Israel’s military withdrew Sunday from a key corridor dividing the Gaza Strip, leaving nearly all of the territory’s north as required by a tenuous cease-fire with Hamas ahead of any negotiations for a longer-lasting agreement.

The military’s departure from the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza came as the Israeli government sent a delegation to Qatar over the weekend to discuss the next group of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners to be freed during the cease-fire agreement’s initial phase, which went into effect last month and is ongoing. The gaunt appearances of three Israeli hostages who were released on Saturday, stoking public comparisons to Holocaust victims, heaped new pressure on the negotiations.

In a statement on Sunday, the Israeli military said troops were “implementing the agreement” to leave the corridor and allow hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to continue returning home to northern Gaza.

Two Israeli military officials and a soldier in Gaza who were not authorized to discuss the situation publicly or by name said the troops had already left the Netzarim Corridor by Sunday morning.

Hamas also said that Israeli troops had departed from the Netzarim Corridor, saying in a statement that it was “a victory for the will of our people.”

Sunday’s withdrawal from the corridor means that the presence of Israeli troops in Gaza is now mostly limited to a small sliver of land in southern Gaza, near the Egyptian border, and a buffer zone along the Israeli border.

Gaza’s interior ministry alerted Palestinians heading north on Sunday that their vehicles could still be inspected by foreign security contractors there to prevent weapons from being transferred from the south.

“We call on citizens to be careful and adhere to moving according to the currently permitted mechanism for their safety,” the interior ministry said in a statement Sunday.

The Israeli military had ordered a mass evacuation of northern Gaza in the early days of the war and patrolled the corridor, in part to prevent Palestinians from returning. Israeli troops had already partially withdrawn from the Netzarim Corridor last month, leaving the foreign contractors to fill the void.

Their complete withdrawal from the corridor was required under the first 42-day phase of the cease-fire agreement — which is now at the halfway point — and necessary to advance to the next stage of the deal to fully bring an end to the war in Gaza.

Significant new pitfalls to reaching an agreement for the next phase — which could involve a complete Israeli military withdrawal from all of Gaza — emerged over the past week, however, after President Trump said that the United States could take over Gaza and turn it into the “Rivera of the Middle East” by relocating its Palestinian residents.

On Sunday, Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry again rejected the proposal, repeating that no lasting peace agreement could be reached without creating a sovereign Palestinian state — a diplomatic goal for generations, but one that officials and experts now say is probably all but impossible to achieve.

The emaciated appearance of three Israeli hostages who were freed by Hamas on Saturday has also spurred widespread concern in Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had not acted quickly enough to ensure their or others’ release — increasing the pressure on the Israeli government to bring the rest of the captives home and advance to the second phase of a deal.

But despite the weekend meetings in Qatar, little to no progress was expected on negotiating the next stage until Mr. Netanyahu convenes a meeting of his top security officials in the coming days.

In an interview on Saturday in Washington, where he had been meeting with the Trump administration, Mr. Netanyahu said Hamas, not he, was to blame for the hostages’ conditions. He predicted that at least a half-dozen more hostages would be released by the end of next week.

“We have three war aims in Gaza,” Mr. Netanyahu said in an interview with Fox News. “One, destroy Hamas’s military and governing capabilities. Two, get all the hostages out. Three, make sure that Gaza never poses a threat to Israel again. And I’m committed to achieving all three.”

Even as Israeli troops left the key corridor in Gaza, they continued raids and patrols in the occupied West Bank. Palestinian health officials there said at least two people, including a woman who was eight months pregnant, were killed in the Nour al-Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm. The Israeli military did not comment on any casualties.

Hiba Yazbek and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.

At Gate 10 of the arrivals hall of the Bangkok airport, Wichayada Saeyang stroked her son’s hair, as if he were a small boy, not a grown man. A few feet away, Pongsak Thanna wrapped his arms around his father and did not let go. His tears dampened his father’s shoulder.

“To see my son, it’s indescribable,” said Vilas Thanna, Mr. Pongsak’s father. “I cannot say it in words.”

On Sunday morning, five hostages returned to Thailand after 15 months of captivity in Gaza. The family reunions at the airport were a happy culmination to an ordeal that has roiled a large community of Thai laborers since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Despite having nothing to do with the conflict, Thais were, after Israelis, the biggest victims of the terror that Hamas unleashed. At least 39 Thai agricultural workers were killed on Oct. 7. More than 30 were taken hostage, with the majority released in November 2023. Two died during captivity; one final Thai hostage remains unaccounted for.

“Today is a very emotional day,” said Maris Sangiampongsa, Thailand’s foreign minister, who received the five hostages at the Bangkok airport, describing how wonderful it was “for a person to be able to come home to the warmth of their family.”

Poverty has compelled tens of thousands of people from Thailand, particularly from the rural northeast, to find work in Israel as farmhands. Their numbers climbed in the 1990s after the first intifada, or uprising, when farm owners were looking for replacements for Palestinian workers, and are now around 30,000. About 5,000 of them worked the fields near the border with Gaza, helping to grow much of the fresh produce eaten in Israel.

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Until a few days ago, Antonietta Moccia, a 61-year-old housewife, had little hope that the Italian authorities would ever tackle the illegal waste disposal that had long plagued her town and others just north of Naples.

Her daughter was diagnosed with a rare cancer at age 5 in an area where clusters of cancers have been linked to pollution. But her years of marches, sit-ins and comforting neighbors whose lives were upended by the untimely deaths of loved ones had yielded little.

