When around 100 criminal investigators and police officers entered a hilly compound in central Seoul on Friday morning, they tried to achieve something that has never been done before in South Korea: detain a sitting president.

First, they made it through two blockades formed by parked vehicles and people. Then, when they came within 650 feet of the building where President Yoon Suk Yeol was believed to be holed up, they came face to face with an even more formidable barrier: 10 buses and cars along with 200 elite soldiers and bodyguards belonging to Mr. Yoon’s Presidential Security Service. Small scuffles erupted as the investigators tried in vain to break through and serve a court-issued warrant to take Mr. Yoon away.

Three prosecutors were allowed to approach the building. But there, Mr. Yoon’s lawyers told them that they could not serve the warrant because it was “illegally” issued, according to officials who briefed news media about what happened inside the compound.

Outnumbered, the 100 officials retreated after a five-and-a-half-hour standoff.

“It’s deeply regrettable,” the Corruption Investigation Office for High-Ranking Officials, the independent government agency that led the raid into the presidential compound on Friday, said in a statement. It accused Mr. Yoon — who has already been suspended from office after being impeached by Parliament last month — of refusing to honor a court-issued warrant. “We will discuss what our next step should be.”

The failure to bring in the deeply unpopular president deepened a growing sense of helplessness among South Koreans, exacerbated by the country’s sharply polarized politics. The nation appears rudderless and distracted by infighting at a time when it faces major challenges at home and on the international scene.

There is already uncertainty around its alliance with the United States as the unpredictable Donald J. Trump prepares to return to the White House. Seoul’s decades-old foe North Korea has sought to score propaganda points from the South’s political quagmire, with its state media reporting that its neighbor was in “paralysis of its state administration and spiraling sociopolitical confusion.”

And, at home, the crash of a Jeju Air passenger jet that killed 179 of the 181 people on board on Sunday has added to challenges that include widespread labor strikes and rising household debts. On Thursday, the finance ministry sharply downgraded its growth forecast for 2025.

A Constitutional Court is deliberating whether to remove Mr. Yoon, who was impeached on Dec. 14 by the National Assembly. That came after he abruptly declared martial law 11 days earlier, prompting national outrage and calls for his ouster.

On Friday, the besieged Mr. Yoon vowed to fight to return to office through the Constitutional Court trial and showed he had no intention of voluntarily subjecting himself to criminal investigations. Mr. Yoon faces accusations that he committed insurrection by sending armed troops into the National Assembly during his short-lived military rule.

By refusing to honor the warrant, Mr. Yoon “kept adding more reasons he should be removed from office through impeachment,” said Lim Ji-bong, a professor of law at Sogang University in Seoul.

“He may think he survived today, but what he did today would not go down very well with the justices at the Constitutional Court and judges who would eventually try his insurrection case.”

Mr. Yoon is not the first South Korean politician who has defied court warrants to detain them. In 1995, prosecutors wanted to question the former military dictator Chun Doo-hwan on insurrection and mutiny charges stemming from his role in a 1979 coup and a massacre of demonstrators the following year. He defied the summons and headed to his southern hometown, trailed by a crowd of supporters.

The prosecutors chased him there. After an overnight standoff, Mr. Chun surrendered himself.

But unlike Mr. Yoon, Mr. Chun was out of office when he faced the insurrection charge. Mr. Yoon, though suspended, is still guarded with the full support of his Presidential Security Service, a government agency that hires teams of elite bodyguards and anti-terrorist experts selected from the police, military and other government services.

“People who have seen him rely on his bodyguards as a shield against his legal trouble will see him as a coward,” Mr. Lim said.

The investigators warned that they would charge the presidential bodyguards with obstruction of justice.

“We will do everything we can to provide security for the object of our service according to laws and principles,” the Presidential Security Service said in a statement.

Public surveys showed that a majority of South Koreans wanted Mr. Yoon ousted and punished for insurrection. But his governing party, which opposed his impeachment, denounced attempts to hold him.

Mr. Yoon also has die-hard supporters — mostly among mostly older South Koreans. Thousands of his supporters have been camped out for days on the pavement, chanting, “Let’s protect Yoon Suk Yeol!”

