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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International aid workers accused Israel of ignoring the problem and allowing looters to act with impunity. The United Nations does not allow Israeli soldiers to protect aid convoys, fearing that would compromise its neutrality, and its officials called on Israel to allow the Gaza police, which are under Hamas’s authority, to secure their convoys.

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

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

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

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

Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting from New York.

The leader of Canada’s most populous province and the heart of its vital auto industry said on Friday that he would call early elections because he needed a stronger hand to deal with President Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on Canadian exports.

“With a strong mandate, we will be able to fight with Donald Trump to make sure we stop the tariffs,” Doug Ford, the Conservative premier of the province, Ontario, said at a news conference on Friday.

Mr. Ford has emerged as one of the strongest political voices defending Canada against Mr. Trump, who argues that Canada has an unfair economic advantage over the United States.

“He’s going to try to devastate our country,” Mr. Ford recently told reporters of the U.S. president.

Ontario’s auto industry is deeply intertwined with that of the United States, with parts and components crossing back and forth numerous times before vehicles are fully assembled.

A blanket tariff of 25 percent that Mr. Trump said he would apply on Feb. 1 would decimate Canada’s economy, and the province could lose as many as 500,000 jobs, according to Mr. Ford.

Ontario is also a major producer of hydroelectric power that flows across the border and provides energy to New England, something Mr. Ford said the province could withhold as a form of retaliation.

“We will go to the extent of cutting off their energy,” he said recently.

At such a potentially perilous moment, Mr. Ford said Canada was hobbled by lacking a strong bargaining position at the federal level, in part because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has decided to step down and make way for a new party leader and prime minister.

“You need a loud voice at the table,” Mr. Ford said.

Mr. Ford’s party already holds a majority of seats in the Ontario legislature, but he signaled that increasing the Conservatives’ seats would bolster their ability to act aggressively in a turbulent political climate with the United States, Canada’s largest trading partner.

“The opposition treats you with a little more respect, as opposed to being vulnerable,” Mr. Ford said. Elections will now be held on Feb. 27, more than a year before the June 2026 fixed election date.

Opposition leaders have said that early elections are unnecessary because they would support Mr. Ford in defending the province and the country against tariffs.

Mr. Ford has been making the rounds on American cable programs, including Fox News, to criticize Mr. Trump on tariffs. He also launched a multimillion dollar advertising campaign reminding viewers of Ontario’s contributions of energy and minerals to the United States.

Mr. Trump reiterated his tariff threat on Thursday in remarks delivered to attendees of the Davos economic forum in Switzerland, saying that the United States does not need Canadian exports like lumber, oil and gas.

“We have our own,” said Mr. Trump.

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

In a statement, Hamas named the four women, who were abducted from a military base near Gaza during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023 that kicked off the war. Israel said mediators between the two sides had passed along a list of names of hostages slated for release on Saturday, without confirming their identities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was no immediate response from Hezbollah or the Lebanese government. But in a statement released publicly on Thursday, Hezbollah said that any “breach” of the deal would not be tolerated, because it would be “a blatant violation of the agreement, an attack on Lebanese sovereignty and the beginning of a new chapter of occupation.”

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

Violations of the truce are monitored and investigated by a committee chaired by the United States and involving France. Hezbollah has called on those international monitors and the Lebanese government not to allow “any pretexts or excuses for prolonging the occupation,” but did not say what action it would take if Israeli troops remained.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is also a test for Lebanon’s new leaders. President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister-designate Nawaf Salam, both selected this month, need a peaceful environment to rebuild Lebanon after years of war, political chaos and economic catastrophe. Their authority risks being undermined if they prove powerless to control their own territory and influence either Hezbollah or Israel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thousands of displaced Israelis have yet to return to their homes, fearful that Hezbollah will not adhere to the terms of the cease-fire and rebuild military infrastructure within firing range of Israeli communities.

Israeli officials complain that the Lebanese Army has yet to mobilize enough forces to replace Israeli troops in several key places, preventing the truce from being implemented in full. And they say that Hezbollah’s forces have yet to leave southern Lebanon, breaking the truce’s terms and forcing the Israeli military to remain in place.

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

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

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

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

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

Hundreds of thousands of people were without power on Friday in Ireland, an extraordinarily high number for the small country, as a powerful storm moved its way across the island, bringing record-breaking winds and disrupting travel.

The storm, named Eowyn, was expected to bring gales throughout Friday, according to the Irish Meteorological Service. Forecasters also said that Northern Ireland, southern Scotland and the northern and western areas of England and Wales would see strong winds. Britain’s national meteorological service issued a red warning, its highest level of alert indicating dangerous weather, for Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland.

The hills and coasts along the Irish Sea, as well as southwestern Scotland, could experience gusts of up to 100 m.p.h., the service said. At 5 a.m., a gust of 114 m.p.h. was recorded in western Ireland at Mace Head, County Galway, beating an Irish record set in 1945.

ESB Networks, an Irish state-owned power company, said that about 715,000 of its customers were without power on Friday morning, nearly a third of the utility’s roughly 2.4 million total customers.

Eowyn will also bring rain showers and longer spells of rain across the north of Ireland, according to Irish forecasters. And there was a chance of hail and snow in the hills of Scotland, according to forecasters. Britain’s Meteorological Office warned of “very dangerous conditions with widespread disruptions and significant impacts.”

The strong winds disrupted travel across Ireland, Scotland and the north of England. Ireland’s National Transport Authority suspended all public transport on Friday. Northern Rail, an English train company, urged customers to avoid traveling on Friday and Saturday.

Hundreds of flights were grounded on Friday at airports across Ireland and Britain. Belfast International Airport, in Northern Ireland, urged travelers to stay home on Friday and said it was experiencing intermittent power outages. Travelers should check with their airlines on the status of their flights, the airport advised.

A strong jet stream — a high altitude current of fast-moving air that drives global weather patterns west to east (and can also speed up plane journeys) — helped Eowyn gain its strength. The jet stream, which is usually 190 to 220 m.p.h., increased to 260 m.p.h. this week, strengthened by a stark temperature contrast created by the arctic blast that has gripped the United States in recent days and the warm moist air in the Gulf of Mexico.

The same weather system plunged much of the United States into cold conditions this week, delivering low temperatures not seen in decades, and life-threatening wind chills.

The last time Britain experienced a storm of this strength was early December with Storm Darragh, which was also influenced by a strong jet stream. Wind speeds for that storm reached 93 m.p.h. in Wales.

For Ireland, Eowyn is the most severe storm since 2017, when one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the northeastern Atlantic killed at least three people.

Eowyn was expected to clear into the Norwegian Sea on Saturday, allowing a brief lull of drier and calmer conditions, but another storm system is forecast to bring similar hazards for Britain on Sunday and Monday.

Nazaneen Ghaffar contributed reporting.