Dozens of Israeli strikes pounded the Gaza Strip over the weekend as Israeli and Hamas officials continued indirect cease-fire talks through mediators in Qatar.

Israel’s military said on Sunday that it had hit more than 100 targets across the enclave over the weekend, including sites from which militants had fired at least four projectiles toward Israeli territory on Friday and Saturday. It said that the strikes had killed Hamas militants and that the military had taken measures to mitigate the risk of harming civilians. The claims could not be independently verified.

The Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Sunday that 88 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes over the last 24 hours. The ministry’s figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The Gaza Civil Defense, an emergency services agency, said that its crews had responded to multiple airstrikes on family homes on Sunday in which several people were killed and wounded.

Pressure has been mounting on both sides to reach a cease-fire agreement that would include the release of hostages held in Gaza before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office on Jan. 20. Hamas and Israel both said they were sending delegations to the Qatari capital, Doha, in recent days to meet with mediators.

The Israeli delegation remained in Doha over the weekend, according to an Israeli person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a lack of authorization to discuss the secretive talks publicly. The person said that the discussions in Doha were making slow progress and were aimed at reaching a limited deal that would see a temporary halt in the fighting and some Israeli hostages released in exchange for a number of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel.

Reflecting the abiding gap between the sides, at least in their public positions, Hamas said in a statement on Friday that the current round of talks would focus on an agreement leading to a complete cease-fire and the details for a withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. Israel had not committed to ending the war, an official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, said last week.

Roughly 100 hostages are still being held in Gaza out of some 250 people taken captive during the Hamas-led attacks in October 2023 that prompted the war. At least a third of them are presumed to be dead.

A weeklong truce in November 2023 allowed for the release of 105 hostages, but subsequent efforts to reach a cease-fire have faltered amid gaps in the two sides’ demands. Each side blames the other for the failure to reach a deal.

Israeli officials have recently said that they believe that Hamas is rebuilding its forces in Gaza. And the group appears to be recruiting new fighters faster than Israel can eliminate them.

Security officials reportedly told an Israeli parliamentary committee last week that Hamas has up to 19,000 fighters, with about 9,000 of them in organized units. Before the war, Israel estimated that Hamas had roughly 25,000 fighters, though Hamas never confirmed that figure.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in November that Israel’s military had killed close to 20,000 fighters.

In all, more than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed during the war, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

And as hopes for even a limited cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas rise again, Palestinians and human rights organizations say the humanitarian situation in Gaza is getting even more desperate.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said on Sunday that overnight Israeli airstrikes near Al-Amal Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis caused significant damage to several hospital facilities and killed one person.

Last week, Israeli forces raided the last remaining major hospital in northern Gaza, Kamal Adwan, and forced its staff and patients to evacuate. The Israeli military said that Kamal Adwan was a stronghold for Hamas and that it was carrying out “targeted operations” in the area.

The hospital had been the main provider of medical care in the northernmost stretch of Gaza amid a monthslong offensive by Israel’s military against what it says is a resurgent Hamas.

The World Health Organization said that the raid on Kamal Adwan “put the last major health facility in North Gaza out of service” — and that the remaining patients, caregivers and health workers were transferred to the Indonesian Hospital.

But on Sunday, Gaza’s health ministry said that the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza was no longer providing services to patients or the wounded, leaving the northern part of the enclave without any functioning hospitals amid the near-constant bombardment.

Aaron Boxerman contributed to this report.

Ukrainian forces have gone on the offensive in the Kursk region of Russia, Ukrainian and Russian officials said Sunday, in what appeared to be an effort to regain the initiative there as they struggle to thwart relentless Russian assaults across eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine took about 500 square miles last summer in the Kursk region in a surprise incursion, but Russia clawed back about half of the territory in the months that followed.

On Sunday, the Russian Defense Ministry said Ukrainian forces had launched a large new assault featuring tanks, mine-clearing equipment and at least a dozen armored vehicles. The ministry claimed to have thwarted the attack.

Ukrainian soldiers fighting in the area who were reached by phone declined to discuss continuing operations beyond saying that Ukraine was on the offensive in parts of the Kursk region and that fierce fighting was raging there. The Ukrainian military high command said on Sunday night that there were 42 “combat engagements” in the region over the past 24 hours and that 12 were still happening.

