Outside a warehouse in southern Gaza one day this week, a small crowd of men and boys waited their turn for a bit of the humanitarian aid that Gaza — sick, starving, freezing Gaza — has desperately needed. They walked away with sacks of flour and cardboard boxes of food, many dragging their precious cargo behind them in two-wheeled shopping carts.

It was an orderly sight that had become rare in the territory since the war began more than 15 months ago. Israeli restrictions on aid, a security collapse that allowed widespread looting of aid trucks and other obstacles had combined to limit the food, water, tents, medicine and fuel that reached civilians amid an Israeli siege on the strip.

In the week since a cease-fire agreement stopped the fighting in Gaza, Palestinians in Gaza and aid officials say that more food deliveries and other much-needed items are streaming in. The question now is how to maintain the level of aid they say Gaza needs, despite many logistical challenges and uncertainties over how long the truce will hold.

The United Nations moved as much food into Gaza in three days this week as it did in the entire month of October, the interim head of the U.N. humanitarian office for Gaza, Jonathan Whittall, said in a briefing on Thursday.

Other U.N. agencies and aid groups were distributing medical supplies and fuel to power hospitals and water wells, among other types of assistance, and helping to repair critical infrastructure. Tents were set to enter soon, and bakeries were expected to start supplying bread by Friday, according to the United Nations.

Since the start of the cease-fire, civilian police officers belonging to the Hamas government have re-emerged, which appears to have restored some security and order to the enclave. The show of Hamas control, however, may complicate prospects for a durable peace in Gaza.

COGAT, the Israeli government agency that oversees policy in Gaza and the West Bank, did not respond to a request for comment, but it said in a post on social media on Friday that 4,200 aid trucks had entered the Gaza Strip over the past week after being inspected.

Throughout the war, Israel said that it was not limiting aid into Gaza and blamed humanitarian agencies for failing to distribute the supplies it admitted into the enclave after screening.

In all, anywhere between about 600 and 900 truckloads of aid have arrived in Gaza each day since the cease-fire took effect on Jan. 19, dwarfing the few dozen trucks that had been entering daily in recent months.

By Tuesday, Kholoud al-Shanna, 43, and her family had received a bag of flour from the World Food Program, the first in two months.

It was welcome. But “we’re still missing the basics,” Ms. al-Shanna said. “My kids haven’t had fresh vegetables in so long that they’ve almost forgotten what they taste like. How are we supposed to survive on just flour?”

Improvements were coming on that front, too. Before the war, Gaza was supplied with a mix of donated aid and goods for sale. Small amounts of imported fresh produce, meat and other food continued to be sold in markets until Israel banned most commercial items late last year, arguing that Hamas was profiting off the trade. Some commercial goods have entered Gaza this week, according to aid workers, bringing fresh vegetables and even chocolate bars to markets at lower prices than shoppers have seen in many months.

Distributing the aid once it enters Gaza remains a work in progress. Many roads are in ruins after 15 months of war, though Gaza municipalities are starting to clear debris. Unexploded ordnance still litters the enclave, making distribution and repairs dangerous.

About 500 trucks carrying a mix of aid and commercial goods entered Gaza each day before the war. The cease-fire agreement envisions 600 trucks entering each day, which aid officials say they will be hard-pressed to sustain on their own.

“It cannot be delivered just by the United Nations, no way,” Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, the primary lifeline for Palestinian refugees, said days before the cease-fire took effect.

UNRWA’s precarious situation is another potential hindrance: While U.N. officials say the agency is crucial to the aid effort because it forms the backbone of supply chains and services in Gaza, Israel has moved to ban the agency over accusations that it shielded Hamas militants. Aid officials say there is nothing comparable to take its place.

The biggest challenge of all is the sheer scale of the emergency. Though aid may be rolling in now, aid officials said, Gaza has been so lacking in assistance that it will take a deluge of supplies just to stabilize the population and prevent more deaths, to say nothing of eventual reconstruction.

Gaza will also need educational and psychological services and other support to begin to recover, officials say.

The number of trucks recently entering Gaza “is still a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of aid needed to catch up on what has been a massive dearth over the last year and a half,” said Bob Kitchen, the vice president for emergencies at the International Rescue Committee.

Some obstacles are gradually yielding. Israel’s evident willingness to usher in a surge of aid has resolved what aid officials and governments that donated assistance say was the biggest hurdle to getting Gaza what it needed. Saying its goal was to keep Hamas from resupplying through aid shipments, Israel had imposed stringent inspections on the assistance entering Gaza and restricted its movement once inside Gaza, frequently delaying or outright stopping delivery.

Aid workers no longer need to ask permission from the Israeli military to move around Gaza, except from south to north, speeding up the process. Before the cease-fire, many trucks designated to ferry aid to warehouses around the strip sat paralyzed for lack of fuel; now fuel is entering.

