The Israeli military said on Sunday that it has been conducting “operational raids” in recent weeks on Mount Hermon in Syria, continuing a military campaign on Syrian soil that is drawing increasing international condemnation.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based Syrian war monitor, on Sunday also reported airstrikes around the Syrian capital, Damascus, attributing them to the Israeli military. The strikes targeted an ammunitions warehouse used by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, who was ousted in a rebel offensive last month, the observatory said. The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the airstrikes.

Israel’s continued military operations in Syria, which it said on Sunday are intended to “strengthen the defense of Israel’s citizens,” have drawn accusations from the United Nations and some member states that Israel is violating a decades-long cease-fire by sending its troops within and beyond a buffer zone between the countries.

The raids come just days after Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, said he had met with members of the U.N. peacekeeping mission on the border between Syria and Israel. The U.N. Disengagement Observer Force, known as UNDOF, was established by the Security Council in 1974 to maintain a cease-fire between Israeli and Syrian forces after a 1973 war and to supervise the buffer zone that agreement established.

After rebel forces in Syria last month suddenly toppled the Assad regime, Israeli ground forces advanced into and beyond the demilitarized zone, marking their first overt entry into the country in a half century and prompting the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, to decry Israel’s violations of the 1974 agreement.

Mr. Sa’ar said in a statement that “extremist armed groups” had attacked peacekeepers in the buffer zone, violating the cease-fire. UNDOF did not immediately respond to a request for comment on those claims.

The Israeli attacks in Syria complicate a situation there that is already intensely complex, as the new Syrian leadership attempts to reconstruct a nation devastated by over a decade of civil war and gain international recognition.

Ahmed al-Shara, the rebel commander who led the coalition that toppled Mr. al-Assad and who has assumed interim leadership of the country, criticized the Israeli military’s actions in Syriain an interview with The New York Times and other news outlets in December, shortly after he took power. He said Syria would continue to abide by the 1974 cease-fire agreement, and called on the international community to make sure that Israel followed it, too.

But Israel has repeatedly signaled that it plans to remain in Syria for however long it deems necessary. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a December visit to Mount Hermon, which Israeli troops seized last month, he said they would remain in the country “until another arrangement is found that guarantees Israel’s security.”

His defense minister, Israel Katz, who accompanied the prime minister on the visit, said that Israel’s military presence there serves as “deterrence against the rebels in Damascus, who claim to present a moderate face but are among the most extreme Islamist movements.”

Mr. al-Shara’s rebel faction, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, was once affiliated with Al Qaeda but broke with the group in 2017. It has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the United Nations and others, but some countries say they may consider lifting that designation. A decision, they say, will hinge on whether there is a democratic transition in Syria and if rebel leaders demonstrate respect for minority groups.

In recent weeks, Mr. al-Shara has sought to present himself as a diplomat focused on rebuilding his country, meeting with officials from the United States as well as those from European and Middle Eastern nations.

There are some indications that the new Syrian government would welcome relations with Israel as well. The newly appointed governor of Damascus, Maher Marwan, in an NPR interview in late December, called on the United States to use its sway over Israel to encourage the establishment of diplomatic relations.

For now, however, Israel appears more focused on military action.

Apart from the encroachment of Israeli ground troops in Syria, the Israeli military has also conducted intensive airstrikes there, war monitors say, both before and since the fall of Mr. al-Assad. In a report on Thursday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it had documented more than 370 Israeli attacks in Syria last year, the majority of which came in recent weeks.

Dozens of Israeli strikes pounded the Gaza Strip over the weekend as Israeli and Hamas officials continued indirect cease-fire talks through mediators in Qatar.

Israel’s military said on Sunday that it had hit more than 100 targets across the enclave over the weekend, including sites from which militants had fired at least four projectiles toward Israeli territory on Friday and Saturday. It said that the strikes had killed Hamas militants and that the military had taken measures to mitigate the risk of harming civilians. The claims could not be independently verified.

The Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Sunday that 88 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes over the last 24 hours. The ministry’s figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The Gaza Civil Defense, an emergency services agency, said that its crews had responded to multiple airstrikes on family homes on Sunday in which several people were killed and wounded.

Pressure has been mounting on both sides to reach a cease-fire agreement that would include the release of hostages held in Gaza before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office on Jan. 20. Hamas and Israel both said they were sending delegations to the Qatari capital, Doha, in recent days to meet with mediators.

The Israeli delegation remained in Doha over the weekend, according to an Israeli person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a lack of authorization to discuss the secretive talks publicly. The person said that the discussions in Doha were making slow progress and were aimed at reaching a limited deal that would see a temporary halt in the fighting and some Israeli hostages released in exchange for a number of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel.

Reflecting the abiding gap between the sides, at least in their public positions, Hamas said in a statement on Friday that the current round of talks would focus on an agreement leading to a complete cease-fire and the details for a withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. Israel had not committed to ending the war, an official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, said last week.

