Eliana Passentin delights in her house, which sits nearly 3,000 feet above sea level in a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, with a view from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean coast. The dining room looks out over ancient Shiloh, the Israelites’ first capital in ancient times.

But Ms. Passentin would feel even better if the area was annexed by Israel.

Some of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s staffing choices have raised hopes among settlers that that could happen. Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s contentious choice for defense secretary, went to ancient Shiloh for an episode of his “Battle in the Holy Land” series on Fox Nation. Mike Huckabee, Mr. Trump’s pick as the next ambassador to Jerusalem, has visited several times over the years and has argued that all of the West Bank belongs to Israel.

Nearly half a million settlers and roughly 2.7 million Palestinians live in the West Bank. The Palestinians, and much of the world, have long envisioned the territory as part of a future independent Palestinian state, alongside Israel, and consider the Jewish settlements to be illegal. After the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel from Gaza, and with the prospect of a more sympathetic administration in Washington, settler leaders say they are confident that a Palestinian state is off the agenda.

They also hope that Israel will extend its sovereignty over parts, or all, of the territory through annexation — a step it has formally avoided since capturing the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war amid opposition from much of the world.

“We want to live our lives in Israel,” Ms. Passentin said, adding, “I believe the new administration will support whatever Israel decides.”

The West Bank has grown increasingly volatile. Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians and their property have risen sharply, while Israel has carried out a series of deadly raids and drone strikes targeting armed Palestinian militants that have chewed up streets and left many Palestinian civilians in fear.

Nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the beginning of 2023, according to the United Nations. The Israeli authorities say that most were armed fighters, but at least some were uninvolved civilians. About 50 Israelis were killed by Palestinian assailants in the West Bank during the same period, 18 of them members of the security forces, according to U.N. data. Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, said it had thwarted more than a thousand attacks in 2024, including hundreds of shooting attacks.

On Monday, gunmen shot at a civilian bus and cars passing the Palestinian village of Al-Funduq in the northern West Bank, killing at least three people in what the Israeli authorities described as a terrorist attack.

Some settlers express a wariness of Mr. Trump born of experience. He has not articulated clear plans for the region, other than a vague aim of bringing peace. But they nonetheless believe that the new administration will go along with the wishes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — the most right-wing in Israel’s history.

“Trump’s team was here, they saw the reality, and for me, that’s a total relief,” said Yisrael Ganz, the head of the Binyamin Regional Council, which governs the settlements around ancient Shiloh, including the adjacent settlement of Shilo. He is also the chairman of the umbrella council representing the rest of the settlements.

Mr. Ganz recently took Doug Burgum, Mr. Trump’s nominee for interior secretary, on a tour in the area. “I see the people he chose,” Mr. Ganz said of the president-elect.

Support for a two-state solution has been waning for years among Israel’s Jewish majority, and since the Oct. 7 attack, many Israelis fear that a Palestinian state would endanger their country. A recent survey found that nearly two-thirds of Jewish Israelis think Palestinians have no right to a state of their own.

But in his public statements, Mr. Ganz has avoided explicitly telling Mr. Trump what to do. To sound less provocative, instead of sovereignty, he uses vaguer terms like “changing the reality” in Judea and Samaria, the biblical names for the West Bank, which the Israeli government considers disputed, not occupied, territory.

During his first term, Mr. Trump showered Israel with diplomatic gifts, including moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv and recognizing the contested city as Israel’s capital. Mike Pompeo, then secretary of state, reversed four decades of U.S. policy by stating that settlements did not violate international law. (Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken returned to the traditional U.S. position in 2024, saying the American government considers settlements to be “inconsistent with international law,” in line with most countries.)

Mr. Trump’s administration also floated a peace plan that strongly favored Israel, discarding the longtime goal of granting the Palestinians a viable state with its capital in Jerusalem.

The proposal, which Mr. Trump called the “deal of the century,” called for Israeli annexation of about 30 percent of the West Bank, including its current settlements, and a disjointed Palestinian state with limited sovereignty. It was immediately rejected by Palestinian leaders and many settlers, who preferred continued ambiguity over what they saw as a patchwork of Israeli and Palestinian territory that would leave many settlements as isolated enclaves.

Adding to the settlers’ wariness, the idea of Israeli annexation was abruptly dumped by both Mr. Trump and Israel’s leaders in favor of forging diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, a process known as the Abraham Accords. The Trump administration is expected to try to expand the accords to include Saudi Arabia, which would most likely require some kind of Israeli acceptance of a pathway to Palestinian statehood.