In a message delivered on New Year’s Day, Mr. Yoon called them “citizens who love freedom and democracy” and thanked them for braving the cold weather to show their support out on the street near his home.

“I will fight with you to the end to save this country,” Mr. Yoon said.

When the officials withdrew from Mr. Yoon’s compound, they shouted: “We have won!”

Protesters who have been clamoring for Mr. Yoon’s arrest began gathering again on Friday, marching near Mr. Yoon’s residence and shouting “Arrest Yoon Suk Yeol!” They, as well as the country’s opposition parties, expressed fury over the failure to detain Mr. Yoon, calling his presidential security service “accomplices” in an insurrection.

“I’m so angry,” said Lee Ye-seul, 19, a university student in Seoul. “I will speak out until he is removed and the people involved in the insurrection are punished.”

To Mr. Yoon’s supporters outside his residence, the security service was the last line of defense to save Mr. Yoon.

“The presidential guard should throw grenades if necessary to stop them from coming near the president,” said Lee Young-jin, 65.

But Mr. Yoon’s tactic of stoking political divides to avoid his legal trouble reflected poorly on South Korea, said Ahn Byong-jin, a professor of political science at Kyung Hee University in Seoul.

It “exposed weaknesses in South Korea as a democracy,” he said.

It was another call to action on Friday for the South Korean protest movement that had faced down security forces just a month ago to resist President Yoon Suk Yeol’s declaration of martial law.

Those first mass protests got results: Mr. Yoon’s startling declaration of martial law on Dec. 3 was reversed, then the National Assembly impeached him and opened an investigation into whether he had led an insurrection.

But in the weeks since, paralysis and polarization have set in. And that’s what protesters found on the roads outside Mr. Yoon’s official residence.

A mass of Mr. Yoon’s supporters were already there. They had hurried to his neighborhood after being jolted by the news Friday morning of the move afoot to detain him in connection with his martial law declaration last month. Other Yoon supporters had already been there for days, camped out on the pavement near his home in central Seoul, vowing to block any efforts to detain him.

Law enforcement officials retreated after trying for hours to work their way past Mr. Yoon’s supporters and running up against greater numbers of his personal security team. Their warrant to detain him for official questioning went unserved.

Thousands of anti-Yoon protesters rushed in to face off with thousands of pro-Yoon supporters. For his supporters, it was a moment of joy and defiance. For his detractors, one of bitter frustration.

“I’m so angry,” said Lee Ye-seul, 19, a university student in Seoul, who was marching toward Mr. Yoon’s residence with a crowd of protesters calling for his arrest.

The protesters occupied a section of a road near Mr. Yoon’s residence and planned to camp out overnight. “Detain and arrest Yoon Suk Yeol immediately!” read signs they held up. “Let’s wipe out the accomplices, sympathizers and party of insurrection!”

Kim Yoon-hyeong, 20, called the presence of Mr. Yoon’s supporters “the hard right’s attempt to protect its interests” and dismissed their claims. He said Mr. Yoon could not stay in power.

“It doesn’t make sense to leave a person who declared martial law against the country in office,” he said.

Kang Hye-sun, 57, joined the pro-Yoon protest on Friday afternoon after seeing the news earlier of the plan to detain him. She had learned on YouTube that his supporters were near his residence.

“Yoon Suk Yeol is fighting alone,” she said tearfully. She added that she believed there had been voter fraud in last year’s election, when his ruling party lost the majority in the National Assembly.

She was holding a poster that read, “Stop the steal,” the slogan popularized by former President Donald J. Trump to question the results of the 2020 presidential election in the United States, which he lost.

“What happened to Trump is happening to Yoon Suk Yeol,” she said.

Nearby, leaders of the pro-Yoon protests aired similar conspiratorial claims of mass voter fraud in the last election and called Mr. Yoon’s impeachment by the National Assembly invalid.

One pro-Yoon protester waved her cane at the marchers calling for Yoon’s arrest, shouting, “What country are you from?” Some anti-Yoon marchers urged the police to arrest a pro-Yoon protester whom they accused of spitting at the crowd from a pedestrian overpass overlooking the street.