Israel still prohibits agencies from bringing in a long list of items that aid officials say are vital to the emergency response but that Israel deems “dual use,” meaning they could also be used by Hamas for military purposes. That has included everything from scissors to tent materials.

Some of those restrictions have been lifted, however, aid officials say, and talks are continuing about lifting more.

Another problem plaguing aid distribution in Gaza for months was looting, which diverted much of the aid meant for civilians.

The situation in Gaza deteriorated after the Israeli military invaded Rafah, in southern Gaza, in May, seeking to oust Hamas from what Israel said was one of its final strongholds. Hamas’s security forces fled, and organized gangs — with no one stopping them — began intercepting aid trucks after they crossed into Gaza.

International aid workers 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 called on Israel to allow the Gaza police, which are under Hamas’s authority, to secure their convoys.

Israel, which has sought to destroy Hamas in Gaza, accused it of stealing aid and said the police were part of its apparatus. In the end, security broke down so badly that many aid groups kept their deliveries sitting at Gaza’s borders rather than risk the dangerous drive into Gaza.

But fears that organized looting would continue after the cease-fire have eased. Policemen are once again patrolling much of Gaza. While some people are still pulling boxes from trucks — scenes described by aid officials and witnessed by a New York Times reporter — it is now on a far smaller scale.

Palestinians in Gaza say that as aid becomes more widely available, people will have less incentive to loot.

“I’ve noticed a clear improvement — more people are getting food parcels today,” said Rami Abu Sharkh, 44, an accountant from Gaza City who had been displaced to southern Gaza. “I hope it continues until theft is eliminated completely.”

Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting from New York.

Hamas said on Friday that it would release four female soldiers held hostage for over a year in Gaza, as part of a hostage-for-prisoner swap set to take place on Saturday, as Israelis and Palestinians anxiously await the next steps in the cease-fire deal.

In a statement, Hamas identified the four women as Karina Ariev, 20; Daniella Gilboa, 20; Naama Levy, 20; and Liri Albag, 19. All four were abducted from the military base near Gaza where they served during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that began the war.

Israel said mediators between the two sides had passed along a list of names of hostages slated for release on Saturday, without confirming their identities. It remained unclear whether the four named by Hamas would ultimately be released.

Mediators hope that the six-week truce between Israel and Hamas, which began on Sunday, could lay the foundation for a permanent end to the war in Gaza. But the coming weekend could prove a crucial test for the agreement.

Under the terms of the deal, Israel would be expected to release around 200 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the four women hostages on Saturday, including some serving life sentences for involvement in attacks on Israelis.

The truce also stipulated that Israeli forces would have to partly withdraw from a wide zone in central Gaza to allow hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians to begin heading back to their homes in the devastated north.

And Hamas has also committed to supplying Israel on Saturday with information about the condition of the remaining hostages to be released during the six-week truce, said two Israeli officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive diplomacy.

Israel has long demanded to know which hostages were still alive after more than 15 months in captivity in Gaza. Hamas has refused to provide the information, with some officials arguing that they could not even confirm their status before a truce allowed its fighters to move and communicate freely.

The 42-day cease-fire deal went into effect on Sunday, pausing the fighting between Israel and Hamas. Hamas agreed to release 33 of the remaining hostages in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinians jailed by Israel and a partial Israeli withdrawal. During the pause, both sides agreed to discuss terms for a longer cease-fire.

Many on both sides saw the deal as a bittersweet moment. Gazans were grateful for a reprieve after 15 months of war that killed tens of thousands, even as they feared for their future in the enclave, much of which has been reduced to rubble.

Israelis experienced a moment of collective euphoria over the release of three female hostages — Romi Gonen, 24; Emily Damari, 28; and Doron Steinbrecher, 31. But their joy was tempered by scenes of Hamas fighters parading through the streets of Gaza in a show of force, despite Israeli leaders’ vows to destroy the group. As part of that exchange, Israel released 90 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

The war began after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that the Israeli authorities said killed roughly 1,200 and saw 250 taken hostage. Israel’s subsequent military campaign against Hamas in Gaza killed at least 45,000 people, according to local health officials, whose statistics do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Roughly 94 hostages still remain in Gaza, dozens of whom are presumed dead, according to the Israeli authorities. They include Israeli soldiers, male civilians, women and Thai migrant workers.

One early evening in December, the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled his country as rebel forces advanced on Damascus. In France, three days later, one of the country’s most-watched TV news channels turned to a cartoonist for expert opinion on the news.

“Did you think that this could have happened so rapidly?” a news anchor for the channel, BFMTV, asked the cartoonist, Riad Sattouf, whose smiling face appeared on a giant video wall.

Over the past decade, Mr. Sattouf, 46, has become one of France’s biggest literary stars, thanks largely to his masterwork, “The Arab of the Future,” a series of graphic memoirs. Over six volumes, the series tells the story of Mr. Sattouf’s childhood, which was jarringly divided between the Middle East and France, and the disintegration of the marriage between his French mother and his Syrian father.