The settlers are far from homogenous. They include from secular, middle-class Israelis seeking affordable housing as well as religious ideologues who believe settling the land is part of a Messianic plan ordained by God.

But in the hills around Shilo and the neighboring settlement of Eli in the central West Bank, the mission of Jewish settlement expansion is clear. Alongside official government-approved settlements, outposts have been built in recent decades without official permits. Some have been retroactively authorized by Israel and have come to resemble the more established neighborhoods.

Ms. Passentin, a mother of eight, came to Israel as a child from San Francisco. She and her husband, David, lived for 10 years in a trailer, then in a tent, helping to establish outposts, before settling in Hayovel, a satellite of Eli, parts of which are still unauthorized after years of court battles over the ownership and status of the land.

As the Binyamin Council’s international relations director, she has accompanied some of Mr. Trump’s close circle on tours and hosted Mr. Hegseth in her home.

One immediate request of the Trump administration from settler leaders is to cancel sanctions imposed by the Biden administration on more than 30 individuals and organizations accused of violence against Palestinians and destruction or seizure of Palestinian property.

Settler leaders like Mr. Ganz say they do not condone the violence, some of which is directed at Israeli forces who come to remove illegal settlement structures. But they say that it is a police matter and that it is a fraction of the anti-settler violence perpetrated by Palestinians.

For all of the enthusiasm in settler circles surrounding Mr. Trump’s election, expectations of what he will actually do once in office are tempered.

Citing an adage that marriage is often better the second time around, Aaron Katsof, a winemaker in Esh Kodesh, a hilltop outpost perched above Shilo, between the Palestinian villages of Qusra and Duma, said of a second Trump term: “You don’t come with the lovey-dovey infatuation of high school sweethearts. But you come with a lot more experience and maturity.” Esh Kodesh still lacks Israeli government authorization and permits for permanent housing.

Rivka Amar, 19, who is nine months pregnant, moved in the fall to Alei Ayin, a tiny outpost between Esh Kodesh and Qusra. She and her husband live in a lone quick-build home there, accompanied only by some young men who sleep in a tent, in what was open land.

Ms. Amar had been lunching at the Merlot Cafe in Shilo with her friend Rina Kohen, 18, who lives on a settler farm in the northern West Bank with her brother and 150 head of cattle. The idea, she said, was for a few settlers to control as much land as possible, to keep territory away from Palestinians.

“If I’m not there, my enemy will be there,” Ms. Amar said.

But, she said, she keeps her focus on the tasks at the hand, not on political shifts in Israel or the United States.

“I don’t wake up in the morning thinking of Biden or Trump,” she said, “but of where to graze the goats.”

A fresh injection of about 150 foreign officers arrived in Haiti this weekend to bolster an international security force charged with taking on the powerful and well-armed gangs that have inflicted so much misery on the country for months.

But if the past is any guide this latest infusion is unlikely to make much of a difference.

Back-to-back massacres that killed more than 300 people, followed by a Christmas Eve assault on Haiti’s largest public hospital have underscored the Haitian government’s increasing lack of control over the nation’s deepening crisis.

A news conference to announce the reopening of a public hospital that had been closed for nine months because of gang violence came under another gang attack, killing two reporters and a police officer.

More than two dozen journalists caught in the ambush were trapped for two hours triaging seven wounded colleagues before they were rescued. They ripped their own clothing to fashion tourniquets and used tampons to stanch the bleeding because, witnesses said, the few doctors at the hospital ran for their lives. Reporters escaped by climbing a rear wall.

“There was blood all over the floor and on our clothes,” said Jephte Bazil, a reporter with an online news outlet, Machann Zen Haïti, adding that the hospital had nothing “available to treat the victims.”

The hospital shooting followed two massacres in separate parts of the country that killed more than 350 people and have shined a harsh spotlight on the failures and shortcomings of local authorities and an international security force deployed to protect innocent civilians.

One of the massacres unfolded last month in an impoverished, sprawling, gang-controlled Port-au-Prince neighborhood where a lack of any police presence meant that for three days older people were dismembered and thrown to the sea without the authorities finding out. At least 207 people were killed between Dec. 6 and Dec. 11, according to the United Nations.

At about the same time, another three-day killing spree took place 70 miles north in Petite Rivière. Community leaders say 150 people were killed as gang members and vigilante groups attacked one another.