But police officers in neon yellow jackets surrounded both groups of protesters. There was tension, raised voices, jostling now and then, but no outright violence.

As darkness fell, leaders of the protest calling for the impeached president’s arrest urged demonstrators to sit down as they began to camp out on a road outside Yoon’s residence.

Thousands of protesters continued to chant, “Arrest Yoon Suk Yeol!” while seated on the cold asphalt. Temperatures in Seoul, which hovered a little above freezing on Friday, were expected to drop to 17 degrees Fahrenheit overnight.

Ms. Lee, who planned to stay out through the night, said that she had put on a thick winter coat and brought an extra vest in her backpack.

“I will speak out until he is removed and the people involved in the insurrection are punished,” she said.

They draw millions of poor Pakistani children with the simple promise of free education, meals and housing. For devout families, they offer Islamic learning rooted in ancient tradition.

But to the Pakistani government and Western counterterrorism officials, the religious seminaries known as madrasas also represent a potential threat. The institutions have long been accused of contributing to violence and radicalization, supplying recruits for the Taliban, Al Qaeda and other militant groups.

Now, Pakistan’s Islamic schools are at the center of an intense political clash — one that jeopardizes years of hard-won progress toward bringing the seminaries under the government’s regulatory umbrella.

The conflict goes back to 2019, when the government enacted a sweeping overhaul requiring madrasas to register with the Ministry of Education. The effort, meant to increase accountability for institutions that have historically operated with minimal state oversight, was strongly backed by Pakistan’s military but faced vehement resistance from Islamist political parties.

In October 2024, the largest of those parties, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, secured a deal with the government to end the registration requirement. Under the agreement, madrasas would be registered as they had been before 2019, under a colonial-era law governing charitable, scientific and educational groups. That law provides little oversight of curriculums, activities or funding.

In exchange, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam agreed to support unrelated constitutional amendments on judicial appointments that had set off a firestorm of controversy.

As the end of the year approached, however, the government had still not implemented the change. It cited concerns that reverting to the older system could undermine counterterrorism efforts, weaken oversight and breach international commitments to combat money laundering and terrorism financing.

The delay triggered threats of anti-government protests in Islamabad, the capital, adding to the government’s challenges amid frequent marches by supporters of Imran Khan, the ousted prime minister.

“We are firm on the agreed madrasa registration terms and will ensure they are upheld,” Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the chief of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, warned in Parliament last month. “If the government deviates, the decision won’t be made in Parliament, but on the streets.”

Late last week, the government finally approved the new registration provision, allowing madrasas to choose between modern oversight and the colonial-era framework. The move, in effect, discards the 2019 efforts to reform religious schools in favor of short-term political stability.

When Pakistan was created 77 years ago, madrasas numbered in the dozens. They gained prominence and grew significantly in the 1980s, when U.S. and Arab funding transformed them into recruitment hubs for Islamic volunteers to fight Soviet forces in neighboring Afghanistan. Today, there are about 30,000 madrasas in Pakistan.

Many future Taliban leaders were educated in these institutions, where some teachers endorsed the anti-U.S. ideology of Al Qaeda.

Pakistan came under increased pressure to regulate the religious schools after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, said Abdur Rehman Shah, a madrasa affairs expert affiliated with Tongji University in Shanghai.

“The post-9/11 war on terror and events like the 2005 London bombings raised global concerns about the lack of effective madrasa monitoring,” Mr. Shah said.

After militants attacked a military-run school in northwestern Pakistan in 2014, killing more than 145 people — mostly children — observation of madrasas became central to counterterrorism efforts. Security agencies used GPS to map the schools and carried out raids and interrogations targeting seminaries suspected of militant links, Mr. Shah said.

In 2019, the government established the new regulatory framework to curb Islamist parties’ influence over the seminary boards that govern madrasas. More than 17,500 madrasas enrolling 2.2 million students were registered with the Ministry of Education, according to official data.

Registration streamlined visa processing for international students, as madrasas attracted increasing interest not only from the Pakistani diaspora but also from students in African and Southeast Asian countries.

