Follow live updates on the deal for a cease-fire in Gaza.

It is almost over, the end so close they can practically feel the keys they have kept all these months sliding into the locks of their old homes, the doorknobs turning in their hands, the beds they will sink into for their first night’s peaceful rest in more than 15 months — their own beds. Just a couple more days to go.

Two nights before the first stage of a cease-fire in Gaza was announced, Layan al-Mohtaseb, 15, dreamed of being back in her bedroom in Gaza City, cleaning it as she used to before her family fled during the war.

“This time, it feels like we’re truly going home,” she said.

That may be true only for those whose homes are still standing after months of destruction. And there is always a chance the fighting might resume after the six-week initial truce if talks over a permanent one collapsed. But across Gaza, people were daydreaming of the first moments of peace, the people they would hug as soon as the truce took hold, the graves they would visit. They already knew they would be shedding tears, tears they hardly knew whether to attribute to joy or to grief.

If Wednesday night was for celebrating the news that a cease-fire deal had been struck, the following days were for making preparations. As the Israeli security cabinet convened to vote on the cease-fire and hostage release agreement on Friday, Palestinians were calling around for trucks they could rent to move their things back to northern Gaza, or vans, or even donkey carts; they were packing up their tents, wondering where they would live if their houses were no longer there.

Fedaa al-Rayyes, 40, was already buying ingredients to make small festive sweets to welcome the war’s end. But the first thing she planned to do when the bombs and drones fell silent was to search for relatives she hadn’t seen in months, to find out who was still alive and to mourn for those who did not live to see this day.

“It’s impossible to describe this mix of relief and grief,” she said. “I’m happy we survived and grateful for the kind people who helped us. Yet, I’m deeply sad — sad for the relatives and friends we lost and for the neighborhood we’ll return to without them.”

There were practical matters to think of, too. She would remind her children to “stay away from anything that might still be dangerous or explosive,” she said — from all the unexploded ordnance littering Gaza that could keep adding to the war’s casualty count, one accidental blast at a time, for months or years to come.

Most of Gaza’s population of more than two million people have had to huddle into tents and schools and other people’s apartments for much of the war, driven by Israel’s airstrikes and evacuation orders from their houses or the earlier shelters they had tried. Now they could think of little else but going home. Even if those homes were damaged. Even if they were now no more than rubble and ash.

Manal Silmi, 34, a psychologist for an international aid group, planned first to go hug her mother and her siblings and “cry, letting out all the pain we’ve carried for these 15 months,” she said.

Then the trek home could begin. Per the agreement, people displaced from northern Gaza to the south will be allowed to return on the seventh day after the cease-fire takes effect on Sunday. Her family was already looking for a big van to drive all their tents and bedding back up north. Her friends and the few relatives she had left in Gaza City had already called, making plans to meet them at the crossing point dividing northern and southern Gaza.

“We’ll hug, we’ll cry and we’ll thank God over and over for surviving this war,” she said.

Al-Hassan al-Harazeen, 23, a college senior majoring in computer science, knew his family’s house in eastern Gaza City was in ruins, he said. But he would still head straight there as soon as the cease-fire began.

He was imagining spray-painting his family’s name on any brick that was still in one piece, picturing himself sitting on the rubble for a while, he said, “to embrace those broken stones and bricks as if they’re a part of me.”

Then he would visit the grave where they had buried his grandfather at the start of the war to recite the opening verses of the Quran for him.

Even as mediators announced the deal on Wednesday, Israel was still heavily bombing Gaza. Two of Jamal Mortaja’s employees from the solar-panel business he owned before the war were killed the day before. They would be in his thoughts, said Mr. Mortaja, 65, when he headed back to Gaza City to visit what remained of his home before checking on his stores at the al-Ansar roundabout.

Raed al-Gharabli, too, wanted to return to Gaza City, despite his home’s destruction, just to say goodbye before the rubble was removed. He wanted to walk through his neighborhood, Shuja’iyya, greeting neighbors who had stuck it out all these long months. He would take his makeshift tent from the central Gaza city of Deir al Balah, where he had fled with his family, and set it up next to the ruins of his house.

“I can’t wait to see this moment become real,” said Mr. al-Gharabli, 48, a tailor. “If I could, I’d fly straight north and land on the rubble of my home.”

To speed things up, he said his family would leave some belongings with neighbors in Deir al Balah, where they and other displaced people had come to trust and rely on people who had been total strangers at the war’s beginning.