Case in point, she nodded to a mound of garbage — construction debris, sundry objects and plastic bags stuffed with varied refuse — piled along a dusty back street in Acerra, her hometown.

“We need less talk, more action,” she said. “There’s been talk for years.”

Recently, the European Court of Human Rights let it be known that it felt much the same. The court based in Strasbourg, France, found that the Italian authorities had long been aware of the illegal dumping in an area colloquially known as “the land of fires” because of the persistent burning of toxic waste.

But it said that local and national authorities had repeatedly failed to act. The court cited a 1997 report to Parliament that said the dumping had been going on since at least 1988.

“Progress had been glacial,” seven judges ruled unanimously, saying that residents had been denied their “right to life.” It ordered the government to take immediate action and report back in two years.

Residents and environmental activists said they hoped the decision would finally break the logjam of inaction to clean up one of the poorest areas of Italy, where some three million people are scattered among 90 municipalities.

An ongoing study by Italy’s top heath authorities found in a 2023 report that the mortality rate for people in this part of Campania was 9 percent higher than the rest of the region. People had a greater chance of dying from malignant tumors (10 percent higher) or circulatory system diseases (7 percent higher), and in some cases the statistics were stark: Instances of liver tumors in women were 31 percent higher.

“We hope there will be a jolt of consciences in all Italian politicians,” said Enrico Fontana, who monitors environment and legality for Legambiente, Italy’s largest environmental group. “The hope is that this landmark ruling will trigger a real national unity with a national strategy that sees forces on every level react together to solve the problem.”

The case involved complaints by scores of residents seeking to know whether Italy had violated Article 2 of the Convention of Human Rights, the right to life, by failing to clean up the mess, and whether the Italian authorities had also violated people’s right to information about the pollution in the area.

An additional 4,700 citizens have filed complaints in Strasbourg concerning the same issues, and those cases could move forward should Italy fail to prepare an overall strategy within the two-year deadline set by the court.

The Strasbourg case drew on the findings of several parliamentary commissions, scientific studies, reports by environmental groups and the opinions of experts, showing that the area had willfully been allowed to become a dumping ground.

Manufacturers in Italy, and beyond, experts said, cut secret deals with the Camorra, as the local mafia is known, to illegally dispose of hazardous waste for a fraction of the cost of legal disposal.

By burying the waste in its backyard, the Camorra could ensure a measure of protection, and silence.

“It’s what is known as a sacrifice area, a vulnerable, low-income, low-education community that was already struggling” socially and economically, said Marco Armiero, an expert in political ecology who weighed in on the case for the court.

The opening of an incinerator in Acerra in 2009 “added insult to injury to an already contaminated community” and brought no relief to toxic waste management, he said in telephone interview. As a result, he added, “these communities don’t trust the institutions much anymore.”

Rebuilding trust can come only from doing the court’s bidding, he said.

The European court gave Rome two years to draft a “comprehensive strategy” to address the situation, including the decontamination of areas where toxic waste had been buried and burned.

It calls for Italy to set up “an independent monitoring mechanism and a public information platform” for residents. The court found that “it was impossible to get an overall sense of where had yet to be decontaminated,” and called for better coordination among institutions to tackle this issue.

“The overall situation remains worrying,” said Lorenzo Bianchi, a researcher at the National Research Council Institute of Clinical Physiology in Pisa. Despite decades of delays, he said, time is still of the essence.

“The further we go on, if decontamination is not undertaken and the pressure on the territory is not mitigated, the more the negative effects will be felt,” he said.

Antonella Mascia, a lawyer who represented some of the people who filed a complaint, said it had been rare for the court to be so detailed with its recommendations to Italy, specifying a two-year time limit.

After that period, the court said it would also address the question of financial compensation for those who put in claims. “But it was not about money, but about the verification that there was a violation in order to bring about change — this is the spirit” of the claim, Ms. Mascia said.

Her colleague in Acerra, Valentina Centonze, said Italy had to make it a priority to find funds to fulfill the court’s recommendations, from decontaminating the territory to monitoring it so that new dumps are not developed. As it is, garbage is strewed along back roads throughout the area.

“To resolve a problem, you have to invest in it,” she said.

The court was also clear that the local population should no longer be kept in the dark about what was happening in its territory, for better or worse.

“There has to be transparency about what was not done and what has to be done,” said Alessandro Cannavacciuolo, a local environmental activist.

He said he had been shocked into awareness about the pollution when lambs with two heads or two tails or one eye started to be born on the family farm.

The health authorities eventually ordered the entire flock to be put down. His uncle, Vincenzo, died within a few weeks of a lung cancer that had metastasized.

Earlier this month, he was invited to a meeting at the Prefecture of Naples with assorted health authorities, lawmakers, law enforcers and environmental activists to address the court’s ruling. He said tangible proposals had been in short supply.

“There is talk, talk, talk. Eh, this territory has already heard a lot of talk,” he said.

Attempts to reach the Campania regional authorities were unsuccessful.

Mr. Cannavacciuolo, who is 36, could leave his home region but has chosen to stay and fight. “Our roots are here,” he said. “Why abandon a land that belongs to us? The people who have polluted it are the ones who should go away.”

Others can’t wait to leave. Maria D’Alise, 18, known to everyone as Miriam, was just 5 when she was diagnosed with a kind of brain tumor that affects about 650 children per year in the European Union. “In Acerra, a town of 60,000, there were three cases,” said Ms. Moccia, her mother.

Now cancer free but still dealing with the aftereffects of her treatment, Ms. D’Alise is in her last year of high school and hopes to become a tattoo artist after graduating. Not in Acerra.