However, many seminaries, particularly those aligned with Islamist parties, including the country’s largest and most prominent ones, resisted integration into the formal system, citing fear of government interference in religious education.

After the government agreed last October to end the requirement for registration with the Ministry of Education, officials hesitated to move forward in part because of intensified scrutiny from the Financial Action Task Force, a global watchdog based in Paris.

The task force had placed Pakistan on its “gray list” from 2018 to 2022 for deficiencies in combating money laundering and terrorism financing — a designation that often leads to reduced foreign investment and heightened financial oversight.

“F.A.T.F.’s main demand was a crackdown on terrorism financing, particularly targeting U.N.-designated individuals and entities, including their madrasas,” said Sanaa Ahmed, an assistant professor of law at the University of Calgary who researches illicit financial flows and terrorism financing.

To comply with the task force’s requirements, Pakistan in 2019 seized control of several madrasas linked to banned militant groups such as Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba.

But after more than two decades of increased examination of madrasas, education experts argue that the efforts overlook a deeper crisis: the country’s struggling public education system, which fails to meet the needs of millions of children, particularly from low-income families.

Pakistan has the second-highest number of out-of-school children globally, with 22.8 million ages 5 to 16 not attending school — 44 percent of this age group, according to UNICEF.

Madrasas, supported by private donations, partly fill the gaps in the public system. For many poor families, they are the only viable option.

One recent day, in a modest building in a low-income neighborhood in southern Pakistan, the air was filled with young voices reciting verses from the Quran.

Inside, hundreds of young men — some barely in their teens — sat cross-legged on woven mats. Their heads, covered with cotton-knit caps, were bowed over Islamic books, fingers tracing the Arabic script. Some were memorizing the holy verses.

Madrasas emphasize Islamic theology, often with sectarian leanings, and Arabic, a language not widely spoken in Pakistan. While not all of the schools are linked to militancy, many promote a narrow interpretation of Islam, emphasizing doctrinal purity and the defense of Islam against other faiths.

Critical thinking and open dialogue are not primary focuses. Madrasas’ resistance to incorporating subjects like computer science or mathematics leaves graduates ill-equipped for the contemporary job market.

For many families, it is not poverty, but religious conviction, that drives them to enroll children in madrasas.

“I could send my children to private schools to study computers and science, but I’m sending them to a madrasa because I want them to study Islamic education,” said Abdul Wahab, a real estate dealer in Karachi, in southern Pakistan.

Like many devout people in Pakistan, Mr. Wahab believes that a child who memorizes the Quran will bring blessings to the family, including the promise of taking 10 others to paradise in the afterlife.

Despite concerns over radicalization, madrasa administrators say they are unfairly blamed for militancy. “There are many people who go to liberal schools and are radicalized,” said Qari Shahid Gul, a teacher at a madrasa in Karachi.

He cited Saad Aziz, a graduate of a prestigious business school who was sentenced to death after confessing to involvement in several terrorist activities, including the killing of 45 members of the Ismaili sect of Shiite Islam.

“Terrorism must be curbed, but scapegoating madrasas is not the solution,” Mr. Gul said.

For decades, Syria was Iran’s closest Arab ally in the Middle East while the wealthy Persian Gulf monarchies were locked in a competition with Tehran for power and influence across the region.

With the sudden overthrow of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, his close ally Iran has been sidelined. That presents an opportunity for Gulf states to fill the void and develop ties with the new government in Damascus.

The two leading Gulf powers, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are taking a cautious approach, because Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the main rebel faction that has seized control of much of Syria, leans toward Islamism and was once affiliated with the extremist group Al Qaeda.

The two Gulf nations have spent the better part of the past two decades trying to prevent the rise of groups that embrace political Islam across the Middle East, opposing the likes of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Gulf powers have said publicly that the new leaders in Syria must demonstrate that they will be inclusive and tolerant of the country’s diverse array of sects before they can win political and financial support.

Anwar Gargash, a diplomatic adviser to the Emirati president, said recently that the nature of the rebel factions and their past affiliation with Al Qaeda were cause for concern.

“I think these are all indicators that are quite worrying,” Mr. Gargash said during a conference in the Emirati capital, Abu Dhabi, in mid-December shortly after the rebel takeover. “The region has seen episodes like this before, so we need to be on guard.”

