When Israeli forces first swarmed into Gaza last year, they targeted North Gaza, an area stretching across densely packed urban centers and small strawberry farms near the border with Israel.

The military said that hardened Hamas fighters were hiding among the civilians there, so it struck residential neighborhoods, hospitals and schools turned shelters. It was one of the deadliest moments of the war.

Now, almost exactly a year later, it is all happening again.

North Gaza is the epicenter of a renewed Israeli offensive that, over the past five weeks, has unleashed some of the Israeli military’s most devastating attacks yet. In an effort to stamp out what the military has called a Hamas resurgence, troops, tanks and armed drones have hammered the area almost daily, displacing 100,000 residents and killing likely more than 1,000 others, according to the United Nations. (Those statistics do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.)

There are so many corpses, multiple residents and a local doctor said, that stray dogs have begun to pick at them in the streets.

“Life over the past four weeks, if I can sum it up, is a people being exterminated,” said Islam Ahmad, 34, a freelance journalist from North Gaza who described helping bury neighbors in a mass grave.

The return of fighting to the northernmost reaches of the Gaza Strip shows how Israel’s approach has led to a bloody carousel of sorts, with the Israeli military chasing Hamas fighters in circles — and civilians often caught in the crossfire.

Two Israeli security officials compared it to cutting the grass, using a phrase that has circulated among Israeli officials for years, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Each time Hamas cells regrow, they say, Israeli forces will come back to cut them down.

This sort of cyclical combat reflects Israel’s murky strategy in a war now in its 14th month. Israel has eliminated much of Hamas’s senior military leadership, killed thousands of its fighters and collapsed many of its tunnels — yet Israel has shown no sign of letting up.

That is in part because Israeli forces have avoided holding much ground and Mr. Netanyahu has not committed to a viable postwar plan. Hamas has filled the resulting power vacuum.

North Gaza is the northernmost of Gaza’s five governorates, just north of Gaza City. Israeli forces left after pummeling the region last year. In May, they returned for an intense bout of fighting and recovered the bodies of seven hostages seized in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel last year. Then they left again. Hamas fighters regrouped, and now, once more, the military is back.

The goal this time is to isolate Hamas fighters in North Gaza from others in Gaza City, according to a senior Israeli security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe military tactics. Israel captured 500 suspected Hamas fighters and killed another 750 in North Gaza last month, the official said. He said the military had encouraged civilians to evacuate but did not track civilian casualties. He said forces planned to remain for at least another month.

Gadi Shamni, a retired general who once commanded Israeli forces in Gaza, said full occupation would demand tremendous resources, but the current approach is a temporary fix, with ugly consequences for residents.

“As soon as you evacuate those alleys and streets, Hamas will regain control immediately,” he said. “The main problem here is that the government of Israel, and Netanyahu himself, is trying to bypass the real solution of finding an alternative to Hamas” to govern Gaza.

The situation on the ground, by some measures, is even more dire than a year ago. Infrastructure is crumbling, humanitarian aid is severely restricted, and many emergency workers and aid groups have left. On Friday, a U.N.-backed panel said that famine was likely “imminent” within northern Gaza.

The Palestinian Civil Defense, the emergency service run by Hamas’s interior ministry, said it had officially halted rescue operations in the region last month because of the intense threat.

The Palestinian Red Crescent, one of the few aid groups still operating there, said that no ambulances could reach the hardest-hit parts of North Gaza. When a woman recently called for rescue after a relative lost a limb, the dispatcher provided instructions over the phone on how to treat the amputation, the spokeswoman said.

Hosam Al Sharif, 46, a father of four in Jabaliya, said that at the start of the latest siege, help was available. Now, he said, people with “any minor injury will bleed until they die.”

Hospitals are also teetering, leaving many treatable patients to die. On Oct. 30, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiyah, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Jabaliya, issued an urgent plea saying that the hospital lacked surgeons but had multiple victims needing surgery.

Over the next five days, the hospital was bombed three times, according to Dr. Abu Safiyah.

