As the war between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah intensified last September, Abed Al Kadiri sat glued to the television in the art studio where he was working in Kuwait.

Mr. Al Kadiri watched as Beirut, the Lebanese capital and city of his childhood, was ravaged by Israeli bombardments. He was distraught about what members of his family, including his mother and 13-year-old son, along with his friends, were enduring there. He began having nightmares and panic attacks and was unable to sleep.

Determined to support his family and help his country rebuild, Mr. Al Kadiri decided to book a ticket home.

“Lebanon was going into an apocalyptic phase,” Mr. Al Kadiri, 40, said on a recent morning in the outskirts of Beirut. “Going back was the only best option.”

Lebanon’s large and influential diaspora — estimated at nearly three times the size of the country’s population of 5.7 million — has been trickling back, hoping to offer physical and financial support for a country devastated by one of the bloodiest wars in decades in the Mediterranean nation.

The challenges are huge. The returnees are coming back to a shattered country whose economy has been in crisis for years and which has long been plagued by sectarian tensions, political bickering and foreign interference. Lebanon’s trajectory remains deeply uncertain after a conflict that is likely to shift the balance of power inside the country and across the Middle East.

But many of the returnees say they felt that they had no choice, even as a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah signed in November remains delicate.

“I felt like our country was calling us, that our physical presence was important,” said Zeina Kays, 48, a communications consultant who left Lebanon in 2004 for Doha, Qatar, where she has lived and worked on and off since then. She returned to Lebanon in October.

In Doha, she said, she watched on television as families displaced from Beirut arrived in other cities and towns across Lebanon with what remained of their belongings. As the deaths and the destruction escalated, she had “an emotional urge” to return and help, she said.

Ms. Kays, 48, is now back for good, she says, in the Koura area, about 30 miles north of Beirut, where she and her husband own a home. ⁠There, with the help of friends and family, she spearheaded a campaign to secure supplies — blankets, medicine, food, utensils and clothes — for dozens of displaced families in her hometown and nearby villages.

“This war demonstrated the patriotism, solidarity and unity that exists among all Lebanese people, regardless of their region or religion,” she said in an interview in Batroun, a coastal city that is also home to the Lebanese Diaspora Village, a cultural and touristic project aimed at connecting overseas Lebanese to their homeland.

“Lebanon deserves a brighter vision and a better future,” Ms. Kays said.

War came again to Lebanon after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel. Hezbollah began targeting Israel in solidarity with Hamas, setting off a series of tit-for-tat attacks across the Israeli-Lebanese border. The conflict, which escalated in late September, killed and injured thousands of people and displaced an estimated 1.3 million, according to Lebanese officials and the United Nations.

Entire villages and neighborhoods, especially in the south, were pummeled as Israel conducted intense air raids. Hezbollah, a dominant political and military force that is backed by Iran, was severely weakened as its top leaders were assassinated and its ally in neighboring Syria, Bashar al-Assad, was ousted.

The war exacerbated the mounting problems already facing Lebanon.

The economic disarray, beginning in 2019 and aggravated by pandemic lockdowns, was ranked by the World Bank in 2021 as among the worst national financial crises since the mid-19th century. Anger over corruption led to huge antigovernment protests. Then, an explosion at the Beirut port in 2020 destroyed parts of the capital and killed hundreds. For two years, Lebanon had a caretaker government, and a new president and prime minister were chosen only in January.

“These last few years in Lebanon were really like a roller coaster,” said Mr. Al Kadiri, the artist, who left Beirut for a second time after the 2020 port explosion.

He first departed Lebanon for Kuwait during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. But he returned in 2014, establishing a studio and reconnecting with the city. He decided to leave again when the port blast destroyed a gallery where he had been exhibiting his work. After starting an initiative titled “Today, I Would Like to be a Tree” in Beirut to help rebuild homes shattered by the explosion, he went to Paris, hoping to find work in the arts there to support his family.

He had just arrived in Kuwait from Paris to curate a show when the latest war escalated.

Now he is back in Beirut again. “The future can be dark, concerning and scary, but we are here,” he said. “Even if we leave, we still come back.”

