Pope Francis’ condition has improved enough that he will be discharged from a hospital in Rome on Sunday and sent to recover in the Vatican for at least two months, his doctors said on Saturday evening.

On Sunday, Francis plans to make his first public appearance since he was hospitalized on Feb. 14. He is expected to appear at noon on the 10th-floor balcony of Rome’s Gemelli hospital, where he has been staying, to greet the crowd and to impart a traditional Sunday blessing, Matteo Bruni, the Vatican spokesman, said at a news conference on Saturday.

The announcement of the pope’s coming release made for a remarkable turn of events for the leader of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics, after weeks in which he lay in critical condition and the Roman Catholic Church seemed on the brink of a conclave to pick his successor. Instead, Francis’ steady, if slow, improvement has ushered in a new phase for him and the church.

He will return to the Vatican, physically diminished, at least in the short term, without his voice, reliant on oxygen and deprived of closeness to the faithful, which has been the hallmark of his pontificate and the manifestation of his pastoral vision for the church.

“It’s a sigh of relief,” Father Antonio Spadaro, a close associate of Francis’, said Saturday evening. He added that for the church, but also for a world in flux, “there was a great anticipation, as well as need, for his presence.”

Francis had been able to govern the church from the hospital, but after he finished his blessing on Sunday he would go home, Mr. Bruni said.

Only weeks ago, there was great concern within the church and beyond that he would never return. The doctors, speaking at a news conference at the Gemelli hospital on Saturday evening, said that the pope’s case of pneumonia in both lungs had been so severe that it had twice put his life in grave danger.

But they said that he had been stable for two weeks and that in the last three or four days he had been asking when he could go home.

“He was very happy,” said Dr. Sergio Alfieri, the leader of the medical team taking care of the pope. Dr. Alfieri added that he himself was happy to share “the good news that I imagine the whole world was waiting for.”

The doctors said that the pope had overcome his most dangerous infections, but that he was not completely healed and needed to rest for at least two months.

But the doctors said that Francis, 88, would still require drug therapy and oxygen, as is normal for patients recovering from pneumonia, before he could resume his regular schedule. They added that they hoped he would soon no longer require oxygen, but urged that the pope avoid meeting with large groups and people with small children, and that he avoid other possible sources of infection.

His doctors also said that Francis had difficulty speaking, which was to be expected for a patient who had suffered serious damage to the lungs and respiratory muscles.

“One of the first things that happens is you lose your voice a little,” said Dr. Luigi Carbone, the pope’s Vatican-based doctor, who also spoke at a news conference on Saturday evening. “It will take time for his voice to return as it was.”

For weeks, Catholics around the world have been praying for the pope’s recovery, and since Feb. 25, cardinals and bishops have led a nightly rosary prayer in St. Peter’s Square that draws hundreds of the faithful each night.

Francis remained in critical condition for several weeks as he experienced an asthmatic respiratory crisis; initial, mild kidney failure; and a bronchial spasm that caused him to inhale his vomit after a coughing fit. He used noninvasive mechanical ventilation during the night and high-flow oxygen therapy during the day.

The doctors said that after the pope had survived his most severe crises, they asked him how he was doing.

“‘I’m still alive,’” Dr. Alfieri said the pope responded. “That’s when we knew he was well and had regained his good humor.”

Francis entered the hospital with an acute respiratory insufficiency from viral and bacterial infections, but was treated with a drug therapy treatment and oxygen that slowly improved his condition. The pope, his doctors said on Saturday, had never been intubated and remained alert and conscious throughout his hospitalization.

The doctors said that the pope’s Vatican residence was sufficiently equipped to deal with his medical needs and that they had emergency services available around the clock.

Francis has often struggled with bronchitis during the winter months, but that had not stopped the pope from keeping up a grueling schedule in the weeks before his hospitalization, intensified by the opening of the 2025 Jubilee, a year of faith, penance and forgiveness of sins that takes place only every quarter century.

Throngs of passengers anxious to get on their way surged into Heathrow Airport in London on Saturday, a day after a power blackout closed the airport and forced thousands to delay their trips.

As information boards flickered back to life, an army of extra airport staff members, dressed in purple, sprang into action to help people as they walked through the terminal doors.

Ganesh Suresh, a 25-year-old student who was trying to get home to Bangalore, India, was among those who secured a coveted seat on a Saturday flight. After his Air India flight was canceled, his parents booked new tickets on Virgin Atlantic, while he spent the night at a friend’s place in Birmingham, England.