It was not possible to verify the claims by either side independently, and the scope of the Ukrainian assaults remained unclear.

Ukrainian and Western military analysts said that the attacks could be a deliberate attempt at misdirection, trying to force Russian troops to shore up defenses there in the hopes of weakening them on the front line in Ukrainian territory.

Russian forces continue to make costly but consistent gains in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. They are steadily grinding down a pocket of resistance around the town of Kurakhove and are also fighting to envelop the larger nearby city of Pokrovsk, Ukrainian soldiers and officials said.

Russian troops are now within one mile of a critical supply road leading to Pokrovsk, which had served as a vital logistics and transportation hub for Ukrainian forces in the region.

Some American officials initially expressed skepticism about the wisdom of Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region last August, concerned that it might be a drain on already exhausted and undermanned brigades struggling to stabilize defensive lines in eastern Ukraine.

But as Russian casualties mounted, some of those American officials changed their assessments.

Although Ukraine now holds less than half of the territory it seized in the Kursk offensive last summer, it has managed in recent weeks to slow Russia’s advances despite repeated waves of Russian counterattacks, including assaults bolstered by thousands of North Korean soldiers.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has sought to play down the significance of the Kursk incursion, which was the first ground invasion of Russia since the end of World War II.

While saying that it was the military’s “sacred duty” to expel Ukrainian forces, he recently declined to offer a timeline for when that might be accomplished.

“We will definitely drive them out,” Mr. Putin said at his annual news conference in December. “I cannot answer the question about a specific date right now.”

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said Moscow continued to pay a high price trying to push the Ukrainians out.

“Specifically, in battles today and yesterday near just one village — Makhnovka in the Kursk region — the Russian army lost up to a battalion of infantry, including North Korean soldiers and Russian paratroopers,” Mr. Zelensky said on Saturday night. A battalion is composed of 600 to 800 soldiers.

It was not possible to verify his claim, but the Pentagon recently said that North Korea was suffering mass casualties on the Kursk front, with more than 1,000 killed or wounded in only a few weeks.

RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency, said that about 340 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and wounded in Kursk the past 24 hours. That claim also could not be independently verified, and the news agency, citing the Russian Defense Ministry, did not mention Russian casualties.

Mr. Zelensky said that holding on to land in Kursk gave Kyiv a “very strong trump card” in any possible negotiations with Moscow.

President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed to end the war rapidly once he takes office, without saying how.

Liubov Sholudko, Nataliia Novosolova and Valerie Hopkins contributed reporting.

It was an abrupt turnabout, even for the easy-come, easy-go nature of alliances in President-elect Donald J. Trump’s political orbit.

For weeks, Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s billionaire backer, had wrapped his arms around the British populist politician, Nigel Farage, promoting his insurgent, anti-immigrant party, Reform U.K., as the answer to Britain’s problems.

But on Sunday, Mr. Musk posted, “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.”

Mr. Musk did not explain his change of heart. But it appears linked to Mr. Farage’s refusal to endorse Mr. Musk’s demand that a far-right agitator, Tommy Robinson, be released from prison. Mr. Farage has distanced himself from Mr. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and who has multiple criminal convictions in addition to a history of Islamophobic statements.

“Well, this is a surprise!” a studiously chipper Mr. Farage posted an hour after Mr. Musk. “Elon is a remarkable individual but on this I am afraid I disagree. My view remains that Tommy Robinson is not right for Reform and I never sell out my principles.”

Mr. Musk’s rupture with Mr. Farage was a new twist in the days-long barrage of increasingly strident, misinformation-filled posts about Britain from Mr. Musk, who appears intent on exercising the same influence in European countries that he did during the American presidential election.

He falsely accused the prime minister, Keir Starmer, of failing to go after child rapists when he was head of public prosecutions. And he endorsed a post calling on King Charles III to dissolve Parliament and call elections to remove Britain’s Labour government, a constitutional impossibility.

Mr. Musk targeted Britain after boosting a far-right party in Germany, Alternative for Germany. In Britain, where Mr. Musk has condemned the Labour government for its prosecution of online hate speech, among other issues, Mr. Farage seemed to have locked up Mr. Musk’s support.