The violence is part of a relentless string of bloodshed that has befallen Haiti in the last two months, exposing the fragility of its interim government, raising concerns about the viability of a U.S.-brokered security mission and leaving a planned transition to elections and more stable leadership on the verge of collapse.

With President-elect Donald J. Trump about to assume the reins of an international deployment that has been criticized as ineffective and underfunded, the future of Haiti has never seemed so bleak.

Justice Minister Patrick Pelissier said he believed the 150 soldiers, mostly from Guatemala, should help turn the tide. He stressed that some gang-controlled areas had been retaken and that the government is tending to displaced people.

“The state has not collapsed,” Mr. Pelissier said. “The state is there. The state is working.”

But many experts believe Haiti is a failing state, with various factions of the interim government embroiled in political bickering with no apparent strategy for tackling the worsening violence and providing a path to elections, which were supposed to be held this year.

“Political disputes translate into violence,” said Diego Da Rin, a Haiti analyst with the International Crisis Group. “The gangs are very aware of when is the right moment to shift from defensive mode to offensive mode. They flex their muscles when they need to.”

The gang attacks have also drawn attention to the weakness of the U.S.-backed Multinational Security Support mission, a detachment of several hundred mostly Kenyan police officers that began arriving in Haiti last June.

The mission was supposed to have up to 2,500 officers, but with little international financing, the force numbers far less and lacks the staffing to tackle the many gang-entrenched areas.

Several experts said the Christmas Eve killings gave a sense that the government was inept. The event announcing the hospital’s reopening was held in a gang stronghold, with virtually no security. Even as people came under attack, the police took at least an hour to respond, though their headquarters are nearby.

The country’s heath minister, Dr. Duckenson Lorthe Blema, who was sick and running late, believes he was the intended target.

“I am not crazy — I wanted to do well, and it went badly,” Dr. Blema, who was fired in the aftermath of the attack, said in an interview. “It turned into a fiasco. The scapegoat is me.”

Dr. Blema insisted that he had asked for police deployments at the event and did not know why there was so little protection. He defended the hospital’s dearth of supplies, saying he had intended to open the facility “gradually” as an outpatient clinic, which would not have been for treating gunshot wounds.

The justice minister acknowledged that there was no coordination between the ministry of health and the police, nor was a proper security assessment done in advance.

“Neighborhoods are controlled by gangs, and the police are working to recover them,” he said, noting that while the crisis is severe in the capital and the rural Artibonite Valley, much of the country was operating normally.

Haiti’s descent into chaos was largely triggered by the assassination in July 2021 of its last elected president, Jovenel Moïse. Gangs earning income from illegal checkpoints, extortion and kidnappings used the political vacuum to expand their territories.

With no elected national leaders, the country is ruled by a transitional council made up of rival political parties, with an interim presidency rotating among its members.

The latest surge in violence began Nov. 11, when the council replaced the prime minister, and gangs took advantage of the political upheaval to fire on U.S. commercial aircraft and escalate their brutality. Haiti’s main airport has been closed since.

More than 5,300 people were killed in Haiti last year and the total number of people forced to flee their homes now exceeds 700,000, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Gang checkpoints and ambushes have disrupted food supplies and the nonprofit group Mercy Corp, estimates that nearly 5 million people — half the country’s population — are facing severe food insecurity.

The new prime minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, in his only news conference since taking office nearly two months ago, announced pay increases for police officers and said he was committed to restoring the rule of law.

The prime minister and members of the presidential council declined to comment for this article.

In a New Year’s Day speech, the president of the council, Leslie Voltaire, insisted that elections would still take place this year, but likened the current situation to war. A police spokesman said he had no comment.

The commander of the Kenyan-led mission, Godfrey Otunge, who also did not respond to requests for comment, has complained that the mission’s successes have not been sufficiently touted.

In a recent message posted online, he said “the future of Haiti is bright.”

The U.S. State Department, which has committed $600 million for the Kenya mission, defended its record, noting that a recent operation with the police led to the death of a high-profile gang member.

Two police stations recently reopened and the Kenyan mission now has a permanent presence near the main port, which has long been controlled by gangs, the State Department said.

The U.S. government sent several shipments of materials in December, the agency said.

But absent significantly greater outside help, experts say Haiti’s worsening trajectory is unlikely to be reversed.

“The Haitian government is really not clear on what they are doing,” said Sophie Rutenbar, a visiting scholar at New York University, who helped run United Nations operations in Haiti until 2023. “Unfortunately right now they are faced with not good choices and worse choices.”

Some of the injured journalists blamed gangs — and the government — for a debacle that cost precious lives.