There was even a part of them that was already nostalgic for it, the camaraderie that had formed between them and their temporary neighbors.

After his home in the southern city of Khan Younis was destroyed, Ismail al-Sheikh, 39, a university lecturer, had moved to a tent nearby, where he got to know two men in nearby tents. The new friends spent their evenings reminiscing about life before Oct. 7, 2023, when the war began, and imagining aloud what would happen once the nightmare was over. What they would do. Where they would go.

For Mr. al-Sheikh, who taught at al-Aqsa University, the daydreams were nothing crazy. He just wanted his normal life back, teaching his classes, meeting up with friends at night at the Titanic Restaurant in Khan Younis. The Titanic, which he’d heard had collapsed into rubble.

Now, with the war nearing its close, his new friends were getting ready to return to Gaza City, where they were from.

“I’ll deeply miss those gatherings,” Mr. al-Sheikh said. “It’s truly a mix of emotions — happiness for their return, sadness for the farewells and hope for what lies ahead.”

Donald Trump has promised to pursue the largest deportation operation in American history as soon as he takes office.

But the Mexican government and other regional allies have been unable to meet with the incoming Trump administration, according to officials in Latin America, leaving them in the dark about the president-elect’s plans to deport millions of illegal immigrants.

The incoming administration rebuffed requests by Mexico for a formal meeting, insisting that detailed discussions will only begin after Mr. Trump is sworn in next Monday, according to a Mexican official and two people familiar with the exchanges who were not authorized to speak publicly.

The Guatemalan and Honduran governments received similar messages, according to officials from those countries.

“This is not the way things usually work,” said Eric L. Olson, a fellow at the Wilson Center’s Latin American program and Mexico Institute. “Usually there are more informal contacts and some level of discussion by now.”

The incoming administration may want to limit confrontation before ramping up pressure by signing a flurry of executive orders on migration, analysts say, leaving governments in the region scrambling to respond. That would likely strengthen Washington’s hand in upcoming negotiations.

“At the moment, we cannot talk about concrete measures because we have not had any specific conversations about immigration policies with the incoming authorities,” Santiago Palomo, the spokesman for Guatemala’s president, said in an interview about how his country is preparing to respond to Mr. Trump’s mass deportation plans.

Guatemala’s ambassador to the United States was in touch with the Trump transition team, officials said, but members of the incoming administration had not communicated specific plans around a ramp-up in deportations, or how Guatemala should prepare.

Honduran government officials also said they had not yet had significant contact with the incoming Trump administration. Earlier this month, President Xiomara Castro of Honduras threatened to push the U.S. military out of a base it built decades ago in the Central American country if Mr. Trump carries out mass deportations.

Given Mr. Trump’s sharp focus on Latin America, the lack of clarity on his objectives has rattled regional governments.

The incoming administration has said that it wants to restore the “Remain in Mexico” policy implemented during the first Trump term, which forces some migrants to wait in Mexico rather than in the United States while their asylum cases are pending. Mr. Trump has also said he intends to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military in some form to assist in his plans for mass deportations of millions of undocumented immigrants.

“President Trump will enlist every federal power and coordinate with state authorities to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers and human traffickers in American history,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump transition team, wrote in an email to The New York Times. She did not respond to questions about whether the incoming administration has rebuffed Mexico’s and other countries’ requests for meetings.

Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has said her administration does not approve of the mass deportation program. “Of course, we do not agree,” she said in a news conference on Wednesday. “But, in the event of such a decision by the U.S. government, we are prepared.”

But whenever asked how the country will respond, her answers have been evasive — although she recently signaled the country’s willingness to accept some non-Mexican deportees.

“We are going to ask the United States that, as far as possible, the migrants who are not from Mexico can be sent to their countries of origin — and if not, we can collaborate through different mechanisms,” she told reporters earlier this month.

Some analysts said Mr. Trump’s team may be limiting their meetings with Latin American governments because they are worried about violating the Logan Act. That law forces incoming administrations to limit the scope of their negotiations with foreign governments until they take office, so as not to undermine sitting American presidents.

But previous incoming administrations have met with foreign governments to cautiously discuss their policy objectives, without violating the act.

Either way, the act has done little to curb Mr. Trump’s appetite to meet with his future counterparts. Since his November election, Mr. Trump has met separately with the leaders of Italy, Canada and Argentina at his hotel in Mar-a-Lago.