Lebanese started leaving their homeland in waves starting in the late 19th century, when it was under the Ottoman Empire, and continued to emigrate during French rule and after independence in the 1940s. They fled sectarian divisions, economic crises, famine during World War I, politically motivated killings and a civil war from 1975 to 1990.

In countries like Australia, Brazil, Nigeria and the United States, they and their descendants have established new lives. Among their numbers are the international lawyer Amal Clooney and the trader-turned-philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Many also kept a close relationship with home: In 2023, the diaspora sent some $6 billion in remittances, or about 27.5 percent of Lebanon’s gross domestic product, according to the World Bank.

As the war unfolded last year, the Lebanese diaspora mobilized to raise money and emergency aid.

Many say they are watching how the new government plans to rebuild the economy, enforce the delicate truce between Israel and Hezbollah, and stabilize the nation before they decide whether to return.

Another consideration, said Konrad Kanaan, a 31-year-old lawyer based in France who was visiting Beirut recently, is the shifting geopolitics of the region and how they could affect Lebanon’s future.

At a recent dinner at Mr. Kanaan’s brother’s home in the Achrafieh neighborhood in Beirut, an animated conversation ensued about Syria and Gaza. One family member twice quoted the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and said she was eager to understand what his vision for a “new Middle East” would look like. Another spoke about the agony and emotional resentment brewed by recurring wars.

They all acknowledged that none of them had a clear idea of the future.

“I don’t think resilience is something very positive,” Mr. Kanaan said of an attribute cited by many Lebanese. “It is draining.”

Many Lebanese also wonder what will happen to Hezbollah, how the group’s relationship with Iran will develop and whether the militants will withdraw from southern Lebanon as agreed in the truce with Israel. While anger with Israel is high among Lebanese, many have openly criticized Hezbollah for attacking Israel at Iran’s behest.

“We love our homeland, but it was taken from us by the Iranians,” said Rabie Kanaan, a 35-year-old business developer from Australia who was visiting family in Beirut (and is no relation of Mr. Kanaan the lawyer). Rabie Kanaan is originally from Tibnin, a town in southern Lebanon that was pounded by Israeli airstrikes during the war. His family’s home was in ruins, he said, and he is now unable to bring his 8-year-old daughter to visit the verdant hills where he grew up.

“She’s always asking, ‘Dad, why are they always fighting in our country?’” he said. He tried to counter that notion, he added, telling her, “As ordinary people, we just aim for peace.”

Sarah Chaayto contributed reporting from Beirut.

To many Chinese, DeepSeek’s success is a victory for China’s education system, proof that it equals that of the United States or has even surpassed it.

The core team of developers and scientists behind DeepSeek, the Chinese start-up that has jolted the A.I. world, all attended university in China, according to the company’s founder. That’s a contrast with many Chinese tech companies, which have often sought talent educated abroad.

As Chinese commenters online basked in Americans’ shocked reactions, some pointed to the high number of science Ph.D.s that China produces annually. “DeepSeek’s success proves that our education is awesome,” read one blog post’s headline.

Acclaim has even poured in from overseas. Pavel Durov, the founder of the messaging platform Telegram, said last month that fierce competition in Chinese schools had fueled the country’s successes in artificial intelligence. “If the U.S. doesn’t reform its education system, it risks ceding tech leadership to China,” he wrote online.

The reality is more complicated. Yes, China has invested heavily in education, especially in science and technology, which has helped nurture a significant pool of talent, key to its ambition of becoming a world leader in A.I. by 2025.

But outside of the classroom, those graduates must also contend with obstacles that include a grinding corporate culture and the political whims of the ruling Communist Party. Under its current top leader, Xi Jinping, the party has emphasized control, rather than economic growth, and has been willing to crack down on tech firms it deems too influential.

DeepSeek has managed to evade many of those pressures, in part because it kept a low profile and its founder declared his commitment to intellectual exploration, rather than quick profits. It remains to be seen, though, how long it can continue doing so.

