For 16 months, the smiling faces of Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, had been slowly receding into the background of Israeli life as their photographs — posted on walls and bus stops soon after the family’s abduction to Gaza in October 2023 — began to fade, tear and peel.

On Friday, the Bibases’ lives and disturbing deaths were swept back to the forefront of Israel’s collective consciousness in such a startling and unsettling way that it set off fresh alarm about the long-term fate of the fragile cease-fire in Gaza. The truce looked set to continue through the weekend, as both sides prepared for another exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners on Saturday, but the turmoil over the Bibas family heightened doubts about an extension.

Early on Friday morning, the Israeli military announced that the body of Ms. Bibas — nominally returned, along with those of her sons, by Hamas to Israel on Thursday — appeared to be that of someone else. And an autopsy of the two boys, aged 4 and 8 months at the time of their abduction, revealed that terrorists killed them in Gaza “with their bare hands,” the military said.

A senior Hamas official, Mousa Abu Marzouq, said in a phone interview that the family was killed in an Israeli airstrike in November 2023, dismissing the accusation that a small militant group that held the hostages, the Mujahideen Brigades, had murdered them. But Mr. Abu Marzouq acknowledged that Ms. Bibas’s body may have been kept in Gaza by mistake, saying that Hamas members were now searching for her remains in a place where the family had been buried alongside Palestinians.

Neither side’s account could be independently verified.

By Friday night, Mr. Marzouq and two other Hamas officials said the group had found and delivered to the Red Cross the body of another woman, which it believed belonged to Ms. Bibas. The Red Cross confirmed the receipt of remains from Hamas, but it was not immediately clear if they were those of Ms. Bibas.

The news of the wrong body’s return set off a paroxysm of fury and agony in Israel rarely seen since the tumultuous days that followed the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, when up to 1,200 people were killed and 251 were abducted, including Ms. Bibas and her sons, on the deadliest day in Israeli history.

For Palestinians, the devastation wrought by Israel’s military response to the Oct. 7 raids — a reaction that, among other consequences, razed Palestinian burial grounds and killed thousands of children including some younger than Kfir Bibas — has long overshadowed Hamas’s terrorist attacks at the start of the war.

But Israelis remain deeply traumatized by the October assault, and the return of the Bibas boys, coupled with the uncertainty about their mother’s whereabouts and the disrespectful way that Hamas paraded their coffins on Thursday, revived the torment.

Responding to the military’s announcement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel returned to the language of vengeance that defined his speeches in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack.

“May God avenge their blood,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a recorded speech to the nation on Friday morning. “And we will also have our vengeance.”

The seething tenor of Mr. Netanyahu’s response was maintained across much of the Israeli political spectrum. Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, said in a broadcast interview that the Bibases’ treatment showed how “the majority of Gazans want to murder all of the Israelis.” (Polling last fall suggested that less than 40 percent of Gazan Palestinians supported the Oct. 7 attack, down from more than 70 percent early last year.)

This combination of vulnerability and vengeance was compounded by the overnight news that, according to the Israeli security services, terrorists had detonated bombs on several buses across central Israel. The vehicles were empty at the time. Commentators said that the attacks were possibly a response to ongoing Israeli military operations in the occupied West Bank, which have displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes.

For some Israelis, the fate of the Bibas family underlined the need to restart the war to defeat Hamas once and for all. The current truce is set to elapse in early March unless Hamas and Israel can agree to an extension. “The only solution is the destruction of Hamas, and this must not be postponed,” said Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, in a post on social media.

But others called for calm, arguing that the fate of the Bibas family exemplified why the truce needed to be extended to bring home roughly 70 hostages still held, both dead and alive, in Gaza.

The village leadership at Nir Oz, the Bibases’ hometown, released a statement on Friday that called on Israel to “stick to our values and to the Bibas family’s clear demands at this moment: release, not revenge. The state must bring Shiri back by all means, in a way that does not jeopardize the continuation of the deal and the immediate release of all the hostages.”

Isaac Herzog, Israel’s mainly ceremonial president, also called on the government to “remember our highest duty — to do everything in our power to bring every one of our kidnapped sisters and brothers home. All of them. Until the very last.”

For now, the truce seems likely to last at least another few days. Six living Israeli hostages are set to be released on Saturday, and analysts said it was unlikely that Israel would do anything to jeopardize their freedom. Hamas announced their names on Friday morning, projecting a sense of business as usual.

The six included two Israeli citizens — Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed — who were captured by Hamas years before the attack in 2023 after the two entered Gaza of their own accord. Israel said that it had received a list of hostages set for release and had informed their families but did not immediately confirm that they were the same six named by Hamas.

The long-term future of the truce seemed even less clear. According to terms agreed in January, the sides were supposed to begin negotiations for the deal’s extension nearly three weeks ago, but have not yet done so.

Arab leaders were set to meet in Saudi Arabia on Friday to try to thrash out a proposal for Gaza’s postwar reconstruction that would allow for the peaceful transfer of power from Hamas to an alternative Palestinian administration.