Despite the lack of contact, Mr. Trump has made his foreign policy objectives clear through speeches and on social media, giving the Mexican and other regional governments some insight into potential U.S. policies in the pipeline.

“Trump has signaled publicly that migration is a top priority, as are tariffs,” Mr. Olson said.

Shortly after his electoral victory, Mr. Trump threatened to slap 25 percent tariffs on Mexico if it did not do more to curb migration and the flow of drugs.

“But there aren’t clear mechanisms for the Trump administration on how to engage in dialogue and negotiate. That will resolve soon enough” once he assumes office, Mr. Olson added.

The incoming U.S. administration will likely try to get Latin American countries to agree to accept asylum seekers from other nations that are seeking refuge in the U.S., known as “safe third country agreements.” The first Trump administration was able to get Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to sign those pacts, though the policy was only implemented in Guatemala, albeit fleetingly.

But those agreements may be tricker to forge this time. President Bernardo Arévalo of Guatemala told The Associated Press this week, “We are not a safe third country, nobody has proposed it.”

His foreign minister, Carlos Ramírez Martínez, said in an interview that he expected his government would face pressure. “I don’t doubt that that’s coming,” he said.

Officials in El Salvador have said that they will work with the Trump administration to protect the status of Salvadorans in the United States. “We are working so that migration can be an option not an obligation,” Cindy Portal, a senior foreign ministry official, said in a television interview on Wednesday.

Absent clarity from the transition team, some Latin American leaders are instead crafting a united response in anticipation of any executive orders related to immigration or deportations issued once Mr. Trump takes office.

Representatives from several regional governments gathered in Mexico City this week to discuss the “opportunities and challenges of migration in the region and the strengthening of coordination and cooperation,” according to a Guatemalan government statement on the meeting.

The agenda, although heavy on migration, did not mention Mr. Trump.

Jody García contributed reporting from Guatemala City; Joan Suazo from Tegucigalpa, Honduras; and Gabriel Labrador from San Salvador, El Salvador. James Wagner, Paulina Villegas, Emiliano Rodríguez Mega and Simon Romero contributed from Mexico City; Mary Triny Zea from Panama City; Julie Turkewitz from Bogotá, Colombia; Hogla Enecia Pérez from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Ed Augustin from Havana, Cuba; and Lucía Cholakian Herrera from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Hundreds of mourners flocked to Paris’s venerable Val-de-Grâce church on Thursday to pay their final respects to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the architect of France’s modern far-right movement who was known for his racist and antisemitic remarks.

A speaker at the requiem Mass praised Mr. Le Pen, saying he had “perceived, before all others, the dangers that threaten France today.” A choir sang a French military song asking God for “the ardor to fight.” The crowd repeated the words of a prayer to Joan of Arc, with its plea that “the people of France will always be a Christian people.”

But since Mr. Le Pen’s death on Jan. 7 at age 96, the question of how much respect he deserves in death has ignited a passionate debate in France, given Mr. Le Pen’s long history of alarming comments, his trivialization of Holocaust horrors, and his assertion that Germany’s occupation of France had not been “particularly inhumane.”

Questions about his legacy reflect broader, unresolved tensions over the party that Mr. Le Pen co-founded in 1972, the National Rally. The party has in recent years moved from the fringes to the center of French politics and currently holds the largest number of seats in the National Assembly.

Yet despite their recent success, leaders of the National Rally regularly complain that they are still denied “respect” from fellow lawmakers, are locked out of policy debates and snubbed for leadership positions.

Their peers can be blunt. In a TV interview earlier this week, François Rebsamen, the minister for regional planning and a leftist in the current center-right government, declared, “I respect all political forces, except the National Rally.”

Earning respect has been high on the National Rally’s agenda in recent years. Mr. Le Pen’s daughter, Marine Le Pen, took over leadership of the party in 2011, and kicked out Mr. Le Pen in 2015. Three years later, the party changed its name (it had originally been called the National Front) as part of an effort to soften its image, gain distance from her father, and appeal to a wider base.

The moves have helped. Millions of voters have been attracted by its anti-immigrant and law-and-order stances, and populist economics. Its supporters hope that either Ms. Le Pen or her telegenic 29-year-old protégé, Jordan Bardella, might eventually win the presidency.

But some memories are long. The night of Mr. Le Pen’s death, French TV stations showed a crowd in Paris’s Place de la République, smiling and popping champagne bottles. Similar street parties erupted in Lyon, Marseille, and elsewhere.