The Gulf nations have long feared that the empowerment of Islamist groups in the Middle East could destabilize their own autocratic governments. When the Arab Spring erupted across the Middle East in 2011, several autocracies were toppled and powerful Islamist groups rose to fill the vacuum in countries, including Tunisia and Egypt.

“The U.A.E. has a long history of being particularly hostile to Islamist-affiliated political parties and governments,” said Anna Jacobs, a senior Gulf analyst for the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit. “But at least up until now, the U.A.E. has sent some very clear signals that it’s willing to work with the interim government for the sake of preserving stability in Syria and in the wider region.”

Concerns in the Gulf about Islamist power trace back to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York. Most of the 19 hijackers were Saudi and had been influenced by the kingdom’s strict version of Islam, Wahhabism, which has been blamed by some for fueling intolerance and terrorism. Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has since curbed the power of religious clerics.

After the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt, voters elected a president from the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement, Mohammed Morsi. But he was ousted in a coup in 2013 that the United Arab Emirates supported.

And the wariness toward Islamists in Syria is felt not only in the Gulf, but in other regional powers, including Egypt.

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the general who replaced Mr. Morsi in Egypt in 2013, has spent the years since then stamping out the Brotherhood in his country, seeing the group as a threat to his power.

In mid-December, Mr. el-Sisi made a rare appearance before journalists that suggested nervousness over the events in Syria. He appeared to draw a contrast between himself and Mr. al-Assad.

“There are two things I have never done, by the grace of God: My hands have never been stained with anyone’s blood, and I have never taken anything that wasn’t mine,” he said.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were staunch opponents of the Assad regime after Syria’s civil war began in 2011 and for the decade that followed. Mr. al-Assad became a pariah in the region and beyond for his brutal repression of opponents, which included the use of chemical weapons against his own people.

Both Gulf nations closed their embassies in Syria in early 2012 amid the Assad government’s crackdown on opponents. Over the years, as Mr. al-Assad regained control over much of his country with significant Russian and Iranian military support, there appeared to be a shift in Gulf attitudes.

The two Gulf powers were pivotal players in bringing Mr. al-Assad back into the Arab fold after a decade of isolation. The thaw was driven at the time by a desire for Arab unity to counterbalance Iran’s growing influence in Syria and in the wider Middle East.

After a devastating earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria in early 2023, the Saudi leadership made a humanitarian outreach to Mr. al-Assad. And in a milestone later that same year, the Syrian leader was readmitted to the Arab League.

The engagement with Mr. al-Assad’s administration was a tacit acknowledgment that, despite Western-backed efforts to oust him, his political survival had become a reality that could no longer be ignored.

The shift in Gulf attitudes while Mr. al-Assad still controlled Syria was part of a broader regional reordering as the Saudis and Emirates began to re-engage with Iran.

Under Syria’s new leaders, the economic opportunities of post-conflict rebuilding, an interest when Mr. al-Assad held sway, will be part of any assessment for the Gulf states.

With the country’s infrastructure in ruins, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates stand to profit from reconstruction efforts, provided they can negotiate favorable terms with the new government in Damascus.

Securing a role in rebuilding Syria also offers another way to influence the country’s future.

Qatar, in particular, seems open to supporting the transitional government in Syria.

Qatar maintained contacts with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and with other Islamist rebel factions in Syria during the civil war. In 2015, Qatar brokered a prisoner exchange deal between the rebels and the Lebanese Army.

When Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain severed ties with Qatar in 2017, one of their demands for restoring relations was that Qatar sever its support for the Nusra Front, the precursor to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

At an Arab League summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2023, Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, walked out of the meeting before a speech by Mr. al-Assad, signaling his country’s stance.

After the Assad ouster, Qatar sent its foreign minister to Damascus in late December, the highest-level government official from the Gulf to meet with the transitional government. It was followed earlier this week by a visit from the chief of the Gulf Cooperation Council and Kuwait’s foreign minister.