“If the state had taken its responsibilities, none of this would have happened,” said Velondie Miracle, who was shot seven times in the leg, temple and mouth. “The state is a legal force and should not give bandits access to places where the state cannot respond.”

André Paultre contributed reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Costas Simitis, a former prime minister of Greece who oversaw his country’s entry into the euro single currency and its uneven preparations for the 2004 Olympic Games, died on Sunday. He was 88.

Grigoris Karpouzis, the director of the Corinth hospital in Greece, confirmed his death in a statement but did not give a cause. The Greek government declared four days of national mourning for Mr. Simitis, who will receive a state burial.

A low-key politician who proved popular with voters, Mr. Simitis demonstrated more sympathy for capitalism and the United States than some of his predecessors as prime minister.

His two successive premierships yielded the longest continuous term of any modern Greek prime minister, although the man he succeeded, Andreas Papandreou, served a longer total over three terms separated by a period in opposition.

Both the hosting of the Games and the adoption of the euro in 2001 seemed to betoken an unaccustomed self-confidence, optimism and national pride among Greeks.

Yet, in a land whose ancient Greek forebears coined the notion of hubris as a potent ingredient of tragedy, both developments contributed to a crippling debt crisis that raised questions about Greek membership in the European Union and ballooned into a broader crisis across the eurozone.

The Summer Olympics, held shortly after Mr. Simitis left office in March 2004, were billed as a homecoming, not only to the venue of the inaugural modern Olympics in 1896, but also to the birthplace of the ancient games in 776 B.C.

But the 17 days of competition and pageantry cost far more than planned and created yet more debt as a result of big-ticket infrastructure projects designed to showcase Athens as the Games’ host.

Months later, the European Commission criticized Athens for purportedly falsifying economic data in order to replace its drachma currency with the euro. The warning foreshadowed years of crisis and bailouts that forced Greeks into a brutal era of austerity and hardship.

Some international commentators, including Robert Reich, the former U.S. labor secretary, also faulted the Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs, which earned huge fees for advising Greece on measures to reduce the book value of part of its debt in order to qualify for euro membership.

But Mr. Simitis, a trained economist and lawyer who served two four-year terms as prime minister, defended his record, saying Greece did not bear sole responsibility for the debt crisis and arguing that the blame for lax fiscal management lay with the conservative political adversaries who succeeded him.

Specifically, he said in a study of Greece’s role in the European debt crisis, published in 2014, the New Democracy party that won the 2004 elections displayed “criminal indifference” to the need to reduce the country’s public debt and relegated fiscal discipline to the status of “mere window dressing.”

Two years earlier, in an article in The Guardian, as Greece racked up ever greater debts from international bailouts, Mr. Simitis insisted that, when Greece was admitted to the eurozone, leading European institutions had carried out “exhaustive scrutiny” of its economic suitability before endorsing its membership of the new currency.

Not only that, as the eurozone crisis spread to other poorer members of the European Union on its southern periphery, Mr. Simitis wrote, the true cause of the malaise was not “Greece’s alleged extravagance and excessive deficits” but a more fundamental imbalance between the wealthy northern lands, such as Germany, and the less advanced southern economies.

“Greece sparked the eurozone crisis but was not its cause,” Mr. Simitis said. “The cause lies in the fact that the eurozone is a fully fledged monetary union but an incomplete economic and fiscal union of member states with different structures: the more mature economies of the European north and the less mature ones of the European south.”

Konstantinos Simitis was born on June 23, 1936, in the Greek port city of Piraeus near Athens, to Georgios Simitis, a professor at the School of Economic and Commercial Sciences in Athens and his wife, Fani Christopoulou, a left-leaning feminist activist. An elder brother, Spiros Simitis, became a leading jurist specializing in data protection in Germany.

Mr. Simitis is survived by his wife of 60 years, Daphne, and their two daughters, Fiona Mouzakitis and Marilena Simiti.

Mr. Simitis studied in West Germany and in London before returning to Athens, but fled the country to avoid arrest during rule by a military junta from 1967 to 1974. He was a founder of the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement, known by its Greek initials as PASOK, along with Mr. Papandreou. Mr. Simitis served as a minister under Mr. Papandreou, although the two differed constantly on economic policy.

Mr. Papandreou resigned for health reasons in early 1996, and the party’s 167 parliamentary deputies chose the 59-year-old Mr. Simitis to replace him. He had campaigned in the party ballot as a pro-European modernizer, with a low-key manner that contrasted with his flamboyant predecessor’s patriarchal and sometimes capricious style.

