Standing in the rotunda, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy was a privileged guest at President Trump’s inauguration.

The only European leader to attend the event last month, Ms. Meloni shares many of Mr. Trump’s conservative, nationalist impulses. She is friendly with his billionaire adviser Elon Musk. Many of her supporters hope that the Italian leader’s special relationship with Mr. Trump will bolster Italy’s standing — and her own.

But even as Ms. Meloni joined a standing ovation for the new American president, it took only moments for Mr. Trump to remind her and others on Europe’s right that the unpredictable American president may be as much an adversary as an ally.

“I will, very simply, put America first,” Mr. Trump said in his inaugural address. “We will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”

Since then, Mr. Trump has warned that he will “definitely” slap Europe with tariffs “pretty soon,” raising the same wariness that many Europeans feel among those on the right who would seem to be his natural allies.

While Mr. Trump promises to answer to no one as he prioritizes American interests, many nationalist parties in Europe pledge to do the same for their own countries. Mr. Trump’s threats go to the heart of their own agendas, and they could hurt the core constituencies on which nationalist parties have expanded their appeal.

Potential tensions around trade highlight some of the fundamental contradictions that could emerge from an international alliance of nationalists, with questions on whether their friendship can withstand a collision of competing interests. Leaders are also worried about a possible American disengagement from Europe’s security, and Mr. Trump’s threats to allies who do not meet military spending targets.

“To support a guy who might have negative effects on your country, that’s not a good strategy,” said Renaud Labaye, the general secretary of the far-right National Rally in France’s National Assembly.

Jordan Bardella, the president of the National Rally, said last month that he respected Mr. Trump and was inspired by how quickly he was filling planes with Colombian deportees and threatening the country with tariffs if they didn’t let them land.

But he also painted Mr. Trump as an existential threat to France and Europe. Any tariffs that Mr. Trump might put on French agriculture would hurt French farmers — whose support Mr. Bardella cannot afford to jeopardize.

“If we don’t defend our interests, we will disappear,” he said at a news conference last week.

That coolness differed from the National Rally’s reaction to Mr. Trump’s last election in 2017, when Marine Le Pen, the party’s former president, praised him effusively, and went to Trump Tower in New York hoping — unsuccessfully — to bump into him on the eve of his inauguration.

Mr. Labaye said that it was very useful for the National Rally to have Mr. Trump raise the anti-immigration agenda to a global level in 2017. Now, with nationalist parties surging in Europe, they no longer need President Trump’s services as much.

President Trump’s style could put off many French voters, Mr. Labaye added. “It’s not our culture — being over the top, trash-talking, speaking loud,” he said.

If anything, too much of an association with Mr. Trump could threaten the National Rally’s long and increasingly successful strategy to “undemonize” the party’s image and broaden its appeal among French voters.

“There is a radical aspect of Trumpism today,” said Maya Kandel, a researcher who studies the right in the United States and its links to Europe at the Sorbonne University in Paris. “They don’t know if they want to be part of it or if they want to stick with their normalization plan.”

Still, for as much as Mr. Trump has generated nervousness among his allies, his victory has also galvanized Europe’s right-wing parties, adding momentum to the conservative project they promote.

Some, like the Alternative for Germany, have openly embraced endorsements from Mr. Trump’s right-hand man, Mr. Musk, hoping to gain new stature and legitimacy.

The party, parts of which have been classified as extremist by German intelligence agencies, has seen only a modest bump in the polls following Mr. Musk’s endorsement, and it might not be related to his efforts. Recent polling shows that three-quarters of Germans see Mr. Musk’s attempts to influence German elections as “unacceptable.”

The same poll found that 71 percent of respondents in Germany and Britain, where Mr. Musk has also meddled in the political debate, hold a negative view of him.

For the moment, Mr. Trump’s biggest influence may be in the imitation of his tactics, as demonstrated by a gathering of far-right parties in Madrid this weekend under the banner, “Make Europe Great Again.”

The attendees are expected to include Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary; France’s Ms. Le Pen; and Matteo Salvini, whose League party is part of Ms. Meloni’s governing coalition. They are certain to gush over Mr. Trump’s new presidency.

But beneath the confident veneer lurks the gnawing uncertainty over what Mr. Trump actually means for Europe.

Ms. Meloni’s allies hope she can mediate between the United States and Europe in trade negotiations. “We want to be a bridge,” Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, told the newspaper Corriere della Sera on Monday.

Experts caution that if she tried to play the role of Trump-whisperer Ms. Meloni could also find herself squeezed between a notoriously capricious American president and the European Union, in case the relationship turns more adversarial than it already is.

In case of conflict, it would be hard for Ms. Meloni to side with Mr. Trump, said Jean-Pierre Darnis, a professor at Côte d’Azur University in Nice focusing on Italian foreign relations.