But in Israel, analysts speculated that the government there would rather expel Hamas by force.

“If it’s up to Netanyahu and his far-right coalition associates, then next week — following the ending of the hostage deal’s first stage with the return of four more bodies of hostages — the road for renewing the war in Gaza will be set,” wrote Amos Harel, a commentator on military affairs for Haaretz, a left-leaning newspaper. “This time, they promise, without restraints.”

Reporting was contributed by Adam Rasgon in Jerusalem, Johnatan Reiss in Tel Aviv, and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad in Haifa, Israel.

Hamas on Friday said it had turned over to the Red Cross the body of a woman that Hamas officials believe belonged to Shiri Bibas, the Israeli mother whose capture with her two young sons during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack became a symbol of the country’s anguish.

Ms. Bibas’s remains were initially believed to have to been repatriated to Israel on Thursday, with those of her two children, as part of a negotiated exchange for Palestinian prisoners. With a DNA test, Israeli officials then determined the body was that of another person and not Ms. Bibas.

“Tonight, at the request of the parties, an ICRC team received human remains, which were then transferred to Israeli authorities,” The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Friday, adding, “The ICRC cannot confirm any additional details.”

The Israeli military said that news reports of the repatriation were under review.

Mousa Abu Marzouk, head of Hamas’s foreign relations office, said in a text message that the body returned on Friday was believed to be that of Ms. Bibas. Another Hamas official, who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive arrangement, confirmed the handoff and similarly said it was Hamas’s understanding that they had turned over the right body this time.

A third Hamas official Mahmoud Mardawi told the television network Al Araby TV that Hamas had turned over remains of Ms. Bibas.

It was not immediately clear that Hamas had handed over the correct body on Friday.

Friday’s statements, less than 24 hours after Hamas provided Israel with the wrong remains, were the latest development in a series of crises that have made up the first phase of a cease-fire with Hamas. So far, 19 living Israeli hostages have been traded for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.

Despite recriminations from both sides, the cease-fire has held for a month. And Hamas’s rapid effort to find and return the body of Ms. Bibas was a sign that it did not want to bear responsibility for endangering the agreement ahead of the next transfer, planned for Saturday.

On Thursday, Hamas said it had handed over the remains of four hostages: Ms. Bibas, who at the time of her capture was 32; her two children, Ariel, then 4, and Kfir Bibas, then 9 months; and Oded Lifshitz, 83. The handoff was staged in front of crowds in Khan Younis, and each casket bore a photo of a hostage.

Israeli officials brought the remains to a forensic institute in Tel Aviv, where the identities of Ariel, Kfir and Mr. Lifshitz were confirmed.

But early on Friday, Israel said that one of the bodies Hamas handed over was not that of Ms. Bibas. The Israeli military called the finding a “violation of the utmost severity” of the cease-fire. In a statement, Hamas acknowledged the possibility of a mistake or a “mixing up of corpses.”

The first phase of the cease-fire deal is set to expire in less than two weeks, and Israel and Hamas have yet to agree on terms to extend the agreement into the next phase.

The Trump administration appeared to be making progress on Friday toward a deal that would give the United States valuable mineral rights in Ukraine.

The movement came after a week in which President Trump, initially rebuffed on an agreement, turned up the pressure by assailing Ukraine and suggesting he would side with Russia in seeking to end the war there.

Mr. Trump boasted at the White House that he was nearing a deal that could bring up to $500 billion to the United States. “So we’re signing an agreement, hopefully in the next fairly short period of time,” he said.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine likewise said his country was working on a draft agreement between the two governments, seemingly tamping down the tensions that had flared with Mr. Trump over a deal.

“This agreement can add value to our relations — what matters most is getting the details right to ensure it truly works,” Mr. Zelensky said in a social media post on Friday.

The signs of easing tensions only underscored how Mr. Trump has struck an overtly transactional and mercantilist stance toward resolving a conflict, started by Russia, that carries profound security implications for Europe and the future of the trans-Atlantic alliance.

Mr. Trump and his allies had waged an all-out pressure campaign against the Ukrainian president, suggesting the United States might abandon the war-torn country and side with Russia, which launched an invasion into its western neighbor three years ago.

During a radio interview Friday with the Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, Mr. Trump said he was “tired” of hearing that Russia was to blame for the war as he painted Mr. Zelensky and his predecessor, President Joseph R. Biden Jr., as the true problems.

“Every time I say, ‘Oh, it’s not Russia’s fault,’ I always get slammed by the fake news,” Mr. Trump said. “But I’m telling you, Biden said the wrong things. Zelensky said the wrong things.”

Mr. Trump emphasized he wanted rare earth and other minerals from Ukraine in exchange for any support from the United States.

“Who knows what rare earth is worth, you know, but at least it’s something,” Mr. Trump said.

In the Oval Office, Mr. Trump continued to rail against Ukraine and Mr. Biden for not extracting more demands out of the country.