“This is where I had what I had,” she said, “and should I have children when I grow up, I don’t want them to have my same experience, so I am leaving.”

Doron Steinbrecher vowed that she would never wear pink again when she made her first public comments in a video after being freed from more than 15 months in Hamas captivity in Gaza.

A year ago, she had appeared in a hostage video made by her captors wearing a pale rose-colored sweatshirt. When the Palestinian militant group Hamas released her last month, she was dressed in a bright magenta track suit and looked pale.

Sitting in front of a camera again took her back to the difficult moments when her captors filmed her in Gaza, Ms. Steinbrecher, 31, said in the video, looking composed and smiling at times.

“This time, I’m sitting comfortably on a couch with my family watching me in a warm and pleasant place,” she said. Trying to convey that she had not been broken, she said it was important for her to show everyone that “I’m OK.”

As families and sympathizers at home and abroad doggedly campaigned for the release of the Israeli hostages, most people knew them only as faces staring out from posters. Now, with 16 Israelis released since Jan. 19 under the cease-fire deal with Hamas, those haunting faces are coming to life in video clips, social media posts and statements from relatives that provide glimpses of the joy and relief of freedom as well as hints of the torment they have endured.

The brief messages they have sent out have mostly been expressions of gratitude to all those who worked for their release and pleas not to give up until the last hostage is freed.

The urgency of that message became even clearer on Saturday, when many Israelis were shocked to see the emaciated condition of the latest three hostages who were released: Eli Sharabi, 52; Or Levy, 34; and Ohad Ben-Ami, 56.

Some relatives have said that the hostages released earlier were often deprived of food, suffered severe loss of weight and muscle mass and rarely saw sunlight. Family members said some of the hostages had at least occasional access to radio or television and heard or saw their relatives campaigning for their release, which helped them survive.

Col. Avi Benov, a doctor and deputy chief of the Israeli military’s medical corps, told reporters that several of the recently released female hostages had spent the last eight months underground in Hamas tunnels in Gaza. Some hostages who were released in November 2023 have described suffocating humidity in the tunnels that made it difficult to breathe.

Colonel Benov said the first seven women recently released were all suffering from “mild starvation,” while some still had shrapnel in their bodies from injuries they sustained on Oct. 7, 2023.

That was the day Hamas led an attack from Gaza on southern Israel that ended with about 1,200 dead and about 250 people taken back to Gaza as hostages. The attack ignited a 15-month war, with Israel’s offensive in Gaza killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and devastating the territory.

Of the roughly 250 captives, scores were released during a weeklong truce later that year, while some have been killed in captivity. More than 70 hostages have not yet been returned, including at least 35 who are believed to be dead, according to the Israeli government.

A total of 25 hostages are expected to be released, along with the bodies of eight others, during the initial six-week cease-fire that took effect last month.

They are being exchanged for about 1,500 Palestinian prisoners, some of them convicted of killing Israelis. Released Palestinians, many of whom had been held without charge, say they faced harsh conditions in Israeli jails and detention facilities.

Some of the Israeli hostages had been forced to appear in videos filmed by their captors in Gaza — a practice that rights groups have denounced as inhumane treatment that could amount to a war crime. Israeli officials have called these a form of psychological warfare.

A few months ago, Hamas’s military wing issued a statement claiming that a hostage had been killed and released blurry images apparently showing a body wrapped in a shroud. One close-up shot showed a tattoo identical to one belonging to Daniella Gilboa, one of a number of female lookout soldiers captured from a small military base near the Gaza border.

But Ms. Gilboa, 20, was freed on Jan. 25. Days later, she was singing at a party marking the discharge of the army lookouts from Beilinson Hospital near Tel Aviv.

She reflected on her ordeal in a lengthy Instagram post on Feb. 2. She said her faith and observance of Jewish rituals had gotten her through. She thanked her supporters for not believing the rumors that she had been killed in Gaza.

Liri Albag, another one of the lookouts, celebrated her 20th birthday while recovering at the hospital.

Ms. Steinbrecher was kidnapped from her home in Kfar Aza, a rural community near the Gaza border.

In the video she released, her appearance contrasted sharply with hostage videos made when she was pale, with blond hair pulled back in a braid. Her hair was now dark and neatly styled in a shoulder-length bob, and she dressed in black, wearing long necklaces, a dog tag and a yellow pin in solidarity with the hostages. She said she was no longer that person in the videos from Gaza.

“I’m Doron. I’m 31. I’m no longer in Hamas captivity, and I’m home,” she said.

The recently released hostages have remained largely protected from the glare of the news media and have not given any interviews so far. Medical and mental health professionals say that preserving their privacy is essential to the long healing process.

Footage released by the military of the hostages’ emotional reunions with close family members has given a sense of the elation surrounding their return.

“Dad, I came back alive!” another freed hostage, Romi Gonen, 24, shouted into a cellphone after being reunited with her mother on Jan. 19.

Experts say that the long captivity caused physical and psychological harm, and that full rehabilitation will take time.

“We are walking a very slow path,” said Prof. Noa Eliakim-Raz, the head of the returnees’ ward at Beilinson Hospital. “Of course, we see ups and downs. Every day is different.”

Some of the freed hostages returned with injuries from the Oct. 7 assault. Emily Damari, 28, lost two fingers after being shot in the hand and was also shot in the leg.

She is a fan of the Israeli soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv, and at one of their matches last Monday, a video message from Ms. Damari was projected on a huge screen. She thanked the players, the management and the supporters for fighting for her freedom.