Roughly 100 hostages are still being held in Gaza out of some 250 people taken captive during the Hamas-led attacks in October 2023 that prompted the war. At least a third of them are presumed to be dead.

A weeklong truce in November 2023 allowed for the release of 105 hostages, but subsequent efforts to reach a cease-fire have faltered amid gaps in the two sides’ demands. Each side blames the other for the failure to reach a deal.

Israeli officials have recently said that they believe that Hamas is rebuilding its forces in Gaza. And the group appears to be recruiting new fighters faster than Israel can eliminate them.

Security officials reportedly told an Israeli parliamentary committee last week that Hamas has up to 19,000 fighters, with about 9,000 of them in organized units. Before the war, Israel estimated that Hamas had roughly 25,000 fighters, though Hamas never confirmed that figure.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in November that Israel’s military had killed close to 20,000 fighters.

In all, more than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed during the war, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

And as hopes for even a limited cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas rise again, Palestinians and human rights organizations say the humanitarian situation in Gaza is getting even more desperate.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said on Sunday that overnight Israeli airstrikes near Al-Amal Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis caused significant damage to several hospital facilities and killed one person.

Last week, Israeli forces raided the last remaining major hospital in northern Gaza, Kamal Adwan, and forced its staff and patients to evacuate. The Israeli military said that Kamal Adwan was a stronghold for Hamas and that it was carrying out “targeted operations” in the area.

The hospital had been the main provider of medical care in the northernmost stretch of Gaza amid a monthslong offensive by Israel’s military against what it says is a resurgent Hamas.

The World Health Organization said that the raid on Kamal Adwan “put the last major health facility in North Gaza out of service” — and that the remaining patients, caregivers and health workers were transferred to the Indonesian Hospital.

But on Sunday, Gaza’s health ministry said that the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza was no longer providing services to patients or the wounded, leaving the northern part of the enclave without any functioning hospitals amid the near-constant bombardment.

Aaron Boxerman contributed to this report.

The Catholic priest stood at the altar in the hilltop church for the mass baptism, dunking dozens of heads in water and tracing a cross with his finger on each forehead.

Then he rejoiced at Christianity’s recovery of souls in a land where the vast majority of people are Muslim — as the men, women and children standing before him had been.

The ceremony was one of many in recent months in Kosovo, a formerly Serbian territory inhabited largely by ethnic Albanians that declared itself an independent state in 2008. In a census last spring, 93 percent of the population professed itself Muslim and only 1.75 percent Roman Catholic.

A small number of ethnic Albanian Christian activists, all converts from Islam, are urging their ethnic kin to look to the church as an expression of their identity. They call it the “return movement,” a push to revive a pre-Islamic past they see as an anchor of Kosovo’s place in Europe and a barrier to religious extremism spilling over from the Middle East.

Until the Ottoman Empire conquered what is today Kosovo and other areas of the Balkans in the 14th century, bringing with it Islam, ethnic Albanians were primarily Catholics. Under Ottoman rule, which lasted until 1912, most of Kosovo’s people switched faiths.

By reversing that process, said Father Fran Kolaj, the priest who carried out the baptisms outside the village of Llapushnik, ethnic Albanians can recover their original identity.

Ethnic Albanians, who trace their roots to an ancient people called the Illyrians, live mainly in Albania, a country on the Adriatic Sea. But they also make up a large majority of the population in neighboring Kosovo and more than a quarter of the population in North Macedonia.

At the church where the baptisms took place, nationalist emblems jostle with religious iconography. The double-headed eagle symbol of Albania decorates the steeple and also a screen behind the altar.

“It is time for us to return to the place where we belong — with Christ,” Father Kolaj said in an interview.

In many Muslim lands, renouncing Islam can bring severe punishment, sometimes even death. So far, the baptism ceremonies taking place in Kosovo have stirred no violent opposition, though there have been some angry denunciations online. (It is not known how many conversions have so far taken place.)

But historians, who agree that Christianity was present in Kosovo long before the Ottoman Empire brought Islam, question the thinking behind the movement.

“From a historical perspective what they say is true,” said Durim Abdullahu, a historian at the University of Pristina. But, he added, “their logic means that we should all become pagans” because the people living on the territory of today’s Kosovo before the arrival of Christianity and later Islam were nonbelievers.

Like many other Kosovars, Mr. Abdullahu said he believed that Serbia, which has a mostly Orthodox Christian population, had helped stoke the return movement as a way of sowing discord in Kosovo. While Serbia has long been accused of undermining Kosovo’s stability, there is no evidence it has been promoting the conversions.

Archaeologists in 2022 uncovered the remains of a sixth-century Roman church near Pristina, and in 2023 found a mosaic with an inscription indicating that early Albanians, or at least a people perhaps related to them, were Christians.