But Mr. Farage appeared to have seen trouble brewing over Mr. Robinson. Speaking to the BBC on Sunday before Mr. Musk’s post, he described the tech billionaire as a “friend” and free speech “hero.” But he added that just because Mr. Musk “supports me politically and supports Reform, doesn’t mean I have to agree with every single statement he makes on X.”

Mr. Farage has campaigned for Mr. Trump and made pilgrimages to his Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago. But Mr. Musk has not hesitated to clash with even longtime allies of Mr. Trump. His support of visas for technology workers has put him at odds with some Trump backers, including Stephen K. Bannon, who accused him of betraying Mr. Trump’s “America First” credo.

A rift between Mr. Musk and Mr. Farage could have unpredictable consequences for both men. Mr. Farage, who won a seat in Parliament last July after eight attempts, is an adroit politician who has ridden the populist wave for decades. While Mr. Musk’s posts have drawn a lot of attention, the number of users of X in Britain has declined since he took it over.

Mr. Musk appeared to be flirting with another Reform member of Parliament, Rupert Lowe. Replying to a post about whether he should replace Mr. Farage as the party’s leader, Mr. Musk wrote, “I have not met Rupert Lowe, but his statements online that I have read so far make a lot of sense.”

The most immediate impact of Mr. Musk’s rebuke is likely to be on Reform U.K.’s fund-raising. When he was asked during the BBC interview whether he expected Mr. Musk to donate, he said, “He may well do; he may well do. But it’s got to be legal; he’s got to be comfortable with it.”

For much of her life, Sumaya Ainaya spent weekend and summer nights on Mount Qasioun, which overlooks the city of Damascus, joined by other Syrians drinking coffee, smoking hookah and eating corn on the cob roasted on grills nearby.

But soon after the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011, the military under President Bashar al-Assad closed the mountain to civilians. Suddenly, instead of families and friends shooting fireworks into the sky, soldiers with tanks and artillery launchers were firing at rebel-held areas below.

This New Year’s Eve, weeks after a coalition of rebels ousted the Syrian regime, Ms. Ainaya, 56, and her family returned to Mount Qasioun with snacks, soda and scarves to protect from the winter chill — and reclaimed a favorite leisure spot.

“Thank God, we’ve returned now — we feel like we can breathe again,” said Ms. Ainaya, an Arabic literature graduate and a mother of four, standing along a ridge and pointing out several Damascus landmarks.

“We feel like the city has returned to us,” said her son Muhammad Qatafani, 21, a dental student.

Across Damascus, as in much of the country, Syrians are reclaiming, and in some cases embracing anew, spaces and freedoms that had been off limits for years under the Assad regime. There were places ordinary Syrians were not allowed to go and things that they were not permitted to say when the Assad family was in power. The country, many said, increasingly felt as if it did not belong to them.

But with the newfound sense of freedom comes some trepidation about the future under a government formed by Islamist rebels, and whether with time it might institute new restrictions and limitations.

Many Syrians are watching each decision and announcement as a harbinger of how their new rulers may govern. Last week, Syria’s de facto new leader, Ahmed al-Shara, said it could take two to three years to draft a new Constitution and up to four years to hold elections, alarming Syrians who fear they may have traded one authoritarian leader for another.

For now, there is also a level of chaos under the interim government as it races to prioritize certain state-building measures over others. With many economic restrictions and regulations gone, men and boys sell smuggled gas from large water jugs on street corners. The city’s traffic is snarled, as few police officers are on patrol, and double parking is rife, residents said.

Despite the anxiety, people are returning to or rediscovering spaces across Damascus, the capital. Protest songs that could have landed someone in prison a month ago can be heard on the street.

“We weren’t seeing the city, Damascus, or any city, in all its details,” Yaman Alsabek, a youth group leader, said of his country under the Assad regime. “The public spaces — we stopped going to them because we felt they weren’t for us, they were for the regime.”

His organization, Sanad Team for Development, has begun to organize youth efforts to help clean the streets and direct traffic. “When Damascus was liberated and we felt this renewed sense of ownership, people came out to rediscover their city,” he said.

After last month’s stunning sweep by the rebels, icons of the Assad regime were torn down. Children play on the pedestals and plinths that once held towering statues of Mr. al-Assad, his father and his brother. Murals cover spaces where pro-regime slogans were emblazoned.

