicly remained adamant that they would never accept a mass displacement of Palestinians. Officials, journalists and analysts in both countries said history spoke for itself: When Palestinians have been forced from their homes, they have not been allowed back.

Since the war in Gaza, both countries have been taking in Palestinians in need of medical attention. Egypt has accepted at least 100,000 medical evacuees and others who fled the neighboring enclave. Jordan, much of whose population is of Palestinian descent, is treating dozens of injured people from Gaza.

But participating in any forcible or permanent displacement of Palestinians from Gaza would be “morally and legally horrifying,” said Abdel Monem Saied Aly, a pro-government Egyptian political analyst and columnist.

Given the Saudi population’s broad support for the Palestinians, it would be difficult for the government to accept any agreement that does not address their aspirations for statehood. Public outrage in the kingdom over the war, and now over Mr. Trump’s proposal to empty Gaza, has complicated the prospects of a deal with Israel that was already going to be difficult to pull off.

Before Mr. Trump took office for his second term, there was some cause for modest optimism that Saudi-Israel normalization might move forward. A cease-fire between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas was reached on the eve of Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration. And the new American president has for years fostered a good working relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.

But now, some strains seem to be emerging in that relationship.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s former spy chief and former ambassador to the United States, told CNN on Wednesday that Mr. Trump “will get an earful from the leadership here” not only about the lack of wisdom in what he is proposing but also the injustice of “ethnic cleansing.”

As if to underscore his point, he wore a Palestinian black-and-white checked kaffiyeh in lieu of his traditional white headdress.

The four Arab governments that signed the Abraham Accords — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan — did so despite criticisms that they were giving up on what had for decades been the Arab precondition for any ties with Israel, the establishment of a Palestinian state.

When Bahrain and the Emirates became the first two nations to sign the agreements, the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, called it “a stab in the back of the Palestinian people.” Mr. Abbas governs parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

After 15 months of war in Gaza, outraged Arab publics are unlikely to accept any similar compromises now and the Israeli government led by Mr. Netanyahu firmly opposes Palestinian statehood.

“If normalization with Saudi Arabia depends on progress toward a Palestinian state even by a millimeter, it won’t happen. Period,” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was quoted as saying by Israel’s army radio last month.

The Saudis sat out the historic signing of the Abraham Accords, but when the deal expanded to include Morocco and Sudan, the Saudi crown prince called Israel a “potential ally” in a 2022 interview with The Atlantic.

In September 2023, the crown prince became the first leader of the kingdom to openly discuss the possibility of establishing relations with Israel in exchange for a defense pact with the United States and help with developing a civilian nuclear program. He did not mention Palestinian statehood as a condition.

In an interview with Fox News at that time, the crown prince said such an agreement would require “a good life for the Palestinians.” The indications back then pointed to the possibility that Saudi Arabia, too, might be willing to scale back its insistence on a Palestinian state before forging ties with Israel.

Then came the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed about 1,200 people. The 15-month Israeli military campaign that followed killed more than 46,000 people in Gaza, according to local health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The war devastated the densely populated and impoverished territory.

Since the war, the Saudi government has shifted its tone, saying that the region needs to be on an irreversible path to statehood for the Palestinians.

“We do have some red lines,” Prince Khalid bin Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United Kingdom, said late last month. “And for us to end the last 75 years of pain and suffering caused by one problem has to include a Palestinian state.”

It is possible that both Mr. Trump and the Saudi leadership are laying out maximalist positions as starting points in a negotiation, and will shift at some point to reach a compromise.

Many people in the four countries that normalized ties with Israel have been horrified by the war in Gaza and have publicly protested the accord. While freedom of association and assembly remain highly restricted in Bahrain, the government allowed the protests.

Though Egypt and Jordan have had peace treaties with the Israelis for decades, their publics never warmed to Israel, and ties have been severely strained by the war.

Egyptian officials told foreign diplomats in Cairo this week that their rejection of Gazan displacement was unwavering. In public, they reiterated that Egypt was focused on putting the cease-fire agreement into effect and delivering humanitarian aid to the Palestinians there.

Egypt “affirms its complete rejection of any proposal or concept aimed at eliminating the Palestinian cause through uprooting or displacing from their historic homeland and its seizure, whether on a temporary or permanent basis,” Egypt’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Thursday.