“Biden just gave them money — there was no loan, there was no security, was no anything,” Mr. Trump said. “So we’re going to either sign a deal, or there’s going to be a lot of problems with them. So we’re going to sign a deal to get security, because we have to do that.”

Since Mr. Trump began his verbal assault, Kyiv has focused on strengthening its negotiating position as the United States and Russia open talks on ending the war — with or without Ukraine’s involvement. In a flurry of diplomacy on Thursday and Friday, Mr. Zelensky spoke with half a dozen leaders in Europe and Canada to shore up other sources of support.

Kyiv and Moscow engaged in direct talks early in the invasion but since April of 2022 have negotiated only over prisoner of war exchanges and to return Ukrainian children from Russia.

The idea of trading natural resources for U.S. assistance was first put forward by Ukraine, but Mr. Zelensky balked when the U.S. proposal suggested that Kyiv provide access to profits from 50 percent of the country’s minerals and energy resources. Mr. Zelensky had also objected that the deal included no American security commitments.

Several aides to Mr. Zelensky believe that a new version of the agreement under discussion on Thursday addresses those concerns, and have now advised Mr. Zelensky to sign it, a person familiar with discussions in the Ukrainian government about the U.S. proposal said on Friday. The shift in some Ukrainian officials’ stance on the deal was first reported by Axios.

In another positive sign for the talks with the United States on resources, Keith Kellogg, the retired lieutenant general who is Mr. Trump’s envoy to Ukraine for settlement negotiations, posted on X praise for Mr. Zelensky as “the embattled and courageous leader of a nation at war and his talented national security team.” Mr. Kellogg said he had “extensive and positive discussions” on his visit to Kyiv.

In a statement Friday evening, Mr. Zelensky said his negotiating team was working with U.S. counterparts on “an agreement that can strengthen our relations,” but that the need remained “to work out the details to ensure its effectiveness.”

He added: “I look forward to the outcome — a just result.”

Talks had derailed last week after Mr. Zelensky declined to immediately sign a version presented to him by the U.S. treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, on a visit to Kyiv.

Mr. Trump responded with a broadside against Mr. Zelensky’s moral standing in the conflict, falsely saying Ukrainian leaders started the all-out war that began in 2022 with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky, in turn, said Mr. Trump lived in a “web of disinformation.”

But the U.S. pressure on Kyiv continued. On Thursday, the U.S. national security adviser, Mike Waltz, said in an interview on “Fox & Friends” that Ukrainian leadership needed “to tone it down and take a hard look and sign that deal.”

And Secretary of State Marco Rubio said during an interview on Elon Musk’s social media site X that Mr. Zelensky had verbally agreed to deal in a meeting with Vice President JD Vance a week ago, before backing out of it.

“We explained to them: Look, we want to be in joint venture with you, not because we’re trying to steal from your country, but because we think that’s actually a security guarantee,” Mr. Rubio said.

“And he said: Sure, we want to do this deal. It makes all the sense in the world. The only thing is, I need to run it through my legislative process. They have to approve it.”

“I read two days later Zelensky is out there saying, ‘I rejected the deal. I told them no way, that we’re not doing that,’” Mr. Rubio continued. “Well, that’s not what happened in that meeting. So you start to get upset.”

Mr. Zelensky earlier suggested that talks were progressing, in a nightly address to Ukrainians on Thursday after a meeting in Kyiv with the Trump administration’s envoy to Ukraine and Russia, Mr. Kellogg. He said it was “a meeting that restores hope.”

He offered no details on a potential natural resources deal, other than to say that “economy and security must always go hand in hand,” and that his interest was in securing an enduring agreement with the United States.

The Ukrainian government has simultaneously pursued a flurry of diplomacy with Europe, in hopes that Europe might provide security commitments or military aid to fill gaps if the United States withholds support.

Mr. Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials concede that European nations cannot fully replace the full range of military and intelligence assistance the United States provides to Ukraine, but they have been encouraged by discussions of forming a European peacekeeping force to enforce a cease-fire.

On Thursday, Mr. Zelensky spoke by phone with five European leaders, from France, the United Kingdom, Norway, Denmark and Finland, and with the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, and on Friday with the president of Poland, Andrzej Duda.

In the nine days since Mr. Trump opened negotiations with Russia in a phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin on Feb. 12, Mr. Zelensky has met or spoken on the phone with European leaders at least nine times. A visit was scheduled for Monday by Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez.

And Mr. Macron and the U.K. prime minister, Keir Starmer, will continue to press Ukraine’s case in planned visits to Washington next week, where they are expected to present to the Trump administration what Europe and the United Kingdom can provide Ukraine and to lay out what is still needed from the United States.

The police in Germany detained a suspect in a Friday stabbing attack at Berlin’s iconic Holocaust memorial that left one person seriously injured.

The assault, coming two days before a pivotal national election and amid a rise in antisemitic violence across Europe, occurred in the labyrinth of concrete stelae that make up the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, located across the street from the U.S. Embassy and one of the capital’s most sacrosanct sites.