Ms. Gonen is still suffering from an arm injury and will need complicated surgery, her mother has said.

Gadi Moses, 80, an agronomist who was kidnapped from his home in Nir Oz, a village near the Gaza border, was released on Jan. 30, appearing gaunt. Almost as soon as he returned to Israel, he pledged to do all he could to rehabilitate his ravaged community.

His niece, Efrat Machikawa, later told reporters that Mr. Moses had been kept above ground throughout his captivity but was frequently moved around.

Shut in rooms alone, she said, he exercised by counting steps and pacing up to six miles a day, kept his mind active with calculations and other techniques. And he remained positive.

When she first met him in the hospital, he reassured her: “I’m alive. I’m normal!”

“Loneliness becomes an enemy,” Ms. Machikawa said. “He managed to create a routine that kept his sanity.”

Dozens of Maoist guerrillas were killed in central India by government forces on Sunday, one of the deadliest operations in recent years against leftist rebels who have waged an insurgency that has ebbed and flowed over several decades.

The operation, in the forested Bijapur area in the state of Chhattisgarh, was carried out against the so-called Naxalite movement, and left 31 rebels dead, along with two members of the police forces, according to the area’s police chief, Jitendra Kumar Yadav.

Chief Yadav said the authorities had also recovered a number of AK-47 assault weapons and several other automatic rifles after the clashes.

“We will completely eradicate Naxalism from the country, so that no citizen of the country has to lose his life because of it,” said Amit Shah, India’s home minister, referring to the left-wing insurgency.

The Maoist insurgency began in eastern India in the 1960s and spread widely in central and southern parts of the country.

The violence peaked in 2010, when more than 600 civilians and over 250 security forces were killed in the conflict.

In recent years, civilian deaths have dwindled, after government operations shrunk the space for the insurgents to operate. The insurgency’s leadership has also struggled, analysts say, in the face of targeted operations, old age and illness.

The Home Ministry told Parliament last year that the threat of leftist extremism had dropped significantly in recent years, in terms of the number of deaths as well as the amount of affected territory.

Deaths of civilians and security forces related to the insurgency in 2023 were 86 percent lower than at their peak in 2010, the ministry said, adding that the number of districts affected by the violence had shrunk to 38 from 126.

Niranjan Sahoo, who studies left-wing extremism at the Observer Research Foundation, an Indian think tank, said the Maoists were struggling to recruit members, among other problems.

He also said they were concentrating their activities in several districts around the Abujhmad forest, including Bijapur, after suffering losses over the years.

“The Maoists are at their weakest point, largely because they have lost a lot of their territory,” he said.

A chorus of criticism greeted Friedrich Merz, the favorite to become Germany’s chancellor, last month when he broke a taboo against working with a hard-right party to pass legislation. But it was a lone voice of dissent that rocked the country’s political scene: Angela Merkel, the once-beloved former chancellor, who called Mr. Merz’s decision simply “wrong.”

Ms. Merkel and Mr. Merz have famously jockeyed to lead Germany’s Christian Democrats for much of this century. Ms. Merkel won the early rounds, served 16 years as chancellor, and retired in 2021. Mr. Merz finally has a chance to win her old job in elections this month.

But Ms. Merkel is complicating his efforts — both with her open critiques and, more important, with a policy legacy that German voters have soured on.

The German election is animated by concerns over a stagnant economy, a decade-long surge of immigration, high energy prices and tenuous national security, with Russia waging war to the east and President Trump threatening to upend NATO from the West. The problems have led to a reconsideration of Ms. Merkel and how she steered Germany.

It was Ms. Merkel who kept Germany’s borders open starting in 2015, allowing what became millions of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere to settle. That move has spurred a backlash among German voters. Many political leaders blame it for the rise of the hard-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which has campaigned relentlessly on deporting certain immigrants and sits second behind the Christian Democrats in national polls.

It was Ms. Merkel who agreed to shut down the country’s nuclear power plants and increase Germany’s reliance on imported natural gas from Russia, helping to create an electricity price spike and a security crisis years later, after Moscow decided to turn off the taps following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

And it was Ms. Merkel who, economists say, underinvested in revitalizing Germany’s critical infrastructure, contributing to what German business leaders often call a competitiveness crisis. She also pushed for deepened trade with China and the rest of the world. That bet on a globalized business model that has gone bad in a new age of populist protectionism by countries like the United States and increased competition from low-cost Chinese imports for Germany manufacturers.

In the waning weeks of the campaign, Ms. Merkel is taking criticism from all sides of the contest. Her memoir did not make the splash many analysts expected when it was released last fall. A poll released last week by the Bild news organization, conducted by the research agency INSA, found 43 percent of Germans now say Ms. Merkel’s policies were bad for the country, compared with 31 percent who say they were good.

In many ways, Ms. Merkel finds herself in a similar historical position to that of President Bill Clinton in America. She was once the most popular leader of her generation, on the strength of overseeing an economic boom. Now, like Mr. Clinton, who has seen public opinion turn strongly against his moves to sign NAFTA and throw open trade with China, she finds her legacy under attack.

She is responding with few regrets, and, with the election looming, by criticizing Mr. Merz.

That criticism has drawn a backlash, and a renewed focus on Ms. Merkel, even though she is not running for a parliamentary seat this month.

“Merkel’s book and her recent public statement are, unfortunately, more about insisting on being right than about providing working solutions to people’s current problems,” said Nico Lange, a former chief of staff to one of Ms. Merkel’s defense ministers. Her actions, he added, were “therefore perceived negatively, even by most of her former supporters.”