“There are many young, energetic and talented researchers and engineers inside China. I don’t think there’s a big gap in terms of education between China and the U.S. in that perspective, especially in A.I.,” said Yiran Chen, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University. “But the constraint is really from other parts.”

For many in China, the strength of its education system is closely tied to the nation’s global status. The government has invested heavily in higher education, and the number of university graduates each year, once minuscule, has grown more than 14-fold in the past two decades. Several Chinese universities now rank among the world’s best. Still, for decades, China’s best and brightest students have gone abroad, and many have stayed there.

By some metrics, that is starting to change.

China produced more than four times as many STEM graduates in 2020 as the United States. Specifically in A.I., it has added more than 2,300 undergraduate programs since 2018, according to research by MacroPolo, a Chicago-based research group that studies China.

By 2022, nearly half of the world’s top A.I. researchers came from Chinese undergraduate institutions, as opposed to about 18 percent from American ones, MacroPolo found. And while the majority of those top researchers still work in the United States, a growing number are working in China.

“You’re churning out all this talent over the last few years. They’ve got to go somewhere,” said Damien Ma, MacroPolo’s founder.

Washington has also made it harder for Chinese students in certain fields, including A.I., to obtain visas to the United States, citing national security concerns.

“If they’re not going to go abroad, they’re going to start some company” or work for a Chinese one, Mr. Ma said.

Some have criticized China’s educational system as overly exam-oriented and stifling to creativity and innovation. The expansion of China’s A.I. education has been uneven, and not every program is producing top-tier talent, Mr. Ma acknowledged. But China’s top schools, such as Tsinghua University and Peking University, are world-class; many of DeepSeek’s employees studied there.

The Chinese government has also helped foster more robust ties between academia and enterprises than in the West, said Marina Zhang, a professor at the University of Technology Sydney who studies Chinese innovation. It has poured money into research projects and encouraged academics to contribute to national A.I. initiatives.

Yet government involvement is also one of the biggest potential threats to Chinese innovation.

Beijing has blessed the A.I. sector — for now. But in 2020, after deciding that it had too little control over major companies like Alibaba, it launched a sweeping, yearslong crackdown on the Chinese tech industry. (DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng, pivoted to A.I. from his previous focus on speculative trading, in part because of a separate government crackdown there.)

The resulting layoffs at tech companies, combined with the uncertainty of the sector’s future, helped diminish the appeal of a sector that once attracted many of China’s top students. Record numbers of young people have opted instead to compete for civil service jobs, which are low-paying but stable.

A.I. has been somewhat shielded from the brain drain so far, in part because of its political imprimatur, said Yanbo Wang, a professor at the University of Hong Kong who studies China’s tech entrepreneurship. He added that he expected more successful Chinese A.I. start-ups to emerge soon, driven by young people. But it is impossible to say what China’s A.I. landscape would have looked like if Beijing had been more tolerant toward big tech companies in recent years, he added.

“China’s long-term A.I. competitiveness hinges not only on its STEM education system, but also on its handling of private investors, entrepreneurs and for-profit companies,” he added.

Even within private companies, employees often must contend with a focus on quick results. That has led to a widely accepted stereotype, including within China, that Chinese engineers are better at improving on other people’s innovations than at coming up with their own.

Mr. Liang, DeepSeek’s founder, has lamented as much, noting last year that “top talents in China are underestimated. Because there’s so little hard-core innovation happening at the societal level, they don’t have the opportunity to be recognized.”

DeepSeek’s success may hinge as much on how it differed from other Chinese tech companies as on how it shared their strengths. It was financed by the profits from its parent hedge fund. And Mr. Liang has described hiring humanities graduates in addition to computer scientists, in the spirit of fostering a freewheeling intellectual atmosphere.

Since DeepSeek’s breakout success, some voices have urged more Chinese firms to emulate its model. An online commentary from the Communist Party committee of Zhejiang Province, where DeepSeek has its headquarters, declared the need to “trust in young talent” and give leading companies “greater control over innovation resources.”

But the best way for China to capitalize on its well-educated, ambitious A.I. work force may be for the government to get out of the way.