Italy is a founding member of the European Union, and it depends on the E.U. as its largest trading partner and for billions in post-pandemic recovery funds.

“It’s E.U. first,” said Mr. Darnis. “Then you deal with the U.S.”

Beniamino Irdi, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative, said that no matter how much Ms. Meloni and Mr. Trump got along, political affinity could hardly sustain a relationship with someone like Mr. Trump, who has generally embraced a transactional approach to foreign relations.

Their relationship “can give Meloni some meter of advantage on the starting line,” Mr. Irdi said, “but it’s not enough.”

That may be especially true if Italy’s own interests are on the line.

According to a study by Prometeia, an Italian consulting firm, a 10 percent increase in American tariffs on Italian products would cost Italy from 4 to 7 billion euros.

Mr. Trump has threatened to retaliate against European countries who do not meet NATO’s spending commitments for their militaries. At 1.5 percent of its output spent on defense, Italy is far below the unofficial commitment of 2 percent — and even further below the 5 percent Mr. Trump now demands.

Ms. Meloni’s closeness to Mr. Musk has also exposed her to criticism by opponents who were quick to point out that the Italian leader has in the past railed against foreign actors meddling in other countries’ domestic politics.

Italy has also long been in talks with Mr. Musk’s SpaceX for a potential deal to provide secure communications for government and military officials through Starlink.

But when news about the Starlink talks emerged, the opposition accused Ms. Meloni of cozying up with Mr. Musk at the expense of a satellite initiative that the European Union was also building.

Ms. Meloni defended herself by saying that she was only exploring the possibility and that, for now, there was no alternative to Mr. Musk’s satellites.

At the same news conference, she also found herself facing multiple questions about her relationship with Mr. Musk and his interfering in the politics of other countries.

So far, Ms. Meloni has defended her allies.

“George Soros,” she said, referring to the billionaire American investor and longtime Democratic donor whose support of liberal causes has made him a boogeyman of the right. “That’s what I consider dangerous interference.”

Jim Tankersley contributed reporting from Berlin.

President Trump took the world aback with his declaration that the United States was going to “own” Gaza and move out the Palestinians there to build “the Riviera of the Middle East.” As unrealistic and bizarre as it may seem, Mr. Trump was pointing to a serious challenge: the future of Gaza as a secure, peaceful, even prosperous place.

A former French ambassador to Washington, Gérard Araud, put the dilemma neatly. “Trump’s proposal for Gaza is met with disbelief, opposition and sarcasm, but as he often does, in his brutal and clumsy way, he raises a real question: What to do when two million civilians find themselves in a field of ruins, full of explosives and corpses?”

That is an issue Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has always dodged. He has refused to engage on the question of who will rule Gaza after the conflict, largely because it would undermine his governing coalition, which depends on far-right parties that want to resettle Gaza with Israelis.

As outlandish and unworkable as Mr. Trump’s proposal on Tuesday may seem, it is “no less than an historic resetting of decades of received diplomatic wisdom,” said Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser. However unrealistic, he said, “it may force the sides to reconsider long-held positions, stir things up dramatically and lead to new openings.”

What Mr. Trump described — the forced relocation of two million Palestinians from Gaza to countries like Egypt and Jordan that are fiercely opposed to taking them — is not going to happen, said Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London.

“Trump is a man who doesn’t want new military commitments, and now he wants to move two million people who don’t want to go to places that don’t want them,” he said. “But Trump picks up on a real problem, about how to reconstruct Gaza. The important thing with Trump is to pick out the real issues and deflect the stupid ones.”

In his news conference, Mr. Trump failed to discuss one of the biggest problems with his dream: Hamas, the armed Palestinian group devoted to the destruction of Israel. Hamas set off the war that has devastated Gaza and killed nearly 50,000 Palestinian civilians and combatants, with the Oct. 7, 2023, attack it led on Israel. Despite vowing to destroy Hamas and dismantle its control over Gaza, Israel has not achieved either goal, leading key far-right members of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition to demand that the war continue after Phase 1 of the current cease-fire.

Mr. Trump has made it clear he does not want the fighting to begin again, but he also seems to have no answer to how to dislodge Hamas from Gaza, a precondition for getting help from many Arab governments to rebuild the enclave. The idea of American troops fighting and dying in Gaza seems implausible from a president who has wanted to pull them out of Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. Keeping the peace to allow reconstruction and resettlement to take place would probably involve tens of thousands of American troops for perhaps a decade or more.

Trump officials were backtracking on some of his proposals on Wednesday, saying that any population transfer would be temporary.

But Hamas has made it clear it is going nowhere, and presumably it would fight American troops as it fought Israeli ones. As Basem Naim, a member of the group’s political bureau, said in a statement denouncing the Trump proposal, what Mr. Netanyahu failed to do with the support of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — “to displace the residents of the Gaza Strip” in “carrying out genocide against our people” — “no new administration will succeed in implementing.”

