For more than a year, almost two million Palestinians living in Gaza have been homeless, facing severe food and medical shortages and under enduring threat of Israeli airstrikes. Nearly 46,000 Gazans have been killed, local health officials said on Wednesday, in a landscape largely reduced to rubble.

So when President-elect Donald J. Trump vowed that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if hostages taken from Israel during the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, are not freed in the next two weeks, Gazans were left to wonder: if this is not hell, then what is?

“I am not sure he understands the situation here — it is already hell,” said Alaa Isam, 33, from Deir al Balah, in central Gaza.

Negotiations to end the war between Israel and Hamas have made little progress, leaving civilians in Gaza caught in the crossfire with little hope for the future.

“We have been being killed for 15 months,” Mr. Isam said. “We have been through two cold winters in tents, two hot summers that ruined our food. We have been subject to starvation and people died out of hunger, in addition to the continuous brutal bombardment of everywhere.”

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t want to hurt the negotiation” for a hostage exchange and a cease-fire agreement that remain under discussion. Mr. Trump’s incoming top Middle East envoy, Steven Witkoff, is expected to join those talks in Doha, Qatar, later this week.

But Mr. Trump was explicit about threatening consequences should Hamas refuse to release about 100 remaining hostages — at least a third of whom are presumed dead — who were taken from Israeli territory and have been held since the militant group led the attack on Israel.

“It will not be good for Hamas and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone,” he said.

“If the deal isn’t done before I take office, which is now going to be two weeks, all hell will break out in the Middle East,” Mr. Trump added.

His comments reverberated Wednesday across Gaza, including with some civilians who understood the threat to mean that Palestinians would be punished and not Israel if an agreement on the hostages is not reached by Jan. 20, when Mr. Trump is inaugurated.

Akram al-Satri, 47, a freelance translator from Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, said he found it strange that Mr. Trump “does not realize that Gaza has been deprived of all forms of life, and that he thinks he could add to that hell while Israel had not been spared any effort in turning the lives of Gazans into something far uglier than hell.”

“All of us who witness bombs dropping over our heads daily” were living “a reality that is more destructive and miserable than hell,” he added.

While most Gazans mainly blame Israel for the death and destruction around them, many also say they hold Hamas responsible for starting the war.

“Hamas should have reached an agreement long time ago,” said Abdul Aziz Said, 33, who is also from Deir al Balah. “They say ending the war is their priority, but do not act like this is the case. I know Israel is not offering them anything serious, but I don’t care. I want this killing to stop.”

Mr. Witkoff on Tuesday struck an optimistic tone that a deal could soon be reached. “I think that we’ve had some really great progress, and I’m really hopeful that by the inaugural we’ll have some good things to announce on behalf of the president,” he said, standing next to Mr. Trump.

Regardless of the war’s outcome, several Gazans interviewed on Wednesday said they feared a continuation of the pro-Israel policies Mr. Trump pursued in his first term, from 2017 to 2021.

In those years, the American Embassy in Israel was moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which Palestinians also claim as their capital, and the United States also recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967. Palestinians and their allies in Arab states also worry that Mr. Trump will not stop Israel from annexing more disputed areas in the West Bank and occupying at least parts of Gaza.

But many Palestinians have fumed over the past year that the United States, under President Biden, has not done more to protect them from Israeli strikes that have leveled their cities and halted humanitarian aid deliveries.

Just this past week, the Biden administration informed Congress that it would allow American weapons producers to sell $8 billion in arms to Israel, including 500-pound bombs that can cause significant injury and death, especially in areas with little protection, like tent camps. Many of the weapons would most likely be shipped over the next two years, but some could be delivered within months.

“The engine of this entire ugly and unjust offensive is America,” said Amna Soliman, 42, a former teacher at the American International School in Gaza. “There is nothing left of Gaza.”

Forced to flee her home in Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, Ms. Soliman said that at least a half-dozen of her relatives had died and that she had lost her job since the start of the war’s “hellish reality.”