The books — in a genre known as “bandes dessinées” in France — have sold more than three million copies and have been translated into some 23 languages. Though told from a child’s perspective and drawn in a deceptively simple style, they touch on some of the thorniest questions about the compatibility of the Western and Arab worlds. They are also suffused with a subtle but withering social satire.

For Mr. Sattouf, this posture informs not only his art, but the way he interprets the world. In his TV appearance in December, he told viewers that the fall of Mr. al-Assad was a moment of “immense hope” for Syria. But when asked to predict what might happen next, he warned that he tended to see things “extremely pessimistically.”

“I keep my fingers crossed,” he said, “that a terrible dictatorship won’t be replaced by another dictatorship.”

Mr. Sattouf, who was born in France, grew up enamored with the brutally honest and occasionally offensive work of the American cartoonist Robert Crumb. His work also follows in the tradition of comics that offer readers an intimate view of characters living through pivotal historical moments, including Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis.”

For years, Mr. Sattouf wrote a cartoon strip for Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine. He stopped contributing a few months before January 2015, when the magazine’s offices were targeted in a deadly terrorist attack over its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Mr. Sattouf did not draw the cartoons of Muhammad; his strip had been focused on amusing, and sometimes depressing, scenes of daily life he encountered on the streets and metro in Paris.

In “The Arab of the Future,” Mr. Sattouf paints a complex portrait of his father, who made his way from a small rural village in Syria to Sorbonne University in Paris, where he received a doctorate in history and met the woman who would become Mr. Sattouf’s mother. The cartoonist also portrays his father as sliding, over the years, into a state of permanent bitterness toward the West and an embrace of anti-democratic Arab strongmen.

Some of the most arresting pages in the series depict Mr. Sattouf’s experience as a child in Ter Maaleh, his father’s village. He moved there in the 1980s, while he was in grade school, and lived there during the dictatorial reign of Mr. al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad.

Mr. Sattouf’s memories of Ter Maaleh are vivid and coruscating. The French journalist Stéphane Jarno recently described the depictions of the town as “a few buildings surrounded by emptiness, a micro-society steeped in blind piety and power struggles, with apparently little love but a lot of violence.”

This willingness to pull no punches about his experience in Syria puts Mr. Sattouf in a loose but important category of French public figures with roots in the Arab world who are unafraid to criticize it. It can be a fraught position.

The Algerian author Kamel Daoud, who currently lives in France, recently won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, for a novel that addressed the complex history of the Algerian civil war. In the past, Mr. Daoud, who has openly discussed sensitive religious issues, was the subject of a death threat from an Algerian imam. More recently, Mr. Daoud has complained that he has been castigated by elements of the French left for “not being the good Arab, who is in the permanent state of de-colonial victimhood.”

Somehow, Mr. Sattouf has largely avoided that fate. He has been a critical darling of the French news media since at least the mid 2000s, when, as a young man, he was publishing what he called “sexual and provocatively funny” comics. At the same time, he said in a recent interview, he had never faced a backlash from Islamist groups.

“Never,” he said, smiling. “Because my comics are so good.”

The line was delivered with a joking-not-joking sort of flourish.

Mr. Sattouf met for the interview in Rennes, the capital of Brittany, late last month. He comes across as both impish and serious-minded, with a quiet voice that toggled in the interview between French and a workable English that he said he had learned from bingeing “Seinfeld.”

He insisted, as he has in the many interviews he has given since the flight of Mr. al-Assad, that he is not a Middle East expert. “It’s very complicated to me,” he said. “My books are about Syria, but in my books I tell stories of my family. I tell my memory, my point of view as a child.”

The books describe a childhood of wrenching change, with a love of drawing and cartooning as a refuge and a constant.

When he was 12, he left Ter Maaleh, moving back to Brittany with his two younger brothers and his mother as his parents’ marriage had begun to fray. He has not been back to Syria since.

In France, he said, he found a freedom of expression crucial to his craft. He also watched with concern as some French leaders seemed to embrace Mr. al-Assad. He made specific note of the 2008 decision of Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French president, to invite Mr. al-Assad to Paris for Bastille Day festivities.

As revelations of the Syrian regime’s atrocities have come to light, Mr. Sattouf said that he felt a sense of vindication.

“We see that the story I was telling in my books was closer to the reality than what you could see in the media,” he said.

Mohamed-Nour Hayed, 22, a Franco-Syrian activist and writer who was granted asylum in France amid the civil war in Syria, recalls first reading “The Arab of the Future” at age 15. He said he was concerned that Mr. Sattouf’s negative depiction of Syria could reinforce stereotypes among readers who see only a depiction of “a very closed-minded Syria.”

But Mr. Hayed also praised the series and said that it had influenced him as he wrote his own first novel, which is set during the war. Like “The Arab of the Future,” Mr. Hayed said, it is written from the perspective of a child.