Ahmed al-Shara, the rebel leader who headed the offensive that overthrew Mr. al-Assad, said the Qataris would receive priority for their support over the past decade, possibly alluding to a role for the Gulf emirate in reconstruction projects.

The Qatari delegation was accompanied by a technical team from Qatar Airways to provide technical support for the reopening of Damascus International Airport.

“Qatar has a special priority in Syria because of its honorable stance toward the Syrian people,” Mr. al-Shara told reporters.

Rania Khaled and Vivian Yee contributed reporting from Cairo.

Syria’s new leaders met the French and German foreign ministers in the capital, Damascus, on Friday in one of the highest-level Western diplomatic visits since the fall of President Bashar al-Assad last month.

Annalena Baerbock of Germany and her French counterpart, Jean-Noël Barrot, arrived in Damascus for the first such trip in years on behalf on the European Union, as world powers have begun building ties with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist group that leads the new Syrian government.

Ms. Baerbock and Mr. Barrot met with Ahmad al-Shara, the group’s leader, after visiting the notorious Sednaya prison, where Mr. al-Assad’s regime had tortured and killed thousands of detainees.

“We are traveling to Damascus today to offer our support, but also with clear expectations of the new rulers,” Ms. Baerbock said in a statement before the meeting. “A new beginning can only happen if all Syrians, no matter their ethnicity and religion, are given a place in the political process.”

The visits are among a flurry of contacts between rebel leaders and Western officials looking to gradually open channels to the new Syrian authorities. Mr. al-Shara has worked to project a moderate image since taking power.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is still blacklisted as a terrorist group by the United States and the United Nations because of its past ties to Al Qaeda. Mr. al-Shara has called on the international community to remove that designation and sought to reassure minority groups, saying he wants to focus on rebuilding Syria after years of civil war.

“The current events demand the lifting of all sanctions on Syria,” he said in a televised interview last month.

Mr. Barrot said that France was urging the new rulers in Damascus to pursue a political transition that would allow “all the communities in Syria, in all their diversity, to be represented.” Part of that included reaching a “political solution” with the Kurdish minority, he said, which has carved out an autonomous region in northeastern Syria.

The diplomacy comes during a realignment across the Middle East, where Mr. al-Assad’s regime was a core part of Iran’s regional coalition. His family’s decades of iron-fisted rule were opposed by many Syrians, spurring the 2011 uprising and civil war. At least six foreign militaries were involved in the fighting, including those from Iran, Russia and Turkey.

Many countries — including the United States — have begun forging ties with the new government. In late December, Barbara Leaf, the senior State Department official for the Middle East, met with Mr. al-Shara in Damascus and told him that Washington would no longer pursue an outstanding bounty for his arrest.

Some Syrians — particularly Christians and other minority groups — are uncertain about Mr. al-Shara, pointing to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s conservative Islamist roots. In Idlib, a province controlled by the group since 2017, its leaders banned buying and selling alcohol and opened a chain of free religious schools. But Mr. al-Shara’s faction has eschewed the draconian decrees and brutal punishments of extremists like the Taliban and the Islamic State.

In a sign of the jitters among some Syrians, a posting on a Facebook page run by the Education Ministry this week described a new curriculum that was interpreted by some as taking a more Islamist slant.

It was not clear whether any of the changes had been implemented, but the minister of education, Nadhir Al-Qadri, said in a statement that the curriculum was unchanged except for the removal of “content glorifying the Assad regime” and the addition of images of the Syrian revolutionary flag.

Officials in Hayat Tahrir al-Sham have laid out an ambitious plan for establishing a new government, and rebel leaders have assumed key positions to oversee a transition. They say they are establishing a caretaker government in consultation with Syrians of all backgrounds, as well as a committee to draft a new Syrian constitution.

Many in the region are also wary of the new Syrian government, including Gulf States like the United Arab Emirates, which has long tried to prevent the rise of groups that embrace political Islam, as well as Israel.

Overnight on Friday, Israeli warplanes bombed Syrian defense research sites near Aleppo, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group. There were no immediate reports of casualties. Israel declined to comment on the report.