Michael Milshtein, an Israeli analyst of Palestinian affairs, said that in discussions with Jordanian, Egyptian, Gulf Arab and Palestinian colleagues, “no one even wants to discuss this deal, because there will be no readiness of Hamas to evacuate Gaza, and I cannot find one Arab country or leader willing to accept the Palestinians.”

Even if nothing comes of Mr. Trump’s proposal, just floating it now is threatening the stability of Jordan and Egypt, two crucial allies in the Middle East with the longest history of diplomatic relations with Israel and, thus, is “strategically incomprehensible,” said Tom Phillips, a former British ambassador to Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Jordan already is more than half ethnic Palestinian, and for King Abdullah, who will meet with Mr. Trump next week, to accept more Palestinian refugees “would undermine the kingdom and be the end of the king,” Mr. Milshtein said, a judgment echoed by many. Already, many Jordanians are suspicious that there is “a Zionist conspiracy” to annex the occupied West Bank and create a Palestinian state out of Jordan, he and Mr. Phillips said.

Egypt may have more acreage and is in desperate need of American financial aid, but its president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, is a fierce opponent of Islamist radicalism, which he has tried to stamp out brutally in the Sinai, and of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a part. The notion that he would allow “hundreds of thousands of people supporting Hamas into Egypt” is unthinkable, Mr. Milshtein said.

Even at the height of the fighting, Mr. el-Sisi created a walled-off area near the border with Gaza in case Gazans were pressed into Egypt, to prevent them from going any farther. And Egypt, which considers itself the most important Arab country, would not want to be seen as being pushed around by Washington.

Christoph Heusgen, a former German ambassador to the United Nations who leads the Munich Security Conference, recalled that Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, talked of Gaza as great real estate last year, but then suggested resettling Gazans in Israel, in the Negev. Arab countries will simply refuse a population transfer, he said, “and the only other way is military force, and that’s genocide.” The Saudis are demanding a Palestinian state that Mr. Netanyahu opposes, and Mr. Trump “says he wants out of conflicts,” not to send American troops into another one, Mr. Heusgen said.

“It seems dead on arrival,” he said.

There has been serious diplomatic conversation, begun under Mr. Biden, of some sort of international grouping to oversee Gaza and its reconstruction that would involve officials from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and other countries under the aegis, at least, of the weak Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas. That presumes that Hamas will no longer be in control.

But Hamas has no intention of giving up its control or its aims, let alone disarming. It has expressed willingness to create an “administrative committee” to rule Gaza with other parties, including Arab countries and the Palestinian Authority, expanding on an Egyptian initiative. Such a committee is thought to be only a cosmetic cover that allows Hamas to retain control of security while reducing its responsibility for civilian governance.

Mr. Trump was silent on the future of an independent Palestinian state, which has become a crucial demand of Saudi Arabia after the destruction and death in Gaza. The Saudis were quick to oppose Mr. Trump’s plan in a statement overnight, and made it clear that any normalization with Israel, as Mr. Trump wants to promote, is dependent on concrete steps toward a viable independent Palestinian state, including Gaza. That is exactly the outcome that Mr. Netanyahu has vowed to prevent.

Simone Ledeen, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East during the first Trump presidency, said Mr. Trump was setting out an initial negotiating stance. This is “a starting position,” she said. “It’s a negotiation — it’s the Middle East.”

Mr. Trump’s success in helping forge the 2020 Abraham Accords — bilateral agreements normalizing relations between Israel and some Gulf States — “hinged on setting aside the paradigm and recognizing that it’s broken,” Ms. Ledeen said, and now he is trying to reset the conversation. Mr. Trump spoke of American troops, she said, but “he’s left the door open for other parties to participate or take it over.”

Still, there remains enormous skepticism in the region about Washington’s ability to build statehood in the Middle East, after American failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, or about its willingness to stay the course over many years.

The Trump proposal also overshadowed the real and present problem in Gaza: whether Israel and Hamas will succeed in moving past this first phase of their cease-fire agreement to the much tougher second phase, which would involve Israeli concessions that Mr. Netanyahu has been so far unwilling to make. His coalition partners have vowed to bring down the government if he makes them and effectively ends the war with Hamas still standing.

Whether Mr. Trump, by his proposal, has helped Mr. Netanyahu assuage his partners remains to be seen — as well as whether Mr. Trump keeps the pressure on Mr. Netanyahu to make that deal regardless of the political cost.

Ukraine is sending its largest-ever delegation to a gathering of politically influential Christian leaders in Washington this week, seeking to lay out an argument that protecting religious freedom is a strong reason for continuing U.S. aid to resist Russian aggression.

The Ukrainian pastors, members of Parliament and military chaplains who will be attending the National Prayer Breakfast say they hope the message of combating religious persecution will resonate with the Trump administration officials and members of Congress who are sure to also be there.