Political analysts close to the governments in Egypt and Jordan suggested that the two countries’ leaders would try to persuade Mr. Trump to accept an alternative plan for Gaza’s recovery involving aid and assistance from their countries.

“Egypt and Jordan have been historically engaged in the Palestinian cause, and they have to be an integral part of any solution,” said Khaled Okasha, director of the Egyptian Center for Thought and Strategic Studies, a government-aligned think tank. “But not the one that Trump is suggesting.”

Fatima AbdulKarim contributed reporting from Ramallah, in the West Bank.

They stand in a small crowd outside the large metal gate, tense and waiting in the dark. Most look weighed down, both by stress and by overstuffed plastic bags — all for men who may soon be heading off to war.

“Where’s my father? Where’s my father?” a boy in a camouflage coat asks, leaning on the gray gate. As his mother tells him to be patient, two women comfort each other nearby.

Svitlana Vakar hovers at the back of the group, crying and sniffling as she holds the dimpled hand of Maksym, her 2-year-old grandson. Wiping her eyes, she adjusts Maksym’s red “Paw Patrol” puffer jacket to protect him from the winter cold, then plants a long kiss on top of his head.

Maksym’s father had been picked up by recruiting officers that morning, on his way to work. He was able to send his mother a message: He had been taken to this military gathering point on the edge of Kyiv — along with dozens of other men picked up that day around the Ukrainian capital. Brought in for processing, they would be held overnight then shipped out in the morning for basic military training as recruits.

“Why take him like a dog? Not allowing him to say goodbye to family, to kids,” Ms. Vakar said, starting to sob.

At the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, men flocked to the recruitment centers. But after three years of grinding war, the well of volunteers has run dry. Now, men wait for their draft papers to arrive before appearing at recruiting centers — or try to avoid being found.

Faced with severe troop shortages and heavy casualties, Ukraine’s military has been chasing draft dodgers to help replenish the ranks. In some cases, that means pulling men off the street or off buses and taking them to recruiting points in the clothes they are wearing: jeans, suits, gym shorts. It happens so quickly that the men can’t always immediately call to let loved ones know what has happened or where they’ve been taken, families say.

Some are brought to this isolated facility, where, for a few hours before dawn and at dusk, friends and family trek to say goodbye — and to deliver essentials for the road ahead.

Loss is everywhere in Ukraine, where faces of the fallen cover billboards and memorials stretch down city streets. Amid all the sacrifice, sympathy for those who avoid serving can be in short supply. There are nearly a million people fighting in Ukraine’s military — they have children and families, too.

The uncomfortable, pre-emptive grief on display at the gates is yet another facet of the widespread angst Ukrainians live with. It was unclear how many of the men inside had ignored draft notices; some relatives mentioned paperwork issues around exemptions or cited bureaucratic mistakes.

Ms. Vakar said that she had “dropped everything” when her son Artem, 32, messaged that morning in January to say that he had been picked up and taken to the recruiting center.

“What reaction can a mother have?” she said. She threw his West Blue cigarettes, along with some potatoes and eggs, into a white plastic bag, then rushed with Maksym to the gathering point, where they stood waiting anxiously with other families in the dark.

Every few minutes, a door in the gate would clank open. A soldier would poke his head out to call a name — “Roman,” “Oleg” — and someone in the crowd would hustle forward.

More people kept arriving as the clock moved toward 6:45 p.m. Soon there were between 15 and 20 waiting.

The contents of the bags they carried spoke to how suddenly the men had been taken. Phone chargers. Socks. Underwear. Toothbrushes. A warmer coat. Many at the gate also held plastic containers with food — borscht, macaroni — to help ease the abrupt transition to military life.

Ms. Vakar fed Maksym a snack at 6:50. Soon after, “Vakar” was called. They were led through the gate, past the soldier with the list of names and another with an assault rifle, to a small strip of asphalt with benches. That’s where she was able to see her son, for about 20 minutes.

The gate kept clanking, letting visitors back out. Their bags now empty, many left with tears streaming down their faces.