Israel has conducted hundreds of airstrikes against Syrian military sites since the fall of Mr. al-Assad in an effort to eliminate sophisticated arms like chemical weapons and long-range missiles. Mr. al-Shara has said he will uphold a longstanding cease-fire agreement with Israel, saying that Syria poses no threat to its neighbors.

Here are other developments in the region:

• Houthi missile attacks: The Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen launched a ballistic missile at Israel before dawn on Friday, setting off air-raid sirens across central Israel, including in Jerusalem. The Israeli military said it had intercepted the missile and there were no reports of serious casualties. Israeli fighter jets have flown over 1,000 miles to strike Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen but Israel has struggled to stop the attacks, which have escalated over the past month.

• Northern Gaza hospital: The Israeli military is operating near the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, from which many doctors and patients have already fled, health officials there said, noting that the sound of gunfire could be heard outside. The Israeli military said it did not intend to evacuate those remaining at the hospital at this time. The Israeli military raided Kamal Adwan, another northern Gaza hospital, last week, charging that Hamas was operating in the compound. Israeli troops apprehended at least 240 people they said were militants, including Hussam Abu Safiya, the hospital director. Israel has not provided evidence that Dr. Safiya is a militant, and Amnesty International has called for his release.

• Israeli strikes in Lebanon: The Israeli military said on Thursday night that it had bombed Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon, while a 60-day truce largely continues to hold. Since the agreement went into effect in late November, Israel has repeatedly bombarded what it says are Hezbollah fighters violating the agreement. Hezbollah has generally refrained from responding militarily. The current cease-fire is set to expire in late January, although the United States and its allies hope it becomes permanent.

Abu Bakr Bashir and Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.

Hundreds of people were forced to flee a fire that broke out in an eight-story commercial building south of Seoul Friday afternoon, with video footage showing several people trapped on the roof waiting to be rescued.

Fire officials received reports of the fire around 4:40 p.m. in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, and were at the scene within an hour, fire officials said. About 300 people were said to be in the building at the time of the blaze.

Responders said they had rescued 240 and another 70 people had evacuated from the building on their own. There were no deaths reported, but almost 30 people were hospitalized for minor injuries including smoke inhalation.

Footage from a local news channel shows the lower stories of the building engulfed in flames. Black smoke spewed upward from the windows and people gathered on the building’s roof awaiting rescue.

The officials said the fire broke on the first floor but have not yet revealed an official cause. The building has five underground stories.

Quarry workers in England have discovered the clawed footprints of a 30-foot-tall predator and the sunken tracks of other dinosaurs, in what paleontologists are calling one of the most significant finds in Britain in nearly three decades.

A trail of five distinct prints were uncovered last summer in a quarry in Oxfordshire, about 60 miles northwest of London, scientists announced to the public this week. The prints belong to both herbivores and carnivores that roamed the area during the Middle Jurassic period, around 166 million years ago.

Rather than the grasslands that blanket the area today, Jurassic Oxfordshire more resembled the Florida Keys, humid with lagoons and muddy swamps — prime territory for dinosaur feet to sink into the ground.

The area, first excavated in 1997, had already become known among paleontologists as the “dinosaur highway.” Scientists have found more than 40 sets of footprints across nearly 200 yards of pathways. The new tracks expand it into one of the largest sites of dinosaur discoveries in the world, said Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate paleontologist and collections manager at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

“These recent discoveries prove there is still new evidence of these animals out there, waiting to be found,” Ms. Nicholls said.

At first, the quarry workers did not think much of the abnormality they found while clearing clay in late 2023. The first trace of a dinosaur was just a hump in the ground, said Mark Stanway, who manages the quarry.

“It was probably not as dramatic as it sounds,” he said.

The pattern of humps, each about 10 feet apart, turned out to be the last vestiges of giants who died tens of millions of years ago.

Paleontologists from the University of Birmingham and Oxford first visited the site in November 2023, finding clawed, three-toed footprints in a shape that has become associated with dinosaurs in popular culture.

“It’s like a caricature of a dinosaur,” Dr. Nicholls said.

Those tracks were made by a megalosaurus, a ferocious predator that stood roughly 30 feet tall, weighed one and a half tons and walked on its hind legs. Megalosaurus was the first dinosaur ever to be scientifically named and described at Oxford, in 1824.