Gazan health officials said Israeli forces had bombed the hospital. The World Health Organization said one Israeli strike had destroyed medical supplies that it had delivered just days earlier. The Israeli military said one of the cases was caused by an explosive device planted by militants. It said at the time it had no information about the other two cases. It has said it has targeted Hamas militants hiding at the hospital in the past.

“We are still besieged inside the hospital,” Dr. Abu Safiyah told The New York Times last week. “We urgently appealed to the world, international and humanitarian organizations. We didn’t get a response.” He said he did not witness militants in the hospital but would treat any victim.

The United Nations has said that Israel has cut off nearly all humanitarian aid to North Gaza. A U.S. deadline for Israel to allow more aid expires this week.

Mr. Ahmad, the journalist, said North Gaza had been relatively calm for months. Then fighting exploded again in October.

On Oct. 29, he said, he heard a loud explosion before dawn. When he went to investigate, the street was littered with mangled bodies, he said.

The Israeli military said it had bombed a five-story building because forces had spotted a militant on the roof. There were also, according to local officials and residents, dozens of families sleeping inside. The Gaza Health Ministry said that 93 people were killed, including many children. The Israeli military disputed that number.

Mr. Ahmad, who took photos of the aftermath for Agence France-Presse, said he had also counted 93 bodies as they were carried on donkey carts to a mass grave.

“We stacked every three bodies on top of one another,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of honoring the dead.” They lacked enough sand, he said, so they laid tiles on the grave to keep the dogs out.

Fewer than 95,000 people remain in the region, a fifth of its prewar population, according to the United Nations. Israeli officials said there are far fewer. The relentless bombing has fueled fears among Palestinians that Israel is intent on depopulating northern Gaza permanently.

Since the start of the war, Israel has urged Gazans to migrate south for their safety — even though it has also repeatedly bombarded the south. The Israeli government has acknowledged having studied a plan put forth by a prominent former general to expel the remaining 400,000 people in the broader northern Gaza region and force Hamas to surrender there by cutting off food and water.

Gideon Saar, Israel’s foreign minister, said Monday that residents could return to northern Gaza after the war.

In Beit Lahia, a farming community, residents were trying to rebuild earlier this year. Yousef Abu Rabee, a farmer, returned in February to plant crops to feed his neighbors, including eggplant, squash and fava beans. An American farmer helped him raise $90,000. He provided seedlings to 50 farms and posted videos to Instagram showing him and others sowing fields, including in craters left by missile strikes.

“We’re trying to grow food on our land, or what is left of our land, in order to save ourselves and our fellow people in the north,” he said in a video posted last month. Several days later, another video showed the fruits of his work: a field of sprouting crops.

About a week later, according to a family member and a friend, he was killed in a strike.

Iyad Abuheweila contributed reporting from Istanbul, Abu Bakr Bashir from London and Natan Odenheimer from Jerusalem.

The archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, on Tuesday announced his resignation, days after a report concluded that he had failed to ensure a proper investigation into claims that more than 100 boys and young men were abused decades ago at Christian summer camps.

Pressure had mounted on Mr. Welby, the spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide, after the report was published and after one senior figure in the church, the bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, called on him publicly to step aside.

In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Welby said, “It is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatizing period between 2013 and 2024.”

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Russian lawmakers on Tuesday voted to ban the advocacy of child-free lifestyles, in a move that is part of a broader effort by the Kremlin to reverse a falling birthrate and promote the country as a bastion of traditional values that is battling a decadent West.

The State Duma, or lower house of Parliament, unanimously approved a bill that would ban any form of “propaganda” promoting the “refusal to have children.” That would include material on the internet, in media outlets, in movies and in advertising that portrays child-free lifestyles as attractive.

Violators would be subjected to fines of up to about $4,000 for individuals and $50,000 for legal entities.

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Seventeen years after Amanda Knox, the American exchange student, was arrested and charged with killing her roommate in Perugia, a picturesque university city in central Italy, some of its citizens are outraged that their city is once again being dragged into a tragedy that they would prefer to forget.

This month, when cast and crew arrived there for a two-day shoot for a Hulu series about the case — a show for which Ms. Knox and Monica Lewinsky are executive producers — Mayor Vittoria Fernandi felt obliged to write a heartfelt letter of apology to the city for the hurt caused by their presence.