The center sits at the end of a winding road, far from any public transport. Some people paced as they waited for taxis; others made calls to relay that husbands or boyfriends had gone missing — only to be found at the recruitment site.

Anya, 38, who had come looking for her husband, said it had taken her an hour to get to the closest bus stop, then another hour to find the gate. She asked that only her first name be used out of a fear of retaliation. When she arrived, out of breath, she rushed up to the gate but was told to wait.

Others were still arriving, and some carried duffels. More than one looked bewildered, asking “Where do I go?” or “How does the line work?”

Time was running out on what might be a last chance to say goodbye. In the mornings, large yellow buses roll through the gates with signs reading “Ukrainian Armed Forces!” Visitors can come from 6:30 a.m. to 8 a.m. — after that, the buses take the recruits away for 45 days of basic training, followed by assignment to a unit.

More men are brought in by van to replace them throughout the day. And so the evening visiting window, from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., fills with relatives of those picked up just hours earlier.

Not all visitors make it in time — a man and a woman who arrived at 8:14 p.m. were turned away.

But Anya made it through to see her husband, who works at McDonald’s. When she emerged after 15 minutes, she was a wreck.

“He’s not a soldier,” she said. “I don’t know how he’ll serve.”

Anya said that she had a bad feeling when her husband called her after she had dropped their 7-year-old daughter at school. It was a call she had dreaded, yet expected, for months, but it was no less devastating when it came.

“I’m in shock,” she said, listing the reasons her husband was unfit to serve, including a bad back. She said she would push for an exemption, find medical documents, anything to get him released. That was for tomorrow, she said. Now, she needed to go to her daughter. The girl did not know that her father had been drafted.

“I don’t know when to tell her, and how,” Anya said, choking on the words through tears. No longer able to speak, she headed off down the dark road. Moments later, the gate clanked open, revealing a line of men in civilian clothes being led past a banner that read, “Protecting your homeland is the duty of Ukrainian citizens.”

A white van drove in, but the crowd in front of the gate had cleared. Before the sun came up more people would form a line again, stuffed plastic bags in hand.

Oksana Parafeniuk contributed reporting.

Hundreds of people, including dozens of children, have been killed in Sudan in recent days, according to civilian witnesses, medical workers and the United Nations, as fierce clashes have escalated in an internal conflict that is approaching its third year.

The war between the Sudanese Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has unleashed a wave of devastation across Sudan, killing tens of thousands of people, forcing millions to flee their homes and pushing parts of the vast nation deeper into famine.

“The citizens are currently living in a state of panic,” said Asim Ahmed Musa, 29, an activist in Kadugli city in South Kordofan state, where dozens were killed this week. “People are scared.”

In the capital, Khartoum, and adjoining cities, the region of Darfur in the west, and across several other states, the ruinous war is escalating as the warring parties strive to solidify their territorial claims, regain new ones and secure strategic military and civilian sites.

The conflict has been marked by gross atrocities and ethnically motivated killings, prompting investigations from the International Criminal Court and accusations of genocide from the United States.

In recent weeks, the army has amped its offensive to retake significant parts of the capital, which it lost when the war started in April 2023. The conflict has slowly been heating up since late last year after the end of the rainy season. With the escalating deaths, injuries and attacks on civilians, activists have been calling on the United Nations to deploy a peacekeeping mission in the country.

In January, the army captured a strategic oil refinery north of Khartoum and broke the siege on its main headquarters in central Khartoum.

The army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, visited the facility days later, and promised to remove the paramilitary forces from “every corner of Sudan.”

But even as army officers celebrated their victory, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights accused fighters and militia allied with them of summarily executing at least 18 people in the newly liberated areas.

Fighting has also escalated in Omdurman, a city across the Nile from the capital that is home to about 2.4 million people and is Sudan’s second-largest city. Sudan’s Health Ministry said that at least 54 people were killed and 158 others injured on Saturday when the paramilitary forces shelled a busy market there.

Just days later, on Tuesday, the ministry said that six people were killed and 38 others were wounded when mortar shells hit a main hospital that was already treating people who had been injured in the fighting.

Fierce clashes have also ensued this week in South Kordofan, which shares a border with South Sudan, and Blue Nile states, where millions were already facing dire humanitarian crises.