On a recent gray and drizzly day, it was standing room only in the auditorium that had been the headquarters of the ruling Baath party, which represented the Assad family’s totalitarian grip on political discourse. Hundreds of people gathered to hear a Syrian actress and activist, Yara Sabri, speak about the country’s thousands of detained and missing prisoners.

“We all decide on what it will look like and what we want it to be,” Ms. Sabri said of the country’s future.

Weeks ago, she had been in exile because of her activism. Now, a Syrian flag, with its new colors, hung over the lectern at which she spoke. Above the building’s entrance, the old Syrian flag and the Baath party flag were partly painted over.

Salma Huneidi, the event’s organizer, said the choice of venue was deliberate. “We consider this a victory,” she said. “This was a place that we couldn’t do any activities, and now we are not only holding activities, but important ones that expose the previous regime.”

An event to discuss the writing of a new Syrian Constitution was also held in the building recently.

“Syria feels bigger, the streets feel bigger — gone are the images that used to irritate us, the slogans that used to irritate us,” Ms. Huneidi said. “We used to feel so restricted before.”

Even the utterance of the word “dollar” could land someone in prison under Mr. al-Assad. Foreign-currency exchanges, which were banned for years under the Assad regime, have sprung up seemingly everywhere. Men walk through markets yelling: “Exchange! Exchange!” A seller hawking warm winter porridge offered stacks of Syrian pounds in exchange for crisp $100 bills.

Mohammad Murad, 33, sat in his car on a street corner, wearing a beanie with the colors of the new Syrian flag. A sign in his window said, “Dollars, euros and Turkish.”

Mr. Murad had long worked in currency exchange, but after the previous regime banned foreign currencies, his business went underground. If a customer needed dollars or euros, Mr. Murad said, he would go to the person’s house, bills hidden inside a sock.

In the new Syria, he said, he stands in line at the central bank to exchange $1,000 for stacks of Syrian pounds. When potential patrons come to his window to inquire about the exchange rate, he assures them he is offering the “best price.”

Across the street, the shelves of a small corner store look very different from only a few weeks ago, when shop owners had to smuggle foreign brands and hide them from most customers.

“I would only sell those brands to my regular customers that knew I sold smuggled goods, not to just anyone coming in,” said the owner, Hussam al-Shareef.

Syrian-made products now mingle openly with brands from Turkey, Europe and the United States. Customers walk in and freely ask for “Nescafe, the original.”

Three years ago, a police officer came into his shop and saw six Kinder chocolate eggs in a glass case in the back. Mr. al-Shareef was fined 600,000 Syrian pounds, or roughly $50, and sentenced to a month in jail. He has been fighting it in court ever since.

Back on Mount Qasioun, a man was peddling illegal fireworks smuggled from Lebanon. Hours later, they would light up the sky to ring in 2025.

Ali Maadi, 35, was busy setting up a stand to sell drinks, snacks and hookahs. Before the war, his family had a small but comfortable rest area along the mountain’s ridge. When he returned more than a week ago, he found that Syrian Army soldiers had used it as an outpost and had broken everything, including the bathrooms. He plans to slowly rebuild.

From two speakers in the back of his Peugeot, he was blasting a mix of Syrian protest and folk songs. The lyrics of one song said:

We want to adore, we want to love

We want to walk the path

We want to learn to be men and love Damascus

From our hearts and see Damascus up close.

Nearby, Aya Kalas, 28, and her soon-to-be fiancé, Khalid al-Qadi, 26, sat at a picnic table enjoying the view. She was 15 the last time she came to the mountain, she said.

“Any place you were banned from, you want to come back to it,” said Ms. Kalas, a beautician.

Damascus, where Ms. Kalas has lived her entire life, feels unrecognizable at times, she said. “There were entire streets you couldn’t walk along because a military officer or official lived there,” she said.

“We feel like seeing the country anew; we feel like tourists,” Mr. al-Qadi said. “It feels like it’s ours again.”

Zeina Shahla contributed reporting.

The shop used to sell flowers and gardening gear to visitors from just down the road, where a tiny breakaway region of Moldova has for more than 30 years stood defiantly apart, with support from Russian troops.