The police said they were verifying the detained person’s identity and that the investigation was ongoing. Police have not yet found the knife thought to have been used in the attack, according to local media reports.

The injured man, a 30-year-old Spaniard, was taken to the hospital, and rescue workers were treating people who witnessed the event for shock, the police said in a statement.

The expansive memorial, described as a “place of remembrance and warning” by Berlin’s tourism website, covers more than four-and-a-half acres and contains 2,711 concrete slabs of varying heights. It is also located next to a large public park.

Photos published by the local news media showed a swarm of emergency vehiclesaround the memorial, illuminated by the glow of blue lights.

While police have not linked the attack to any motive, there has been an increase in antisemitic incidents in Berlin, according to RIAS, a nongovernmental organization that tracks crimes ranging from to online slurs to physical attacks. In the first six months of last year, the organization recorded nearly 1,400 antisemitic incidents, half of which were online, in Berlin, more than occurred in all of 2023.

The attack comes as Germans prepare to vote in parliamentary elections Sunday that may reshape the country’s political landscape. Frustration over Germany’s stagnant economy and dissatisfaction with immigration have pushed Germany’s far-right party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, high in the polls.

The AfD party, which has been linked to neo-Nazis, has promised to stop migration and deport immigrants.

Over the last year, Germany has endured a string of seemingly unrelated attacks carried out by immigrants from Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Last week, an asylum seeker from Afghanistan crashed a car into a union demonstration in Munich, injuring dozens in the city, where global figures had gathered for a security conference.

And in December, a Saudi Arabian citizen plowed his car through a Christmas market in Magdeburg, killing six people and injuring hundreds more.

President Trump on Friday appeared to back off his demand that some two million Palestinians be permanently relocated from the Gaza Strip to nearby countries in the Middle East so the United States could take over the territory and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Earlier this month, the president said he favored taking control of Gaza and displacing the Palestinian population of the devastated seaside enclave. Over the course of several days, he repeatedly waved aside objections to the idea, including flat-out rejections from the leaders of Egypt and Jordan.

At the time, Mr. Trump said that he would be able to persuade the leaders of those two countries — and potentially others in the region — to accept the Palestinians through the force of his will.

“They say they’re not going to accept,” Mr. Trump said. “I say they will.”

But in a telephone interview with a Fox News host on Friday, Mr. Trump seemed to concede that his efforts at persuasion had failed and the refusal by Egypt and Jordan to accept displaced Gazans would make the idea unworkable.

“Well, we pay Jordan and Egypt billions of dollars a year. And I was a little surprised they’d say that, but they did,” Mr. Trump told the Fox News host Brian Kilmeade before adding: “I’ll tell you, the way to do it is my plan. I think that’s the plan that really works. But I’m not forcing it. I’m just going to sit back and recommend it.”

The comments were a striking reversal for one of the most brazen foreign policy proposals ever made by a sitting president. And they came after weeks of back-and-forth that included several high-ranking Trump administration officials trying to downplay the proposal, followed by the president insisting that he was serious.

Mr. Trump first publicly raised the idea in early February, when he declared that “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip.” With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel by his side during a White House visit, Mr. Trump said the United States would “own it and be responsible” for disposing of unexploded munitions and rebuilding Gaza into a mecca for jobs and tourism, pledging that it would become “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said soon after that any relocation would be temporary. But Mr. Trump followed up with a social media posting suggesting again that Palestinians would be relocated into communities where they would be “happy, safe, and free.”

In the interview on Friday, the president said that trying to redevelop Gaza without moving Palestinians out would be impractical, in part because of the presence of Hamas terrorists, who have ruled in Gaza for decades. He said that a U.S. takeover, and the displacement of Gaza’s Palestinians, would be the best approach.

“The U.S. would own the site,” Mr. Trump said. “It’d be no Hamas, and it’d be developed, and you start all over again with a clean plate.”

But he spoke of the idea in past tense, suggesting that he had given up on it.

“I liked my plan. I thought my plan was good,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Kilmeade. “You get them out, you move them, you build a beautiful community and a permanent community.”

Leaders from across the Arab world met Friday in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, to discuss possible alternatives to Mr. Trump’s plans ahead of a broader Arab League summit in Egypt on March 4. The meeting ended without any official statement of what was discussed or decided.

In Washington, a spokesman for the National Security Council did not respond to emails seeking comment on whether the president’s remarks indicated that he was giving up on the idea of the United States rebuilding Gaza.

In the interview, Mr. Trump seemed resigned to the reality that Gaza would have to be rebuilt without U.S. ownership and without moving its people out, though he also appeared to interpret Israel’s long occupation of the territory as ownership.

“We’ll see what happens,” he said. “I thought it was great, because the location is, you know, it’s a great location. I don’t know why Israel ever gave that up. Why did they give it up?”