In Kadugli city in South Kordofan, the latest infighting has left at least 80 people dead, the United Nations said this week.

Mr. Musa, who lives in the city, said many people did not have access to adequate food or medicine. Workers were unable to receive their salaries, he said, and many families had limited cash, especially after Sudan introduced new bank notes last month.

Clashes have continued all over the city, he said, and the thud of shelling and gunfire had forced many people to hunker down.

“Kadugli is currently an active zone,” Mr. Musa said, adding that the whole situation was “tragic.”

The western region of Darfur has also been the site of intense clashes recently, an agonizing reprise for an area that experienced a genocide just over two decades ago.

Since the beginning of the conflict, the paramilitary forces, or the R.S.F., and their allies have ratcheted up attacks in the region and consolidated their control over major cities.

They also laid siege to El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, where they have been clashing with the army and its allies. An attack on the only functioning hospital in El Fasher in late January killed 70 people and injured 19 others, according to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization.

A resident in El Fasher on Friday reported disruptions to the already fragile internet connections, severely curtailing people’s ability to communicate. Fierce battles and shelling continued to rage in the city, sometimes late into the night, leading to severe injuries and straining the burdened health care system.

Fighting across the region has also displaced hundreds of families, according to the United Nations, pushing some of them to flee across the border into Chad.

The latest conflict has not spared children. At least 40 children were killed in just three days this month, UNICEF said this week.

“As the conflict persists, children’s lives and futures hang in the balance and for their sakes, the violence must end immediately,” the UNICEF Sudan representative, Annmarie Swai, said in a statement.

For now, the warring sides insist that they can ultimately quash the other.

Despite incurring losses in the capital, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, the paramilitary leader, delivered a recorded video speech last week in which he sought to restore sagging morale among his forces and promised to seize fresh territory.

“We must think of what we intend to take,” he said. “Look forward and not backward.”

The Trump administration’s efforts to downsize the United States Agency for International Development have endangered the funding for food, tents and medical treatment for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, according to U.S. officials and workers for humanitarian groups funded by the agency.

Officials said that the threats to the aid supply chain risked destabilizing the fragile cease-fire agreement between Hamas and Israel, which is contingent on the weekly entry of 4,200 aid and commercial trucks to the territory.

With almost all U.S.A.I.D. staff set to be placed on administrative leave by Friday night, there will be only a handful of officials left to sign off on and audit hundreds of millions of dollars in outstanding payments to the agency’s partners on the ground in Gaza, raising alarm about how those groups will fund their operations.

Of more than 200 officials in the agency’s Mideast team, just 21 will remain in post to manage its entire regional portfolio, according to an internal agency email reviewed by The New York Times. The team that organizes emergency aid supplies in dozens of crisis zones around the world each year, of which Gaza was just one, is down to just 70 staff members from more than 1,000.

This is expected to slow or prevent the delivery of food packages to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, as well as tents, mattresses, blankets, hygiene kits and medical treatment, according to three officials and an aid worker. All four people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the news media.

While the aid agency does not operate inside Gaza, it has provided roughly $1 billion in aid to international aid groups on the ground since the war began in October 2023 — about a third of the total aid response, according to the United Nations. Hundreds of millions of dollars have yet to be disbursed and now may never be transferred to United Nations agencies and other major aid organizations, three officials said.

“They’re making an already fragile cease-fire more fragile,” said Dave Harden, a former U.S.A.I.D. mission director for Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. “Lifesaving aid to Gaza is going to be disrupted.”

The State Department, which oversees the aid agency, declined to comment. The agency’s director in Jerusalem referred reporters to the U.S.A.I.D. press department, which did not respond to requests for comment. It was unclear if it was still operational.

The World Food Program, the International Organization for Migration and the International Medical Corps, all of which distribute aid or run projects in Gaza funded by U.S.A.I.D., also declined to comment.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a television interview this week that the moves were “not about getting rid of foreign aid,” but an attempt to prevent “rank insubordination” by uncooperative workers.

The Trump administration says the agency wastes taxpayers’ money on costly and unfocused overseas programs that do little for the American people.

Mr. Rubio said that agency employees “take taxpayer money and they spend it as a global charity irrespective of whether it is in the national interest.”