One resident, honoring the memory of Meredith Kercher, the slain roommate, draped a sheet from a balcony with “Respect for Meredith” painted in bold red letters. A council member questioned on social media whether the mayor should have allowed the production to shoot in Perugia, where the crime has long overshadowed the city’s “history, art and beauty.”

An editorial in daily newspaper La Nazione wrote, “Perhaps Meredith and Perugia would have deserved more respect without having to sacrifice the dignity of a murdered student and a brutalized city to business.”

It hardly mattered that after spending four years in prison, Ms. Knox was acquitted for the death of Ms. Kercher, a 21-year-old student from England who was murdered in the house they shared.

People forget “that she, too, is a victim in this case,” said Luca Luparia Donati, the director of the Italy Innocence Project, who is representing Ms. Knox in a slander case.

Ms. Knox, who was 20 at the time of the killing, was twice convicted with her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, of Ms. Kercher’s murder, but they were cleared in 2015. The only person definitively convicted of the crime, Rudy Guede, was released in 2021 after serving 13 years of a 16-year sentence.

Yet for many locals, as well as Italians nationwide, Ms. Knox may never shake off an image crafted in court, and magnified by the world’s media, as a diabolical, sex-crazed woman who murdered Ms. Kercher during what prosecutors initially described as a sex game gone wrong.

She has since rebuilt her life in the United States as an advocate for people incarcerated for crimes they did not commit and a campaigner for criminal justice reform. But the events of Perugia have never been far behind, and she has repeatedly tried to have her voice heard.

She exhaustively laid out her defense in a 2013 memoir, she participated in a 2016 true-crime documentary on Netflix, and she has written podcasts about it. The series currently being filmed for Hulu is co-produced by the company she formed with her husband, Christopher Robinson.

Mr. Sollecito and Mr. Guede have also both written memoirs, and Giuliano Mignini, the case’s lead prosecutor, has written a book about the trial.

While Ms. Knox may be trying to set the record straight, Ms. Kercher’s sister, Stephanie Kercher, said in a statement quoted by the British news media this week, “Our family has been through so much, and it is difficult to understand how this serves any purpose.”

A producer for the series did not respond to a request for comment. Apart from a few days in Perugia, much of the shooting will take place in other parts of Italy and in a film studio elsewhere in Europe.

Perugia is eager to overcome the sinister moment in its 2,400-year history.

Paolo Mariotti, the president of a downtown business association, noted that “Perugia is a provincial city” not accustomed to such headline-grabbing crimes or the attention they bring. It is also a university city that has drawn exchange students from around the world, he said, and the killing hardly sent a message that they would be safe there.

In her letter, Mayor Fernandi said that City Hall was powerless to stop such a production from filming in Perugia, and that she hoped the series would show the city in its best light.

“I wanted to give Perugia a chance for redemption, an opportunity to show itself, even if part of a tragedy, for what it is,” she wrote in a letter published in several newspapers last week. “Yet in trying to protect the image of the city, for a moment I lost sight of people, and their pain which remains raw.”

Mr. Mariotti said it would have been opportune for the Hulu production to shoot in another city in Umbria, the region where Perugia is situated. “They are medieval, ancient, with narrow streets,” he said. “Wherever they shot would have been identical.”

A 68-year-old Russian doctor was convicted on Tuesday and sentenced to five and a half years in prison, according to her legal team, on accusations that she told a young boy during a medical appointment that his father, who was killed while fighting in Ukraine, deserved to die.

The conviction of the Moscow pediatrician, Nadezhda Buyanova, is one of a flurry of criminal cases punishing ordinary Russians for voicing opposition to the war. But it is unusual because it relied in part on the testimony of a 7-year-old boy, whose mother originally said he was not in the room to hear the doctor’s comments but then changed her account a month later and allowed her son to be interviewed for the case.

Ms. Buyanova was charged with “disseminating false information” about Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine. She denied the accusation in court, saying that she did not discuss the war with the boy.

The court did not allow the boy to be questioned during the trial; instead, prosecutors submitted minutes of a pretrial interview. A lawyer for Ms. Buyanova questioned the veracity of the statement, saying that the notes read like a prepared narrative with words and syntax too complex for a 7-year old.