“Innovation requires as little intervention and management as possible,” Mr. Liang said in another interview. “Innovation often comes by itself, not as something deliberately planned, let alone taught.”

Siyi Zhao contributed research.

Shortly after 3 a.m., a battering ram burst open the door to a 14th-floor apartment and three men dressed in the black tactical gear of the Chilean police rushed in. Brandishing guns, they grabbed Ronald Ojeda in front of his wife and 6-year-old son and dragged him away in his underwear.

Mr. Ojeda, a 32-year-old former Venezuelan Army officer, was a political dissident living under asylum in a middle-class neighborhood of Chile’s capital, Santiago. He had tried to organize plots to topple Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s autocratic leader, and weeks earlier, Mr. Maduro’s government had publicly labeled him a traitor.

When his wife called the Chilean authorities, she told them that at least one of her husband’s captors had a Venezuelan accent.

Across town nine days later, the authorities, acting on a tip, discovered a carry-on suitcase buried under nearly five feet of concrete. Inside, packed amid quicklime to speed up the decomposition, was Mr. Ojeda’s folded body.

Now, after a year of investigation, Chilean authorities are confirming the fears of Venezuelan dissidents hiding out around the world: The evidence, the Chileans said, indicates that Mr. Maduro’s government ordered Mr. Ojeda’s assassination.

The Maduro government has vehemently denied that.

If true, the case represents a dark escalation in Mr. Maduro’s efforts to crush any threats to his authoritarian rule — and the accusations arrive just as President Trump opens a new dialogue with the autocrat in hopes of deporting undocumented Venezuelans.

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For decades, the Educational Bookshop has been a cultural cornerstone of East Jerusalem, its two outlets hosting foreign diplomats, feting prominent authors and providing readers with both sides of the story in the conflict between Israel and Palestinians.

This weekend, the Israeli police raided the stores and arrested their two owners after concluding that books being sold there — including a children’s coloring book — could incite violence. The police said they seized a number of books in the raids on Sunday.

The shops were initially closed on Monday, but later opened despite a judge ordering the brothers who own the stores, Mahmood Muna and Ahmed Muna, to remain in detention until Tuesday morning amid a police investigation. They were also ordered to be held under house arrest for five days following their release and banned from returning to their bookshops for 15 days.

Murad Muna, a brother of the two owners who reopened one of the stores on Monday afternoon, denied that the books sold there promoted violence. In fact, he said, the books passed Israeli censors when they were imported from abroad.

“We believe that this is a political, not a legal detention,” the lawyer for the two arrested men, Nasser Oday, said outside the courthouse in Jerusalem after the hearing.

In a statement, the police said the shops were searched on Sunday for books suspected of containing “inciting content.” It said detectives “encountered numerous books containing inciteful material with nationalist Palestinian themes, including a children’s coloring book titled ‘From the Jordan to the Sea.’”

The slogan “from the river to the sea” has long been a rallying cry for Palestinian nationalism and is usually interpreted by Israelis as a denial of their country’s right to exist.

Mahmood Muna’s wife, Mai Muna, was in the courtroom on Monday as her husband was brought before the judge after spending the night in jail.

“They started throwing books off the shelves,” Ms. Muna said in a phone interview on Monday, describing the raids. “They were looking for anything with a Palestinian flag.”

But hours later, one of the shops was jammed with customers and supporters as Murad Muna tried to keep up with nonstop sales that he said were a sign of solidarity.

“Today is overbusy,” Mr. Muna said from behind the cash register. If the Israeli authorities were seeking to make Palestinians fearful, he said, “This is our answer.”

The arrests reflected how Israel is tightening restrictions on free speech and cultural activities for Palestinians across the country. Since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli police have increasingly arrested Palestinian citizens of Israel on charges of incitement to terror on social media and have shut down film screenings critical of the Israeli military or government in Haifa and Jaffa.

The Educational Bookshop outlets are in East Jerusalem, a part of the city that Israel captured from Jordan in 1967 and later annexed. Israel considers all of Jerusalem to be its undivided capital but most East Jerusalem residents are Palestinians, and the United Nations has deemed it occupied territory.