“We are already living in fear and worry and horror,” she added.

It kills more people each year than car crashes, war or drugs do. This invisible killer is the air pollution from sources like cars and trucks or factory smokestacks.

But as wildfires intensify and grow more frequent in a warming world, the smoke from these fires is emerging as a new and deadly pollution source, health experts say. By some estimates, wildfire smoke — which contains a mixture of hazardous air pollutants like particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, ozone and lead — already causes as many as 675,000 premature deaths a year worldwide, as well as a range of respiratory, heart and other diseases.

Research shows that wildfire smoke is starting to erode the world’s progress in cleaning up pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks, as climate change supercharges fires.

“It’s heartbreaking, it really is,” said Dr. Afif El-Hasan, a pediatrician who specializes in asthma care at Kaiser Permanente in Southern California and a board director of the American Lung Association. Wildfires “are putting our homes in danger, but they’re also putting our health in danger,” Dr. El-Hasan said, “and it’s only going to get worse.”

Those health concerns were coming to the fore this week as wildfires ravaged the Los Angeles area. Residents began to return to their neighborhoods, many strewed with smoldering ash and rubble, to survey the damage. Air pollution levels remained high in many parts of the city, including in northwest coastal Los Angeles, where the air quality index climbed to “dangerous” levels.

Los Angeles, in particular, has seen air pollution at levels that could be raising daily mortality by between 5 to 15 percent, said Carlos F. Gold, an expert in the health effects of air pollution at the University of California, San Diego.

That means current death counts, “while tragic, are likely large underestimates,” he said. People with underlying health issues, as well as older people and children, are particularly vulnerable.

The rapid spread of this week’s fires into dense neighborhoods, where they burned homes, furniture, cars, electronics and materials like paint and plastic, made the smoke more dangerous, said Dr. Lisa Patel, a pediatrician in the San Francisco Bay Area and the executive director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health.

A recent study found that even for homes that are spared destruction, smoke and ash blown inside could adhere to rugs, sofas and drywall, creating health hazards that can linger for months. “We’re breathing in this toxic brew of volatile organic compounds and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and hexavalent chromium,” Dr. Patel said. “All of it is noxious.”

Intensifying and more frequent fires, meanwhile, are upending experts’ understanding of smoke’s health effects. “Wildfire season is no longer a season,” said Colleen Reid, who researches the effects of air pollution from wildfires on heath at the University of Colorado Boulder. “We have fires all year round that affect the same population repeatedly.”

“The health impacts are not the same as if you were exposed once, and then not again for 10 years,” she said. “The effects of that is something that we still don’t really know.”

A United Nations report from 2022 concluded that the risk of devastating wildfires around the world would surge in coming decades. Heating and drying caused by climate change, along with development in places vulnerable to fire, was expected to intensify a “global wildfire crisis,” the report said. Both the frequency and intensity of extreme wildfires have more than doubled in the past two decades. In the United States, the average acreage burned a year has surged since the 1990s.

Now, pollution from wildfires is reversing what had been a decades-long improvement in air quality brought about by cleaner cars and power generation. Since at least 2016, in nearly three-quarters of states in the U.S. mainland, wildfire smoke has eroded about 25 percent of progress in reducing concentrations of a type of particulate matter called PM 2.5, a Nature study in 2023 found.

In California, wildfire smoke’s effect on air quality is offsetting public health gains brought about by a decline in air pollution from automobiles and factories, state health officials have found. (By releasing carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases into the atmosphere, wildfires are themselves a big contributor to climate change: The wildfires that ravaged Canada’s boreal forests in 2023 produced more greenhouse gases than the burning of fossil fuels in all but three countries.)

”It’s not a pretty picture,” said Dr. Gold of U.C. San Diego, who took part in the Nature study. If planet-warming gas emissions continue at current levels, “we’ve got some work that suggests that mortality from wildfire smoke in the U.S. could go up by 50 percent,” he said.