Since the halt of gas from Russia on New Year’s Day, however, the store has been selling mostly electric heaters to freezing residents of Transnistria, the self-declared microstate in eastern Moldova.

The cheaper models have already sold out, a saleswoman said, but higher-end heaters are selling fast, as 350,000 inhabitants of Transnistria endure an energy crisis that has shut down factories, left Soviet-era apartment blocks without heating and hot water and raised questions about the survival of their go-it-alone, Russian-speaking enclave.

The situation is so bad that the region’s president, Vadim Krasnoselsky — who leads an entity unrecognized by all other countries, including Russia — tried to reassure his people on Thursday, “We will not allow a societal collapse.”

“It is difficult,” Mr. Krasnoselsky said, enumerating thousands of businesses, schools, farms and homes that were struggling without heat. Citizens have shown “great responsibility,” he said, by “going out into the forest to collect dead wood” to burn at home.

The crisis began on Jan. 1, when Russia’s energy giant Gazprom stopped pumping natural gas through Ukraine, its remaining major export route to Europe, after Ukraine refused to a renew a five-year gas transit deal.

In most places once dependent on Russian gas, like Hungary, the shutdown’s consequences were softened by alternative suppliers from the West. But Transnistria, a tiny sliver of territory built on unswerving loyalty to Russia, faces an existential crisis.

Dorin Recean, the prime minister of Moldova, which has long demanded that the region give up its claims of statehood, accused Russia of inducing an “impending humanitarian crisis.”

“By jeopardizing the future of the protectorate that it has backed for three decades in an effort to destabilize Moldova, Russia is revealing the inevitable outcome for all its allies: betrayal and isolation,” Mr. Recean said on Friday.

Distracted by the war in Ukraine and more cautious about investing resources, Russia has shown an increased willingness recently to cut its losses, most notably in Syria, where it stood on the sidelines last month as rebels toppled Moscow’s closest ally in the Middle East.

Alexandru Flenchea, a former deputy prime minister of Moldova who was responsible for trying to reintegrate Transnistria, said that Russia was not yet ready to abandon the region, valuing its use for exerting military and political pressure over Moldova.

Russia’s desire for leverage, Mr. Flenchea said, grew more acute in October when Moldovan voters narrowly endorsed changing the Constitution to lock the country’s exit from Moscow’s sphere of influence, aligning more closely with the West.

But, Mr. Flenchea added, Russia’s readiness to let Transnistria freeze without gas or its major source of revenue — the sale of electricity to Moldova from a gas-powered power station — suggested that the region was in serious trouble.

“The whole model in Transnistria relies on free Russian gas. No free Russian gas, the whole thing collapses,” he said. “But I don’t think Russia will let this happen soon. It still needs them.”

Others see Transnistria’s travails less as a sign of Russian retreat than of its determination to divert Moldova from its pro-European course.

Also cut off from Russian gas, Moldova has over the past week shifted to more expensive alternatives, including electricity from Romania. This saved Moldova from going cold but doubled the price of electricity for consumers, which could carry a heavy political price for the pro-Western government in elections this year.

Russia’s goal, said Vladislav Kulminski, a former government official now with the Institute for Strategic Initiatives, a Moldovan research group, “is to keep us in a gray zone by getting an election result that will bring to power a different government.”

”Everything has been thrown up in the air,” he said. “We don’t know what shape it will take when all the pieces fall to the ground.”

A retro police state with its own currency and passports — and a successful soccer team financed by local tycoons — Transnistria has an expansive security service, reinforced by Russians, and it has worked hard to control what people hear about.

Transnistria’s media outlets, echoing Russian talking points, blame Ukraine, the United States and Moldova’s government for the gas cutoff. Whispers that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia might also be to blame are taboo.

The media blitz seems to be working.

“Putin would never abandon us,” said Grigory Kravatenko, a resident of Bender, an industrial town bordering Moldovan-controlled territory.

Asked whether Transnistria might be better off less closely aligned with Moscow, he added: “We are not for Russia. We are not for Moldova. We are not for Ukraine. We are for ourselves and we are all suffering.”

Cooking stoves kept working for a while after the Jan. 1 cutoff, thanks to gas that was still in the pipes. But now they, too, are spluttering.