Over the years, the Muna brothers’ stores have hosted talks, film screenings and book launches, including one last July for the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” at another shop that they own nearby.

Its author, Nathan Thrall, was among a small crowd of protesters on Monday who gathered across from the entrance to the courthouse during the hearing. He and his wife, Judy, heard about the arrests through social media and WhatsApp groups.

He said the arrests will send “a very strong message” about police authority.

“It reflects a boldness, a sense that there will be absolutely no consequences, that they have total impunity, that they can go after two of the most well connected Palestinians in East Jerusalem” Mr. Thrall said.

David Grossman, a prominent Israeli novelist, said he knew Mahmood Muna and had visited his shop. “His arrest is outrageous,” he said in a phone interview.

The police also confiscated several books as part of the investigation. They did not return repeated calls and messages on Monday about their titles, content or how they were deemed offensive.

Diplomats from nine European countries, plus the European Union, attended the court hearing on Monday to show support for the Muna brothers. “I, like many diplomats, enjoy browsing for books at Educational Bookshop,” the German ambassador to Israel, Steffen Seibert, said in a social media post. ”I am concerned to hear of the raid and their detention in prison.”

An Israeli human rights group, Association for Civil Rights in Israel, said the arrests were another step in efforts to intimidate and silence Palestinians by the Israeli authorities.

In a statement, the group added that the raids and arrests “cannot be separated from the unprecedented number of interrogations and arrests of Palestinians over expression-related offenses, nor from the broader trend of silencing the Palestinian voice and any social initiative or activity.”

Standing among the protesters at the courthouse, Eliana Padwa said she had visited the bookstores often since moving to Jerusalem from New York.

“They’ve been huge in my journey throughout the years, politically, learning about Palestine,” said Ms. Padwa, 26. “They provided a safe space for me to learn about this, to ask questions.”

In December, a court sentenced Dominique Pelicot to 20 years in prison for drugging his wife Gisèle and inviting dozens of men to their bedroom to rape her between 2011 and 2020.

The trial stunned France and turned Mr. Pelicot into France’s most infamous sexual predator. His wife, Gisèle, became a feminist icon.

But the police and prosecutors suspect that she was not his first victim. “Gisèle Pelicot fears that she herself is only the tip of the iceberg,” one of Ms. Pelicot’s lawyers, Antoine Camus, said in an interview.

While Mr. Pelicot was in prison awaiting his trial, the police confronted him with DNA evidence linking him to the attempted rape of a 19-year-old woman in the Paris region in 1999. After hours of questioning, he admitted to drugging her, telling the police, “It is me.”

He is also being investigated for the rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in 1991. Mr. Pelicot has denied any involvement in the murder. But prosecutors indicted him in 2022 for both crimes, which are so similar they have been folded into one case.

Both victims were young real estate agents in the Paris area. Both were violently assaulted with a blade, tied up, drugged with ether and the lower part of their bodies undressed. In both crime scenes, the victim’s shoes were found neatly placed in the room.

No trial date has been set.

Today Mr. Pelicot, 72, is jailed in southern France, not far from the village where he and his wife, now divorced, had retired. But in 1991, Mr. Pelicot was working as a real estate agent in Paris, and by 1999 had taken a job as a salesman for fire alarms and telephone systems.

The woman who was murdered, Sophie Narme, had been working for a month in her first job as a real estate agent when she was killed.

On the evening of Dec. 4, 1991, her employer discovered her lifeless, partly undressed body in a top-floor flat she had shown to a client earlier that morning in the 19th Arrondissement of Paris. The police suspect the client was Mr. Pelicot using a false name.

They detected a strong smell of ether at the crime scene and during the autopsy. She had been beaten, drugged, stabbed, strangled with her own belt and raped, according to investigation documents read in court during his trial last year.

Though the crime scene showed traces of violence, with the content of Ms. Narme’s purse scattered across the room, her high-heeled shoes were found carefully placed next to the corpse.

Eight years later, in 1999, a 19-year-old real estate agent met a prospective client on the top floor of an apartment building in the Paris region for what was supposed to be a routine visit to look at a rental unit. The client, whom the authorities again suspect was Mr. Pelicot using an alias, asked her to take some measurements in the flat.