One silver lining is that the Santa Ana winds that so ferociously fueled the flames in recent days have been blowing some of the smoke toward the ocean. That stands in contrast to the smoke from the 2023 Canadian wildfires that drifted to New York and other American states hundreds of miles away, causing spikes in emergency room visits for asthma.

At one point that year, more than a third of Americans, from the East Coast to the Midwest, were under air quality alerts from Canadian wildfire smoke. “We’re seeing new and worsening threats in places that are not used to them,” Dr. Patel, the pediatrician, said.

The new normal is bringing about changes to health care, Dr. Patel said. More health systems are sending out air quality alerts to vulnerable patients. In the small community hospital where she works, “every child that comes in with wheezing or asthma, I talk to them about how air pollution is getting worse because of wildfires and climate change,” she said.

“I teach them how to look up air quality, and say they should ask for an air purifier,” Dr. Patel added. She also cautions that children should not participate in cleanup after a wildfire.

Scientists are still trying to understand the full range of wildfire smoke’s health effects. One big question is how much of what researchers know about vehicle exhaust and other forms of air pollution apply to wildfire smoke, said Mark R. Miller, a researcher at the Center for Cardiovascular Science at the University of Edinburgh who led a recent global survey of climate change, air pollution and wildfires.

For example, exhaust particles “are so small that when we breathe them in, they go deep down into our lungs and are actually small enough that they can pass from our lungs into our blood,” he said. “And once they’re in our blood, they can be carried around our body and start to build up.”

That means air pollution affects our entire body, he said. “It has effects on people who have diabetes, has effects on the liver and the kidney, it has effects on the brain, on pregnancy,” he said. What’s still not clear is whether pollution from wildfires has all of those same effects. “But it’s likely,” he said.

Experts have a range of advice for people living in areas with smoke. Keep an eye on air quality alerts, and follow evacuation orders. Stay indoors as much as possible, and use air purifiers. When venturing outside, wear N95 masks. Don’t do strenuous exercise in bad air. Keep children, older people and other vulnerable groups away from the worst smoke.

Ultimately, tackling climate change and cutting back on all kinds of air pollution is the way to reduce the overall burden on health, said Dr. El-Hasan of the American Lung Association. “Can you imagine how much worse things would be if we hadn’t started cleaning up emissions from our cars?” he said. “I’m trying to think, glass half full, but it does break my heart and it does worry me.”

Israeli soldiers have raided Syrian border villages, prompting nervous residents to huddle in their homes. They have captured the country’s highest peak, have set up roadblocks between Syrian towns and now overlook local villages from former Syrian military outposts.

The stunning downfall of Syria’s longtime leader, Bashar al-Assad, closed a chapter in the country’s decade-long civil war. But it also marked the start of an Israeli incursion into the border region, which Israel has called a temporary defensive move to protect its own security.

Thousands of Syrians now live in areas at least partly controlled by Israeli forces, leaving many anxious over how long the campaign will last. Israeli troops have detained some residents and opened fire during at least two protests against the raids, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an independent monitor.

At least some Syrians now say they fear the Israeli presence could become a prolonged military occupation.

“We’re the only part of the country that didn’t truly manage to celebrate the fall of the Assad regime — because even as the tyrant fell, the Israeli military came,” lamented Shaher al-Nuaimi, who lives in the border village of Khan Arnabeh, which has been raided by the Israeli military.

Israel and Syria have fought multiple conflicts, but for decades, the border separating the two has been largely quiet. They last went to war in 1973, when Syria and Egypt invaded Israel on Yom Kippur, Judaism’s holiest day. Afterward, both sides agreed to create a demilitarized buffer zone patrolled by United Nations peacekeepers that served as a de facto border.