A Transnistria resident who gave only her first name, Yulia, walking on Friday with her infant daughter down an abandoned railway track, said she was sure that Russia would soon come to the rescue. “Of course they won’t let us die,” she said.

Victor Ceban, an Orthodox Christian priest responsible for parishes along the zigzagging border, said he avoided talking about who was responsible. “Whatever you say to one person you become somebody else’s enemy,” he said.

In some places, the border is marked with concrete barriers manned by Russians in fatigues. But it is so unclear in other places that it is easy to stray into Transnistria. Waved through a checkpoint this past week by a soldier with a Russian flag on his shoulder, journalists asked people at a bus stop if they knew of Transnistria’s problems.

“Of course we do. This is Transnistria,” an elderly woman said.

Mr. Ceban, the priest, walking from home to home on Friday through the Moldovan-controlled village of Varnita, offered blessings ahead of Orthodox Christmas and prayers that his mostly geriatric flock would not suffer long without heat.

When Transnistria, the most prosperous part of Moldova when both were part of the Soviet Union, first broke away to form a renegade state in the early 1990s, the region boasted it would become a Russian-speaking version of Switzerland — a proudly independent haven from the turmoil gripping Moldova, which was deeply impoverished.

The breakaway region became a template for what has since been a drive by Russia to keep its influence in former Soviet lands by supporting separatists: first in Moldova, then in Georgia and in eastern Ukraine. In all three countries, local militants backed by Russian muscle declared their own microstates.

The deployment of Russia troops in Transnistria, originally as peacekeepers but still there decades after the fighting stopped, ensured that Moldova could never retake the territory by force and doomed diplomatic efforts.

Just as important to Transnistria’s survival, however, has been Russian gas, provided virtually free to keep a steel plant and other industries working — and to fuel the power station selling electricity to Moldova.

Moldova’s secretary of state for energy, Constantin Borosan, said that, before the current crisis, electricity generated in Transnistria had met about three-quarters of his country’s demand and provided about half of the separatist region’s budget.

“These people lived on subsidized gas from Russia,” he said. “Now it looks as if Russia has abandoned them.” He noted that Gazprom had ignored suggestions from Moldova that it could, using an alternate export route under the Black Sea, still get gas to Transnistria — if the Kremlin wanted.

“I don’t know what is going on in the head of Putin,” he said.

Whatever Russia’s intentions, it is causing widespread pain not only in Transnistria, but also to residents of Moldovan-controlled territory.

Alexandru Nichitenco, the mayor of Varnita, a village surrounded by Transnistria and dependent on its energy, said that most of its 5,100 inhabitants could no longer heat their homes. They faced disaster, he said, especially if the usual winter temperatures — typically many degrees below freezing — grip the country.

He said he did not blame Transnistria: “They can’t do anything. Moscow controls everything over there.”

Veronica Ostap, a mother in Varnita struggling to keep her family fed without a working stove, said she was waiting for her pay next week to buy an electric kettle. She was keeping one room warm with an electric heater so that her three young boys can sleep.

A Baptist, she thanked God for keeping the temperature around zero, at least during the day. “The Lord is trying to help us,” she said.

Ruxanda Spatari contributed reporting from Chisinau, Moldova, and Nataliya Vasilyeva from Berlin.

There are, the hit man said, many ways to kill.

A string tied between two sticks strangles with a tug of the wrists. A butcher’s blade, long and thin, slices into the heart.

Edgar Matobato said he fed a man to a crocodile, but only once. Mostly, he said, he ended people’s lives with a trusted weapon: his .45-caliber Colt M1911 pistol.

“For almost 24 years, I killed and disposed of many bodies,” Mr. Matobato said of his time with a death squad in Davao City, in the southern Philippines. “I am trying to remember, but I cannot remember everyone.”

“I’m sorry,” he added.

We were sitting in the outdoor kitchen of Mr. Matobato’s secret refuge in the Philippines. A fierce rain sent water skittering into the room. Mosquitoes followed. He slapped one dead, its body oozing someone else’s blood.

Mr. Matobato was in hiding. He has been for a decade, ever since he confessed to his crimes and divulged who ordered the bloodletting: Rodrigo Duterte, the mayor of Davao City, who later became president of the Philippines.