In addition to writing “The Arab of the Future,” Mr. Sattouf has directed two feature films. “Les Beaux Gosses,” or “The French Kissers,” a coming-of-age comedy, won a César award for best first film. Late last year, he released the first volume of “I, Fadi, the Stolen Brother” a spinoff series to “The Arab of the Future,” based on interviews with his youngest brother, who, Mr. Sattouf said, was taken from France to Syria by his father when his brother was a child. Mr. Sattouf, in the interview, described it as kidnapping.

When asked to fill in exactly what happened to his brother afterward, Mr. Sattouf declined, saying he did not want to give away the rest of the story, to be published in later volumes.

The first four volumes of the “Arab” series have been translated into English; Fantagraphics, a U.S.-based comics publisher, is planning to publish versions of the final volumes, as well as the new series. Many French bookstores currently feature big cardboard displays showing off Mr. Sattouf’s books, along with a photograph of his face. Outside the Rennes train station recently, a middle-aged man recognized Mr. Sattouf and ran up to shake his hand.

And the French media continue to turn to him for insight into the fall of the Assad regime.

Mr. Sattouf told the regional newspaper Ouest-France that organizing democratic elections “in a country fractured by 13 years of civil war required immense political will, but also international support.”

He told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that living under Assad rule in Syria had imbued him with “a certain paranoia, let’s say, a distrust which has become part of my personality.”

He also spoke to the newspaper La Croix about going back to Syria one day.

“But this can only happen in a peaceful and democratic Syria,” he said. “For now, it is still a distant and fanciful prospect.”

President Donald J. Trump said he would reach out to North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, raising the possibility of rekindling their bromance diplomacy five years after their first round of negotiations drew global attention but did little to reduce Mr. Kim’s growing nuclear threat.

“He liked me and I got along with him,” Mr. Trump said during an interview with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, after saying that he would reach out to Mr. Kim again in his second term. “He is not a religious zealot. He happens to be a smart guy.”

Mr. Trump’s comments, aired on Thursday night, were the first time he has expressed an intent to reopen diplomacy with Mr. Kim since taking office on Monday. During his first term, Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim made history when they held the first summit between their nations, which remain technically at war. But their relationship petered out after their three high-profile meetings failed to yield any progress.

It is unclear whether or how Mr. Kim, emboldened by a stronger alliance with Russia and his own country’s military advances, will respond to the overtures this time around. Since Mr. Trump last met Mr. Kim five years ago, North Korea’s missile capabilities have expanded and he could demand a bigger price for making concessions on his nuclear program, analysts say.

Mr. Trump had voiced interest in the North Korean leader during his campaign, saying at one point that “it’s nice to get along when somebody has a lot of nuclear weapons.” Hours after his inauguration, he also told reporters that Mr. Kim was “a nuclear power,” a shift from Washington’s longstanding refusal to recognize North Korea as such.

Officials in South Korea, a U.S. ally gripped by a domestic political crisis following the impeachment of its leader, have feared Mr. Trump’s return might put the Korean Peninsula on a diplomatic roller coaster ride again.

During his first term, Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim first exchanged personal insults and threats of nuclear war. They then shook hands and held three meetings between 2018 and 2019. At one point, Mr. Trump declared on social media that there was “no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea” and that he “fell in love” with Mr. Kim.

Those talks, however, ended without an agreement on how to roll back North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs or when the United States should ease sanctions imposed on the country. Mr. Kim vowed not to engage Washington in dialogue again and has doubled down on building and testing nuclear-capable missiles.

Now, South Korean analysts and officials fear that Mr. Trump might make a deal with Mr. Kim in which North Korea would give up its long-range missiles, but not all its nuclear weapons, in exchange for sanctions relief.

Mr. Trump’s recent statement describing North Korea as a nuclear power clashed with a long-held agreement between Washington and Seoul that North Korea should never be accepted as such.

“We cannot grant North Korea nuclear power status,” South Korea’s Defense Ministry said in a statement after Mr. Trump’s comment.

Despite Mr. Trump’s flattering comments about Mr. Kim, it was unclear whether the dictator would warm to the idea of a renewed courtship. Following the collapse of the first round of meetings, Mr. Kim has championed a new “multipolar” global order, signing a mutual defense pact with Moscow last year and sending weapons and an estimated 12,000 troops to help Russia in its war against Ukraine.

Despite suffering heavy casualties in the war against Ukraine, North Korea was preparing to send more troops to Russia, the South Korean military said on Friday.

China has long been the only major buffer between North Korea and American-led international efforts to tame its regime’s military ambitions. In return for helping Russia in its war against Ukraine, Mr. Kim has recruited Moscow as another major ally to shield his country from U.S. pressure.

North Korea had not commented on Mr. Trump’s election or inauguration until on Wednesday, when its state media carried a two-sentence report.

The regime did, however, launch missiles off its east coast in the days before the inauguration. And it is preparing to launch more missiles, according to South Korea’s military, including long-range ballistic missiles powerful enough to reach the continental United States, which tend to annoy American defense officials the most.