But when Syrian rebels drove Mr. al-Assad from power on Dec. 8, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel ordered his country’s troops to “take over” the buffer zone, home to a number of Syrian villages. He called it a temporary move to “ensure that no hostile force embeds itself right next to the border with Israel” amid Syria’s internal upheaval and after the Hamas-led surprise attack from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, that left some 1,200 people dead in Israel.

Israeli forces quickly seized the peak of Mount Hermon, the highest mountain in Syria, and advanced along the length of the buffer zone and beyond it. Around the same time, Israel said it conducted hundreds of airstrikes around the country targeting fighter jets, tanks, missiles and other weapons belonging to Mr. al-Assad’s government.

The continued military campaign, particularly the ground operation in the de facto border area, has prompted international accusations that Israel is violating the decades-old cease-fire. Several groups still hold territory in parts of the country in addition to the new Syrian government in Damascus, with Turkish forces in effect controlling areas along the northern border and a Kurdish autonomous region in the northeast.

The Israeli military is operating in the border area “now similarly to the West Bank, in that it can go in and go out anywhere it wants and arrest whomever it wants,” said Rami Abdulrahman, the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, in a phone interview.

Some Syrians said they hoped for good relations with Israel, citing their shared animosity toward Iran, which backed Mr. al-Assad’s regime. Israel also provided medical care to some Syrians inside Israeli-held territory during the decade-long Syrian civil war, including those from the border area.

“The medical treatment broke through some of the enmity that people felt,” said Dirar al-Bashir, a local leader in the border region of Quneitra.

But Mr. al-Bashir and others also said that if Israel’s operation became a protracted occupation, that would ignite further violence in a country exhausted by years of civil war. Israel already controls much of the Golan Heights, territory once held by Syria that Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war and subsequently annexed in a move not recognized by most of the international community.

“We want peace, but the decision makers in Israel seem to think that they will achieve everything by force,” said Arsan Arsan, a resident of a Syrian village outside the buffer zone who has helped coordinate between U.N. officials and local residents. “If they push people into a corner, things will explode, just as they did in Gaza.”

Israeli officers have also entered villages to meet with local leaders and demand that they gather up all of the weaponry in their towns and hand it over to the Israeli military, according to seven residents. The towns mostly complied with the order, leading Israeli soldiers to take out rifles by the truckload, they said.

Israel did not respond to requests for comment on specific accusations by local residents. But the Israeli military said on Wednesday that its forces have seized and destroyed weapons that formerly belonged to the Syrian army, including anti-tank missiles and explosive devices.

Syrian residents and local leaders in the border area also said that Israeli military vehicles have damaged water pipes and electrical cables around some villages, causing blackouts and water cuts.

Turki al-Mustafa, 62, said there had been no running water in his town, Hamidiyeh, since Israeli troops entered the buffer zone. He said that troops had allowed some water to be trucked in, but had set up roadblocks around the town, ordering residents to enter and leave only at designated hours.

Cellphone reception has also become spotty in the buffer zone since the Israeli incursion, according to Ahmad Khreiwish, 37, a resident of the town of Rafeed, making communication difficult.

“Everyone is now living with this dread about the Israeli military,” he said. “We don’t want things to escalate between us. We just want safety and security.”

Some Syrians have protested the Israeli military presence, organizing demonstrations in at least four villages. Two residents of the town of Sweisa said Israeli soldiers had opened fire and injured several people during a protest there on Dec. 25.

“They were unarmed and chanting slogans against Israel’s deployment in the area,” one of the residents, Ziyad al-Fuheili, 43, said of the protesters. “At first, the soldiers shot in the air, but when the crowd kept marching toward them, they fired at the demonstrators.”

Israel’s military said that its forces had fired “warning shots” in Sweisa and that it was looking into reports that civilians had been harmed.

Even before Mr. al-Assad’s fall, Israel worried about Iran-backed militias gaining a foothold along the Syrian border. Israeli warplanes regularly struck Iranian officials and their allies in Syria as part of the yearslong shadow war between the two sides.