As she turned her back, he pinned her to the ground, forced her onto her belly, bound her wrists with a rope and pressed a fabric covered in ether to her nose, according to the lawyer for the victim, whose name has not been disclosed. She tried holding her breath as he drugged her.

He took off her high-heeled shoes, carefully placing them on the side. She remembered feeling a box cutter against her skin as her attacker squeezed her throat with his arm.

“I was still sluggish from the product he’d made me inhale,” the woman told investigators according to case documents read in court. “I couldn’t turn around, I remember feeling like a prisoner in my own body. I didn’t want him to see that I was awake. I felt I couldn’t move.”

But the effects of the drug soon wore off, and the victim fought off her attacker and then managed to hide in a storeroom for hours, locking it from the inside. Her attacker eventually left.

The police collected traces of his blood on her shoes and on the carpeted floor. But for years, they made no progress. In 2011, the case was dropped.

It was only reopened when it was linked to Narme murder case.

For the past 34 years, Florence Rault, the lawyer for Ms. Narme’s mother, had continued to pursue the murder case, regularly asking the court to analyze pieces of evidence or to explore new leads.

“I was doing it for Sophie,” Ms. Rault said. “I made a promise to her mother that we’d get to the end of this story and that she wouldn’t die before knowing the name of her daughter’s killer.”

As early as 2004, the police had already made a connection between the two cases. But back then, the national system classifying DNA criminal records had just been created and was barely functional.

Traces of sperm found on the 1991 crime scene were lost by the forensic institute in charge of analyzing the sample.

In 2010, Mr. Pelicot was arrested for the first time for filming up women’s skirts at a shopping mall in the Paris region, using a camera hidden in a pen. He was let off with a fine of 100 euros, equivalent to roughly $104.

He was caught doing it again in 2020, in a supermarket in the south of France. But this time, the security guard encouraged the victims to file an official complaint, allowing the police to conduct an investigation.

That is when the police say they linked Mr. Pelicot’s DNA to the 1999 attempted rape.

Ms. Rault is now the lawyer for that case, too. Through Ms. Rault, the woman who survived said she had moved on and did not want to talk publicly about the case. She did, however, engage in the legal proceedings and confronted Mr. Pelicot in 2023 as part of the investigation.

By then, Mr. Pelicot had confessed to many details of the attempted rape. He told the police that he had gone to a real estate agency in Paris because he wanted to get a feel of his old job and to check out prices for rentals.

He said he acted on “impulse,” after meeting the agent and setting up an appointment to visit the apartment. He then went back to his car to get the rope and what he described as “a product for cleaning headrests” — a bottle of ether.

“I wasn’t planning to have relations with her,” he told the investigating judge, explaining that he drugged her because he wanted to look at her undressed body while avoiding any violence.

“I tried to forget that for a long time,” he added. “I apologize for lying, it was difficult to admit.”

His lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, said the statement to the police did not amount to a “formal recognition” of the crime.

“He acknowledges the materiality of making her fall asleep, he does not acknowledge carrying a knife, and he explains that if all this happened it was not with the primary intention of raping her,” she said.

The French media have also reported that the police are looking into two similar cases from 1995 and 2004, although Mr. Pelicot has not been questioned by the police about them, his lawyer said.

As for the 1991 murder, Mr. Pelicot has repeatedly denied any connection. “There’s no way he’s going to let go because he really doesn’t want to be recognized as a killer,” his lawyer said. “Because he’s not a killer.”

Catherine Porter contributed reporting.

Bangladesh is facing a fresh bout of violence as members of a student protest movement that toppled the authoritarian government of Sheikh Hasina in August clashed again with her supporters, highlighting the fragility of a country struggling to rebuild itself.

The violence started on Wednesday, after the Awami League, the political party of Ms. Hasina, the former prime minister, said that she would address the students and citizens of Bangladesh via audio from India, where she has been based since her Aug. 5 ouster. Student protesters said the virtual speech would instigate violence. Thousands of students then bulldozed and set fire to a museum that had once been the residence of Ms. Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, a founder of Bangladesh.