North Korean state media reported Friday that the nation’s parliament had this week adopted budgets for the year that would ”ensure the acceleration of the significant change in the national defense capabilities.”

Mr. Kim will likely wait until a Workers’ Party meeting in June or another parliamentary gathering in September to react to Mr. Trump’s overture, said Hong Min, a senior analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul.

“He will react after gauging the Trump administration’s seriousness, intention and calculations behind its North Korea approach,” Mr. Hong said.

Israel is set to occupy parts of southern Lebanon after a deadline for its full military withdrawal lapses on Sunday, the Israeli government implied in a statement on Friday, amid Israeli concerns that Hezbollah remains active there and doubts about the Lebanese Army’s ability to stymie the militia’s resurgence.

Under the terms of a truce between Israel and Hezbollah in late November, Israeli troops were supposed to withdraw within 60 days from areas of Lebanon that they had recently wrested from the group’s control. Hezbollah was also required to withdraw from the region, allowing the Lebanese military to assert its control over an area where Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Shiite force and political movement, had long dominated.

Less than two days before the deadline, the office of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, announced that Israel’s withdrawal was dependent on the Lebanese Army asserting its full control over the area, adding that the timeline was flexible and implying that Israeli troops would remain in Lebanon beyond the cutoff.

“Since the cease-fire agreement has not yet been fully enforced by Lebanon, the gradual withdrawal process will continue under full cooperation with the United States,” the statement from the Israeli prime minister’s office said.

Asked for clarification, the prime minister’s office declined to say if this meant that Israeli troops would definitely remain in Lebanon after the deadline. But Israeli leaders have told American and French mediators that they want to keep some soldiers in southern Lebanon beyond Sunday, according to three officials briefed on the negotiations.

There was no immediate response from the Lebanese government. In a brief message, Hezbollah’s media office said it was awaiting reaction from the countries overseeing the cease-fire, the United States and France. In a longer statement released on Thursday, Hezbollah said that any “breach” of the deal would not be tolerated, because it would be “a blatant violation of the agreement, an attack on Lebanese sovereignty and the beginning of a new chapter of occupation.”

Hezbollah officials did not respond to accusations that Hezbollah had failed to live up to its commitments and that the Lebanese military had not yet taken control of the territory in question. Its media relations office said the group was “committed” to the terms of the cease-fire deal but would not go into further detail.

Hezbollah has called on the Lebanese government and international monitors not to allow “any pretexts or excuses for prolonging the occupation,” but did not say what action it would take if Israeli troops remained.

After two months mostly without conflict, despite occasional violations, the specter of renewed fighting looms again, even if Hezbollah, battered and exhausted, no longer poses the same threat to Israel as it did at the start of the war nearly 16 months ago.

If Israeli troops do remain beyond the weekend without Lebanon’s blessing, Hezbollah will have to choose between accepting the status quo and losing face — or resuming battle and risking a large Israeli counterattack that would further damage both its decimated ranks and Lebanese civilian infrastructure. Should fighting restart, Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, has warned that Israeli strikes would no longer differentiate between Hezbollah and the Lebanese state.

“It’s a serious dilemma for Hezbollah,” said Nicholas Blanford, a Beirut-based analyst for the Atlantic Council, an American research group. “They are damned if they resist and damned if they don’t. Hezbollah’s supporters will not thank the party for resuming war when they are trying to return to their homes and begin rebuilding.”

Since November, Israel has transferred more than 100 military installations and villages to the Lebanese authorities, but still occupies roughly 70 percent of the areas that it captured after invading Lebanon last fall, according to Andrea Tenenti, a spokesman for UNIFIL, the United Nations peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon.

Israeli officials say that the Lebanese Army has yet to signal its willingness to fill the void in those areas, all which are south of the Litani River. Mr. Tenenti said that the Lebanese military stood ready to do so but could not enter places that the Israeli military had yet to vacate.

Asked for comment, the Lebanese military referred to a public statement in which it said that it “maintains readiness to complete its deployment in the area south of the Litani River immediately after the Israeli enemy withdraws from it.”

In recent days, Israeli troops did not appear to be preparing for a complete evacuation, according to an official and an Israeli military officer who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak more freely.

The deadline poses an early quandary for President Trump, who strongly backs Israel but campaigned on a promise of peace for Lebanon.

It is also a test for Lebanon’s new leaders. President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister-designate Nawaf Salam, both selected this month, need a peaceful environment to rebuild Lebanon after years of war, political chaos and economic catastrophe.

The new Lebanese leadership “has yet to demonstrate adequately that it can be a confident leader in managing Hezbollah — a weakness that, of course, Israel is going to continue to exploit as justification for staying past the deadline,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East program at Chatham House, a London-based foreign affairs research group.