“The dirty racist is dead,” one protester’s sign declared. “What a beautiful day.”

The scenes of the revelers were criticized by members of the current center-right government.

“Nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies dancing on a cadaver,” the country’s conservative interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, posted on social media.

Mr. Le Pen’s death comes amid tremendous political turmoil in France. The economy is dragging, public debt is growing, and the National Assembly, the powerful lower house of the legislature, is paralyzed by a three-way split between left, center and hard right.

Last month, the government of the former center-right prime minister Michel Barnier fell after only three months, as members of the lower chamber, unable to agree on a budget, punished Mr. Barnier for trying to force one through. The National Rally joined the left in taking down Mr. Barnier’s government with a no-confidence vote. Disrespect was one big reason they did so.

Mr. Barnier’s centrist replacement, François Bayrou, is barely hanging on with a government that could capsize any day.

The National Rally hasn’t said what its next move would be. But if members decide to vote against the government again it could prove fatal to Mr. Bayrou’s hopes of staying in office.

Holding a public Mass for their xenophobic old figurehead may hurt the party in the short term. But Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, said the party “had no choice but to organize a public tribute,” given Mr. Le Pen’s stature and history with the movement. “In a way, the party is a prisoner of its own history.”

Giorgios Samaras, an assistant professor of public policy at King’s College London, said the party will now be able to reinforce “its newer, more moderated brand without constant reminders of Jean-Marie’s extreme stances.”

The service focused on Mr. Le Pen’s love of France, and the combative spirit he brought to politics and war itself, having served in the French military in Indochina and Algeria.

“Yes, Mister Le Pen, you were strong-headed, you had a bad reputation, but you had the soul of a musketeer, a soldier in the service of France,” said Christophe Kowalczyk, the military priest who oversaw the ceremony, alluding to the lyrics of an old military song.

After the Mass, the mourners left the church and the square facing it. They moved down the narrow Rue Saint-Jacques, gripping their programs from the service and shaking hands with friends.

A multistory college dormitory loomed over them. And from the windows came a familiar battle cry from of the European left: “Siamo tutti antifascisti!” — We are all anti-fascists.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a meeting of Israel’s political security cabinet on Friday to approve the Gaza cease-fire deal after Israeli and Hamas negotiators worked out their remaining differences.

Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement early Friday that he had ordered the meeting to approve the deal for later in the day.

Lawmakers would later “convene to approve the deal,” the statement said, without specifying the day.

A security cabinet vote that had been expected on Thursday was delayed by last-minute disputes with Hamas and rifts over the agreement that emerged inside Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition.

The prime minister’s office said that the families of hostages had been informed of the agreement and that he had instructed the government authority responsible for the hostages to prepare to receive the captives upon their return to Israel.

“The state of Israel is committed to achieving all the goals of the war, including the return of all our hostages — both the living and the dead,” the statement said.

A vocal member of Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition took a stand against a cease-fire deal late on Thursday. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s hard-line national security minister, threatened to resign and remove his party from the Israeli government if the cabinet voted to approve the provisional cease-fire deal.

“This deal would effectively erase the achievements of the war,” said Mr. Ben-Gvir, adding that the cease-fire would leave Hamas in power in Gaza.

While Mr. Ben-Gvir’s threat could destabilize Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition at a critical time, it was unlikely to scuttle the cease-fire deal, which would also free hostages held by Hamas and Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Mr. Netanyahu would still command a majority of 62 seats in the 120-member Parliament.

Opposition lawmakers have pledged to support Mr. Netanyahu’s push for a cease-fire if more hard-line allies leave the coalition. “This is more important than all the differences of opinion that there have ever been between us,” said Yair Lapid, the leader of the parliamentary opposition.

Mr. Netanyahu’s announcement suggests that a cease-fire could still come into effect by this weekend. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken had said on Thursday that he was confident the agreement would go into effect as planned on Sunday.

President Biden and other mediators announced on Wednesday that Israeli and Hamas negotiators in Qatar had reached a deal to stop the fighting and free hostages held in Gaza. The difficulties on Thursday underscored the volatility of the truce and prompted fears of further delays.

President-elect Donald J. Trump, who had pressured the parties to reach an agreement before his inauguration on Monday, repeated his warning that he wanted the deal closed before he took office in a podcast interview on Thursday. He told the host, Dan Bongino, that “it better be done.” In December, weeks after he was re-elected, Mr. Trump said there would be “hell to pay” if a cease-fire and hostage deal was not reached.