They came forward in small groups at first. And then they spoke out in waves.

Over the past two years, dozens of people, mostly men in their 50s and 60s, have reported being sexually abused at schools run by Catholic orders in Ireland.

Their accounts only hint at the magnitude of a national scandal, experts say. In September, a preliminary government inquiry identified almost 2,400 allegations of sexual abuse in religious schools between the 1960s and the 1990s, and 884 alleged abusers. Norma Foley, Ireland’s minister for education, said the scale of abuse was “truly shocking,” and has ordered a full government investigation.

While Ireland has long grappled with the legacy of abuse within Catholic church institutions, the latest revelations shed light on how dozens of schools allegedly harbored serial abusers for decades.

The fight for accountability has been led by a cohort of older men who are challenging taboos around sexual abuse, masculinity and shame.

“Their numbers are so big, and the ripple effect of harm must bring some impact on broader Irish society,” said Tim Chapman, an academic and a practitioner of “restorative justice,” a process that helps people harmed by a crime to communicate with those responsible and to find some resolution.

The reckoning began in 2021 when several former students from two private boys’ schools, Willow Park School and Blackrock College, began discussing their experiences of abuse in a Facebook alumni group. The following year, Ireland’s national broadcaster RTÉ aired a documentary called “Blackrock Boys” that featured the harrowing testimony of two brothers abused for years at the college.

Both Willow Park and Blackrock are run by a Roman Catholic order called the Spiritans. In November 2022, the leader of the Spiritans then, Father Martin Kelly, issued a formal apology to the victims at Blackrock, in which he said, “What was done to you as innocent children was cruel and indefensible.”

Since then, accounts have poured in from alumni of schools run by other Catholic orders in Ireland.

Mr. Chapman was first contacted by Blackrock survivors in 2021 and then was hired by the Spiritans to facilitate dialogue between the religious order and the survivors and victims of abuse. “As I often put it to these men, you can stand up for the child inside you,” he said. “Now, they can tell their story.”

John Coulter, 63

John Coulter attended Willow Park School and Blackrock College in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He has visceral memories of two priests, he said: one who molested students as he taught music, and another, a math teacher, who leaned students over the desks in class and rubbed himself on them. Mr. Coulter still remembers the smell of one man and the way spit would cling to the corners of his mouth.

Mr. Coulter was in the alumni Facebook group in 2021, when friends began recounting their experiences of abuse. “In our time alone, there are 10 people that we now know were molesting, abusing, raping boys,” he said.

As the scale of abuse became clear, the men decided they wanted to act. They established a nonprofit advocacy group, Restore Together, to collectively demand accountability. As a result, the Spiritans are now funding counseling for survivors and are currently formalizing a financial reparations program.

“You get to your 60s or late 50s and maybe you’ve got a little bit more capacity for dealing with this,” Mr. Coulter said.

Corry McMahon, 65

Corry McMahon was on the train between Dublin and its affluent southern suburbs when he saw an email with the Spiritans’ official apology to victims. He wept.

The setting was particularly meaningful: It was the same train route, hugging the scenic coast of Dublin Bay, that he used to take as a child heading to Willow Park and then Blackrock College, which share a campus. “I think about it more on this train,” he said, speaking of the abuse he and his classmates endured.

He said he was abused at 12 by two priests and a lay teacher. As a member of Restore Together, he and three classmates held a news conference in November 2022 to encourage others to come forward, helping break the taboo around speaking out.

“Picture a 12-year-old child that you know. That was the shape of us,” he said then, his voice breaking.

While he welcomes the government’s pledge to investigate, he worries that the full inquiry will be too slow. “There are guys that we know that need things to be done now,” he said. “This is the time to deal with it, not in 10 years when a number of them are dead.”

Ireland’s Department of Education said in a statement that it was “keenly aware of the importance of immediate action on the issue of historical sexual abuse to survivors,” and that it would establish the terms of its inquiry “in the shortest possible time frame.”

Michael O’Keeffe, 65

Michael O’Keeffe, who was born with a visual impairment, was 8 years old when he was sent to St. Joseph’s School for the Visually Impaired in Dublin. At the time, the residential school was run by the Rosminians Catholic religious order.

He says he endured sexual and physical violence there, including being beaten by one cleric, Louis Summerling, who has since died but who was the subject of previous sexual abuse allegations by another former student.

Mr. O’Keeffe said he was forced to remove his trousers and bend over the cleric’s knee while he was beaten with a hairbrush.

“I remember the shame and humiliation experienced as a young boy, possibly aged only 11, from this so-called man of God,” he said, adding: “We just felt we didn’t have the power to stand up to these people.”

He reported the violence to the police 15 years ago, he said, but an investigation went nowhere.