The current conflict began after Hezbollah’s ally Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking some 250 hostages. The next day, Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israeli military positions in solidarity with Hamas, and Israel fired back, leading to daily exchanges that displaced hundreds of thousands of Israeli and Lebanese civilians and damaged towns on either side of the border.

The fighting escalated last summer, after a rocket from Lebanon killed a group of children and teenagers in an Israeli-controlled town. Israel assassinated most of Hezbollah’s top leadership, sharply increased its bombardment of Hezbollah strongholds and then launched a ground invasion into southern Lebanon.

The Israeli offensive destroyed whole neighborhoods, displaced more than a million people and killed several thousand, including many civilians.

The war also led to direct confrontations between Israel and Iran, Hezbollah’s main backer.

Bruised and distracted, Hezbollah and Iran were both powerless to prevent the collapse of a third member of their alliance, the Syrian government. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria was toppled by rebels in December, making it almost impossible for Iran to send arms to Hezbollah through Syrian territory. Within Lebanon, Hezbollah’s strength was diminished, leading to the rise of Mr. Aoun and Mr. Salam, who both promised to restore the cohesion and authority of the Lebanese state.

Israeli leaders privately say that a stronger Lebanese government is in Israel’s interests, because it could further curb the influence of Hezbollah, which opposes Israel’s existence. Hezbollah was founded in the 1980s, partly in response to a previous Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which lasted until 2000. The militia’s weaponry gave it outsize influence over Lebanese affairs, with some comparing it to a state within a state. Now, the group is at its weakest ebb in decades.

But Israel is prepared to stay within Lebanon, denting the new Lebanese leadership’s authority, with its officials arguing that Hezbollah still retains the resources and the ambition to pose a threat to Israeli villages along the border.

The Lebanese Army has deployed to major towns and villages in southern Lebanon in recent weeks, mostly in places close to the Mediterranean Sea, in the southwest of the country. It has also deployed specialized units to remove rubble, dispose of unexploded ordinance and reconstruct roads that were destroyed. Army officials say they have operated in coordination with the international committee supervising the cease-fire.

But Lebanese soldiers have yet to take charge of the borderlands further to the east, with the exception of the area around Khiam, a town in southeast Lebanon that was the site of fierce fighting during the war.

An Israeli military officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak more freely, said the Israeli Army had made no attempt to dismantle roughly half a dozen military bases built in recent months along a narrow strip, less than a mile wide, north of the Israel-Lebanon border.

The expectation among soldiers at the front, the officer said, was that they would remain in place for the foreseeable future to prevent Hezbollah’s return there.

Dayana Iwaza contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon; Johnatan Reiss from Tel Aviv; and Christina Goldbaum from Damascus, Syria.

So was it a Hitler salute or wasn’t it?

Speaking at President Trump’s inauguration event this week, Elon Musk slapped his right hand on his chest before shooting his arm diagonally upward, palm facing down. He did it twice.

It looked a lot like the salute used in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. But almost immediately, a striking number of different interpretations began to circulate.

Some commentators called it a “Roman salute.” Others described it as a “heartfelt” expression of joy, or dismissed it as merely clumsy.

The website of the Anti-Defamation League, which campaigns against anti-Semitism, defines the Nazi salute as “raising an outstretched right arm with the palm down,” and ranks it as “the most common white supremacist hand sign in the world.”

But after Mr. Musk’s stiff-arm salute, the Anti-Defamation League called it “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.”

Andrea Stroppa, known as Mr. Musk’s emissary in Italy, posted on the social media platform X: “The Roman Empire is back, starting from the Roman salute.” He later deleted the post, saying that people were interpreting “the whole thing as a reference to Nazi-fascism.”

Mr. Musk, who owns X, posted in response to the criticism: “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is soo tired.”

The straight-arm salute has meant very different things in different places and during different periods of history. But at a time when the far right is once again on the rise, the interpretation of this gesture being performed deliberately and publicly was straightforward — especially in Germany, where the salute’s history lingers most powerfully.

‘There is no need to make this complicated’

In Germany, gestures like the one Mr. Musk made are illegal, along with other symbols and slogans from the Nazi era. (On Wednesday night, anti-Musk protesters projected an image showing his salute and the words “Heil Tesla” onto the facade of his company’s German factory.)

For the German establishment, the situation was very clear.

“A Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute,” the prominent German weekly Die Zeit wrote in an editorial.

“There is no need to make this unnecessarily complicated,” the editorial said. “Anyone on a political stage giving a political speech in front of a partly right-wing extremist audience,” — present at the inauguration were several far-right politicians from Germany, Italy, France and Britain — “anyone who raises their right arm in a swinging manner and at an angle several times is doing the Hitler salute.”

“Anyone who now thinks they have to discover the older ‘Roman salute’ as a supposed Musk reference is, above all, demonstrating their willingness to reinterpret it in a benign way,” it concluded.

“Roman salute” is indeed trending on social media — along with images of toga-clad actors in grainy films set in ancient Rome raising their right arm alongside Mr. Musk raising his.