No single policy action is driving German voters in this election more than Ms. Merkel’s refugee decision in 2015.

At the time, Ms. Merkel praised the German public for embracing downtrodden migrants, even those who did not qualify for official refugee status. But German society has been strained by a decade-long influx of migrants who arrived with little or no German language knowledge, and who have often received significant social assistance.

A series of seemingly unrelated deadly attacks, carried out by immigrants in Germany cities over the last year, has vaulted migration to the top of voter concerns along with the economy.

Analysts roundly agree that attention has helped the AfD, parts of which have been classified as extremist by German intelligence.

Mr. Merz was attempting to address voters’ migration concerns when he pushed a package of tough-on-migration measures in Parliament late last month, breaking a postwar consensus against working to pass laws with parties deemed extreme.

Ms. Merkel’s decision to allow refugees to flow freely into the country “was just a big shock to Germany that we’re still grappling with, that explains some of the politics today,” said Cornelia Woll, a political scientist who is the president of the Hertie School, a private university in Berlin. “I think it’s fair to say, did we bite off more than we could chew?”

Economic research has generally found immigrants boosted the size of Germany’s economy over the past decade, by working and by spending money. By some measures, the nation has been more successful than many of its peers in helping immigrants integrate and learn the local language.

A report last year from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that the employment rate for immigrants in Germany hit 70 percent in 2022, a record and much higher than most other European Union countries.

Still, polls have shown rising voter unease with migration and crimes committed by immigrants. Politicians, including a wide range of chancellor candidates in this election, have increasingly responded by denouncing Ms. Merkel’s policies of welcome.

Alice Weidel, the chancellor candidate for the AfD, repeatedly raised and disparaged Ms. Merkel last month in an interview with the billionaire Elon Musk on his social media platform X.

Christian Lindner, the chancellor candidate for the pro-business Free Democrats, said in an interview that some German parties “have still not recognized what the overriding interest of the people in this country is — namely, a break with Merkel’s policies.”

Even Mr. Merz has piled on. “We find ourselves left with the tatters of 10 years of misguided asylum and migration policy in this country,” he said last month, impugning both Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Ms. Merkel.

Mr. Merz and his Christian Democrats joined the AfD to pass a mostly symbolic migration measure late last month; a second vote, aiming to toughen the migration law, ultimately failed amid some defections by party members.

Mr. Merkel’s criticism of Mr. Merz came just before the final vote and further strained her relationship with the party they share. Ms. Merkel declined to take an honorary party position after her retirement, as is often customary, and rarely appears at party events.

It also contributed to an image of stubbornness that has defined Ms. Merkel’s time out of office.

“She really does not recognize her mistakes,” said Stefan Meister, the head of the Center for Order and Governance in Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “I think this is, for me, really crucial.”

In her autobiography, “Freedom,” Ms. Merkel seemingly blamed her successors in German’s mainstream political parties for aiding the rise of the AfD, by tacking to the right on its signature issue.

“The democratic parties have considerable influence over how strong AfD can become in practice,” Ms. Merkel wrote. “I am convinced that, if they assume they can keep it down by appropriating its pet topics and even trying to outdo it in rhetoric without offering any real solutions to existing problems, they will fail.”

And while she conceded few major errors on policy issues, Ms. Merkel’s book contained some broad admissions of fallibility.

“I know that I am not perfect and make mistakes,” she wrote, about halfway through its nearly 700 pages.

Near the end, she added, “A chancellor should never have to apologize too often, but neither should they shy away from doing so when unavoidable, for fear that it could be interpreted as weakness.”

Melissa Eddy contributed reporting.

The students meet a day a week for lessons in a tiny underground classroom that teachers call the beehive, for the buzzing of all the children packed inside.

Holding classes above ground in this part of Ukraine, in the city of Balakliya near the front line, is considered too dangerous because of the ever-present threat of Russian missiles and drones. Children spend most of their time in online classes and take turns going to school underground.

“When they come, they often ask me, ‘Can we see our former classroom?’” said Inna Mandryka, a deputy principal. The teachers, she said, never imagined children longing for school so much.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was intended to undermine the country’s future in many ways, stamping out language and culture, destroying infrastructure and leveling whole cities with bombs in the country’s east.

Disruption to the education of Ukraine’s 3.7 million schoolchildren is one of the most serious challenges for the country. Classes have been repeatedly interrupted, leaving many students far behind academically, experts say. Children are also losing their soft skills, such as communication and conflict resolution, from being unable to interact enough with other students.

Providing classes of any kind has been a huge obstacle for the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022.

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Stephen James Hubbard left America behind decades ago, first for Japan, then Cyprus and finally Ukraine. He didn’t like the government — any government, really.

He was a wanderer, growing up in a small town in Michigan and traveling the world before ending up alone in the eastern Ukrainian town of Izium when the Russians invaded on Feb. 24, 2022.

Now Mr. Hubbard, a retired English teacher who turns 73 on Thursday, has become an unlikely pawn in an international war. The Russians arrested him shortly after invading and accused him of fighting for Ukraine. They moved him to at least five different Russian detention centers before putting him on trial on a charge of being a mercenary.

In October, a Moscow court convicted him and sentenced him to almost seven years in a penal colony.

His case has remained mostly under the radar. But last month the State Department said Mr. Hubbard was “wrongfully detained” — elevating his case and indicating that the United States believes that the charges are fabricated.

A State Department spokesman said he never should have been taken captive or moved to a Russian prison.

