Hamas has indefinitely postponed the release of Israeli hostages who were set to be freed from the Gaza Strip this weekend, a spokesman said on Monday, accusing Israel’s government of violating an already fragile cease-fire agreement.

The move threatens to derail both the six-week truce agreed to last month and the prospects for agreement on a lasting end to the war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was consulting with his top advisers on Monday night, and planned to move up a scheduled meeting with his security cabinet to Tuesday morning, a top official said.

Hours later, President Trump issued an ultimatum to Hamas on Monday evening, saying that if all Israeli hostages were not released from Gaza by 12 o’clock on Saturday, then the cease-fire agreement with Israel should be canceled and “all hell is going to break out.”

“Israel can override it, but from myself, Saturday at 12 o’clock, and if they’re not, they’re not here, all hell is going to break out,” Mr. Trump said while signing executive orders at the White House in front of reporters.

Asked whether he meant retaliation from Israel, the president said: “You’ll find out, and they’ll find out to. Hamas will find out what I mean.” Asked whether he would rule out any U.S. involvement after the Saturday deadline, Mr. Trump said, “We’ll see what happens.”

Both Hamas and Israel have accused each other of violating various aspects of the cease-fire agreement, but they have continued to release Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners each week.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

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. 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.

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.

For years, Mr. Maduro has maintained his grip on Venezuela by jailing political opponents at home. But the murder in Chile suggests the Venezuelan leader has also adopted the tactics of his close ally, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, to reach into foreign nations to assassinate political rivals.

“Everyone is terrified. No one says where they are, how they took refuge, what country they arrived in,” said Zair Mundaray, a former top Venezuelan prosecutor who recently fled exile in Colombia to a country he would not identify after facing threats from people he believes are Venezuelan agents. “Ojeda was a turning point for everyone.”

Chile has been holding hearings to charge 19 people whom the authorities said took part in some aspect of Mr. Ojeda’s murder, including planning the killing, carrying it out and hiding the body, according to court documents viewed by The New York Times. Chilean prosecutors said most of the 19 accused are members of the Chilean branch of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan crime group that Mr. Trump wants to designate a terrorist organization.

Carolina Tohá, Chile’s interior and public security minister, said in an interview that three people have testified that the Venezuelan government hired Tren de Aragua to assassinate Mr. Ojeda. One of those people said Mr. Maduro’s top deputy and interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, personally ordered the killing, she said.

She said investigators had eliminated two other hypotheses: extortion and gang infighting. As for the third hypothesis — a political assassination — she said: “It’s still not proven. But we can say that the probabilities are very worrying.”

The Maduro government, including Mr. Cabello, has repeatedly denied involvement in the killing. Mr. Cabello has joked that the Venezuelan government would not be capable of pulling off such a crime. Tarek William Saab, Venezuela’s attorney general, said the murder was actually “a false flag operation that the Chilean State itself covered up.”

Mr. Maduro’s spokesman declined to comment for this article, while Mr. Cabello’s spokesman also did not respond to a request for comment.

Chilean investigators believe Venezuelan counterintelligence agents have worked out of Venezuela’s Embassy in Santiago, according to a senior official close to the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss findings that had not yet been made public.

The accusations from Chile come as Mr. Trump has made overtures to Mr. Maduro. He dispatched Richard Grenell, a U.S. special envoy, to meet Mr. Maduro in Caracas, the capital, and he returned with six Americans who had been held in Venezuela.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the meeting did not mean the United States recognized Mr. Maduro as the legitimate Venezuelan president. Instead, Mr. Grenell wants Mr. Maduro to agree to take back several hundred Tren de Aragua members detained in the United States and release U.S. citizens detained in Venezuela.

The United States pulled diplomats from Venezuela in 2019. Mr. Maduro’s government called the meeting “a new beginning in bilateral relations.”

Last week, the new U.S. border czar, Tom Homan, told The Times that deportation flights to Venezuela would begin within a month.

Many international observers — including Secretary of State Marco Rubio when he was a senator — have said sending Venezuelans back to Venezuela under Mr. Maduro would be a death sentence.

Mr. Maduro’s government has a long history of human rights abuses inside Venezuela. But the government has also been tracking down dissidents abroad for years, according to former Venezuelan officials, security experts and dissidents themselves.

To do so, Mr. Maduro has relied on a network of Venezuelan agents, criminal gangs and allied rebel groups to surveil, intimidate and, in some cases, kidnap dissidents outside Venezuela, according to the former officials and experts.

In 2021, members of a Colombian guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army, or ELN, kidnapped a former Venezuelan Army lieutenant, Franklin Caldera, who was hiding in Colombia after helping attack a Venezuelan military base, according to his father and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

The ELN brought Mr. Caldera to Venezuela, where he was imprisoned and tortured. In November, the commission moved to protect more of his family outside Venezuela because of increasing threats.

In December 2023, Mr. Ojeda traveled to the Colombian border to plot a potential uprising against Mr. Maduro with other dissidents, according to a lawyer for Mr. Ojeda’s family. There, the ELN captured the dissidents’ effective leader — a former military officer named Anyelo Heredia — and brought him back to Venezuela, according to Mr. Mundaray and Pablo Parada, a dissident close to Mr. Heredia. Mr. Ojeda escaped.

A month later, the Venezuelan government published a list of 33 military members it said had turned on the nation. “Zero tolerance for traitors!” the document said. The names were taken from Mr. Heredia’s phone, Mr. Mundaray said, and many of those in Venezuela were imprisoned.

Mr. Ojeda was also on the list. Less than a month later, he was murdered.