Officials interviewed for this article said that the aid to Gaza was a clear example of how the agency’s work was helping to further President Trump’s stated foreign policy goals. He has repeatedly called for an extension of the cease-fire, which is partly dependent on the smooth flow of aid.

The virtual collapse of U.S.A.I.D. is expected to remove a key form of oversight over that aid delivery. The agency is set to lay off officials who monitor the distribution of supplies within the territory, three officials said, making it harder for the United States to assess who controls and receives the aid within areas run by Hamas.

It is also likely to sideline officials who previously coordinated between the Israeli military, the Egyptian government, the United Nations and private aid groups, helping various parties to troubleshoot problems in the supply chain and prevent soldiers from mistakenly firing on aid convoys. An Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, confirmed the importance of the aid agency’s coordination role and said it was unclear which institution would step in to fill it.

Some aid and development programs in Gaza and the West Bank have already been halted or restricted after a freeze in January on most of U.S.A.I.D.’s programs and the firing or suspension of thousands of its workers. By the start of this week, more than half of the roughly 50 officials who work on the Gaza response in Jerusalem and Washington had already been placed on leave or had their contracts terminated.

They included a U.S.A.I.D. representative who worked from an Israeli military control room in Tel Aviv, helping to coordinate between the military and aid groups in Gaza, according to three U.S. officials.

The funding freezes have already suspended tens of millions of dollars earmarked for Gaza, including for water infrastructure, mobile hospital units and psychological support programs, according to one of the U.S. officials.

Among the groups affected was the International Medical Corps, a Los Angeles-based medical aid group funded by U.S.A.I.D. that runs two large field hospitals in Gaza. As a result, the group said in a statement that it may no longer be able to sustain an emergency room that treats up to 200 patients a day, an outpatient department that serves up to 2,000 people a day and a childbirth unit that delivers roughly 20 babies a day.

Anera, a Washington-based aid group, said in a statement that the freeze on a U.S.A.I.D. grant worth $50 million had forced it to suspend work on a program to restore Gaza’s decimated health services.

Tens of millions of dollars for West Bank and East Jerusalem projects have also been frozen, endangering key funds for several hospitals that President Biden pledged to sustain during a visit to the region in 2022.

Ronen Bergman contributed reporting from Tel Aviv.

A Trump administration envoy to the Middle East pressed Lebanon’s new leaders on Friday to ensure that Hezbollah does not become part of the government, as the country grapples with a fragile cease-fire and violence that could undermine its push for stability.

The United States deputy envoy to the Middle East, Morgan Ortagus, said at a news conference in Beirut that the United States has set “clear red lines” with the Lebanese government to isolate Hezbollah. Ms. Ortagus said that Lebanon’s leaders were committed to ensuring that the Iran-backed militia “is not a part of this government in any form.”

Her remarks came after she met with Lebanon’s new president, Joseph Aoun, who later appeared to contradict her suggestion. In a statement, his office said that some of Ms. Ortagus’s comments expressed her “personal viewpoint,” without elaborating on which ones.

Lebanon’s new leadership will most likely need to strike a balance with Hezbollah, which has long been the country’s dominant political force, but has been battered by a 14-month war with Israel. Washington has sought to capitalize on Hezbollah’s weakened standing in recent weeks by pressuring Lebanese officials to undermine its political stranglehold, but the group still holds significant power in Parliament.

The visit by Ms. Ortagus, a former State Department spokeswoman, was the first by a senior U.S. official since Mr. Trump took office, providing some of the earliest public indications of what the new U.S. administration’s objectives look like in Lebanon.

Mr. Aoun was elected president last month, after years of political gridlock, and he has designated a new prime minister, Nawaf Salam, to form a government. That is seen as crucial step to restoring stability to Lebanon after years of crisis, but the effort has so far been slow.

In Lebanon, cabinet posts have traditionally been divided up along sectarian lines under a decades-old power sharing agreement among 18 religious groups. The new government would need a vote of confidence from Lebanon’s 128-member Parliament, where Hezbollah and its allies hold a significant number of seats.

Hezbollah’s continued sway would put the new government in a bind. Lebanon is emerging from its deadliest war in decades and desperately needs foreign funding to rebuild, but Western governments are loath to send aid to a government with unfettered Hezbollah influence.