The decision to send in troops reflects concerns about the prospect of surprise attacks on Israel, like the one that prompted the 1973 war, as well as the 2023 assault from Gaza. That prompted Israel’s wars with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, along with Israeli airstrikes on Iran-linked targets in Syria well before Mr. al-Assad’s ouster.

“Israel is closely monitoring the situation in Syria, and will not jeopardize its own security,” Gideon Saar, Israel’s foreign minister, said this month. “We will not allow another Oct. 7 on any front.”

Syria’s new leadership has criticized the Israeli military moves. Critics abroad, including several Arab states and France, have called Israel’s actions a violation of the decades-long truce and called on Israel to withdraw. Egypt accused Israel of “exploiting Syria’s current instability to expand its territorial control and impose a new reality on the ground.”

Israel’s officials say they will only withdraw after “new arrangements” are in place along the border. Given the chaotic internal situation in Syria, that could take months or even longer.

In Kodana, a small Syrian village just outside the buffer zone, Israeli armored vehicles arrived just a few days after Mr. al-Assad’s fall, according to the mayor, Maher al-Tahan. He said the Israeli troops told village leaders to broadcast a message over mosque loudspeakers ordering Kodana’s roughly 800 residents to turn over any weapons.

Since then, the Israeli military has brought generators and set up makeshift barracks in the hills overlooking Kodana, he said. But since most of Kodana’s wells sit on those hilltops, he and other residents said, they have turned to buying expensive trucked-in water rather than pumping it out of the ground.

“The Israeli military must leave as soon as possible,” Mr. al-Tahan said. “As long as they stay here, the problems on both sides will simply continue to grow.”

In light wool trousers, dress shoes and an overcoat that was partly open, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was minimally clothed for the minus 13 degrees Celsius weather on Monday when he stepped out of his official residence to announce his resignation.

Mr. Ignatieff pulled on a Team Canada hockey jersey — conveniently Liberal red in color — and, mostly for the benefit of television camera crews and photographers, went for a skate with some other members of Parliament and senators from his party.

I went ahead of them and randomly stopped other skaters to ask whether they recognized Mr. Ignatieff. Few did. No one waved at Mr. Ignatieff or paid attention to him.

But when Mr. Ignatieff sat on a bench to take off his skates, I heard a commotion on the ice behind me. Mr. Trudeau had arrived — and was immediately swarmed.

[Read: In Canada, Covering the Trudeau News With an ‘Orchestra’]

Two years later, I got a personal demonstration of that star power.

I interviewed Mr. Trudeau at his constituency office in Montreal for a profile that would appear just after he became Liberal leader in 2013. The office was above a drugstore, and it looked as though the furniture had been left behind by a previous tenant.

We met in a dark boardroom. When we started discussing the death of his father, former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and the crowds that lined the route of his funeral train from Ottawa to Montreal, Mr. Trudeau briefly lost his composure and had to get a box of tissues. I had never seen anything like it during an interview with a politician, and have yet to see it since.

After the interview was over, we walked in the same direction down the busy road in front of the office. It was another bone-chilling day. A man ran toward us from across the street, zigzagging through traffic. In African-accented French, he said that all he wanted was to shake Mr. Trudeau’s hand.

[From Opinion: Justin Trudeau Was His Own Worst Enemy]

[From Opinion: Saying au Revoir to a Trudeau. For Now.]

Even as Mr. Trudeau’s popularity faded in the years that followed, the crowds never did. Nor did his apparent desire to meet people.

Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister whom Mr. Trudeau succeeded in 2015, favored tightly controlled events before carefully selected audiences. In contrast, even outside of election campaigns, Mr. Trudeau held town halls that were open without registration and that often generated overflow crowds even after being moved into larger arenas.

During campaigns, Mr. Trudeau didn’t just stop for selfies and handshakes and immediately move along. If people had questions, he listened and had conversations — usually to the dismay of his staff trying to keep things on schedule.

