There were times, before Israeli airstrikes on Gaza shattered the two-month-old cease-fire on March 18, when Huda Abu Teir and her family could almost believe things might go back to normal.

After fleeing from their home to a shelter for displaced people, and then to a tent, another shelter and on to another encampment during 15 months of war — six or seven displacements in all — they had returned to their house in Abasan al-Kabira, in southeastern Gaza, where they lived with Huda’s grandparents and uncles.

Back at home a few weeks ago, Huda, 19, threw a pizza party for her cousins, said one cousin, Fatma al-Shawwaf, 20. The other girls teased Huda: Shouldn’t you be studying? Huda, who was set on becoming a nurse, always seemed to be studying. But Huda laughingly retorted that she liked having fun, too.

The day before Israeli airstrikes resumed, Huda asked her Uncle Nour, who taught technology, if he could help her go over the material for her high school exams. He promised her a study session the next evening, he said.

But around midnight, Huda’s brother Abdullah, 15, heard an explosion. “What was that?” he screamed to his father, who had no time to answer before the next blast, this time over their heads and under their feet all at once.

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Myanmar’s military on Wednesday declared a 21-day cease-fire to support relief and reconstruction efforts in the wake of a devastating earthquake in the country, a day after it fired on a Chinese Red Cross convoy trying to deliver food and medicine to desperate survivors.

The attack on the Chinese convoy, which was widely condemned by rights activists, highlighted the dangers aid groups face from the country’s ongoing civil war.

It remains unclear whether the cease-fire would be honored — armed rebel groups said the military had launched scores of airstrikes since Friday’s 7.7-magnitude temblor, which killed at least 2,700.

In the wake of the earthquake, the shadow government in exile, known as the National Unity Government, and an alliance of three rebel groups announced cease-fires. But the military, which seized power in a coup four years ago, had indicated that it would not stop hostilities. The fierce civil war had already caused widespread suffering before the earthquake, which left millions of people with little food and water.

On Wednesday, the office of Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the chief of Myanmar’s junta, said the temporary cease-fire would run from April 2 to April 22. It was declared “to express sympathy for affected citizens, facilitate humanitarian aid and ensure stability during the recovery period.”

But a day before, he had said that military operations would continue as “necessary protective measures” despite the earthquake.

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that Israel has captured a new strip of territory in the Gaza Strip, part of a new strategy to seize land in the enclave after the cease-fire with Hamas collapsed last month.

Israel has conducted a new round of airstrikes to force Hamas to release more Israeli hostages. Hamas argues that Israel is violating the agreement it signed in January, which created a path toward ending the war. Both sides have been speaking to mediators about a potential deal to restore the truce — so far without success.

Meanwhile, some anti-Hamas protests have also broken out in parts of Gaza. And the United Nations accused Israel of killing more than a dozen rescue workers.

What is happening in Gaza?

On March 18, Israel launched what it called “extensive strikes” on Hamas targets in Gaza, shattering the fragile truce in the enclave.

In the weeks since, Israeli ground troops have seized the Netzarim Corridor in central Gaza, from which they withdrew during the cease-fire with Hamas, and they have expanded ground raids in northern and southern Gaza. The Israeli military has issued sweeping evacuation orders, displacing more than 140,000 people in Gaza since the cease-fire broke down, according to the United Nations.

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An 800-mile rail corridor stretching from Angola’s northern border to the Atlantic Ocean was former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s signature project in Africa, meant to counter Chinese influence and reshape America’s engagement with the continent.

When President Trump came into office this year, he quickly moved to dismantle decades of American aid to Africa, raising fears that the United States was pulling back from its commitments. The future of America’s involvement in the rail project was an open question.

But this week, the acting U.S. ambassador in Angola, James Story, gave the first indication that the Trump administration was on board with the project, the Lobito Corridor, which is expected to improve America’s access to minerals like cobalt and copper that are critical to the clean-energy transition.

Mr. Story, who arrived in Angola last October, is leading a delegation of more than a dozen, mostly Western envoys on a three-day publicity tour along the rail line, including visits with local politicians.

As Mr. Trump continues to craft his own Africa team, the tour offered clues to how he plans to shape his policy on the continent, and the ways in which it may align with or depart from Mr. Biden’s approach.

“The Trump administration is all about making business to favor the United States,” said Osvaldo Mboco, a professor of international relations at the Technical University of Angola in the capital, Luanda.

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Only one building in Bangkok fell during the earthquake on Friday that rocked Myanmar, hundreds of miles away. Recovery efforts continue with at least 15 people killed and dozens still missing. Determining the cause could take months.