Still, Christophe Goddard, a French archaeologist working at the site, said it was wrong to impose modern concepts of nation and ethnicity on ancient peoples. “This is not history but modern politics,” he said.

Traces of Kosovo’s distant pre-Islamic past also survived in a small number of families that clung to Roman Catholicism despite the risk of being ostracized by their Muslim neighbors.

Marin Sopi, 67, a retired Albanian language teacher who was baptized 16 years ago, said his family had been “closet Catholics” for generations. In childhood, he recalled, he and his family observed Ramadan with Muslim friends but secretly celebrated Christmas at home.

“We were Muslims during the day and Christians at night,” he said. Since coming out as a Christian, he said, 36 members of his extended family have formally abandoned Islam.

Islam and Christianity in Kosovo mostly coexisted in peace — until Orthodox Christian soldiers and nationalist paramilitary gangs from Serbia began torching mosques and expelling Muslims from the homes in the 1990s.

Foreign Christian missionaries have kept their distance from Kosovo’s conversion campaign. But some ethnic Albanians living in Western Europe have offered support, seeing a return to Catholicism as Kosovo’s best hope of one day entering the European Union, a largely Christian club.

Arber Gashi, an ethnic Albanian living in Switzerland, traveled to Kosovo to attend the baptism ceremony at the church in Llapushnik, which overlooks the scene of a major battle in 1998 between Serb forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army.

He and other activists worry that funding for mosque-building and other activities from Turkey and countries in the Middle East like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, with their more conservative approaches, threatens Kosovo’s traditionally laid-back form of Islam. Most of this money has gone into economic development projects unrelated to religion.

The center of Pristina has a statue honoring Mother Teresa, the Catholic nun and Nobel Peace Prize laureate of Albanian descent, and is dominated by a large Roman Catholic cathedral built after the war with Serbia. But Turkey is currently funding the construction nearby of a giant new mosque that will be even bigger.

Mr. Gashi also said that he feared a return of the Islamic extremism that emerged in Kosovo’s first, chaotic decade of independence. By some counts, Kosovo provided more recruits to the Islamic State in Syria than any other European country.

Christianity, on the other hand, would open a path to Europe, he said.

A crackdown by the authorities in recent years has silenced extremism and reinforced Kosovo’s traditionally relaxed take on Islam. The streets of Pristina are lined with bars serving a wide range of alcohol. Veiled women are extremely rare.

Gezim Gjin Hajrullahu, 57, a teacher who was among those baptized recently in Llapushnik, said he had joined the Catholic church “not for the sake of religion itself” but for the “sake of our national identity” as ethnic Albanians. His wife also converted.

Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian prime minister, Albin Kurti, in an interview in Pristina, played down the importance of religion to Albanian identity. “For us, religions came and went but we are still here,” he said. “For Albanians, in terms of identity, religion was never of first importance.”

That sets them apart from other peoples in the now vanished, multiethnic federal state of Yugoslavia, which disintegrated during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s. The main warring parties in the early phases of the conflict spoke much the same language and looked similar but were clearly distinguished from one another by religion — Serbs by Orthodox Christianity, Croats by Roman Catholicism and Bosnians by Islam.

Activists in the return movement believe that ethnic Albanians also need to cement their national loyalties with religion in the form of Roman Catholicism.

Boik Breca, a former Muslim active in the movement, insisted that the Catholic church is not an alien intrusion but the true expression of Albanian identity and evidence that Kosovo belongs in Europe.

He said his interest in Christianity began when Kosovo, along with Serbia, was still part of Yugoslavia. He was sent to jail off the coast of Croatia as a political prisoner. Many of his fellow inmates were Catholics, he recalled, and helped stir what he now sees as his true faith and a belief that “our ancestors were all Catholics.”

“To be a true Albanian,” he said, “you have to be Christian.”

This view is widely disputed, including by Mr. Kurti, the prime minister.

“I don’t buy that,” he said.

The current push against Islam began with a meeting in October 2023 in Decani, a bastion of nationalist sentiment near Kosovo’s border with Albania. The gathering, attended by nationalist intellectuals and former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters, discussed ways to promote “Albanian-ness” and decided that Christianity would help.

“We are no longer Muslims as of today,” attendees said, adopting the slogan: “To be only Albanians.”

The meeting led to the formation of what was initially called the Movement for the Abandonment of the Islamic Faith, a provocative name since largely dropped in favor of the “Movement of Return.”

From his office in Pristina, decorated with a model of Mecca, Kosovo’s grand mufti, Naim Ternava, has watched the return movement with anxiety and dismay. The push for Muslims to switch to Christianity, he said, risked disrupting religious harmony and was being used by “foreign agents to spread hatred of Islam.”

“Our mission,” he added, “is to keep people in our religion. I tell people to remain in Islam.”