But was there a Roman salute in ancient times? No: There is no evidence that the salute was ever used in ancient Rome.

The actual history of the salute is little-known — and much shorter: It was used in late 19th century theater productions and early 20th century films, which then inspired its use by fascists in Italy and Germany. And it was actually performed for decades by American school children for entirely different reasons.

From silent films to European fascists

“The Roman salute is a modern invention,” said Martin Winkler, professor of classics at George Mason University in Virginia, and author of “The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology.”

“There is no evidence whatsoever from the Roman art and paintings that survive that ancient Romans ever used that gesture,” he added.

The salute first became popular in stage productions and silent cinema, when films began using the gesture for costume dramas set in ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt.

“It’s simply a visual gesture that was heavily deployed in the silent cinema era when many films were set in antiquity,” Mr. Winkler said. “Why? Because in the absence of sound, dramatic gestures and what we would now consider overacting were pretty much ubiquitous. Saluting gestures were no exception.”

The salute had a real-life breakthrough in 1919. Gabriele D’Annunzio, a soldier and Italian poet turned nationalist (who had worked on “Cabiria,” an Italian silent film set in antiquity) invaded Fiume, a coastal city that is now part of Croatia.

He ruled Fiume for 15 months as a kind of mini-Caesar, calling his soldiers legionnaires and addressing them from his balcony. And he adopted a ceremony that involved a straight arm salute he called “Il saluto Romano,” or the Roman salute.

“This Roman salute resembled a stab: You extend your arm, angled upwards with your fingers together, as if it were a dagger that you symbolically thrust into an enemy’s throat,” Mr. Winkler said. “It’s a very militarized, politicized kind of gesture.”

The Roman salute was adopted soon after by the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who came to power in 1922. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party adopted it in 1926, calling it the German salute.

Intriguingly, there was an American salute that preceded both.

A salute to the American flag

To modern eyes, it would be jarring to see a group of schoolchildren giving the stiff-armed salute to the American flag. But the gesture was commonplace for decades.

In 1892 — in the run-up to the Chicago World’s Fair marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus arriving in America — Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister’s son from upstate New York, wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, a version of which is recited by many American school children to this day.

Along with his boss, James Upton, Bellamy also came up with a salute to accompany the recital of the pledge: Stand up, hand on heart, then extend the right arm to salute the Stars and Stripes. It became known as the Bellamy salute.

The pledge itself was part of an Americanization program for immigrant children. But in 1942, when the United States was fighting the Nazis in World War II, the extended arm gesture was abandoned. “It looked too close to the Nazi salute,” Winkler said.

Whatever Elon Musk was trying to invoke on Monday, his salute looked pretty close to a Nazi salute even if it was not identical. He first put his hand on his chest, which is not part of the Nazi salute, and could be closer to what those American school children did until 1942.

But the pledge of allegience salute was dropped in a way that left no room for misinterpretation: The gesture had become inextricably tied to the Nazis.

“The common American perception was, ‘These are our enemies and we don’t want to be like them,’” Winkler said.

Mr. Musk is now courting far-right parties in several European countries. His audience in Washington on Inauguration Day included Tino Chrupalla, a co-leader of Germany’s Alternative for Germany party; Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, whose party is descended from the post-Fascist movement; Nigel Farage of Britain’s Reform Party; and Eric Zemmour of France, who is to the right even of the French National Rally’s Marine Le Pen.

“What is happening now is predictable,” Die Zeit said in its editorial. “Neo-Nazis and right-wing radicals can interpret the stretched right arm as a gesture of fraternization and empowerment.”

Emma Bubola in Rome contributed reporting. Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.

One year has passed since Moscow accused Kyiv of shooting down a Russian military plane carrying dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war. Ukraine opened an investigation, but has yet to release its findings, leaving questions about who was killed, and why.

The crash of the IL-76 transport plane in the Belgorod region of Russia, near the border with Ukraine, set off a series of recriminations at a delicate moment for Kyiv, as it lobbied for Western aid to build up its depleted weapons stocks.

Russian officials called it a “terrorist” act and convened an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council. Ukrainian officials did not admit or deny shooting down the aircraft, and said they could not confirm that Ukrainian prisoners were onboard.

American officials later assessed that Ukrainian forces had used a U.S.-made Patriot missile to shoot it down, thinking the plane carried Russian missiles and munitions.

“We have many questions about the situation,” Sofia Sobolyeva, who believes her father was on the plane, said in a recent interview.

With the families of the prisoners still awaiting answers, here’s what we know about the crash one year on.

Conflicting Accounts

Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Jan. 24, 2024, that one of its military transports had been shot down while en route to Belgorod for a prisoner swap. It said that the plane was carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war and that no one survived the crash.

Initially, Ukraine asserted its right to target Russian military transport planes in the border area, which had been a staging ground for the 2022 invasion and was used to mount attacks after that.