Ismaeel Naar contributed reporting from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

As the United States and Russia begin talks to end the war, Moscow is pressing its advantage on the battlefield by closing in on Dnipropetrovsk, one of Ukraine’s largest regions and one with a major industrial base. Russian troops are now less than three miles from the region’s border, and they have been pushing forward in recent days.

Should the Russian Army cross from the eastern Donetsk region into Dnipropetrovsk, it would deal a big blow to morale in Ukraine — marking the fifth region to face partial Russian occupation and expanding Moscow’s control over the war-torn country. It could also complicate Kyiv’s position in territorial negotiations that might arise during peace talks.

The Russian advance has already reshaped the landscape of Dnipropetrovsk’s border area, once a quiet expanse of rolling fields and small villages. Now, trenches and anti-tank ditches line roads where convoys of armored vehicles pass. Tanks are concealed in tree lines. In villages closest to the front, soldiers have taken over buildings damaged by bombing or abandoned by locals.

The Ukrainian backpedaling can be seen in the westward relocation of the aid station where medics of the 33rd Mechanized Brigade treat wounded soldiers. Late last year, they retreated three times in as many months, hauling medical beds and blood banks in trucks with them.

The medics never thought they would be forced to entirely abandon Donetsk, an area where their unit had fought for a year, and retreat over its western boundary into Dnipropetrovsk.

Earlier this year, that became a reality. Now, the medics fear Moscow’s troops will soon follow.

“It always happens this way,” said Lt. Vitalii Voitiuk, head of the brigade’s medical unit. “When medical units start moving into an area, it means the front line isn’t far behind.” He was speaking at his new aid station near the frontline where injured soldiers receive lifesaving care before being sent to a hospital farther behind the lines.

Outside the aid station, the distant rumble of outgoing artillery fire echoed through the night. “That alone tells you the war is getting closer,” said Mr. Voitiuk, a burly 34-year-old.

Civilians, too, are bracing for the fight. Some have already evacuated — including those who fled the war in the east earlier and do not want to be caught in the violence again — while others are making plans to relocate.

“When we read the requests to evacuate people from Dnipropetrovsk, it felt terrifying,” said Bohdan Zahorulko, a worker at East SOS, a Ukrainian nongovernment organization helping internally displaced people. “But it was also a wake-up call about the reality of the fight.”

Russia’s push toward Dnipropetrovsk, an area of more than three million people with major steel mills, builds on six months of rapid advances in Donetsk. Since August, its troops have captured an average of about 180 square miles of territory each month in Ukraine, nearly four times the size of San Francisco, according to the Black Bird Group, a Finland-based research company. Most of those gains were in Donetsk.

In recent weeks, Russia’s advance has slowed. Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military expert who recently returned from a research trip in eastern Ukraine, attributed the slowdown to bad weather hindering Russian mechanized assaults and airstrikes. He also noted Ukraine’s effective use of drones to hit troops and armored vehicles.

“But drones can’t hold territory,” said Lt. Col. Vadim Balyuk, commander of the Shkval Special Forces Assault Battalion in Ukraine’s 59th Brigade. Speaking from a small wooden house in the border area, where he monitors live battlefield footage on screens, he said his unit’s job is to do what drones cannot: secure control of villages and clear a path for Ukrainian infantry to move in.

Colonel Balyuk said his unit had recently cleared two settlements of Russian forces, which could have been used to support their push toward Dnipropetrovsk. But he had no illusions that the fight was over. “The enemy is just regrouping now,” he said.

Soldiers returning from the Donetsk front said Ukraine’s biggest battlefield challenge remains unchanged: an enemy whose overwhelming manpower advantage allows for relentless assaults.

Dmytro, a 35-year-old infantryman with a concussion, was evacuated to the 33rd Mechanized Brigade’s aid point one recent night. He described a four-hour trench battle so fierce that he could not lift his head above the parapet to spot attacking Russian troops. But from the incoming fire, he said, he could tell they were advancing in small groups, methodically closing in.

“All the soldiers from my section of the trench were evacuated,” said Dmytro, who declined to give his last name per military rules.

One of the clearest indications of the approaching fighting is a blue and yellow roadside sign marking the entrance to Donetsk from Dnipropetrovsk. Over three years of war, the site has become a symbol of Ukraine’s resistance, with soldiers heading to battle signing and putting up Ukrainian flags around it. But now, with the front line just 12 miles away, the sign has been draped in a large net to protect it from drone strikes.

In Mezhova, a small town in Dnipropetrovsk standing in the path of the Russian advance, the number of soldiers at times appears to outnumber civilians — they queue at the post office and crowd into cafes, and their olive-green pickups line the streets.

The new reality weighs heaviest on refugees who fled the Donetsk region earlier in the war and resettled in Mezhova and nearby settlements. Over the past three years, the population has surged from 14,000 to 21,000 with their arrival.

“For so long, we thought this place was safe,” said Nelia Seimova, who moved to Mezhova in August after escaping Novohrodivka, which is now under Russian occupation. “I had plans — buying a house, getting a job, sending my child to school. A normal life.”