“I was so eager to get back,” Mr. Suresh said. He sheepishly admitted to yelling at his parents in frustration during the height of the shutdown chaos. “I might apologize to them when I get back.”

Travelers, diverted or rebooked, arrived early, with trains and other transport routes to the airport reopened. A day earlier, the airport’s roads were empty except for police cars.

A Heathrow representative said on Saturday that the airport was “open and fully operational,” adding that the extra flights on the day’s schedule could accommodate 10,000 extra passengers. At the airport, information boards showed that most flights would leave on time, but the snaking lines at ticketing counters signaled that many travelers were in for more frustrating delays.

More than a thousand flights were diverted on Friday, wreaking havoc on more than a quarter of a million people’s travel plans, Cirium, an aviation data company, estimated.

Some travelers chose not to wait for a flight out of Heathrow. Denyse Kumbuka had lingered in the dimmed Terminal 2 for as long as she could on Friday, spending hours on a bench trying to find her way back home to Dallas.

Then her husband found a seat for her on a flight via Austria. She navigated the London Underground rail system to St. Pancras International train station and got a train to Paris. After spending the night on another bench at Charles de Gaulle Airport, she took an early flight to Vienna, then connected to Dallas on Saturday morning.

“I feel like the mom in ‘Home Alone,’” she said in a text message, referencing the exhausting journey depicted in the 1990 film.

A Heathrow representative said significant delays were expected in the coming days as airlines tried to return their planes to their usual schedules.

Mars Gonzalez, 32, and Olivia Hawthorne, 24, were stuck in the lingering aftermath. They were only meant to transfer at Heathrow on Saturday on a trip from Barcelona to Dallas, with another stop at Kennedy Airport in New York. Instead, they found themselves wandering out of the arrivals gate at Terminal 5 for an unplanned stay in London.

When news of the fire broke, Ms. Gonzalez said she called American Airlines, who assured her that the flight, operated by British Airways, would take off on Saturday as scheduled. But when they got to Heathrow, delays stretched from hours to days, with the next available flight on Tuesday.

“We spoke to like six different people who were just redirecting us to other people,” said Ms. Hawthorne.

For Stephen Delong, 74, and Lesley Scott, 73, the long line at the ticketing office turned out to be the smoothest part of their redirected travel.

“You have to come here; you have to talk to someone,” Mr. Delong said. “The online service just doesn’t work.”

The couple had just learned that in place of their original direct flight from London to Halifax, Air Canada would be rerouting them via Toronto, adding more than 15 hours to their travel time thanks to a long layover. And they would have to spend another night in London because flights on Saturday were all booked. The shutdown had already caused them to miss their grandson’s eighth birthday on Friday.

“You can’t get angry about it,” Mr. Delong said. “It would feel different if somebody blew up the generator.”

The police were still investigating what had caused the fire at the substation in western London that cut power to Heathrow.

John Yoon contributed reporting.

Rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel for the first time in months on Saturday, prompting Israeli forces to strike back hours later at sites in southern Lebanon it said were linked to the militant group Hezbollah.

At least six people in Lebanon were killed in the Israeli bombardment and others wounded, according to statements from the Lebanese Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The Israeli military said it had launched a second round of attacks on Saturday night.

The attacks were the latest example of how the renewed Israeli offensive in Gaza was rippling across the Middle East. They also risk further disrupting the return of tens of thousands of displaced residents on both sides of the border who had fled more than a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. The Israeli military said that it had shot down three rockets from Lebanon with no reports of casualties. The volley was the first rocket attack since Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire that was brokered by the United States and France late last year.

Hezbollah denied involvement in the rocket fire, which followed Israel’s resumed offensive in Gaza this week against the Lebanese group’s Palestinian ally Hamas. Those Israeli attacks have already killed more than 600 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, who did not say how many were combatants.

After the Hamas-led assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which ignited the Gaza war, the militant group’s allies across the Middle East began attacking Israel in solidarity. Last year, that escalated into a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah, in which Israel assassinated Hezbollah’s leadership and launched a ground invasion into southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold.

The truce went into effect in late November and has largely held. Under the terms of the cease-fire, the Lebanese government is supposed to prevent armed groups like Hezbollah from attacking Israel from Lebanese territory.