At the time of the crash, deadly Russian missile strikes had been pounding Kharkiv, just across the border in Ukraine, and Kyiv stressed the need to hinder those attacks.

Soon, though, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency hinted at the possibility of a tragic mistake, not directly acknowledging that Ukraine had downed the plane but offering explanations for how it might have happened.

One Ukrainian official said the IL-76, often used to carry freight, had previously been used to deliver ammunition and missiles, suggesting that it was a legitimate target.

The agency acknowledged a prisoner swap had been planned for Jan. 24 — but said Russia had not warned Ukraine that prisoners were being flown to Belgorod’s airport, as was the case in previous exchanges. Russian officials disputed that account, saying Ukraine’s military had been notified.

The diverging claims illustrated the persistent lack of clarity that has become a defining feature of the war. Both sides have pushed their preferred narratives over nearly three years of fighting, and have been reluctant to disclose or acknowledge setbacks.

Investigators have found DNA matches for more than 50 of the 65 bodies Russia said were on board, but it still was not possible to say whether they were the same bodies said to have been found at the site of the crash, according to a report published on Friday by the Media Initiative for Human Rights, a Ukrainian group investigating war crimes.

It has spent the better part of the past year trying to provide some clarity amid the dearth of official information.

Calls for Investigation

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine called for his country’s intelligence agency to determine what had happened and for an international investigation into the crash. He accused Russia of “playing with the lives of Ukrainian prisoners, the feelings of their loved ones and the emotions of our society.”

Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency opened an investigation into the incident.

Russian officials said the plane had crashed in a snowy field near a settlement in the Korochansky district. No independent groups were able to visit the crash site; Ukraine requested that the Red Cross and United Nations be granted access.

Satellite images and unverified Russian video captured what appeared to be the crash site and debris of a plane in the area Russia described, but it was not possible to identify passengers from the imagery.

Ukrainian officials asked for patience from citizens while they investigated Moscow’s claims.

Identifying the Victims

Prisoner exchanges have occurred regularly throughout the war, even amid bitter fighting. But the Ukrainian authorities typically do not disclose, even to families, the names of those set to be released before exchanges.

The Russian authorities did not identify the victims of the crash when they announced it. But the names of 65 prisoners of war allegedly onboard were shared on social media by the editor in chief of RT, the Russian state media broadcaster,

A few days later, the Ukrainian government agency that oversees prisoners of war confirmed that the names on the list matched those who were set to be exchanged on the day of the crash. But the agency said it did not have evidence to confirm that those prisoners were aboard the plane, or even that they were dead.

That was around the time, Sofia Sobolyeva said, that her family received a phone call from the military requesting a meeting. Ms. Sobolyeva’s father had been in Russian captivity since March 2022 — shortly after the start of the war — and his name was on the list.

“They gathered us and explained the situation but did not answer any questions,” she said. The authorities pledged to investigate “quickly,” she said, and asked relatives to submit DNA.

A Break in the Case

The case dropped from the headlines for months. An exchange of remains in early November was the first sign of a potential break.

The International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed that it was present for a Nov. 8 transfer of remains. Russia said the transfer included the remains of 65 killed in the downing of the IL-76, but that claim could not be independently verified.

“I.C.R.C. did not take part in the identification process,” the agency said this week in response to questions, adding that it stood ready to assist the authorities with technical support.

Ms. Sobolyeva said that the families of the 65, who had formed a WhatsApp group, learned about the transfer and were told by the Ukrainian authorities that “time was needed for DNA expertise.”

Outstanding Questions

Ukraine’s general prosecutor and security service did not respond to questions from The New York Times about the status of the investigation or whether any remains had been identified.

But there appears to be little dispute over who downed the plane.

Russia’s defense ministry had accused Ukrainian forces of launching missiles from the nearby Kharkiv region of Ukraine that struck the aircraft. American officials briefed on the incident later said that Ukraine used a Patriot air defense missile to down the plane.

Some relatives of those believed to have been on the plane attended the presentation of the report on Friday. Some women came with children and others were holding portraits of their loved ones. Many of them cried as they listened.

The Media Initiative for Human Rights conducted its own investigation because relatives were “drowning in the number of requests they send out” to Ukrainian officials, said Tetyana Katrychenko, the head of the group.

“We are left alone with our tragedy because there is no organization in our country that would take care of us,” said Oksana Lozytska, whose 25-year old son at the time Roman could have been on the plane.

While Ukraine has not formally accepted responsibility, Ms. Sobolyeva said that’s beside the point now.

“Logically, we understand that Ukraine shot it down,” she said, even though “officially we have nothing.

What she’s less sure about is whether the families will ever have answers to their other questions — like how it happened, and why.

She described her father as a kind man with “golden hands” — able to fix anything that broke — who loved gardening.

“There was a lot of stress and tears, but I still can’t understand what happened,” Ms. Sobolyeva said one recent evening.

“Now,” she added, “I just wear his black hat, so I feel warmer — both mentally and physically.”