The prayer breakfast, a major event on Washington’s social calendar since 1953, presents an opportunity for business executives, religious leaders and diplomats to jockey for access to influential coreligionists in government to sway policies. While the meeting is open to all faiths, its purpose, according to its website, is ”gathering together in the Spirit of Jesus of Nazareth.”

The Ukrainians will argue to those gathered that further Russian advances would expand a zone of repression of several Christian denominations, as well as the destruction and looting of churches and the arrests of pastors and priests — actions that rights groups have documented in areas already under Russian occupation.

“Russia doesn’t just kill people, doesn’t just destroy our cities — Russia also destroys and bans religious communities” in areas under its control, said Roman Lozynskyi, a member of Parliament with the opposition Holos Party.

Mr. Lozynskyi is a member of the Greek Catholic Church, part of a branch known as Eastern Rite Catholicism that follows the Vatican, that is persecuted in Russian-held parts of Ukraine. He recalled the deportation of a friend and Greek Catholic priest in the Russian-held city of Melitopol as an example of the suppression of Catholic congregations under occupation.

More than 100 Ukrainian pastors, politicians, military chaplains and priests, including the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Epiphanius I, are in Washington for the prayer breakfast on Thursday and related events through the week, said Pavlo Unguryan, a former Parliament member organizing the Ukrainian effort.

Ukrainian Orthodox priests and parishes are among the targets in eastern Ukraine. An estimated 50 priests in Russian-occupied territories — including the most senior church official in Kherson, who refused to join the Russian Orthodox Church — have been killed over the last three years, Metropolitan Epiphanius I said in an interview. Other priests have been forced to leave or to celebrate Mass in secret.

The Ukrainians also intend to highlight the plight of evangelicals, said Mr. Unguryan, who is Baptist. Within its borders, Russia has targeted evangelical Christians with investigations and has arrested Jehovah Witnesses. The repression extends to occupied Ukraine.

“Ukraine is the center of the Bible Belt of Europe,” said Mr. Unguryan, and expressions of evangelical faith there are now under threat. About one million Ukrainians attend evangelical services weekly, he said.

Russia occupies about 19 percent of Ukrainian territory and is making slow but steady gains. Ukraine is defending itself in fierce trench fighting along an about 600-mile front.

“A part of this war is spiritual,” Mr. Unguryan said. “It is important for America to know about this.”

The Ukrainians attending the prayer breakfast want to showcase the vitality of Christian churches in the country, where about 70 percent of the population say in surveys they are religious.

The effort is aimed at swaying supporters of Mr. Trump, who has voiced skepticism about the Biden administration’s heavy military and financial aid to Ukraine. This week Mr. Trump said continued aid could be exchanged for U.S. access to Ukrainian minerals.

Previous religious outreaches in the United States have already yielded results for Ukraine.

Last summer, the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, gave a video address to a Christian gathering in Ukraine. Ukrainian Baptists have appealed to him for military and diplomatic support for their country. Mr. Johnson is a Southern Baptist who has put his conservative Christian faith at the center of his political career.

Ukrainian churches and the country’s Parliament have sent delegations to the breakfast since the early 2000s, but in recent years have ramped up attendance, calling the annual visit “Ukraine Week” in Washington. In past years, several dozen religious and political leaders turned up. The larger delegation this year, Mr. Unguryan said, is in recognition of the importance of Christianity for many supporters of Mr. Trump.

“These are absolutely important issues which can unite Ukraine, a very conservative, Christian country, with a very conservative, Christian America,” said Mr. Unguryan, who has promoted conservative social policies in Ukraine.

Ukrainian protestant pastors have volunteered widely as military chaplains during the war, Liudmyla Filipovych, a Ukrainian scholar of religion, said in an interview. Ukrainian evangelicals have opened about 100 churches in other European countries to provide Ukrainian-language services to the country’s refugees, she said.

Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin has sidelined or banned churches outside what the Kremlin has called the four “traditional” religions — Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. Russia is on a U.S. government list of “countries of particular concern” for restricting freedom of religion.

In occupied territory in Ukraine’s east and south, Catholic and Protestant churches face “threats, interrogations and arbitrary arrests,” according to a report released in January by Mission Eurasia, a group promoting evangelical Christianity in former Soviet States.

“The Russian occupation authorities have also extensively engaged in illegal imprisonment and convictions on fabricated charges of extremism, torture and even murder,” the report said. It described instances of closing and looting churches, and removing their crosses. Overall, Russia’s invasion has destroyed, damaged or led to the looting of at least 630 religious sites, the report said.

Metropolitan Epiphanius’s visit to Washington is part of his efforts to win international recognition of his church and support from religious leaders for its stand against Russia. His church won independence in 2019 from the Russian Orthodox Church, but some congregations continued to follow the hierarchy in Moscow.