Mr. Hubbard’s sister and three former Ukrainian prisoners of war held with Mr. Hubbard dispute that he fought for Ukraine. The former prisoners say they believe he will die if he is not freed. They say he endured the same torture they did: repeatedly beaten, terrorized by dogs, forced to stand all day, every day, even stripped naked for more than a month.

“They’d beat our ankles and force us into the splits, tearing ligaments in the process,” said Ihor Shyshko, 41, who said he shared a cell with Mr. Hubbard. “Many of the men were injured, some permanently. The conditions were beyond inhumane.

“The same thing happened to Stephen, but it was even worse for him because he’s an American,” added Mr. Shyshko, who was freed in a prisoner exchange last summer. “They stormed in, shouting in the hallway: ‘We know you’re an American. You’re dead here!’”

The United States has accused Russia of inflating and inventing criminal charges against Americans so they can be traded for Russians held elsewhere or used as international bargaining chips. After a major prisoner exchange in August, Mr. Hubbard is one of 13 Americans now known to be held in Russian prisons. Mr. Hubbard is the oldest. He is also the only American known to be imprisoned in Russia after being taken from Ukraine.

Only one other American now being held has been publicly designated as wrongfully detained in Russia.

Mr. Hubbard’s family has not been able to find his prison. The Russian judge removed his case file, including even basic information like his lawyer’s name, from public view. The New York Times also could not locate him.

The U.S. Embassy in Moscow has not seen Mr. Hubbard, despite Russia’s obligation to grant access, a State Department spokesman said. The embassy said it would not comment on his case because of privacy concerns.

Mr. Shyshko said he tried to ask the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv for help, but he could not get past the front door.

Patricia Hubbard Fox, 71, Mr. Hubbard’s only sibling, said, “It’s just really very upsetting,” adding, “And now they’ve taken everything from him, even his glasses.”

A Quiet Life

Mr. Hubbard had always been a solitary man. He liked his privacy. He didn’t like email and social media. He was suspicious of government agencies that might be spying on internet posts and of what the government spent taxes on.

He and his sister grew up in Big Rapids, a very small Michigan city. Their single mother sometimes abused them. “We grew up at the end of a bullwhip,” Ms. Hubbard Fox recalled.

As an adult, Mr. Hubbard always seemed to be searching: He enrolled in a Bible college in Tulsa, Okla., but lasted only a year. He married young, at 20.

Mr. Hubbard enlisted in the Air Force, but he left after three years of active duty and two in the National Guard, mainly in Sacramento, records show. He worked as an educational assistant with the local veterans affairs department and studied at a nearby business college. His marriage fell apart and Mr. Hubbard’s wife won custody of their three children.

Mr. Hubbard landed in Seattle, where he earned a master’s degree in English and met the Japanese woman who became his second wife, Ms. Hubbard Fox said.

In the mid-1980s, the couple moved to Japan where Mr. Hubbard taught English and joined the Eastern Orthodox Church. The couple had a son before divorcing. After his son grew up, Mr. Hubbard moved to Cyprus, where a son from his first marriage lived and where he fell in love with another woman, Inna. She was Ukrainian.

In 2014, they moved to Izium. When he needed money, he told his sister, he taught English online. He spoke no Ukrainian, no Russian.

Ms. Hubbard Fox said she last spoke to her brother on Skype in September 2021, as he sat down to eat some porridge.

It’s not clear whether the couple had separated or whether Inna was on vacation. But when the Russians invaded in February 2022, Mr. Hubbard was alone.

Weeks later, the Russians captured Izium. The following day, April 2, 2022, Mr. Hubbard was detained, the RIA Novosti state news agency later reported.

The circumstances are murky. The Russian authorities said Mr. Hubbard had signed up that February — the month he turned 70 — for the regional territorial defense unit to defend Ukraine and received training, weapons, ammunition and $1,000 a month. They said he was arrested while manning military checkpoints.

That was unlikely, said Alyona Hryban, a civil servant in Izium. She said the territorial defense unit had few weapons. No one was paid. “There were no old men there,” she added.

Mr. Shyshko recalled that Mr. Hubbard said he was detained at a checkpoint while fleeing.

“He wanted to get out of there, but he couldn’t,” Mr. Shyshko said.

‘He’s Every American’

Mr. Hubbard’s first detention camp was five miles over the Russian border. Andrii Stratulat, another prisoner of war, said the Russians gave Mr. Hubbard two English books: “The Egg and I,” a 1945 memoir by a young wife on a chicken farm, and “The Lovely Bones,” a 2002 novel about a young girl whose spirit comes to terms with her rape and murder. He read them over and over.

Mr. Stratulat, who spoke English, was put in Mr. Hubbard’s tent in June 2022.

“He said that day he started to smile,” recalled Mr. Stratulat, 30.

They spent 42 days together, Mr. Stratulat said. Mr. Hubbard talked about his life: A trip he took to the Grand Canyon. His baptism into the Eastern Orthodox Church. His Japanese wife, Sumi. Their son, Hisashi. His partner, Inna.

Throughout his imprisonment, Mr. Stratulat would recite those names to himself: Hisashi. Sumi. Inna. When he was freed, he wanted to tell someone about the American he had met.

In late July 2022, Mr. Hubbard was transferred, Mr. Stratulat recalled.

A captured Ukrainian special forces officer with the call sign of Hacker met Mr. Hubbard in the Stary Oskol prison in Belgorod, about 80 miles northeast of the detention camp, in early September. After an interrogation that was more like torture, Hacker said, he was taken to a cell with Mr. Hubbard, who gave him water and prayed for him.