“Those phrases like ‘legitimate target’ and ‘aggression’ — I very much doubt that a young child can say that, let alone remember and repeat it,” the lawyer, Leonid Solovyev, said in an interview.

The case has provoked condemnation among rights groups and health care workers, more than 1,000 of whom signed an open letter posted on social media this year in support of Ms. Buyanova. The case, they said in the letter, sends a “strong signal to young people: Don’t enter the medical profession, don’t help people — they can always speak against you, and you will land in jail.”

Some doctors also recorded a video protesting the charges, filming at their hospitals or clinics.

Ms. Buyanova’s legal troubles began at the end of January when a 34-year old divorced mother of two posted a teary-eyed video online as she was walking away from a doctor’s appointment on a snow-covered street in Moscow.

The woman, Anastasia Akinshina, said that when the doctor on duty asked why her 7-year old boy was misbehaving, she explained that her son had anxiety issues because his father had been killed in Ukraine. Ms. Akinshina said the doctor had replied that her husband was a “legitimate target” for Ukrainian troops.

“I won’t let them sweep it up under the carpet!” Ms. Akinshina, visibly distraught, yelled in the video.

“Where do I go to complain,” she asked, so that the doctor would get “kicked out of this country or sent to prison?”

The video was picked up by the pro-Kremlin news media, and soon Alexander I. Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, which deals with high-profile crimes, took the case under his personal control.

“The fact that Bastrykin paid attention to it played a key role here,” Mr. Solovyev, the lawyer, said in the interview.

“I hear a lot from law enforcement officials that they receive a lot of denunciations: Neighbors complain about neighbors, spouses against spouses,” he said, adding, “but those complaints mostly die” at a lower level.

Mr. Bastrykin’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Memorial, the Russian rights organization that received the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, has listed Ms. Buyanova as a political prisoner. It asserts that Mr. Bastrykin’s personal intervention likely sparked the prosecution of a crime that was never committed.

After such a high-placed intervention, Memorial said in a statement, “law enforcement officials typically have to react and launch criminal prosecution even with a glaring lack of criminal offense, often resorting to the falsification of evidence.”

Russia keeps nearly 800 political prisoners behind bars, most of them convicted or facing charges for opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to Memorial.

The Kremlin has typically used a law banning “fake news” about the Russian army to go after high-profile political opponents. They include Ilya Yashin, who was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison in late 2022 for speaking out against Russian atrocities in the Ukrainian town of Bucha (Mr. Yashin was released in a multicountry prisoner exchange in August); and Aleksei Gorinov, a Moscow lawmaker jailed for seven years for calling for a moment of silence for the victims in Ukraine.

But the Russian authorities have in recent months ramped up the prosecution of any expression of antiwar sentiment, and investigators have grown eager to handle those cases to improve their crime statistics. Often the prosecutions stem from Russians who report their fellow citizens’ supposed transgressions.

In April, a court in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk arrested a butcher from a local farmers market after a stall owner whose son was fighting in Ukraine denounced him for antiwar views. In southern Russia, a court in January sentenced a 72-year-old woman to five and a half years in prison for spreading “fake news” about the Russian army in two social media posts.

In Ms. Buyanova’s case, prosecutors presented no ironclad evidence that the doctor spoke out against the war.

There was no audio recording from inside the room, and CCTV footage showed the boy walking out the door alone before the mother and doctor came outside together, according to reporters who viewed the video in court.

A month after an investigation into the episode was launched, Ms Akinshina said she now remembered that her son was in the room when Dr. Buyanova was said to have made the antiwar comments.

The doctor’s defense believes Ms. Buyanova was targeted for her Ukrainian heritage.

Ms. Akinshina told the court last month that “pieces of the puzzle came together” when she found out that Dr. Buyanova, who has practiced medicine for almost four decades, was born in Lviv, western Ukraine. “Western Ukraine hates Russians,” Ms. Akinshina said in court. “They don’t even hide that.”

Ms. Buyanova, who broke into tears during a hearing last week, rejected the accusation. “I’m related to the three ethnicities: Russia, Ukrainian and Belarusian,” she said. “I don’t want to have to choose between the three of them.”