Facing political pressure from Hezbollah and the group’s allies, Mr. Salam has so far allowed them to select four out of five Shiite Muslim ministers in his new cabinet — a likely cause for alarm in Washington.

The selection of Mr. Salam, who is seen as a reformist, marked a blow to Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim group. Political opponents had hoped that the Shiite nominations to Mr. Salam’s new government — as mandated under the country’s sectarian power-sharing agreement — would be for people without ties to Hezbollah.

“If there are any Hezbollah operatives that are appointed to key positions in the new government, it will complicate if not destroy any support from the new Trump administration,” said Ed Gabriel, president of the American Task Force on Lebanon, a nonprofit aimed at strengthening ties between the United States and Lebanon.

“It will be a wrench in the works,” he said.

The mounting diplomatic pressure comes at a delicate time for the tiny Mediterranean nation.

Under the terms of a 60-day cease-fire that ended the war between Israel and Hezbollah in November, Israeli troops were supposed to have withdrawn by now from Lebanon.

But they have not done so, and Israeli forces killed two dozen people last month, according to Lebanese officials, as thousands of people attempted to return to their homes near the border when the cease-fire expired. The Israeli military said that it had fired “warning shots in order to eliminate threats.”

With the truce deal now extended until Feb. 18, many in Lebanon now fear the prospect of a sustained Israeli occupation of the country’s south. During the news conference on Friday, Ms. Ortagus said that the U.S. was committed to the new cease-fire deadline and that Israeli troops were expected to withdraw by then.

But with tensions rising, the Israeli military carried out a new series of airstrikes overnight deep inside Lebanese territory. The military said it had targeted Hezbollah military sites and accused the group of breaking the terms of the cease-fire agreement. Both sides have repeatedly accused each other of violating the deal.

Lebanon’s state-run news agency reported attacks in southern and eastern Lebanon, which appeared to be some of the most intense since the war ended in November. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Fighting also continued on Friday along the Lebanese-Syrian border, where skirmishes erupted a day earlier between Syrian forces and armed gunmen in Lebanon. Syria’s new rebel authorities said they were attempting to clamp down on cross-border smuggling networks, according to Syria’s state news agency, SANA.

Since President Bashar al-Assad of Syria was toppled in December, Lebanon has feared further instability spilling across its borders.

During his latest presidential campaign, President Trump bragged about compelling Mexico to deploy 28,000 troops to its borders during his first administration to avoid tariffs.

This week, Mr. Trump and Mexico brokered another deal to send an additional 10,000 Mexican National Guard members to the border to stop the flow of migrants and drugs — a compromise to once again stave off U.S. tariffs. Mr. Trump has championed the agreement as a victory for the United States.

But analysts and former diplomats who brokered the first troop deployment in 2019 are doubtful that additional soldiers will have much effect thwarting the movement of migrants or drugs, particularly fentanyl.

Instead, they say, the deployment agreed to by President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico may be catering to Mr. Trump’s affinity for deal-making rather than being part of a well-thought-out military campaign.

“It’s a lot of shock and awe, but very little policy,” said Arturo Sarukhán, Mexico’s ambassador to Washington during President Felipe Calderón’s term from 2006 to 2012, an administration that aggressively pursued cartels inside Mexico, igniting extraordinary levels of violence nationwide.

The Mexican government appears to be echoing Mr. Trump’s fondness for a high-profile media blitz with its own.

After the deal was struck, photos and videos of Mexican soldiers waiting to board military flights and vehicles for their border deployment circulated widely. They mirrored Mr. Trump’s use of American military planes to deport migrants in recent weeks.

But what the Mexico troops will do on the border is unclear. The Mexican defense ministry is known for its lack of transparency, as it is not required to disclose its operations or funding details to Mexico’s congress or the public.

There are clues from Mr. Trump’s first term, when more than 20,000 Mexican troops were sent to the country’s northern and southern borders and were responsible for erecting checkpoints and breaking up large groups of migrants.

The Mexican defense ministry did not respond to questions about the deployment and Ms. Sheinbaum has so far said little about what exactly the force will be responsible for.