“It’s the first time some guy, an old guy, a wise guy, prayed for me,” said Hacker, 33, whom The Times is identifying by his military call sign because he is still fighting Russia.

Hacker said he met Mr. Hubbard again about a month later, in Novozybkov prison. For two months, they were housed in nearby cells. “I heard everything that was happening to him,” recalled Hacker, who was freed last spring.

Mr. Hubbard had problems with his kidneys, stomach and rectal tract, Hacker said. He was bleeding. The Russian guards beat him and forced him to learn Russian words, Russian poets, the Russian national anthem.

“The soldiers, guards and special forces looked at him as an archenemy,” Hacker said. “Because Stephen, he’s the American. He’s the American spider. He’s the American from Michigan. He’s every American.”

Because Russian officials have disclosed no information about Mr. Hubbard, the former prisoners’ accounts are impossible to verify. But they aligned with one another and with those of other Ukrainian prisoners of war.

In 2023, Mr. Hubbard was moved to a prison in Pakino, about 170 miles east of Moscow, where he shared a cell with Mr. Shyshko and 13 other men, Mr. Shyshko said.

There, prisoners were interrogated, often tortured, shocked with electricity, beaten and burned, Hacker and Mr. Shyshko said.

After the Russians found scabies on prisoners, they were all stripped and taken to a cold basement, where they were forced to walk naked in circles wearing only slippers for a month and a half, Mr. Shyshko said.

Mr. Shysko said the doctor told him “the scabies mite can’t reproduce in the cold, it’ll die along with you.’”

Lunch was often boiled water with a few cabbage leaves; dinner, leftovers from Russian inmates, blended together. Mr. Shyshko’s weight dropped to less than 130 pounds from about 240.

“Stephen, though, he never gave in,” Mr. Shyshko said. “He kept telling us: ‘These people aren’t human. Don’t lose hope.’ He stood up to them and encouraged us to hold on.”

One day, Mr. Hubbard said he thought his sister might be looking for him.

A Prison Sentence

Ms. Hubbard Fox worried about her brother when the war started. But she couldn’t reach him. Eventually she found out the Russians had him: She saw an interview on Russian TV in which he echoed Russian talking points — prisoners of war often are told what to say — and another video, posted briefly on X, where guards hit Mr. Hubbard with a sandal.

She said she tried to talk to the American authorities, but got little help. And she wasn’t sure whom to call.

In mid-May 2024, Mr. Hubbard disappeared from the prison in Pakino and later surfaced in court proceedings in Moscow. At one hearing, before the judge closed the trial to the public, RIA Novosti reported that Mr. Hubbard had pleaded guilty to being a mercenary, saying from the dock, “Yes, I agree with the indictment.”

Early last October, Mr. Hubbard — bent over, his hair and beard roughly chopped, his glasses gone — was sentenced to six years and 10 months in a prison colony.

Ms. Hubbard Fox said she hoped President Trump could deal with the Russians. “He’s a doer, and they know that he’s not going to put up with their crap,” Ms. Hubbard Fox said.

She said that seeing her brother beaten with a sandal reminded her of seeing him abused as a child. She plans to sell her home in Colorado and buy one in Oklahoma, so her brother can live with her when he gets out.

“I love my home, but my brother’s lost everything,” she said. “So I’m doing this. I’m going to provide him a home.”

Hisako Ueno contributed reporting from Tokyo. Dzvinka Pinchuk, Yurii Shyvala and Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine, and Shawn Hubler from Sacramento. Susan Beachy contributed research.

Sam Nujoma, the founding president of an independent Namibia, who led a Soviet-backed guerrilla army in an uneven fight against the vastly superior forces of white-ruled South Africa in a victory that owed much to the dynamics of the Cold War, died on Saturday in Windhoek, Namibia’s capital. He was 95.

Nangolo Mbumba, the country’s current president, announced the death. He did not give a cause but said that the former president had been hospitalized for three weeks.

Praising Mr. Nujoma as one who had “heroically marshaled the Namibian people during the darkest hours of our liberation struggle,” he said a period of national mourning would be announced.

A bearded, bespectacled man given to trading his camouflage fatigues for business suits, depending on his audience, Mr. Nujoma pursued twin tracks of diplomacy and insurgency in a decades-long quest for the liberation of his country — a sprawling but sparsely populated former German colony that Pretoria ruled in defiance of the United Nations.

When independence finally came in March 1990, though, it was the product of a United States-brokered deal to secure South Africa’s withdrawal in return for a pullout by 50,000 Cuban soldiers from neighboring Angola, which had provided a crucial rear base for Mr. Nujoma’s guerrillas.

Mr. Nujoma and his South-West Africa People’s Organization, known as SWAPO, which was formed in 1960 after he fled Namibia in exile, played no direct part in the negotiations that led to the agreement. And though Mr. Nujoma adopted a nom de guerre — Shafiishuna, or Lightning — there was no record of his direct participation in combat.

For years, South Africa’s white rulers had maintained that Namibia, which they called South-West Africa, was the final buffer against the southward advance of Communist influence in Africa. So when the Soviet Union collapsed, the oft-repeated claim to be a pro-Western bulwark against Moscow’s encroachment lost its relevance.

As independence approached, Mr. Nujoma’s party abandoned what some had depicted as a drive for a Marxist one-party state, and agreed to multiparty elections and a democratic Constitution that seemed to reinforce his longstanding insistence that he was a nationalist, not an ideologue.