The Association of Leaders of Missionaries and Religious of Ireland, or AMRI, which oversees the work of the Rosminians in Ireland, as well as dozens of other Catholic religious orders, said in a statement it was “deeply sorry” for the abuse in religious-run schools.

Mr. O’Keeffe, a retired assistant professor who used to teach at Dublin City University, decided to share his story with The Irish Times after the abuse at Blackrock made national headlines and the government’s preliminary inquiry was released.

“In Ireland, we just didn’t talk about these things,” he said. “In some ways, we didn’t have the language to do it until now. So this is giving people permission.”

Mark Vincent Healy, 64

Mark Vincent Healy attended St. Mary’s College in Dublin, also run by the Spiritans. Between 1969, when he was 9, and 1973, he says he was sexually abused by two priests.

“I felt simply that I was destroyed by it, by the reality of my childhood,” he said.

He had a breakdown as an adult before becoming an advocate for victims. While there is often a focus on the crimes that were committed, “what isn’t always told is how your life is entirely ripped apart,” Mr. Healy said. “Economically, socially — all of your relationships are impacted.”

Mr. Healy is one of the few victims to succeed with a criminal case against one of the priests, Henry Maloney. Mr. Maloney, who has since died, pleaded guilty in 2009 to abusing Mr. Healy and another boy when they were pupils at St. Mary’s College.

Mr. Healy wants more than a government inquiry, including more robust mental health support for survivors. “If you don’t learn those lessons of the past, you are certainly not protecting the children of the present,” he said.

Hazem Isleem, a Palestinian truck driver, was passing through the ruins of southern Gaza last month with a truckload of aid when armed looters ambushed his convoy.

One of the gunmen broke into his truck, forcing him to drive to a nearby field and unload thousands of pounds of flour intended for hungry Palestinians, he said by phone from Gaza. By the next morning, the gang had stripped virtually all of the supplies from the convoy of about 100 trucks of United Nations aid, enough to feed tens of thousands of people, in what the United Nations described as one of the worst such episodes of the war.

“It was terrifying,” said Mr. Isleem, 47, whom the looters held for 13 hours while they pillaged the flour. “But the worst part was we weren’t able to deliver the food to the people.”

Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza in response to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack last year has unleashed a humanitarian crisis in the enclave, with more than 45,000 people dead, according to local health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Hunger is widespread, and Israel has placed restrictions on the entry of aid into Gaza and blocked movement of aid trucks between the north and south.

Though Hamas has been routed in much of the territory, Israel has not put an alternative government in place. In parts of southern Gaza, armed gangs have filled the resulting power vacuum, leaving aid groups unwilling to risk delivering supplies.

The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said this month that it would no longer deliver aid through Kerem Shalom, the main border crossing between Israel and southern Gaza, because of the breakdown in law and order.

Hundreds of truckloads of relief are piling up at the crossing in part because aid groups fear they will be looted.

What began as smaller-scale attempts to seize aid early in the year — often by hungry Gazans — has now become “systematic, tactical, armed, crime-syndicate looting” by organized groups, said Georgios Petropoulos, a senior U.N. official based in the southern city of Rafah. “This is just larceny writ large,” he said.

This article is based on more than 20 interviews with Israeli and U.N. officials, aid workers, Gaza residents and Palestinian businessmen. The New York Times also reviewed internal U.N. memos in which officials discussed the looting and its consequences.

The situation in Gaza deteriorated after the Israeli military invaded Rafah in May, seeking to oust Hamas from one of its final strongholds. Hamas’s security forces fled, and organized gangs — with no one stopping them — began intercepting aid trucks as they headed from the main border crossing into southern Gaza. They are stealing flour, oil and other commodities and selling them at astronomical prices, aid groups and residents say.

In southern Gaza, the price of a 55-pound sack of flour has risen to as much as $220. In northern Gaza, where there are fewer aid disruptions, the same sack can cost as little as $10.

International aid workers have accused Israel of ignoring the problem and allowing looters to act with impunity. The United Nations does not allow Israeli soldiers to protect aid convoys, fearing that would compromise its neutrality, and its officials have called on Israel to allow the Gaza police, which are under Hamas’s authority, to secure their convoys.

Israel, which seeks to uproot Hamas, accuses the group of stealing international aid and says that the police are just another arm of the militant group. They have repeatedly targeted Hamas’s police force, severely weakening it, and police officers are rarely seen in much of Gaza, residents say.

Over the past two weeks, Israel has allowed some aid trucks to travel along Gaza’s border with Egypt, a new route fully controlled by the Israeli military. U.N. agencies have been able to avoid looters and deliver some relief.

But that has not done enough to address the shortfall in aid, aid groups and residents say. The high prices of goods sold by looters have contributed to desperate scenes among ordinary Gazans fighting for what little affordable food is available.