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The air is laced with cigarette smoke and Cantonese profanities as half a dozen taxi drivers hang out by their fire-engine-red cabs on a quiet corner of the gritty Prince Edward neighborhood of Hong Kong.

It is the afternoon handover, when day shift drivers pass their taxis to those working the night shift. They are surrendering wads of cash to a taxi agent, a matriarchal figure who collects rent for the vehicles, manages their schedules and dispenses unsolicited advice about exercising more and quitting smoking. The drivers wave her off.

There may be no harder task in this city of more than seven million than trying to change a taxi driver’s habits. Often grumpy and rushing to the next fare, cabbies in Hong Kong have been doing things their way for decades, reflecting the fast-paced, frenetic culture that has long energized the city.

But taxi drivers are under pressure to get with the times. Their passengers are fed up with being driven recklessly, treated curtly and, in many cases, having to settle fares with cash — one of the strangest idiosyncrasies about life in Hong Kong. The practice is so ingrained that airport staff often have to alert tourists at taxi ranks that they need to carry bills.

The government, both because of the complaints and to revitalize tourism, has tried to rein in taxi drivers. Officials ran a campaign over the summer urging drivers to be more polite. They imposed a point system in which bad behavior by drivers — such as overcharging or refusing passengers — would be tracked and could result in the loss of licenses.

In early December, the government proposed requiring all taxis to install systems to allow them to accept credit cards and digital payments by the end of 2025, and to add surveillance cameras by the end of 2026.

Predictably, many taxi drivers have opposed the idea of closer supervision.

“Would you want to be monitored all the time?” said Lau Bing-kwan, a 75-year-old cabby with thinning strands of white hair who accepts only cash. “The government is barking too many orders.”

Hold On to Your Seats

The new controls, if put in place, would signal the end of an era for an industry that has long been an anomaly in Hong Kong’s world-class transportation system. Every day, millions of people commute safely on sleek subways and air-conditioned double-decker buses that run reliably.

Riding in a taxi, by comparison, can be an adventure. Step into one of Hong Kong’s signature four-door Toyota Crown Comfort cabs and you will most likely be (what is the opposite of greeted?) by a man in his 60s or older with a phalanx of cellphones mounted along his dashboard — used sometimes for GPS navigation and other times to track horse racing results. Pleasantries will not be exchanged. Expect the gas pedal to be floored.

You will then reflexively grab a handle and try not to slide off the midnight-blue vinyl seats as you zip and turn through the city’s notoriously narrow streets. Lastly, before you arrive at your destination, you will ready your small bills and coins to avoid aggravating the driver with a time-consuming exit.

“When they drop you off, you have to kind of rush,” said Sylvia He, a professor of urban studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who, like many residents of this city, feels conditioned to walk on eggshells around a cabby. “I don’t want to delay their next order.”

To many cabbies, the impatience and brusqueness are a reflection of their harsh reality: When they are scraping by in a business with shrinking financial rewards, no time can be wasted on social niceties. Lau Man-hung, a 63-year-old driver, for instance, skips meals and bathroom breaks just to stay behind the wheel long enough to take home about $2,500 a month, barely enough to get by in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

“Some customers are too mafan,” said Mr. Lau using a Cantonese word that means causing trouble and annoyance. “They like to complain about which route to take. They tell you to go faster.”

An Industry’s Fragile Economics

Driving a cab used to be a decent way to make a living. But business has gotten tougher, made worse by the fallout of mainland China’s economic slowdown. The city has had trouble reviving its allure with tourists, while its bars and nightclubs, once teeming with crowds squeezed into narrow alleyways, now draw fewer revelers.

Even before the downturn, some owners of taxi licenses were struggling. Taxi licenses are limited by the government and traded on a loosely regulated market. Some owners suffered huge losses after a speculative bubble drove prices up to nearly $1 million for one license a decade ago, then burst.

Today, licenses are worth about two-thirds of their decade-ago high. Many businesses and drivers who own licenses are focused more on recouping losses than on improving service.

Tin Shing Motors, a family-owned company, manages drivers and sells taxi license mortgages and taxicab insurance. Chris Chan, a 47-year-old third-generation member of the company, says Tin Shing is saddled with mortgages bought when licenses were worth much more.