Now, Ms. Seimova, 33, is planning to move again, farther west. She knows from experience not to wait for the town to be hit with regular bombardment. “We’ve been through this before,” she said, tears filling her eyes.

Volodymyr Zrazhevsky, the mayor of Mezhova, is also worried about airstrikes, particularly glide bombs — powerful weapons carrying hundreds of pounds of explosives that Russia often uses to level towns ahead of ground assaults.

Each day, Mr. Zrazhevsky studies a battlefield map marked with circles indicating which cities are within the range of the bombs as Russian forces advance. For now, Mezhova is safe. “But we understand that if it happens — and it will at some point — we’ll need to take drastic measures,” he said, possibly mandatory evacuations.

Lists from East SOS, the group assisting refugees, show that some Mezhova residents have already started evacuating. On a recent afternoon in Pavlohrad, a city in Dnipropetrovsk where the group has set up a transit center, refugees who had just been evacuated from towns and villages near the Dnipropetrovsk-Donetsk boundary streamed in.

All were bleary-eyed and some had faces streaked with soot from weeks of burning firewood to keep warm after attacks knocked out the power grid. Among them were elderly women bundled in thick woolen scarves, children in puffer coats and their parents in tears, uncertain of what the future would hold.

Some in Ukraine believe the Trump administration’s push for peace talks might freeze the front line, stopping the Russian advance. Mr. Zrazhevsky, the mayor of Mezhova — which means “border line” in Ukrainian — clings to the hope that a cease-fire will spare his town from evacuation and turn it instead into the new “eastern capital of Ukraine.”

Mykhailo Afendikov, 52, who recently fled Komar, a village in Donetsk, after a glide bomb destroyed his home, struck a more somber tone. Even if the Russians do not capture Komar, he said, “Where can I go back to? There’s no house left.”

When German voters go to the polls on Sunday, the fate of companies like SKW Piesteritz will be at the top of their minds. The chemical factory halved its annual Christmas bonus for workers last year, and it just shut down one of its two ammonia plants.

Hammered by high energy costs and what they call excessive German regulation, executives say they might be forced to move production abroad. That would jeopardize 10,000 jobs in and around the small community of Lutherstadt Wittenberg in the country’s economically depressed eastern region, which has already been hurt by pullbacks at the company.

“It is a catastrophe,” said Torsten Zugehör, the local mayor.

The German election has in part focused on hot-button issues like immigration and more recently on the threat to the Atlantic alliance presented by President Trump. But the overriding concern in daily German life, according to interviews and polls, and the thing most likely to drive the choice of voters, is the nation’s anemic economy.

Business executives, workers and politicians alike agree that the next German chancellor must move quickly to repair the country’s ailing industrial sector, or risk economic and political disaster for years to come.

German competitiveness, long a source of national pride, “was never as bad as it is today,” said Petr Cingr, chairman of the board of SKW, which makes products such as fertilizers and an additive for diesel motors.

The German economy has not grown in five years. Its once-powerful industries are suffering through what corporate and labor leaders call a crisis of competitiveness. Structural problems, including crumbling public infrastructure, from bridges and roads to schools; a lack of high-speed broadband networks; and public services that still work with paper have dragged on growth. So have regulations, tax rates and, in particular, high energy costs.

Energy prices spiked when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. They have fallen slightly since, but remain nearly 20 percent higher than the European average, according to Eurostat. Company leaders say measures from Berlin and Brussels that are meant to reduce fossil fuel emissions and combat climate change have exacerbated the problem.

Increasing competition from China, which is able to produce machinery and other industrial products more cheaply than German firms, and the looming threat of tariffs from the United States have added to the pressure on Germany’s industry.

BASF, the world’s largest chemical company, has already begun closing its factories in Germany and shifting production to China and the United States.

SKW fears it could be next.

“If this becomes a permanent loss-making operation, then we can’t rule out the possibility that some of the production will be relocated to France, to Austria,” said Carsten Franzke, the company’s head of operations.

The leading candidates for chancellor have all promised changes to jolt growth. Olaf Scholz, the incumbent chancellor from the Social Democrats, has pledged to increase government spending in targeted industries. Posters across the country cast him as the “Made in Germany” candidate.

The favorite to supplant Mr. Scholz, Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democrats, has promised to slash regulation — including scaling back some climate goals — reduce taxes and build new advanced nuclear fusion reactors in a bid to push energy costs down.

“Germany is stuck in stagnation,” Robert Habeck, the economic minister and the chancellor candidate for the Green Party, said late last month.

Not all the economic news is grim. Even as Germany’s traditional industries, such as auto manufacturing, are suffering, the country has seen its service sector expand in recent years. The unemployment rate is low, at 3.2 percent, and some economists point out that the country has experienced industrial ups and downs before.

“Germany has repeatedly experienced phases of deindustrialization,” said Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research. He pointed to the textile industry that disappeared in the 1970s and the electronics industry a decade later. “For the companies and employees affected, it was difficult, but Germany came back stronger in other sectors,” he said.