Once in office, Mr. Simitis confronted familiar challenges. Within weeks, a dispute with Turkey sent his popularity ratings into a downward spiral, underscoring the uneasy nature of the relationship between the Aegean neighbors.

On several occasions tensions between the two countries — NATO allies divided by deep historical antagonisms — have stirred powerful nationalist passions and brought them to the brink of hostilities.

In a bizarre episode in 1999, for instance, Mr. Simitis was accused by critics of bungling an attempt to shield Abdullah Ocalan, a fugitive rebel leader of Turkey’s Kurds, who was seized by Turkish security forces in Nairobi, Kenya. Mr. Ocalan had been hiding in the Greek Embassy there.

The event dented Greek national pride. Several government ministers and senior officials resigned. Mr. Simitis acknowledged making mistakes but accused other European nations of triggering the crisis by denying Mr. Ocalan a haven.

In his first term, Mr. Simitis set about curtailing Greece’s extravagant public and private spending and sought to prepare the economy to meet European Union targets for his country’s entry into the eurozone. He had succeeded in reducing inflation and public indebtedness while stabilizing the drachma currency.

His cautious manner offered a marked contrast with the Papandreou years.

“We needed someone who would say less and do more, a person who is an ordinary Greek, who doesn’t descend from on high, and who doesn’t hide problems with endless myths,” Dimitris Rappas, a government spokesman, told The New York Times in 1996.

Mr. Simitis won a second term in 2000, but only by a wafer-thin majority and far short of the endorsement he had sought against his main challenger, Kostas Karamanlis, the leader of the New Democracy Party. It was on Mr. Simitis’s watch, too, that Greece finally made its reckoning with the feared November 17 urban terrorist movement that emerged from a popular struggle against the American-supported military officers who took power in 1967.

In 2002, an injured bomber began to talk and, as a result, the police made a slew of arrests that persuaded the authorities to say that most of the organization had been rounded up. Theodore Couloumbis, a political analyst, said at the time that the country had undergone a “sea change.”

“We’ve crossed the threshold from an unstable democracy to a consolidated one,” he said.

Two years later, though, Mr. Simitis resigned as PASOK chairman and said he would not contest the forthcoming election, in which his party lost to New Democracy. He was succeeded as head of PASOK by George Papandreou, a son of Andreas Papandreou who, at the time, was Greece’s foreign minister.

“Simitis has not made Greece perfect but he has helped make it better,” a largely favorable assessment in the newspaper Ekathimerini said in 2004 as he prepared to step down. “He changed the country and he changed our expectations of our leaders.”

Later, those perceptions of progress collided with the financial crises associated with the eurozone. Only in 2018, did the Greek government say that it was “turning a page” after eight years of riots, bailouts, crisis and instability that brought down four governments.

Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting.

In a chilly auditorium in Afghanistan, heaps of freshly mined green emeralds glowed under bright table lamps as bearded gemstone dealers inspected them for purity and quality.

An auctioneer asked for bids on the first lot, which weighed 256 carats. With that, the Taliban’s weekly gemstone auction was underway.

These sales, in the emerald-rich Panjshir Province of eastern Afghanistan, are part of an effort by the Taliban government to cash in on the country’s vast mineral and gemstone potential.

Since seizing power in August 2021, the Taliban say they have signed deals with scores of investors to mine gemstones, gold, copper, iron and other valuable minerals, like chromite. These buried treasures offer a potentially lucrative lifeline for a feeble economy.

China has led the way in investments under its Belt and Road Initiative, an aggressive effort to spread Chinese influence worldwide. Russian and Iranian investors have also signed mining licenses, filling the void left by the chaotic U.S. withdrawal in 2021.

The U.S. government estimates that at least $1 trillion in mineral deposits lie beneath Afghanistan’s rugged landscape. The country is rich in copper, gold, zinc, chromite, cobalt, lithium and industrial minerals, as well as in precious and semiprecious gemstones like emeralds, rubies, sapphires, garnets and lapis lazuli.

Afghanistan also holds a trove of rare earth elements, according to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a U.S. agency that will close this year. Such elements are used in an array of modern technology, like mobile phones, laptops and electric vehicles.

The Taliban are trying to do what the United States could not during its 20-year occupation. The U.S. government spent nearly a billion dollars to develop mining projects in Afghanistan, but “tangible progress was negligible and not sustained,” the special inspector general concluded in a report published in January 2023.