Last year, Ukraine banned the Orthodox branch aligned with the Russian Church, drawing criticism from the Kremlin and from Pope Francis. Ukrainian officials have said the restrictions were necessary, as some priests served as Russian spies or encouraged congregants to pray for the head of the Russian church, which has blessed the invasion.

“The Russian church has tried to block our activity abroad, and we are trying to unblock it, because the church is one of the most important elements for the future of the existence of the Ukrainian state,” Metropolitan Epiphanius, the Ukrainian church leader, said in an interview in December in Rome. “We are trying to destroy these blocks, speaking the truth, because truth destroys the walls.”

Recently, he has preached that message to as many religious leaders as he can reach. He says he talks regularly to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians.

With discussions swirling among Western officials over how to negotiate an end to the war, Metropolitan Epiphanius said the outcome for Ukraine was unpredictable, but he left little doubt of his hopes for Ukraine’s destiny.

“We believe that God could create the miracle, the same as he created a miracle for Syria, and Assad left Syria,” he said. “We ask everybody for the spiritual weapons, the prayers.”

Mechanical diggers have spent days excavating the dark, volcanic earth of the city of Goma, preparing long trenches in which to bury the victims of one of the deadliest battles in decades in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Humanitarian workers in hazmat suits and teenagers in flip-flops and dirty masks tended to the dead amid the overwhelming stench.

“We have days of mass burials ahead of us,” said Myriam Favier, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Goma.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed in Goma last week, according to early estimates provided by the U.N. peacekeeping operation in eastern Congo. The fighting between M23, a rebel group that the U.N. says is funded by Rwanda, and Congolese armed forces resulted in the rebels’ capture of Goma last week.

Millions have died in the past 30 years in Congo, where ethnic tensions and fighting over access to land and mineral resources have erupted into several wars. But rarely have so many been killed within just a few days, experts said.

Though most fighting has stopped in Goma in recent days, the city’s capture by M23 rebels has raised fears of a broader war between Congo, Rwanda and their respective allies.

The death toll is likely an underestimate, according to Vivian van de Perre, the deputy head of the U.N. peacekeeping force based in Goma.

Many bodies still have to be collected in areas of Goma that remain unreachable by humanitarian organizations. More than 2,800 additional Congolese have been wounded, nearly two thirds of them civilians, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The ongoing conflict has already drawn in mercenaries from Eastern Europe and soldiers from allied countries such as Burundi and Uganda. U.N. peacekeepers who have been deployed in eastern Congo for a dozen years have been accused by both sides of not doing enough to end the fighting.

M23 launched its incursion into Goma on Jan. 26 and fully captured the city on Jan. 30, after a monthslong offensive. More than 700,000 people have been displaced.

In front of the city’s airport on Tuesday, dozens of volunteers and Red Cross workers interred victims in mass graves dug in an already overcrowded cemetery.

The land where bodies can be buried in Goma is limited, Ms. Favier said. The city is cornered by Rwanda on its eastern side, Lake Kivu on its southern shore, and camps for displaced people and M23-controlled territories in its eastern and northern areas.

Rwanda has denied backing M23, even as officials from the United Nations highlight how its army and intelligence services train, arm and command the rebels. Experts say that Rwanda seeks to exploit mineral resources in eastern Congo by using M23 as a proxy group.

Since capturing Goma, M23’s fighters have been patrolling the streets aboard vehicles seized from the Congolese army. They wear tactical gear and carry automatic rifles and sophisticated electronic devices that give them the look of a conventional military.

This week, rebel leaders threatened to attack a U.N. base where 2,000 Congolese have taken shelter if peacekeepers didn’t hand them over. Those being protected at the base include high-ranking Congolese military and intelligence officers, the city’s mayor and civil servants, according to U.N. officials.

On Wednesday, M23 broke a unilateral cease-fire it had declared days earlier and captured a village in Goma’s neighboring province of South Kivu.

Among the many victims buried this week was a celebrated local boxer, Jean de Dieu Balezi, known as Kibomango, who was killed by a stray bullet, according to his relatives. Mr. Balezi founded the Friendship Boxing Club, where he trained generations of young boxers who were child soldiers, recruited by armed groups like M23 in eastern Congo.

M23 has ordered locals to clean Goma’s streets, but they remain littered with military uniforms abandoned by Congolese soldiers.

“Wherever I sweep, I find these,” Anna Mapendo said as she showed dozens of bullets collected in her courtyard. Ms. Mapendo and her husband said that about 20 Congolese soldiers broke into their home last week to escape from M23 fighters who were attacking the airport, which sits behind their house.

Two of their sons were wounded by bullets when they were in their courtyard, Ms. Mapendo said. She had just returned from the hospital to bring them rice and cassava.

Désiré Mirimba, Ms. Mapendo’s husband, accused Congolese soldiers of looting their home as they fled the rebels. “We feel safe for now with the new ones,” Mr. Mirimba said, referring to M23. “But we know that it’s very precarious.”