“We were excavating new trackways of megalosaurus in 2024, which of course is the 200th anniversary,” Dr. Nicholls said. “Completely coincidental but really spine-tingling.”

The other four prints belonged to one species, likely a herbivorous sauropod, a family of dinosaurs known for their long necks and tails, small heads and thick pillars for legs — features that made them the largest land animals ever.

The footprints were more than three feet long and one and a half feet deep, about the size of a baby’s bathtub, said Kirsty Edgar, a professor of micropaleontology at the University of Birmingham.

The researchers said they could not tell precisely what species of sauropod made the print but that they believed it was a cetiosaurus, a dinosaur some 60 feet long and weighing roughly two tons, because of previous fossil finds in the area.

The tracks also give scientists some insight into how the animals behaved, particularly at the point where the different species’ paths interact, the scientists said.

For much of the path, the sauropods seem to be walking at a steady space heading north. But then, suddenly, one of the animal’s left feet lands too close to the previous one, suggesting that it stopped and possibly looked over its shoulder.

Though the scientists cannot determine exactly when the prints were made, the prints hint at a moment of interaction.

“It’s very possible that the cetiosaurus is actually stopping to look back at the megalosaurus,” Dr. Nicholls said.

The sets of sauropod footprints are also different sizes, showing that the animals might have moved in a herd with juveniles or traveled alongside smaller herbivores. The megalosaurus, the apex predator at the time, moved alone.

“A body fossil is the death of the animal,” Dr. Edgar said, “whereas we’re getting a kind of snapshot of what these multiple animals were doing in life.”

In addition to its swampy features, Jurassic Oxfordshire was also affected by higher sea levels.

Inside the prints, scientists found evidence of marine life, namely brachiopods, gastropods, bivalves and echinoids, shelled invertebrates that resemble mollusks and sea urchins today, said Dr. Nicholls.

In the nearly 30 years since tracks were first discovered in the area, technology has rapidly progressed, allowing scientists to more successfully record their findings.

During the seven days last summer when the teams of scientists worked on site, they took hundreds of pictures, created molds, recorded drone footage of the site and created three-dimensional models, allowing ongoing study of prints that may now be lost to the elements.

Work at the quarry went on unaffected, Mr. Stanway said, adding that he would not be surprised to find even more tracks in the coming years.

He demanded the release of a convicted criminal and far-right agitator. He falsely accused the prime minister, Keir Starmer, of failing to go after child rapists when he was head of public prosecutions. He endorsed a post calling on King Charles III to dissolve Parliament and call elections to remove Britain’s seven-month-old Labour government, a constitutional impossibility.

Elon Musk has once again set his sights on Britain, putting the country in the bull’s-eye in the capricious world of his online obsessions. In a fusillade of posts that began before the new year, Mr. Musk moved on from his enthusiastic boosting of a far-right party in Germany to targeting Britain on multiple politically sensitive fronts.

After mostly ignoring Mr. Musk’s trolling, which has been going on for months, the British government on Friday snapped back, though in characteristically polite fashion.

“Elon Musk is an American citizen and perhaps ought to focus on issues on the other side of the Atlantic,” the government’s health minister, Andrew Gwynne, said in an interview with LBC radio. Mr. Gwynne’s boss, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, told reporters, “Some of the criticisms Elon Musk has made, I think, are misjudged and certainly misinformed.”

Britain is one of several European countries where Mr. Musk is trying to replicate the influence he wielded on behalf of President-elect Donald J. Trump in the American election last fall. In addition to Germany, where his advocacy of a far-right party with neo-Nazi ties, Alternative for Germany, has roiled that country’s politics before elections next month, Mr. Musk has nurtured close ties to Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.

In Britain, Mr. Musk’s antagonism toward the Labour government is rooted in part in its aggressive response to hate speech online. Officials said false and inflammatory posts helped incite anti-immigrant riots that followed the killing of three girls in a mass stabbing in the town of Southport last July. They arrested more than 30 people, which prompted Mr. Musk to condemn the government for what he called an attack on the free speech that he extols on his platform, X.

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