To chip away at that debt, Mr. Chan needs to rent out his taxis as much as possible. But he struggles to find drivers. Many cabbies have aged out, and young people have largely stayed away from the grueling work. Profit margins have dwindled, he added, especially with the cost of insurance almost doubling in recent years. Uber, despite operating in a gray area in Hong Kong, has also taken a chunk of customers away.

“It’s harder and harder to make money,” Mr. Chan said.

At the bottom are the drivers, about half of whom are 60 and older. Many cannot afford to retire. They have to make about $14 an hour to break even after paying for gas and the rent of their vehicles. To them, cash in hand is better than waiting days for electronic payments to clear.

A Blue-Collar Job Professionalizes

Tension between the public and taxi drivers plays out with mutual finger-pointing. When the government introduced the courtesy campaign last year, a driver told a television reporter that it was the passengers who were rude.

In many ways, Hong Kong’s taxi drivers embody the high-stress, no-frills culture of the city’s working class. Their gruffness is no different from the service one gets at a cha chaan teng, the ubiquitous local cafes that fuel the masses with egg sandwiches, instant noodles and saccharine-sweet milk tea. Servers are curt, but fast.

“People tend to have one bad experience and remember it for the rest of their life,” said Hung Wing-tat, a retired professor who has studied the taxi industry. “Consequently, there is an impression among the public that all taxi drivers are bad when most of them just want to earn a living. They don’t want any trouble.”

Indeed, there are cabbies like Joe Fong, 45, who sees no value in antagonizing his customers and has tried to adapt to his passengers’ needs.

“Why fight?” Mr. Fong said. “We need each other. You need a ride and I need your money.”

Mr. Fong maximizes his income by splitting his time between driving a private car for Uber and a cab for a taxi fleet called Alliance. Mr. Fong has five cellphones affixed to his dashboard. He welcomes electronic payments, and he did not raise an eyebrow when Alliance installed cameras in all their taxis last year.

“I’m not like those old guys,” said Mr. Fong, who drives one of Hong Kong’s newer hybrid taxis made by Toyota, which look like a cross between a London cab and a PT Cruiser. “The world has changed. You have to accept it.”

Olivia Wang contributed reporting.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy visited President-elect Donald J. Trump on Saturday at his Florida golf club for an informal meeting.

The trip to the club, Mar-a-Lago, came only a few days before Ms. Meloni is set to welcome President Biden for an official visit to Italy and the Vatican from Thursday through Jan. 12.

On Saturday, she appeared in the grand ballroom at Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Trump, according to pool reports, said he was having dinner with Ms. Meloni, whom he called “a fantastic woman,” adding, “She’s really taken Europe by storm, and everyone else.”

They, along with some potential members of the future Trump administration, including the nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and for Treasury, Scott Bessent, then watched a screening of a film titled “The Eastman Dilemma: Lawfare or Justice.”

Ms. Meloni and Mr. Trump have expressed mutual appreciation in the past, and her trip is one of the first few visits by a foreign leader to the president-elect’s estate in Florida since his election in November. The meeting reinforces the hopes of Ms. Meloni’s supporters that the conservative Italian prime minister will become Mr. Trump’s go-to ally in Europe.

Much of that role would involve mediating tensions between other European leaders and Mr. Trump, who has threatened to start a trade war with the continent, as well as to reduce American backing for some NATO countries and for Ukraine in its war with Russia.

The agenda of the meeting was unclear on Saturday night, but observers expected the two leaders would discuss those issues.

Another possible topic of discussion, according to observers, was the detention in Iran of a prominent Italian reporter, Cecilia Sala. It happened a few days after Italy arrested, at the request of the United States, an Iranian suspected of providing drone components to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Iran has routinely detained foreigners and dual citizens to trade them for money and people.

One person briefed on the meeting said Ms. Meloni had pressed aggressively for it.

She also has a good relationship with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a close adviser of the president-elect’s, which her supporters hope will bolster her international standing once Mr. Trump becomes president.

Since being elected, Mr. Trump has welcomed to Mar-a-Lago Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, a champion of “illiberal democracy,” as well as Argentina’s firebrand right-wing president, Javier Milei. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada became the first Group of 7 leader to visit Mr. Trump in Florida since the election, after a threat to impose tariffs on Canada.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.