In Goma on Wednesday, pockets of the city remained unreachable to humanitarian agencies that lost months of aid in looting last week. Medicine, bags of rice from the World Food Program and cans of cooking oil were on sale across the city.

The freeze on foreign aid announced by the Trump administration last week has raised alarm over the deteriorating situation in eastern Congo, which had already been one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises.

Caleb Kabanda contributed reporting from Goma and Justin Makangara from Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo.

As Japan’s prime minister prepares for his first meeting with President Trump, he is hoping to make a personal connection with the leader of the superpower on which his country depends both economically and militarily. But in the unpredictable Trump White House, even a simple meet-and-greet might be a risky gamble.

The summit between Mr. Trump and Japan’s prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, which is scheduled for Friday, is the result of months of behind-the-scenes efforts by a wide range of Japanese: not just diplomats and lawmakers, but also one of the country’s richest investors and the widow of an assassinated former prime minister.

When he arrives at the White House, Mr. Ishiba will most likely seek reassurances that Mr. Trump won’t target Japan in a trade war or abandon America’s post-1945 security guarantees at a time when his nation faces a muscular China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.

In exchange, the Japanese prime minister is expected to come with concessions that could include promises to buy more American weapons or energy, invest in U.S.-based artificial intelligence and share more of the defense burden in the Asia-Pacific region.

“This summit will be the moment of truth,” said Narushige Michishita, a professor of security affairs at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo. “Does Mr. Trump view Japan as an indispensable partner in the Asia-Pacific, or are we just another counterpart across the bargaining table?”

So far, Japan’s name hasn’t come up when Mr. Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on many other major U.S. allies and trading partners. The two leaders seemed to get off to a good start when Mr. Ishiba called Mr. Trump in November to congratulate him on his election victory.

“It was my first time speaking to him, but he seemed friendly,” Mr. Ishiba told reporters. “I got the impression that he was someone I could speak honestly with.”

However, former diplomats say that asking the mercurial U.S. president to observe the status quo will be a tall order. These are still the early days in the administration of a transactional president who is eager to show results to his supporters.

“Ishiba is taking a risk,” said Glen Fukushima, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who was a U.S. trade diplomat. “The more time he spends with Trump, the more chance that Trump will make new demands.”

Then there’s the possibility of what some analysts now call a “Gaza surprise,” a reference to the summit this week between Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, when the U.S. president blindsided the world by proposing a takeover of Palestinian territory.

Ahead of the Japanese-U.S. summit, Mr. Ishiba has prepared by gathering an informal “Trump strategy council” of top officials from across his government, who gamed out the possible demands that the president might make and how Japan should respond, according to Japanese news media.

Mr. Ishiba has also tried to learn from one of his predecessors, Shinzo Abe, a long-serving prime minister who was shot and killed in 2022 after leaving office. Mr. Abe used face-to-face meetings to build rapport with Mr. Trump during the first Trump administration.

One of Mr. Abe’s strategies was to come bearing gifts. When he became the first world leader to meet with the newly elected Mr. Trump in 2016 in Trump Tower, Mr. Abe presented his host with a gold-plated golf club. At a summit three years later, Mr. Abe brought a bigger present: a promise to buy 105 American F-35 fighter planes worth billions of dollars.

Mr. Abe’s personal diplomacy helped avert a trade war during the first Trump administration, signing a limited deal with Washington after Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of a broader Pacific trade pact.

On Monday, Mr. Ishiba said he planned to talk with Mr. Trump about joint development of artificial intelligence. He made the comments after meeting with Sam Altman of OpenAI and Masayoshi Son, a Japanese tech investor who in December stood next to Mr. Trump to pledge $100 billion in investments to create 100,000 jobs in the United States.

Mr. Ishiba is also expected to emphasize major increases in security spending, which could lead to additional purchases of U.S.-made weapons. Japan plans to expand the size of its defense budget by 65 percent in the five years ending in 2027.

Still, Mr. Ishiba’s efforts to follow Mr. Abe’s playbook have not always gone well. After Mr. Trump’s re-election last year, Mr. Ishiba tried to meet him, only to be turned down on the grounds that the president-elect wasn’t meeting world leaders right away.

Japan turned to Mr. Abe’s widow, Akie Abe, who attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration ceremony as a guest of the first lady, Melania Trump. Mr. Trump referred to his personal tie with the deceased Mr. Abe when mentioning the coming summit with Mr. Ishiba.

“Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was a very close friend of mine,” Mr. Trump told reporters last Friday. “What happened to him was very sad, one of the saddest things that ever happened, but they’re coming to talk to me, so I’m looking forward to it.”

There have been concerns that Mr. Ishiba won’t be able to replicate Mr. Abe’s personal chemistry with Mr. Trump. While Mr. Abe was an avid golfer who played with Mr. Trump at a club in Japan, Mr. Ishiba favors interests like building plastic models.