In late November, crowds had already gathered at Zadna bakery in the central city of Deir al Balah hours before it opened, hoping to buy a 20-piece bag of bread for the U.N.-subsidized price of $1. Suddenly, mayhem broke loose as ordinary people in the crowd — some brandishing knives — pushed to reach the front of the line, said Abdelhalim Awad, the bakery’s owner.

During the commotion, gunshots rang out. Two women were killed and others were injured, he said, and a third later died of her wounds.

With unrest rising, all of the U.N.-backed bakeries in southern and central Gaza have closed their doors for now.

“Today, the ordinary Gazan’s dream, his aspiration, is to obtain a piece of bread,” Mr. Awad said. “I can’t say anything sadder than that.”

Gazan transportation company owners, truck drivers and aid groups say multiple gangs have participated in looting recently. But many people involved in aid delivery named Yasser Abu Shabab, 35, as the man who runs the most sophisticated operation.

They say Mr. Abu Shabab’s gang dominates much of the Nasr neighborhood in eastern Rafah, which the war has transformed into a wasteland. Mr. Petropoulos, the U.N. official, called him “the self-styled power broker of east Rafah.”

Mr. Isleem, the truck driver who was ambushed in Rafah, said the looters who captured him told him that Mr. Abu Shabab was their boss. Awad Abid, a displaced Gazan who said he had tried to buy flour from Mr. Abu Shabab’s gang in Rafah, said he had seen gunmen guarding warehouses containing stolen cartons of U.N.-marked aid.

“I asked one of them for a sack of flour to feed my children,” Mr. Abid said, “and he raised a pistol at me.”

Mr. Abu Shabab denied looting aid trucks on a large scale, although he conceded that his men — armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles — had raided half a dozen or so since the start of the war.

“We are taking trucks so we can eat, not so we can sell,” he said in a phone interview, claiming he was feeding his family and neighbors. “Every hungry person is taking aid.” He accused Hamas of being primarily responsible for stealing the aid, a claim that Hamas has denied.

The looters’ chokehold on supplies and soaring prices are undermining Hamas in the areas that it still controls. On Nov. 25, Hamas’s security forces raided Mr. Abu Shabab’s neighborhood, killing more than 20 people, including his brother, Mr. Abu Shabab said.

Official Hamas media reported at the time that its forces had killed 20 members of “gangs of thieves who were stealing aid.”

As looters have run rampant in areas nominally controlled by the Israeli military, truck drivers and aid workers have suggested the Israeli military mostly turns a blind eye.

“There is continued tolerance by the Israel Defense Forces of unacceptable amounts of looting of areas that are ostensibly and de facto under their military control,” Mr. Petropoulos said.

At times, Israeli tanks have deployed along main roads where aid trucks travel. And Israeli ministers have said they debated authorizing private security contractors to protect international aid convoys inside Gaza.

Until recently, Israeli forces largely did not target the looters unless they were affiliated with Hamas or other militant groups, according to U.N. officials. But that appears to have changed in recent weeks.

In Israeli military drone footage viewed by The Times, looters can be seen confiscating white sacks of aid from cars in southern Gaza in November. Minutes later, an Israeli airstrike killed them, the footage appears to show.

Shani Sasson, a spokeswoman for the Israeli military agency that regulates aid to Gaza, said Israeli forces were targeting armed looters who attacked convoys, not just those affiliated with Hamas. She denied that Israel was providing any immunity to criminal gangs stealing aid.

In late November, Israeli forces opened fire on looters waiting to waylay trucks in Rafah, forcing them to retreat, according to an internal U.N. memo. With the path cleared, U.N. aid trucks rushed toward central Gaza.

But the gangs were far from deterred.

The looters soon regrouped and hijacked them on the road, the U.N. memo said. The trucks were stripped bare.

Abu Bakr Bashir and Bilal Shbair contributed reporting from Deir al Balah, Gaza.

Days after an attacker driving an S.U.V. killed five people at a Christmas market in eastern Germany, calls for solidarity have given way to political sniping, as questions grew on Monday about the authorities’ inability to prevent the deaths.

The police are holding a Saudi refugee, a 50-year-old doctor, who they say carried out the attack. His detention brought concerns about immigration and security back to the fore, with political leaders on Monday looking to position themselves on those hot-button issues ahead of snap elections scheduled for February.

Despite calls not to use the attack for political purposes, criticism of the German government — including from Elon Musk — has cropped up from all sides. The fallout looks likely to supercharge what was already shaping up to be a brief, intense campaign following the collapse of the government after Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in Parliament last week.