With this approach, he was sometimes working without a net. In 2017, when his image was just starting to tarnish, I attended a town hall in Peterborough, Ontario, on yet another cold day. While Mr. Trudeau clearly had fans in the crowd, the gathering became raucous.

The Ontario government’s electrical utility had introduced steep rate increases. One woman brandished at the prime minister her monthly bill of more than 1,000 Canadian dollars. Even though the utility was not at all under federal control, Mr. Trudeau became the target of the people’s wrath.

After he became prime minister, his interviews lost their previous candor. His replies were carefully considered.

Certainly he never again offered anything like his response in that boardroom to why he was opening himself up to the sort of vitriol that his father received as prime minister.

“Am I going to make mistakes? Loads of them,” he told me in 2013. “I’ll be apologizing, I’ll stumble through. But I trust my core, I trust my values and I trust Canadians. And if I blow it, it will really be because I wasn’t up to the task.”

Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times and is based in Ottawa. Originally from Windsor, Ontario, he covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has reported on the country for two decades

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The Lebanese prime minister on Saturday headed to the Syrian capital, Damascus, for the first official visit to meet with the new government there, after clashes along the countries’ shared border left several Lebanese soldiers wounded last week.

The prime minister, Najib Mikati, spoke with Ahmad al-Shara, the leader of the new Syrian government, on Saturday afternoon, according to the Lebanese prime minister’s office. Mr. al-Shara leads Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist group that spearheaded the lightning offensive that toppled the decades-long rule of Bashar al-Assad, the former Syrian president, last month.

Mr. Mikati’s visit came after the election of Joseph Aoun as Lebanon’s president this week after two years in which the office lay vacant. Mr. Aoun will soon begin consultations on nominating a new prime minister next week.

In Syria, Mr. al-Shara faces the challenge of imposing order on a country that has been devastated by 14 years of civil war that split it into multiple warring regions and spurred a proliferation of armed groups.

Lebanon, like other countries on Syria’s borders, fears that its internal chaos could spill over into its territory. Last week, at least five Lebanese soldiers were wounded in clashes along the Syrian border after Syrian militants fired at Lebanese soldiers. The Lebanese military said its troops were trying to shut down an illegal border crossing in the area.

Mr. Mikati spoke by phone with Mr. al-Shara after the incidents. During the call, Mr. al-Shara pledged that “the Syrian authorities are doing everything necessary to restore calm on the border and prevent the matter from recurring,” Mr. Mikati’s office said at the time.

Further underscoring those challenges, Syrian state media announced on Saturday that its security forces had arrested people accused of belonging to the Islamic State who had planned to commit a major attack in Damascus.

The two men had planned to use explosives inside the Sayeda Zeinab mausoleum, a holy site particularly venerated by Shiite Muslims on the outskirts of Damascus, according to SANA, the government-controlled outlet.

While an international coalition led by the United States has largely beaten back ISIS in its former bastions in Iraq and Syria, the group is still active in some areas, and continues to inspire attacks online.

Here’s what else is happening in the region:

• Gaza cease-fire talks: Efforts to reach a truce in the Gaza war that would free the remaining hostages were ongoing in the Qatari capital of Doha. Steve Witkoff, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s incoming Middle East envoy, met on Friday night with Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Qatar’s prime minister. The two discussed “efforts aimed at reaching a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip,” among other issues, according to the Qatari foreign ministry. Qatar and Egypt have been mediating between Israel and Hamas — which refuse to negotiate directly — with help from the United States.

• Rockets from Gaza: Over 15 months in the war between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian militants are still firing munitions from the Gaza Strip, although both Israeli and U.S. officials say the group’s military capacity has been significantly degraded. Air-raid sirens went off in Kerem Shalom, an Israeli border community, on Saturday after a rocket launch from southern Gaza; the Israeli military said it was successfully intercepted.