But interviews with workers who had been on the site, together with early official findings, highlighted potential problems with construction design and quality.

At the center of the scrutiny is China Railway 10th Engineering Group, a Chinese state-owned company with about a dozen other projects in Thailand and whose contractors tried to remove documents from the site after the disaster.

Behind that Chinese company is its parent, China Railway Group — a Chinese infrastructure giant with soaring debt, a hunger for new projects and subsidiaries facing accusations of weak safety in several countries.

Workers in Bangkok told The New York Times that China Railway 10th, which was part of a consortium constructing the building, underpaid contractors who turned to lower quality materials, and used columns narrower than usual.

Thai officials testing twisted metal from the ruins said they found substandard steel bars — made by a Thai factory with Chinese owners that the authorities had shut down in December.

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Wednesday that Israel is seizing territory in the Gaza Strip hours after his government laid out plans to take over large parts of the enclave.

The announcement adds to the growing drumbeat from Israeli officials in recent days who have suggested that Israel would shift tactics to hold territory in Gaza, at least temporarily, in an effort to pressure Hamas to free the remaining hostages. The officials have also asserted a vision for postwar Gaza in which Palestinians would move elsewhere — an idea vehemently rejected by much of the world.

Holding territory, Mr. Netanyahu said, was meant to push Hamas to return at least 59 remaining hostages the group and its allies captured on Oct. 7, 2023. “The pressure will increase until they hand them over,” he said in a filmed statement.

In the 15-month military campaign that preceded a January truce, Israeli forces stormed Gazan cities before withdrawing, leaving behind vast destruction but allowing Palestinian militants to regroup in the rubble.

In the weeks after the cease-fire took hold, many Gazans returned home, but Israel resumed its attacks in mid-March.

Now, the military appears to be planning to station forces in captured territory. The defense minister, Israel Katz, on Wednesday said newly captured areas would be “added to the security zones” that the military currently maintains in Gaza, including a buffer along the enclave’s borders with Egypt and Israel, and much of a key road in the center of the enclave.

Mr. Netanyahu said Israel would establish a corridor, which he hinted would cut off territory in the southern city of Rafah from the rest of the strip. The so-called Morag Corridor appeared to take its name from a former Israeli settlement in southern Gaza, from which Israel withdrew in 2005.

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Bilal Mohammad Ramadan AbuKresh has lost his home, his job, his wife and seven other relatives during the war in Gaza. Now, as the United Nations closes 25 bakeries across the territory, he is also losing his only reliable source of food.

Before Wednesday, Mr. AbuKresh, 40, said he would leave his tent in a camp for displaced people in northern Gaza at dawn and stand in line for hours at one of the bakeries, waiting for bread for his four children.

“The line was unimaginable, like the Day of Judgment,” Mr. AbuKresh said on Wednesday, the day after the World Food Program, a U.N. agency, said it had run out of the flour and fuel needed to keep the bakeries in Gaza open.

But at least it was affordable, compared to the $30 he paid for a bag of pasta that he bought recently to feed his family.

The lack of humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza over the past month has prompted violent competition for food and driven up prices.

Mr. AbuKresh said he has resorted to selling his children’s jewelry and collecting trash to sell to scrounge up enough money just to buy a bit of food. “To secure a bag of bread for my children, I risk death a hundred times,” he said.

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Three American citizens who were sentenced to death over a failed coup attempt in the Democratic Republic of Congo have had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment, according to a spokeswoman for the Central African country’s president.

The three Americans were among 37 people condemned to death last September after taking part in a May 2024 attack on the government that was streamed live and included a gun battle near the presidential palace.

Security forces killed the coup leader, Christian Malanga, a minor opposition politician. But his son, Marcel Malanga, was arrested along with his high school friend Tyler Thompson and Benjamin Zalman-Polun, a business associate of Christian Malanga’s.

Those three men — who are all American citizens — were singled out and granted “individual clemency,” Tina Salama, the Congolese president’s spokeswoman, said in a post late Tuesday on X. There was no immediate comment from the U.S. State Department.

Congo has been trying to enlist American support against neighboring Rwanda and a rebel militia that Rwanda directs and arms, M23. Since January, M23 has torn through eastern Congo, seizing vast tracts of land and major cities. Thousands of civilians, soldiers and allied militia fighters have been killed in the rebel offensive, which has also left millions destitute.

In an interview with The New York Times in February, Congo’s president, Felix Tshisekedi, offered the United States a stake in his country’s vast mineral wealth, saying that such a deal would bring his country more security and stability. Experts agree that U.S. pressure on Rwanda could be one of the few things that might induce M23 to pull back.

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