The hard-right Alternative for Germany party called for a demonstration on Monday in Magdeburg, the town where the attack took place, to mourn the victims. But in a social media post, the party’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, made clear that the event would also be used for political purposes.

“Magdeburg would not have been possible without uncontrolled immigration,” said Ms. Weidel, whose party has been polling in second place in recent months, behind the conservative Christian Democrats. She added, “The state must protect its citizens through a restrictive migration policy and consistent deportations!”

The attacker in Magdeburg plowed an S.U.V. into the city’s main Christmas market on Friday, killing a 9-year-old boy and four women, the police said, and wounding more than 200 others. As more indications have emerged that the authorities had been alerted to the erratic behavior of the suspect, demands have also increased for answers to why the warnings were not taken more seriously.

In the state of Saxony-Anhalt, of which Magdeburg is the capital, lawmakers called an emergency session on Monday to examine those questions, as well as how, despite extensive security measures, the attack was possible. Members of the center-left Social Democrats, Mr. Scholz’s party, have said that they will grill the state’s interior minister, Tamara Zieschang, a member of the Christian Democrats, who control Saxony-Anhalt. Each side has blamed the other for weaknesses in the system that led to the attack.

At the national level, Germany’s top security official, Nancy Faeser, who is also a Social Democrat, called for opposition parties to support bills proposed before the government collapsed, which she said would strengthen the federal police and allow for increased observation of foreigners in Germany.

“All of this proposed legislation could be passed if the conservatives and the Free Democrats would stop blocking,” Ms Faeser said in an interview with Der Spiegel, a German newspaper, referring to rivals of her party in Parliament.

But the Christian Democrats blamed Mr. Scholz and his party for what they saw as a decline in trust in the police over the three years he has been in office.

The Social Democrat-led government “has unfortunately contributed to sowing mistrust against our security forces instead of strengthening our officers,” Thorsten Frei, a Christian Democratic lawmaker, told the German newspaper Rheinische Post.

Security officials in Germany have acknowledged receiving alerts about the suspect before the market attack, including tipoffs from Saudi Arabia about his extreme views. The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees said it had also received a prior warning about the suspect, though it did not specify where the alert came from, and the German branch of the Atheist Refugee Relief, an activist organization, said that it had taken him to court in Cologne over what it called a “defamation campaign” involving “aggressive” accusations against the group.

Lars Castellucci, a Social Democrat and head of the internal affairs committee in the German Parliament, said on Monday that he would call security service chiefs to an extraordinary meeting next week to try to understand why the suspect, who has been identified only as Taleb A. in keeping with German privacy laws, was not under closer observation.

“He was in no way unknown to officials,” Mr. Castellucci said. “We have to minutely retrace why we were not vigilant enough.”

Marco Buschmann, a leader of the Free Democrats, which quit Mr. Scholz’s government last month, leading to its collapse, called for Germany’s security systems to be examined and reorganized. But he also appealed to political rivals not to use the attack to gain ground in the election campaign.

“Our task is to stand by the victims and their families,” he said.

Elon Musk, who has already provoked the ire of German leaders by wading into their country’s politics with social media posts, wrote another message hours after the attack, calling Mr. Scholz an “incompetent fool” who should resign immediately. The remark was the latest in series of postings that the billionaire has made about German politics, including expressing support for the Alternative for Germany party.

While members of Mr. Scholz’s party have expressed outrage and concern about Mr. Musk’s interfering in the German election, the chancellor has taken a different tack.

“We have freedom of opinion” in Germany, Mr. Scholz told reporters on Friday. “This also applies to multibillionaires.”

For years, North Korea’s military has helped its leader, Kim Jong-un, keep control of his people and provide a buffer against the country’s sworn enemy, South Korea. With 1.3 million members, the North’s army is among the world’s largest conventional armed forces.

Now, with more than 11,000 North Korean troops fighting alongside Russian forces against Ukraine, it’s playing a more prominent role in Mr. Kim’s geopolitical gambit for much-needed cash and diplomatic leverage.

The troops that North Korea deployed are from its “​Storm” Corps​, special forces that are among the military’s best trained ​and most heavily indoctrinated. But they were badly prepared for​ drone attacks and the unfamiliar terrain far from their isolated homeland, according to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service.

More than 100 of them were killed and 1,000 others wounded in their first battles, the intelligence agency told South Korean lawmakers in a briefing on Thursday. The agency said a general-ranking officer may be among those killed, according to Lee Seong-kweun, a lawmaker who spoke to reporters after the closed-door briefing.

The agency said Mr. Kim appeared to be preparing to send more troops to Russia, as he sees Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II as an opportunity to advance his own military and diplomatic ambitions.

Here is what to know about the North Korean military and the troops Mr. Kim sent in his country’s first major intervention in an overseas conflict.

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