Lebanese leaders appeared eager to head off any new escalation with Israel. The Israel-Hezbollah war killed about 4,000 people in Lebanon and more than a million people fled their homes, according to the country’s authorities. Tens of thousands were still displaced as of mid-March, according to the United Nations.

After the rocket fire on Saturday, Joseph Aoun, the Lebanese president, condemned what he called “attempts to drag Lebanon back into a cycle of violence.” He called on the committee charged with overseeing the cease-fire — including representatives from the United States and France — to prevent any violations that could threaten Lebanon.

The Lebanese Army said on Saturday that it had located and dismantled rocket launchers in southern Lebanon. The national military is a distinct force from Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia which has long wielded enormous political and military influence in Lebanon.

“Military units are continuing to take the necessary measures to control the situation in the south,” the Lebanese military said.

Israeli officials have expressed skepticism over whether the Lebanese military is up to the task of preventing attacks. And Israel has continued to bombard Lebanon despite the truce, arguing that it is cracking down on militants violating the cease-fire.

While the cease-fire initially stipulated a full Israeli withdrawal by late January, Israeli forces still control five points inside Lebanese territory. Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, said Israeli troops would remain there indefinitely to protect Israeli towns near the Lebanese border.

The truce requires the Lebanese government’s security forces to be the sole armed presence in southern Lebanon, but it is unclear to what extent Hezbollah has actually withdrawn its fighters and weaponry.

The resumed strikes in Gaza this week have brought attacks on Israel from at least one other Hamas ally.

That ally, the Houthi militia in Yemen — which, like Hamas and Hezbollah, is backed by Iran — has resumed firing ballistic missiles at Israel, sending hundreds of thousands of Israelis rushing for fortified bomb shelters. Israel’s aerial defense systems have intercepted the missiles.

Israeli leaders, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have said that they launched the renewed attack in Gaza in part to pressure Hamas to free more of the dozens of remaining Israeli and foreign hostages in the enclave. Hamas has argued that Israel is tearing up the cease-fire deal.

Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s Mideast envoy, said that Israel and Hamas were “talking again” to try and solve the impasse in the negotiations. He made the remarks during an extended interview on Friday with the right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson.

The United States is now discussing how to demilitarize Hamas as part of a postwar settlement for Gaza, Mr. Witkoff said, adding, “That’s the big thing.”

“They need to demilitarize. Then maybe they could stay there a little bit, right? Be involved politically,” he said. “We can’t have a terrorist organization running Gaza.”

Mr. Witkoff said he believed that by resuming the fight against Hamas, Mr. Netanyahu was going “up against public opinion” in Israel — which Mr. Witkoff said broadly backed a deal to free the hostages.

Euan Ward contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel.

When it comes to confronting global conflicts, President Trump is a man in a hurry.

Even before his inauguration, the president claimed credit for what he called an “EPIC cease-fire” in Gaza. He has raced to get Ukraine and Russia to quickly embrace a pause in fighting. And with Iran, Mr. Trump wants an agreement within two months to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon.

It is the foreign policy version of the president’s “flood the zone” approach in Washington, where he and his lieutenants have used blitzkrieg-like tactics to dismantle the bureaucracy, consolidate executive power and attack his political enemies. On the world stage, too, Mr. Trump has embraced a hurry-up foreign policy approach designed to quickly resolve the disputes he inherited.

But his diplomatic impatience is now running headfirst into the complexity of war and peace, raising questions about the durability of what he has achieved so far. The cease-fire between Gaza and Israel has collapsed. Mr. Trump’s proposal for an immediate 30-day cease-fire was rejected by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. And an Iran nuclear agreement — not unlike the one he withdrew from during his first term in office — seems to remain far over the horizon despite his push for a speedy deal.

“Trump’s MO is to always be in a hurry, looking for the transaction, for the temporary, for the now,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator and a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“American foreign policy — Ukraine, Gaza, Iran — they’re not measured in terms of administrations. It’s generational time,” Mr. Miller said. He added that rushing a solution was risky, “because he’s in such a hurry to get results, he’s sort of misdiagnosing the problem.”

The president’s allies reject that assessment. They argue that his approach is designed to create momentum to obliterate what they derisively call the “international, rules-based order” that has dominated global foreign policy for decades. In addition to Iran, Israel and Ukraine, they note that Mr. Trump has shocked the world with threats to use force to acquire control of both Greenland and the Panama Canal.