SKW operates in multiple European countries. But since its founding in 1993, the company, which sits on the Elbe River, has focused on tailoring its products to meet the needs of local farmers.

“We live and die with Germany and Europe,” Mr. Frantzke said.

Lutherstadt Wittenburg lives and dies, for now, with SKW. Aside from its tax bill, the company has opened its on-site day care and medical center to the public. It has donated money for playgrounds, sports teams and local events. Area firefighters train with the factory fire brigade. The company sponsors the local high school prom.

It has stopped new donations this year, and its lack of profits means it will not pay local business taxes. City officials say they will need to cut spending on sports and culture to balance this year’s budget.

If SKW relocated operations, there is no other industry to replace it, said Mr. Zugehör, the mayor. Many of the well-educated, highly skilled workers and their families would leave, gutting a region that has spent the past three decades working to create an attractive standard of living, he said.

“We would not be able to compensate for the loss,” he said.

One of those at risk of leaving would be Valentin Koch, 27, who arrived seven years ago from the western region of Rhineland Palatinate, because he saw more opportunities to find a good job and build a life here. He got a job at SKW and has worked his way up, becoming a plant operator and deputy shift manager.

His hope had been to spend the next two to three decades at the company, but he fears that might not be possible much longer.

Mr. Koch said he was able to handle the unexpected drop in last year’s Christmas bonus, despite having recently purchased his first home. But not everyone was so lucky.

“I know some people who counted on that, who calculated their loans on the bonus payments,” Mr. Koch said. “That makes people more worried. And it all depends on politics.”

Many companies, including SKW, say government directives have raised their costs and hurt profits, especially those aimed at meeting Germany’s ambition to be carbon neutral by 2045. Mr. Franzke hopes that a new government will grant companies more freedom and flexibility to reach carbon neutrality, including by using technologies the government has not championed.

Asked about his preferred future government, Mr. Franzke praised the Christian Democrats. He was on his way last week to personally deliver a letter with industry recommendations for the economy to Mr. Merz, ahead of a campaign rally.

“We hope that at some point common sense will prevail and that competition will reassert itself in Germany,” Mr. Franzke said.

Mr. Koch was also hopeful, but he was less sold on Mr. Merz. A few days before the election, he said he still had not decided which party to back.

“It’s difficult,” he said. “It’s really difficult.”

On a recent eight-hour shift at a McDonald’s in Hong Kong, Luke Ching, 52, wiped tables, cleared trays of half-eaten fries, emptied cups of soda and milk tea and lugged bulging trash bags to the dumpster.

For him, the main goal of the part-time work was not making ends meet. It was research for his main pursuit: using art to advocate for better treatment of people in menial jobs in a city with one of the widest income gaps in the world.

That project came to an abrupt end last month when he was fired after publicly calling on McDonald’s Hong Kong to reinstate paid meal breaks for employees at its local outlets. Undeterred, Mr. Ching is pushing ahead — even as the scope for broader political protest has shrunk in the city.

“Many people have accepted that they’re not allowed to speak critically about their workplace. But employees don’t exist just to drive profit,” Mr. Ching said in an interview. “We have the right to express ourselves in public.”

Over the past two decades, his campaigns have cut across the worlds of art and activism, gaining him a wide following of supporters as well as some online detractors, who call him attention-seeking and gimmicky.

The workplace has been both muse and canvas as he has agitated for everything from stools for museum guards to more consideration for the people who clean the subway.

Hong Kong’s minimum wage — about $5 an hour — barely covers basic living costs. There are no collective bargaining laws, and employers are not legally obligated to recognize labor unions, so relatively few do.

Unions, nevertheless, had long been politically active, regularly joining demonstrations to pressure the local government. Such protests became more common as people in Hong Kong resisted what they saw as efforts to erode the “high degree of autonomy” Chinese leaders had promised after Britain returned its former colony in 1997.

But a year of antigovernment protests, at times violent, led to a crackdown by Beijing in 2020 and the imposition of a national security law that has chilled dissent and led many activist unions to disband.

Some labor organizers in Hong Kong have been convicted of violating the law over their pro-democracy activism and sentenced to prison. Lee Cheuk Yan, a former lawmaker and labor champion, has been jailed since 2021 awaiting trial, and the government has offered a bounty for the arrest of another such activist, Christopher Mung, who now lives in the United Kingdom.

Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London, said that, on its own, labor activism is not likely to be seen by the Hong Kong government as a potential threat to national security, especially if it targets big companies rather than government bodies.

“The difficulty is that in Hong Kong, what you do and how it will be treated is not always as clear,” he said. “Therefore, people are becoming a lot more cautious about what they can and cannot say.”

Pressure continues to mount: The city on Wednesday proposed amendments that would empower the government to reject new unions on national security grounds.

Mr. Ching said that his activism has always focused on livelihood issues, and he does not think there’s anything wrong or risky about what he does.