Kiuko Notoya and Hisako Ueno contributed reporting.

Almost eight years after 72 people died when a devastating fire ripped through a tower block in central London, the government is set to announce that the building will be demolished, according to former residents and survivors’ groups.

Survivors of the fire at Grenfell Tower responded to the plans after a meeting on Wednesday with the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, ahead of an official announcement on the future of the structure, which is expected on Friday.

One group condemned the decision to demolish the remains of the building. In a statement on social media, Grenfell United, a group representing residents, said that Ms. Rayner “could not give a reason for her decision to demolish the tower,” and that she could not say “how many bereaved and survivors had been spoken to.”

But another group that represents some of the bereaved families, Grenfell Next of Kin, acknowledged that the tower could not be allowed to remain a permanent feature of the London skyline for structural reasons, saying in a statement: “Do we wish the whole tower could stand forever? Yes. Is that an option? Not from a structural point of view. Do we need a way forward? Yes.”

Since 2017, the shell of the tower — covered in a protective wrap — has remained a visible symbol of Britain’s most lethal residential fire since World War II.

Some former residents would like some or all of the building to remain in place as a lasting reminder and warning — or at least for it to remain until any possible prosecutions begin in connection with the disaster. That may not happen before 2027.

Others have supported moves for Grenfell Tower to be replaced with a permanent memorial, such as a garden and monument, to those who lost their lives there.

The blaze was started by faulty wiring in a refrigerator and ripped through the 24-storey building aided by flammable exterior cladding and insulation that had been installed the year before.

Some residents were advised to stay in their apartments and await help from firefighters that never came. An official inquiry, whose findings were published last year, blamed cost-cutting, dishonest sales practices and lax regulation for the disaster.

Grenfell also came to symbolize fears about growing inequality in Britain, following years of government austerity, because the tower had housed many on modest incomes living in one of the wealthiest parts of the country.

But it has proved difficult to decide what to do with the remainder of the building, the higher levels of which are said to be structurally unsound.

Grenfell Next of Kin said in its statement that the building was being supported “by approximately 6,000 props,” at a cost that by 2028 is projected to reach 340 million pounds — about $425 million — and that it could not be propped up indefinitely because of “safety concerns.” The group noted that the previous Conservative government had avoided taking a decision on the tower’s future, and that Ms. Rayner was in a difficult position.

However, it added: “We want discussion about the facts — the structural issues that have informed this decision. We want a discussion about what will go in the tower’s place.”

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said in a statement that “the priority for the deputy prime minister is to meet with and write to the bereaved, survivors and the immediate community to let them know her decision on the future of the Grenfell Tower.”

It added: “This is a deeply personal matter for all those affected, and the deputy prime minister is committed to keeping their voice at the heart of this.”

President Trump on Thursday defended his proposal for the United States to take charge of postwar Gaza and resettle its Palestinian residents, but stressed that he would not deploy U.S. troops to the enclave, as Israel’s defense minister announced that he had ordered the military to draft a plan to allow people to voluntarily leave.

The developments add to a swirl of confusion over the proposal by Mr. Trump to “take over” the Gaza Strip and for the roughly two million Palestinians living there to move elsewhere. The forced deportation or transfer of a civilian population is a violation of international humanitarian law, a war crime and a crime against humanity, experts say. Mr. Trump’s plan has already provoked furious opposition around the world, with some critics likening it to ethnic cleansing.

It is far from clear whether and how the proposal would be carried out, and Mr. Trump’s comments did not resolve some of the biggest questions about it, including where Israeli and American authorities hoped Gazans would go, how many people they imagined would actually leave willingly and who would govern and secure the enclave.

Mr. Trump’s proposal was not vetted by the president’s top advisers and some of Mr. Trump’s aides had sought to soften the president’s ideas on Wednesday evening. But in an early morning social media post, Mr. Trump doubled down, saying that the United States and its partners were prepared to build “one of the greatest and most spectacular developments” on the planet in Gaza once Israel ceded control there.

“The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding that Palestinians “would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region.”

Appearing to address concerns about sending troops to Gaza, Mr. Trump insisted that there would be no need for U.S. soldiers to deploy there: “No soldiers by the U.S. would be needed! Stability for the region would reign!!!”

Security in Gaza would be a major challenge. A 15-month insurgency by Palestinian militant groups led by Hamas outlasted Israel’s offensive to emerge as the enclave’s de facto rulers, at least for now.

The Israeli government did not immediately comment on Mr. Trump’s latest remarks. Much of the international community considers Gaza to be an integral part of a future Palestinian state, and any attempt by Israel to “turn over” the enclave to the United States without the consent of its residents would be challenged.

But the plan has evoked celebration on the Israeli far right, many of whom have long promoted what they call “voluntary emigration” as the solution to the conflict with the Palestinians.

Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, praised Mr. Trump’s proposal, saying it could “allow a large population in Gaza to leave for various places in the world.” He announced that he was ordering the military to draw up concrete plans for Gazans who wished to do so to leave.

Mr. Katz said his plan would include “exit options via land crossings, as well as special arrangements for departure by sea and air.” He made no mention of whether they would be allowed to come back home after the war.

In devastated Gaza, many have vowed to remain despite the hunger, cold and fear of renewed fighting between Israel and Hamas. Both sides are observing a six-week truce — the first stage of a cease-fire deal mediated by Qatar, Egypt and the United States — and there is no guarantee how long it will hold.

Many modern wars have generated waves of refugees. But Gazans, unusually, have mostly been trapped inside the Palestinian enclave with little way out. Many have resisted leaving: the mass displacement of their parents and grandparents in the wars surrounding Israel’s 1948 establishment remains one of their greatest collective traumas.

Neighboring countries like Egypt and Jordan have also shown little interest in taking them in en masse, treating them as an economic burden and a source of potential domestic upheaval.

More than 100,000 people trickled out over the first several months of the war before Israel took over the border crossing with Egypt, shuttering the gateway. That left roughly two million still in the Gaza Strip, many of them displaced and living in tents.

In the weeks after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack ignited the war, aides to Mr. Netanyahu lobbied Israel’s allies, including the United States and Britain, to pressure Egypt to admit hundreds of thousands of Gazan civilians.

Israel’s allies largely dismissed the proposal, in part because they feared the Israeli authorities would not allow Gazans to return home after the war. Senior members of Mr. Netanyahu’s hard-line coalition government have publicly called for Israel to rule the territory indefinitely and build Jewish settlements there.

During an interview with Fox News on Wednesday evening, Mr. Netanyahu said that Palestinians could “relocate and come back” if necessary. “The actual idea of allowing Gazans who want to leave to leave — I mean, what’s wrong with that?” he said. “They can leave, they can then come back.”

Mr. Katz, the Israeli defense minister, argued that countries like Spain and Norway, which have been critical of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, were obligated to take them in or else “their hypocrisy would be exposed.”

José Manuel Albares, Spain’s foreign minister, appeared to reject the idea in an interview with the country’s public broadcaster on Thursday morning.

“Gazans’ land is Gaza and Gaza must be part of the future Palestinian state,” Mr. Albares said.

Erica L. Green contributed reporting from Washington, and Myra Noveck from Jerusalem.

The Indian Parliament erupted into an uproar on Thursday over reports that illegal migrants being deported to the country on an American military plane had faced mistreatment, including being shackled during the long intercontinental journey.

More than 100 illegal immigrants were returned to India on Wednesday. While deportations are nothing new — India is a big source of unauthorized migration to the United States — most have relied on commercial flights.

The use of a military aircraft, along with the claims of mistreatment, appears to have hit a nerve, creating a political headache for Prime Minister Narendra Modi days before he is expected to visit President Trump in Washington.

Mr. Modi has described the president as a “dear friend.” Officials in India had hoped their declared willingness to work with the United States on taking back migrants would avoid the embarrassment and back-and-forths seen in countries like Brazil and Colombia.

In India, much of the outrage on Thursday was in response to reports in local media, citing accounts of deportees, that they were shackled for over 40 hours and that their access to toilets was restricted.

A video put out by the U.S. Border Patrol showed the deportees boarding the plane in shackles. A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi declined to comment on reports that women and children were shackled.

Sukhpal Singh, a 35-year-old chef from the Indian state of Punjab, who had been arrested upon entering the United States through Mexico in January, was among them, according to his father.

“He told me that he was handcuffed, as were the other adults. His feet were also shackled,” his father, Prempal Singh, said in a telephone interview.

“Everyone around him was tied — adults, both male and female were chained.”

On Thursday, opposition lawmakers staged a protest in Parliament, some wearing handcuffs and carrying signs that read “humans, not prisoners.” They demanded to know how many Indians in the United States were facing imminent deportation.

“Why did we not send our own planes to bring back the Indians, with dignity and respect, instead of a military plane landing on our soil?” Mallikarjun Kharge, the president of the Indian National Congress, said.

In a scramble to control the damage, India’s foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, told Parliament that deportation procedures “provide for the use of restraints,” and he said American officials had confirmed to them that women and children were not shackled.

“We are, of course, engaging the U.S. government to ensure that the returning deportees are not mistreated in any manner during the flight,” Mr. Jaishankar said after the protest.

He told Parliament that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement looks after the needs of the deportees, including food and medical requirements.

“During toilet breaks, deportees are temporarily unrestrained if needed in that regard,” he said.

But his response revealed the delicate balance that his government needs to walk — between containing the domestic uproar and demonstrating its strictness on illegal immigration to the Trump administration.

“Our focus,” he said, should be on a “strong crackdown on the illegal migration industry.”