Mexico already has a significant military presence along the U.S. border. Sam Storr, a Mexico-based analyst who tracks military activity with the Citizen Security Project at the Ibero-American University, said that there was a monthly average of 1,115 National Guardsmen and 7,959 Mexican Army troops as part of immigration enforcement at the country’s northern border in the first half of 2024.

Adding 10,000 new National Guards members, Mr. Storr said, could “potentially be a significant increase,” but he also called it “extremely confusing.” He said it was not known if some troops would be rotated out. And, he said, based on public records requests, it is the Mexican Army that has traditionally carried out more drug seizures — and has a larger presence in northern states.

The National Guard, Mr. Storr said, “seems to be an auxiliary force,” filling gaps for state police and contributing to customs enforcement.

When it comes to immigration, however, the flow of migrants trying to cross into the United States is now a trickle of what it once was, after Mexico stepped up security efforts last year and the Biden administration enforced restrictions on asylum.

U.S. Border Patrol officials recorded roughly 71,000 illegal crossings at the end of Mr. Trump’s first term in December 2020. While crossings hit record highs under President Joseph R. Biden in 2023, they dropped to about 47,000 by December 2024.

The bigger question is what additional troops can do, if anything, to stanch the flow of fentanyl into the United States.

“It’s Whac-a-Mole,” said Mr. Sarukhan, the former ambassador. “Most of the fentanyl goes through legal points of entry into the U.S., not between them, and that’s where most troops will be deployed: at illegal points of entry.”

The challenge of fentanyl interception, analysts say, is threefold. First, fentanyl is compact, with only small quantities of the drug needed to get a lot of people high, unlike cocaine. It is much easier to smuggle into the United States in personal vehicles compared with other drugs. Mexican security forces do not search vehicles at U.S. ports of entry; that happens on the American side of the border.

Second, a majority of fentanyl smugglers are not illegal migrants, as Mr. Trump claims, but American citizens going through border crossings. In 2023, American citizens were responsible for 86 percent of fentanyl trafficking cases in the United States, according to government figures.

Third, although the National Guard is authorized to carry out inspections, significantly more soldiers would be required to effectively inspect the volume of vehicles, which would likely slow down bilateral trade between the United States and Mexico. In 2018, the port of entry at Laredo, Texas — where most trade flows — saw more than five million cars and 2.3 million trucks cross, carrying goods worth about $235 billion.

“Militarizing drug enforcement is nothing new,” said Stephanie Brewer, the Mexico director at the Washington Office on Latin America research institute. “If anything, this is doubling down on a failed war on drugs that has done nothing to stop drugs since it began decades ago.”

Analysts say that to crack down on fentanyl more intelligence is needed to go after labs or to identify American citizens who are smuggling it. The Mexican National Guard is a relatively new force and only established its own intelligence wing in late 2023.

Intelligence “is really the most effective tool, beyond 10,000, 15,000 or 20,000 National Guard members,” said Jonathan Maza, a Mexico-based security analyst. He said that increased cooperation between Mexican authorities and U.S. agencies — such as the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the F.B.I. — was crucial.

But that work needs to be done elsewhere, not at the crossings.

“Fentanyl production is happening not on the border, but in the hinterlands,” said Falko Ernst, a security analyst in Mexico.

“These are transnational organized crime networks that use both U.S. and Mexican territory,” he added. “What is needed is a transnational solution.”

The Mexican government announced that the 10,000 National Guard members would be stationed in 18 cities and towns along the U.S.-Mexico border, with the largest contingents deployed to Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez.

Troops began being redirected to the north on Tuesday from southeastern Mexico, one of the safest regions in the country and a popular tourist destination. Others were pulled from states that have seen a recent decrease in crime rates.

“The plan that was made does not obviously put security at risk in the rest of the territory,” Ms. Sheinbaum said on Wednesday.

Inspector General José Luis Santos Iza, the coordinator of the 31st Battalion of the National Guard based in Ciudad Juárez, said there would be “permanent surveillance” of the border and all routes leading to it, with troops patrolling on foot and in vehicles.

Mayor Juan Francisco Gim Nogales of Nogales, a city bordering Arizona, said Wednesday that he was waiting for 400 troops to be deployed later that day.