Court documents show the planning of the murder among members of Tren de Aragua, one of Latin America’s most violent and notorious criminal organizations. Messages from confiscated phones showed that a Tren de Aragua boss told the gang’s leader in Chile that they would be paid a large sum to kidnap and kill Mr. Ojeda. That set off a flurry of activity — all laid out in a WhatsApp group — in which gang members obtained Chilean police uniforms, weapons and vehicles, according to the documents.

At 3:05 a.m. on Feb. 21, 2024, five men disguised as police officers arrived at Mr. Ojeda’s building in a Nissan Versa with police lights on top. One stayed in the car, one gave the doorman a false warrant and the other three kidnapped Mr. Ojeda.

Days later, in a poor neighborhood controlled by the gang, the police were tipped off when neighbors reported suspicious activity in a shack where men were seen wheeling cement in and dirt out. An autopsy concluded that Mr. Ojeda was killed by asphyxiation, according to the documents.

As evidence began to point to the Maduro government, the Chilean prosecutor leading the case said so on television. Venezuela responded angrily, denying involvement. Last month, Venezuela ordered Chile to close its consulates in Venezuela and said diplomatic ties had been suspended.

President Gabriel Boric of Chile said that if Venezuela is shown to have ordered Mr. Ojeda’s killing, “it is not only a violation of our sovereignty, it is a violation of human rights and it has the worst precedents, which we know in our history,” referring to Chile’s own murderous dictatorship.

Building surveillance footage showing the kidnapping spread across Chile and beyond. Ms. Tohá said the criminals could have destroyed the cameras but chose not to. “Mr. Ojeda could have been killed in a much simpler, much less conspicuous way,” she said. “There is a reason they chose this strategy of making it visible.”

Mr. Parada, the Venezuelan dissident in Colombia, said that days after authorities found Mr. Ojeda’s body, mysterious men showed up to a meeting of dissidents in Colombia and chased him through the streets. He spent a night in a sewage pipe to evade them. Now he is in hiding again.

“It’s not easy to know that they’re looking for you to kill you. It’s not easy to know that you can’t even return to your country,” Mr. Parada said. “It’s not easy to know that, at any moment, I could suffer the fate that Ronald suffered.”

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.

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.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

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 two members of the family that owns the business who were working at the time 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 two men, 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 relative of the two men and 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 family’s 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 two men. “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.”

Two flights carrying Venezuelan migrants from the United States back to Venezuela will arrive late Monday in the capital, Caracas, the country’s communication’s ministry said.

The flights are a major victory for the Trump administration, which made a campaign promise to deport millions of undocumented migrants. To accomplish this goal, President Trump needs Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s autocratic president who has found himself increasingly isolated by world leaders, to agree to accept some of those people.

Two planes owned by the Venezuelan airline Conviasa left Fort Bliss in Texas, where migrants subject to deportation are being held, at around 10:45 a.m. They were set to arrive in Caracas at 7:15 p.m., according to FlightAware, a flight tracking website.

The White House confirmed the move in a message on X.

“Repatriation flights to Venezuela have resumed,” said the post. “MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN.”

Following a rupture in the relationship between the United States and Venezuela in 2019, Mr. Maduro’s government had refused to accept deported citizens, except during a brief period in the Biden administration.

The announcement about the flights follows a recent visit by a Trump adviser, Richard Grenell, to Venezuela. Mr. Grenell returned to the United States with six Americans who had been detained by the Maduro government.

In authorizing the flights, the United States is sending migrants back to a nation run by an autocrat who has spent years imprisoning political opponents and others he views as unpatriotic.

In a statement to the news media, Mr. Maduro’s government said it had been informed by U.S. authorities that several deportees were part of a criminal group called the Tren de Aragua.

Neither the U.S. nor Venezuela has provided proof of this.

But Mr. Maduro’s government assured the public that the returning Venezuelans accused of gang membership “will be subject to a rigorous investigation as soon as they touch Venezuelan soil and will be subject to the actions provided for in our justice system.”

For years the Venezuelan justice system has been used a tool of the governments of Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez.

Laura Dib, a Venezuela analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, said the politicization of the justice system had been documented extensively by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, United Nations treaty bodies and the United Nations Fact Finding Mission in Venezuela.

“I don’t expect them to have any guarantee of due process upon return,” she said of the deportees. “If anything, I think there could be retaliations against people that had fled to the U.S.”

Venezuela has experienced an extraordinary economic crisis in recent years. Many people have left the country for economic reasons. But others, including former members of the military and political activists, have fled out of fear of persecution.

And in recent months, Mr. Maduro’s government has been rounding up not just political activists known for vocal anti-governments statements, but also people who pass by protests and Venezuelans who appear to have little involvement in politics.

In his first term, President Trump took a hard line against Mr. Maduro, imposing economic sanctions and backing an opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, in an attempt to oust the Venezuelan leader. In 2020, federal prosecutors in the United States accused Mr. Maduro of involvement in a narcotrafficking conspiracy, and the State Department offered $15 million for help in his arrest. (Mr. Biden raised it $25 million.)

But the first weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term have been marked by a friendlier approach to Mr. Maduro.

Mr. Grenell’s visit to Caracas in January was an important win for Mr. Maduro, who is accused of stealing a recent election.

It was the first public visit of a U.S. official to Caracas in years, lending an air of legitimacy to a leader who has used force and repression to remain in power.

A photograph of Mr. Grenell and Mr. Maduro smiling together was shared widely by Venezuelan officials and in state media.

In the statement to the news media, the Venezuelan government said it had reached a deal with the Trump administration to have Venezuelan planes retrieve its citizens so that the transfer could be done “with absolute respect for their dignity and human rights.

The government also called for “a new beginning of relations between both countries” in which they could “establish mechanisms of direct cooperation” to combat organized crime and smuggler networks “that have harmed and defrauded thousands of our compatriots by bringing them to the United States.”