Nikolai Lyaskin, a rare Russian opposition figure still in Russia, last week described the doctor’s prosecution as an “extremely dangerous precedent: Any ‘patriot’ whose feelings were hurt can now write a complaint and send anyone to jail.”

Russia’s domestic intelligence agency patrols the meandering river, alongside cameras, watchtowers and three rows of barbed-wire fencing.

But Russia itself is almost 200 miles away. And by January, the Russian officers will start leaving.

This is the border between Iran and Armenia, a 30-mile strip that is a pivot point of a head-spinning geopolitical shift. Here in the Caucasus, the mountainous region where Europe meets Asia, Russia and Iran are increasingly seen as rivals, while Western countries are — surprisingly — finding some common cause with Tehran.

This complex, multicountry knot of interests and influences challenges Western conventional wisdom about alliances and could be upended yet again by the re-election of Donald J. Trump in the United States.

In a rare interview last week, Iran’s ambassador in Armenia, Mehdi Sobhani, acknowledged the diverging interests of Russia and Iran in the region, rather than the “strategic partnership” they often profess, banding together against the United States.

“We are not allies,” Mr. Sobhani said. “We have some differences, and we have some mutual interests. It doesn’t mean that we are allied.”

Armenia, a majority-Christian democracy, is at the center of the Russia-Iran rivalry. It is also unsettled by the prospect of renewed war with its archenemy, Azerbaijan, which is taking a major step on the world stage this week by hosting global leaders for the annual United Nations climate conference known as COP.

In the last year, Armenia has looked to Iran, its southern neighbor, as the main guarantor of its sovereignty, while Azerbaijan, a majority-Muslim, secular autocracy, has been deepening military ties with Iran’s own nemesis, Israel.

Russia is racing to contain Iran’s expanding influence in Armenia, a former Soviet republic at a crossroads of trade routes that Moscow needs to replace Western imports. Complicating matters, some Western countries currently in conflict with Iran see their interests in the Caucasus — preventing war and reducing Russian influence — aligned with those of Tehran.

Markus Ritter, who heads a European Union mission monitoring Armenia’s borders, said the Iranians “are here in the region, the best friends of the Armenians.” While Russia and Azerbaijan bristle at the European presence, he said, Iran seems to accept it.

“It’s very complicated here,” he notes.

In the coming Trump presidency, Armenians fear, a harsher U.S. policy toward Iran could ricochet against their country and embolden Azerbaijan. If the current conflict between Iran and Israel, fueled by the fighting in Gaza and Lebanon, escalates into a full-scale war, they also worry that Tehran would be less able to protect Armenia.

Until recently, many Armenians saw Russia as their guarantor. Russia was a haven during the Armenian genocide a century ago. After the Soviet Union’s fall, Russia kept a military base in Armenia and guards at its borders. In 2020, when Azerbaijan waged a 44-day war against Armenia to retake the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, the mediation of President Vladimir V. Putin and the deployment of Russian peacekeepers brought the fighting to an end.

But then Russia invaded Ukraine, leaving it distracted and weakened in the Caucasus. When Azerbaijan last year again attacked Nagorno-Karabakh — a breakaway Armenian enclave within Azerbaijani territory — Russian forces stood by and later departed.

The latest round of tensions over the region’s future revolves around a thin strip of Armenian land, Syunik Province, snaking south to the border with Iran. The road from Yerevan, the capital, passes berms, machine gun nests and Armenian flags on hilltops. It is bounded on both sides by Azerbaijani territory.

Clogging the winding road is a stream of Iranian trucks.

For the moment, the road is a key route north from the Persian Gulf and critical for exporting Iranian goods to Russia and to Europe. But it is also where Russia and Azerbaijan want to establish an east-west route toward Turkey that would be outside Armenia’s control — a route that Armenians fear Azerbaijan could take by force.

“It’s quite the peculiar situation,” said Alen Shadunts, an Iran specialist at the American University of Armenia. “Iran, on the one hand, is moving towards a strategic partnership with Russia in other areas, but in the South Caucasus, there is an evident disalignment of interests and positions.”