He expressed hope that the additional forces would help tackle the organized crime operating in his city and curb the flow of guns entering Mexico. The deployment would double Nogales’s armed forces from some 350 to 700, Mr. Gim Nogales said.

“It’ll give citizens peace of mind,” he said.

Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting from Mexico City, Rocío Gallegos from Ciudad Juárez, Aline Corpus from Tijuana and Chantal Flores from Monterrey, Mexico.

Tens of thousands of Afghan refugees who have congregated in Pakistan’s capital region to seek resettlement in other countries are being ordered to move elsewhere in Pakistan by March 31.

The refugees have arrived in large numbers in the capital, Islamabad, and in neighboring Rawalpindi because of the embassies and refugee agencies based there. Forcing them to go elsewhere in the country is intended to put pressure on Western nations, including the United States, to accept them quickly.

The Pakistani government’s announcement, issued last week, said that Afghan refugees who could not find a country to take them would be deported to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, although it did not say how quickly that would happen after the March 31 deadline.

The order has added to the fear and uncertainty faced by the refugees, especially the 15,000 who had applied for resettlement in the United States. Days earlier, President Trump put those Afghans’ fate in doubt with an executive order suspending all refugee admissions to the United States.

Many of those Afghans worked with the United States-led mission in their country, or with NGOs or other organizations funded by Western countries, before the Taliban took power in August 2021. Others are family members of Afghans who did so. Advocates for these refugees have accused the U.S. government of betraying wartime allies by blocking their paths to resettlement.

The U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, and the International Organization for Migration said on Wednesday that many of the refugees threatened with deportation — particularly members of ethnic and religious minority groups, women and girls, journalists, human rights activists and artists — could be subjected to persecution by the Taliban government. In a joint statement, they urged Pakistan to “implement any relocation measures with due consideration for human rights standards.”

Sara Ahmadi, 26, a former journalism student at Kabul University, said her family had feared being deported to Afghanistan — “the very place we risked everything to leave” — since the Trump administration halted refugee admissions.

“That fear is now becoming a reality,” Ms. Ahmadi said in a telephone interview. Her mother had worked in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, for Children in Crisis, a U.S.-funded NGO. Their six-member family arrived in Islamabad in November 2021, hoping to eventually settle in the United States.

They were among hundreds of thousands of Afghans who fled to Pakistan after the Taliban takeover.

A spokesman for the Pakistani Foreign Ministry, Shafqat Ali Khan, recently said that nearly 80,000 Afghan refugees had left Pakistan for other countries, and that about 40,000 who had applied for resettlement elsewhere were still in Pakistan.

That includes the roughly 15,000 who were waiting for approval from the United States Refugee Admissions Program when Mr. Trump suspended it. The three-month suspension took effect on Jan. 27; the Trump administration has given no indication of whether resettlement will eventually resume.

Pakistan has forced hundreds of thousands of other Afghans — both documented and undocumented migrants, and even some who arrived in Pakistan for resettlement to Western countries — back to their home country because of rising tensions with the Taliban.

Pakistan accuses the Taliban of harboring Pakistani militants who conduct cross-border attacks, which the Taliban deny. The Pakistani authorities also frequently accuse Afghan nationals of involvement in terrorism.

The U.N. refugee agency and the International Organization for Migration said there had been an increase in arrests of Afghan nationals in Islamabad and Rawalpindi since Jan. 1, with more than 800 Afghans, including children, deported from those two cities alone.

Ms. Ahmadi said her family had endured police harassment and struggled with Islamabad’s relatively high housing costs for more than three years, while remaining hopeful that they would be relocated to the United States.

“One midnight in December, police officers forcibly entered our house and treated us roughly,” she said. “It was a terrifying experience.”

But Mr. Trump’s suspension of refugee admissions shattered her optimism, and Islamabad’s new directive to evict Afghan refugees from the capital has deepened her distress, she said.

“For two decades, my family built a life in Afghanistan, only for it to be destroyed in a single day when we were forced to leave everything behind in Kabul,” Ms. Ahmadi said. “We endured all these hardships in Islamabad with the hope that we would soon reach the United States and begin a new life.”

“But it seems the U.S. has abandoned us,” she said.