Clashes between student protesters and supporters of the Awami League lasted three days before the interim government led by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus instituted “Operation Devil Hunt,” bringing in Bangladesh police and paramilitary forces on Saturday to crack down on sympathizers. The Awami League has threatened to protest against the students’ actions.

After Ms. Hasina’s live speech in which she reminded Bangladeshis of the sacrifices her father had made and how the country had flourished during her tenure, protesters and Awami League supporters in the Dhaka area began attacking one another. Mr. Yunus began the police operation on Feb. 8, after reports of spiraling violence and injuries.

“The government is urging all the citizens to abide by the law,” Mr. Yunus said in a statement. “The new Bangladesh we are working together to build, moving away from the old Bangladesh under fascist rule, will be distinguished by following the rule of law.”

Officials said more than 1,300 people had been arrested since the latest round of violence erupted — mostly from the Awami League — and things were calm for now. Although the interim government has sought to ban Ms. Hasina’s party, the Awami League is trying to reassert itself. Members recently called for protests and strikes this month. They have tried to tag student groups as Islamist militants, comparing them to supporters of Pakistan during Bangladesh’s war of independence from it.

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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 left the zone, 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 Sunday in a statement.

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 partly 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 deal — which is now at the halfway point — and necessary to advance to its next stage to end the war in Gaza fully.

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.

Egypt’s foreign ministry said on Sunday that it would host an emergency Arab summit late this month in Cairo “to address the new and dangerous developments in the Palestinian cause,” noting that the meeting was being coordinated with high level officials in Arab nations and had been scheduled at the request of Palestinian officials.

The emaciated appearance of three Israeli hostages who were freed by Hamas on Saturday has also spurred widespread concern in Israel that its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has 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.

On Sunday, the family of Alon Ohel, one of the hostages still being held, said in a statement released by a group representing relatives of the captives that for the first time in the more than 490 days since he was seized they had received word that he is alive and that he has been held in tunnels in Gaza along with some people who were recently freed. The statement demanded that Israeli leaders “take the necessary humanitarian steps to rescue Alon and the other victims from the hell they are experiencing.”

“Time is running out,” the statement added. “The second phase of the deal must be advanced to bring back all the hostages.”

But despite the presence of negotiators and mediators this weekend in Qatar, no progress was expected in talks concerning the next stage of the truce, 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, intermittent violence continued. Mahmoud Basal, a spokesman for the civil defense agency in Gaza, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, said that three people were killed and several were wounded by Israeli gunfire in eastern Gaza City and warned residents to stay away from the Israeli border and military.

The Israeli military said on Sunday that its soldiers shot at several suspects in the northern Gaza Strip who were “a few hundred meters” away from them, noting that the soldiers fired warning shots. “Hits were identified,” the military said, without providing information on any casualties.

Matan Weitz, a spokesman for Kibbutz Nahal Oz, an Israeli border community, said that Israeli soldiers stationed near the village spotted a breach of the perimeter and people moving in a prohibited area and that soldiers shot at them.

“From inside the kibbutz we heard the shooting,” he said, noting that there was stepped up military activity immediately afterward, including tank and vehicle movements.

The Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, said Sunday in a statement that there would be “zero tolerance” for threats to soldiers or Israeli communities near the border.

Mr. Netanyahu, addressing lawmakers in Israel on Sunday after his return from Washington, also mentioned the episode at the border. “Nobody reaches the perimeter fence or enters it,” he said.

Separately, the Israeli military said on Sunday that its soldiers had fired warning shots at a ship after the Israeli Navy observed a suspicious vessel “violating the security restrictions in the maritime area of the Gaza Strip”; it said the vessel distanced itself in response.

The Israeli military also kept up raids and patrols in the occupied West Bank that it says are aimed at rooting out militants before potential attacks. “We will continue to exert a very, very strong offensive effort” in the West Bank, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the military’s departing chief of staff, told troops on Sunday.

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 said that its police criminal investigation unit had begun an inquiry.

Hiba Yazbek, Gabby Sobelman and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.