Armenia rejects the idea of any road or rail corridor on its territory that it does not control. Iran is also opposed, fearing the blocking of its northern border. When Russia’s foreign minister called on Armenia to accept the corridor in August, Iran summoned Russia’s ambassador in protest — a rare display of discord between Moscow and Tehran.

“We cannot accept the change of the international border,” said Mr. Sobhani, the Iranian ambassador.

Iran and Russia also appear out of sync in the Middle East, where Mr. Putin has tried to position Russia as a mediator between Israel and Iran, rather than throwing his support behind Tehran. Still, officials in Moscow insist that the two countries remain united in opposing what both see as Western hegemony.

“Russia and Iran are allies in the broad sense of the word,” said Konstantin Zatulin, a Russian lawmaker, “which does not at all exclude some differences in the details.”

On Armenia’s southern border, however, the competition between Russia and Iran is playing out in real time. Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, the F.S.B., still patrols the frontier.

When a Times reporter and photographer visited this month, the border settlement of Agarak was celebrating its 75th anniversary. It owes its origins to a Soviet copper mine.

Russians joined Armenians in packing into a municipal office for early-afternoon toasts. The mayor, Khachatur Andreasyan, raised a glass of 10-year Ararat brandy to the Russians: “Thank you for being here, thank you for working with us,” he said. A Russian diplomat in attendance, Igor Titov, hailed the “heroic and hardworking” locals.

It felt like the glimmer of a passing era. Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, announced an agreement with Mr. Putin last month under which Russia would withdraw its guards from the border crossing at Agarak by January. Earlier this year, Mr. Pashinyan said he was freezing Armenia’s participation in a Russian-led military alliance.

Mayor Andreasyan made it clear that he was looking elsewhere when it came to security.

“We know that if something happens, Iran will definitely be with us,” the mayor said in an interview, adding that he had discussed the matter with Iranian officials. “They all confirm that if, God forbid, someone attacks Syunik, we will fight alongside you.”

Mayor Andreasyan said his town’s engagement with Iran had flourished since 2022, when Tehran opened a consulate in the regional capital, Kapan — where Russia is now working to do the same.

Mr. Sobhani declined to say what Iran would do if Azerbaijan attacked, responding: “It will not happen.”

Azerbaijan says it wants peace. It has also sought to contain tensions with Iran, which flared after an attack on the Azerbaijani Embassy in Tehran last year.

President Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s leader, said last week, “We have achieved what we wanted,” adding, “Islamophobes and Azerbaijanophobes in certain Western capitals are inciting Armenia to start a new war.”

The Biden administration has pushed Azerbaijan and Armenia to hold peace talks. Some current and former Armenian officials said there had been progress recently, but that Mr. Trump was a wild card. They fear a combination of less American attention and a harder line on Iran, which they see as playing a constructive role in the Caucasus.

Areg Kochinyan, an Armenian former security official who runs a think tank in Yerevan, said, “The bad guys in other regions may all of a sudden not be that bad in this region.” He added that the waning of U.S. attention and pressure on Iran “creates a possibility that there will be a vacuum of stabilizing force in the region.”

European countries have their own balancing act. E.U. leaders have been deepening ties with Azerbaijan, despite human rights concerns, because the oil- and gas-rich country provides alternatives to Russian energy. They also recognize the country’s importance to Israel, which gets much of its oil from Azerbaijan, sells weapons to Azerbaijan, and sees strategic value in having close ties with a neighbor of Iran.

Mr. Ritter, the E.U. mission chief, said that both Armenia and Azerbaijan were building bunkers, trenches and artillery positions “to prepare for the worst case.”

Midway along Armenia’s narrow border with Iran, with Azerbaijan roughly 10 miles away, is the abandoned Soviet-era station of Meghri, where rusting train cars stand in the weeds, frozen in time. The line is a symbol of a once interconnected Caucasus under Soviet rule and a reminder of the regional pivot point that the area still represents.

Rima Galstyan, 79, who lives nearby, said that she feared an Azerbaijani invasion. She said that Iran had protected the area in the past, while acknowledging, “We used to love the Russians so, so much.” But things have changed.

“I don’t trust anyone now,” she said.