Nonetheless, many analysts detected an autocratic streak. Re-elected to a second term in 1994, he oversaw a constitutional change that allowed him to successfully run for a third term in 1999, ignoring an earlier commitment to term limits.

During the war itself, his SWAPO acquired a reputation for harsh treatment of dissent. In 1976, the organization’s head of information, Andreas Shipanga, was arrested and accused of siding with young Namibians who regarded the Nujoma leadership as uninspired and hidebound. The crisis led to vicious purges of the party’s ranks, with hundreds of young would-be freedom fighters detained in camps in Angola and Zambia and reportedly beaten, tortured and even killed, facing often unfounded charges of spying for South Africa.

The abuses were not limited to the insurgents. A South African-sponsored police unit called Koevoet — Afrikaans for crowbar — hunted down SWAPO guerrillas, displaying the bodies on the mudguards of their armored trucks like hunting trophies.

No single event encapsulated the opposing perceptions of Namibia’s war as much as a bloody South African airborne incursion at Cassinga, 160 miles north of the Namibian border in Angola, on May 4, 1978. The episode, which left around 600 dead, is now commemorated as a national holiday, Cassinga Day.

South Africa said that its forces struck a military command, control and training center for insurgents, and successfully engaged Cuban forces stationed nearby. SWAPO said the South Africans attacked a refugee transit camp, supporting its assertion with grisly photographs of a mass grave. By most accounts, Mr. Nujoma won the battle of perceptions, gaining him broad international sympathy.

As early as the 1970s, SWAPO had won the recognition of the United Nations as the “sole and authentic representative” of Namibia’s people, buttressing its claim to legitimacy. Crisscrossing the globe as a spokesman for his cause, Mr. Nujoma secured backing from such disparate sources as the Soviet Union, which supplied weapons and training, and Nordic countries, in particular Sweden, which provided humanitarian assistance.

While Mr. Nujoma argued that his party brought about the political fall of successive South African leaders, the final battle for independence was fought primarily by Cuba and South Africa in increasingly ferocious clashes in 1988 around the Angolan town of Cuito Cuanavale. At the same time, Cuba’s Fidel Castro committed huge reinforcements elsewhere in southern Angola that raised the stakes significantly.

American-brokered negotiations toward a settlement signed in New York in December 1988 provided for Cuban troops to leave Angola in return for a South African withdrawal and a United Nations-led transition to elections and independence in Namibia.

In September 1989, Mr. Nujoma returned to the country he had exiled himself from almost 30 years earlier. After his plane landed, he “knelt and kissed the soil of my beloved country,” he wrote in “Where Others Wavered,” a 2001 memoir.

Samuel Daniel Nujoma ya Nujoma was born on May 12, 1929, the first of 11 children, in the Ongandjera district of Ovamboland, named for the Ovambo ethnic group in the north of Namibia, to which he belonged and which accounts for over 50 percent of the country’s population.

His father, Daniel Utoni Nujoma, and his mother, Mpingana-Helvi Kondombolo, worked the land. As a boy, Mr. Nujoma said in his memoir, he tended the family cattle and goats, carrying a baby on his back to free his mother to work in the fields.

With only modest formal education, Mr. Nujoma moved at age 17 to the coastal enclave of Walvis Bay, where he worked at a general store and a whaling station before relocating to Windhoek as a cleaner on the railroad system. After hours, he studied English at night school. In 1956, he married Theopoldine Kovambo Katjimne. They had three sons, and a daughter who died at 18 months. Mr. Nujoma was in exile by then and unable to attend her funeral, he wrote, because the police would have arrested him.

In the late 1950s, as Ghana’s independence from Britain in 1957 became an emblem of liberation for many Africans, Mr. Nujoma was associated with organizations that were forerunners of SWAPO, notably the Ovamboland People’s Organization. He left for exile in 1960 over his role in protests against the forced removal of Black people from one segregated township to another. In 1966, his organization launched the first tentative military operations of its armed struggle. Over the years, thousands of young Namibians joined the insurgents’ ranks.

South Africa sought to belittle its war with SWAPO as a low-intensity conflict, but that belied its increasing commitment of military forces. “Despite major efforts by South Africa over 20 years,” Bernard E. Trainor, a military correspondent for The New York Times, wrote in July, 1988, “the Namibian rebels’ strength, now estimated at 8,000, appears undiminished.”

SWAPO’s military traditions endured after independence when Namibia’s regular army was deployed in support of the Congolese president, Laurent Kabila, in 1998 and to put down a secessionist revolt in the northeastern Caprivi Strip in 1999.

By the time Mr. Nujoma returned to Namibia in 1989, he commanded substantial political support, in part because of the numerical strength of his Ovambo followers, and in part because of his stewardship of the liberation war.

Despite a vigorous South African campaign to promote his adversaries, Mr. Nujoma secured 57.3 percent of the vote for a constituent assembly — shy of the two-thirds majority needed to dictate the terms of a new Constitution. His share of the vote rose to 76.3 percent in 1994 and to 76.8 percent in 1999. His chosen successor, Hifikepunye Pohamba, took over as president in 2005 after elections in late 2004. Mr. Nujoma retired formally as president of SWAPO in 2007.

Like Robert Mugabe at independence in Zimbabwe a decade earlier, Mr. Nujoma had sought to reassure a nervous white majority and its South African backers.

“It does not pay for any of us now to dwell on sad historical events,” he told a news conference after returning to Namibia. “We must leave them behind us and start working afresh together for a bright future for this country.”

Erin Mendell contributed reporting.