Many of the hurdles from that time could still apply: a lack of security, poor infrastructure, corruption, inconsistent government policies and regulations, and frequent turnover of government officials.

The Taliban are nonetheless giving it a shot, desperate for revenue after Afghanistan’s precipitous loss of aid with the U.S. withdrawal.

During the war, the United States provided roughly $143 billion in development and humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, propping up the U.S.-aligned government. Since 2021, the United States has given $2.6 billion in such aid, delivered by a private contractor in shrink-wrapped cash bundles on flights to Kabul, according to the special inspector general.

The Afghan economy has shrunk by 26 percent over the past two years, the World Bank reported in April. The sharp decline in international aid, the bank said, has left Afghanistan “without any internal engines of growth.”

On top of that, the Taliban’s ban on opium production has cost farmers $1.3 billion in income, or 8 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, the World Bank said. The ban has led to the loss of 450,000 jobs and reduced land under poppy cultivation by 95 percent, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime reported.

Mining could help replace poppies as a steady revenue stream. Turkey and Qatar, along with China and Iran, have invested in iron, copper, gold and cement mines. Uzbek companies have signed deals to extract oil in northern Afghanistan, according to the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum.

The Taliban are already collecting tax from emerald sales.

Under the previous government, the emerald trade was a corrupt free-for-all. Warlords and politically connected dealers dominated the trade, and tax collection was haphazard at best.

But as the Taliban government has instituted the weekly emerald auctions, it has controlled and taxed all sales. Dealers who buy emeralds at the auctions do not receive the gems until they pay the 10 percent levy.

The Taliban are taxing other precious stones as well, including rubies and sapphires.

Rahmatullah Sharifi, a gemstone dealer who bought two sets of emeralds at the auction, said he didn’t mind paying the tax.

“The government needs the money to develop the country,” he said. “The question is: Will they spend it on helping the Afghan people?”

In Panjshir Province, where most Afghan emeralds are mined, the government has issued 560 emerald licenses to foreign and Afghan investors, said Hamayoon Afghan, a spokesman for the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum.

The ministry has also granted licenses to mine rubies in Panjshir and Kabul Provinces, Mr. Afghan said, and plans are underway for emerald and precious stone licenses in three other provinces.

But many new licenses are for mines that have yet to open. And many existing mines are hobbled by poor infrastructure and a dearth of experienced engineers and technical experts.

Mr. Afghan conceded that the country needed more engineers and technicians. Foreign investors bring in experienced experts, he said, and they are obligated under licenses to employ Afghans and teach them technical and engineering skills.

Most of the emeralds bought at the weekly auctions are resold to foreign buyers, dealers said. Among the dealers buying emeralds one day in November was Haji Ghazi, who sells gemstones from a tiny cell-like room within a darkened warren of shops in downtown Kabul.

Two days after the auction, Mr. Ghazi bolted his shop’s door, closed the curtains and unlocked an ancient safe. He withdrew several caches of emeralds and rubies, each one wrapped in a plain white sheet of paper.

Mr. Ghazi’s largest set of emeralds was worth perhaps $250,000, he said. He estimated that a much smaller cache of bright rubies was worth $20,000.

In a corner, Mr. Ghazi had piled heavy chunks of rock bearing thick blue veins of lapis lazuli, a semiprecious stone. Much of the world’s supply of lapis is mined in northern Afghanistan.

Mr. Ghazi sells most of his gemstones to buyers from the United Arab Emirates, India, Iran and Thailand. He said he missed the days, before the Taliban takeover, when the occupation brought eager buyers from the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Australia.

In an adjacent shop, Azizullah Niyazi switched on a desk lamp to illuminate a collection of lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires and emeralds spread across a small table. He was still awaiting his first customer of the morning.

Mr. Niyazi said sales were not as robust as during the 13 years he was allowed to sell gemstones one day a week from a small shop on a U.S. coalition military base. His profits soared as soldiers and civilian contractors lined up to buy gemstones every Friday — and they rarely haggled over prices, unlike Afghan or Arab buyers, he said. He paid a 7 percent tax on his profits, he said.

These days, Mr. Niyazi must travel to increase sales: He said he had opened a shop in China, where he made regular visits. In Kabul, he sells to buyers from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, as well as from Pakistan, Iran and a handful of other countries.

He has few Afghan customers.

“Not many Afghans can afford to pay $1,000 or $2,000 for a stone to make a ring,” he said with a shrug.

Safiullah Padshah, Yaqoob Akbary and Najim Rahim contributed reporting.