“Geopolitically, it’s all gas, no brake,” Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump administration strategist, said in an interview. He said the president is dispatching aides — what he calls “shock troops” — to quickly confront the global conflicts in much the same way that he has deployed Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency inside the federal government.

“What he’s doing geo-strategically and geo-economically, it far, far surpasses what he’s doing domestically,” Mr. Bannon said. “If you look across the board, the method to his madness is deep, it’s meaningful, and it’s going to have the biggest implication for national security.”

The president’s push for momentum has been at the heart of his approach to the two most searing global conflicts in recent times: the yearlong fighting between Hamas and Israel in Gaza; and the three-year war that began when Russia invaded Ukraine.

In both, Mr. Trump has repeatedly blamed former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for failing to prevent — and then move quickly enough to resolve — the conflicts. In his speech to a joint session of Congress earlier this month, the president boasted that “a lot of things are happening in the Middle East.” Of the conflict in Ukraine, he declared his impatience: “It’s time to stop this madness. It’s time to halt the killing. It’s time to end this senseless war.”

Clifford D. May, the founder of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Mr. Trump appears eager to move past global crises so he can focus his attention elsewhere.

“He’d rather do his war on woke. He’d rather do immigration,” Mr. May said. “He would like this off his plate.”

But he said Mr. Trump’s push for a resolution in Ukraine has “hit a substantial speed bump” in the form of Mr. Putin. In a telephone call on Tuesday, the Russian leader slammed the brakes on Mr. Trump’s desire for a quick cease-fire agreement between Russia and Ukraine, agreeing only to stop attacks on energy infrastructure.

Mr. May said that Mr. Putin is playing on Mr. Trump’s desire for a quick resolution by purposefully slowing down the American president’s efforts to disrupt the status quo that has existed throughout the war.

“The disruption factor probably can be useful in some cases,” Mr. May said. But when it doesn’t work, as with somebody like Putin, who is savvy, who is patient, who sees what you’re doing, who tries to play you,” he added, “then you may have to step back and say, OK, what’s plan B here?”

In Israel, Mr. Trump used his social media platform to push for a quick truce days before taking office. Until the resumption of Israeli attacks in Gaza this week, the president had hailed his efforts at peacemaking, even musing to reporters that he deserves to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.

“They’ll never give it to me,” he added.

Mr. Bannon rejected the idea that the collapse of the cease-fire in Gaza is evidence that the president’s desire for a quick fix in the region led to a halt in the fighting that was not sustainable or durable. He said Mr. Trump’s support for Israel — and his unequivocal condemnation of Hamas in Gaza — has given Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, more freedom to conduct the war.

“He’s actually showed the world that, ‘Hey, you can’t deal with these people, they’re not trustworthy,’” Mr. Bannon said of Hamas. “And then Israel comes in and now you don’t see any firestorm like you saw at the beginning.”

Other longtime observers of American foreign policy said that while there is merit in moving quickly when it comes to global diplomacy, that can often spur actions that are not based on solid information.

Lawrence Freedman, an emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College in London, said the problem with the president’s desire for urgency is that it shortchanges the detailed and often laborious work usually required for a long-term solution to wars.

“He thinks if he blusters enough, then people will sort of fall away and that you can get on to the stuff you really want to do,” Mr. Freedman said. “But because it’s not based on a serious assessment of the situation — of the problems at hand — it doesn’t really work.”

Mr. Miller said Mr. Trump is less interested in the long-term solution than the short-term political benefit he gets from announcing a diplomatic achievement.

“You’ve got an extraordinarily impatient impulsive person,” he said, “where speed, frankly, matters more than the policy.”

Four years ago, this was a prime riverside location in the capital of a nation that seemed to be inching toward democracy. Then came a military coup, and then almost two years of civil war, as the army and the Rapid Support Forces, its powerful paramilitary partner, turned on one another.

By March 12, when this photograph was taken, the river was more or less the front line.

This apartment block sits on the northern bank; the presidential palace, an emblem of power for centuries, is on the southern bank.

The R.S.F. took most of Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, in April 2023. The army held on to only a few bases across the city.

In recent months, as part of a vast counteroffensive, the army and militias allied with it have gradually reclaimed much of the north and east of the city.

On Friday, the military celebrated reclaiming the palace. Next, it hopes to drive the R.S.F. out of Khartoum entirely.

But even if the army succeeds, analysts see little chance of the war ending soon, and the fighting has already reduced much of the city to a charred wasteland.

Declan Walsh contributed reporting.