Things got tense at times during the Covid pandemic, he said, when authorities were cracking down on anything that might attract a crowd. Police searched and questioned him, he said, as he stood in a subway station wearing a garbage bag over his cleaner’s uniform, with “Lowest pay. Highest risk. Least support” written in tape.

The company that runs the subway, MTR, later increased its hourly pay for contract cleaners.

Mr. Ching has a master’s degree in fine art from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and has participated in exhibitions and residencies around the world, including last year in New York, where he collected cans and other recyclable items as part of an effort to realize “the artist as a citizen.” Some of his work — video, photos and sculpture — is housed in the collections of museums including M+ in Hong Kong and the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, England. His project “Undercover Worker” was shortlisted for the Visible Award, a prize for socially engaged artwork, in 2019.

For about a decade, he taught art part-time at his alma mater and at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, including a popular “creative citizen” course, where his students trained to become security guards and reported on their experiences. (His inspiration for community activism, he said, dates back to 2007, when people chained themselves together to try to save a historic ferry pier from demolition.)

He set aside teaching last August and raised $25,700 in crowd-funded donations so that he could spend more time making art, working briefly at fast-food chains, a Chinese butcher shop and as a cleaner at Disneyland Hong Kong. Though he uses his real name, he said his managers usually were not aware of his activism and were more concerned with filling vacancies.

While working at McDonald’s, Mr. Ching, who is married with a teenage daughter, posted diarylike entries on Instagram and Facebook. To illustrate the repetitive toil during a typical shift, he tracked his step count and made images of himself picking up endless rows of half-emptied cups.

Mr. Ching said he was drawn to study McDonald’s because customers from all walks of life used it as a communal space, bringing to it a Hong Kong flair. At his former branch in the middle-class neighborhood of Tai Po, elderly regulars brought their own insulated mugs, newspapers and novels as they settled into their regular seats, refilling from the free hot water every so often.

Mr. Ching said that he also admired how, like him, the CEO of McDonald’s Hong Kong, Randy Lai, had spent several months working as a low-level employee. He brought up this experience in an open letter to her that was published in the Hong Kong broadsheet Ming Pao in January.

“You must know that without mealtime pay, countless colleagues return to work after a hasty meal or forgo their rest time,” he said.

He was fired within weeks. Representatives for the company, owned by a Chinese private equity firm, did not respond to requests from The New York Times for comment. A McDonald’s spokesperson told local media that Mr. Ching had leaked internal operational and commercial information, and that he had been advised against doing so. Mr. Ching denied those allegations, saying that he had merely shared his observations about his workplace.

Some observers say that as Mr. Ching’s ambitions have broadened, his work has become less focused. Wong Wai Yin, an artist in Hong Kong who wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on Mr. Ching, said at times it was difficult to understand his goals at McDonald’s — until he got fired.

“There were many ketchup packets and selfies,” Ms. Wong said.

Wan Pak Kin, an organizer at the Catering and Hotels Industries Employees General Union, said Mr. Ching’s tactics balanced out the more hard-line approach of traditional labor unions. “He knows how to find a middle ground between praise and criticism,” Mr. Wan said. “He examines relationships and bonding among colleagues. He becomes part of the community.”

This month, Mr. Ching, Mr. Wan and three other organizers representing labor and environmental groups said they would form a coalition called the Alliance for My McDonald’s. Wearing McDonald’s party hats at a news conference, the organizers said they hoped to push McDonald’s to pay attention to suggestions from both employees and the wider public.

Mr. Ching said he plans to spend more time on the front lines to campaign for small and meaningful changes and strengthen relationships among workers. “I want the revolution to be in our daily work,” he said.

When people talk about which parts of the Gaza Strip have been most devastated in the war, Jabaliya nearly always comes up.

A town in the north of the enclave, Jabaliya was once home to some 116,000 people. But many fled south after the Israeli military launched its assault on Hamas, in retaliation for the militant group’s deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

By the time the war was nearing its first anniversary, The New York Times calculated that four out of five structures in Jabaliya had been damaged or destroyed. And Israeli forces, which describe the town as a stronghold for Hamas, bombarded Jabaliya many more times since.

The photograph above was taken late in the morning of Feb. 13, a little more than three weeks into the first phase of a cease-fire that allowed food and other supplies to flood into Gaza, easing its humanitarian crisis.

The combat in Jabaliya had for months mostly prevented market vendors there from selling their wares, but as displaced Gazans returned, so did the stalls. Residents came home to an unrecognizable landscape, with craters sunken into the earth where many homes had once stood. They looked for their dead, and salvaged what they could from the ruins.

At the market that morning the talk was largely of survival. Questions mixed in the air with the smells of sewage and dust kicked up by bulldozers. Where could you find water? How about gas, and tents? How did you apply for aid? Most ominously, was the fighting truly over?

But few of those making their way around the reopened marked could ignore the tables around them, laden with fruit and vegetables after so many months of want. The townspeople, at least those who had a little money, ate voraciously.