A delegation of Syrian Druse made a rare visit to Israel over the weekend for a pilgrimage to a shrine as Israel seeks to extend its influence inside Syria after the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Both Israel and Syria have sizable minorities who belong to the Druse sect — an Arabic-speaking religious minority scattered across the Levant region. But with Israel and Syria formally at war for decades, Syrian Druse were generally unable to enter Israel to visit sites holy to their faith.

Sheikh Muwafaq Tarif, a Druse leader in Israel who helped organize the two-day visit, said roughly 100 people arrived on Friday in a convoy from Syrian territory. They also visited the Tomb of the Prophet Shuaib in the northern Galilee region of Israel, a site deeply revered in their faith.

“After being cut off for decades, to see our people arriving in our country — it’s a moment of great joy,” said Mr. Tarif, adding that he knew most of the visitors only from phone conversations, given the great difficulty of traveling between the two countries.

In Israel, many Druse hold Israeli passports, serve in the national military and are viewed as loyal “brothers in arms.” Others in the Golan Heights, territory that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war, still hold Syrian identity and have Israeli residency cards, not citizenship.

Since the collapse of Mr. al-Assad’s dictatorship in early December, Israel has launched a barrage of airstrikes on Syria which it says are aimed at preventing hostile forces from massing near its borders. But the moves have prompted fears among Syrians of a protracted Israeli occupation of Syrian territory.

At the same time, Israel has reached out to the Syrian Druse, many of whom live in villages and cities in southern Syria, as potential partners.

The Druse militias in Syria are under pressure to integrate into a unified national military that the new president is trying to establish. Israeli officials have suggested that Israel could intervene on behalf of the Druse, including militarily, if they came under threat from government forces.

David Mencer, an Israeli government spokesman, said this week that Israel was “prepared to defend, if needed, the Druse population in Syria from the forces of the new regime.” The major Syrian Druse militias flatly rejected the offer.

Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, said this week that Israel was preparing to allow some Syrian Druse into Israel to work in the Golan Heights.

The Druse belong to a sect that broke away from Islam roughly 1,000 years ago, ultimately becoming a separate religion. Its members, now scattered between Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and northern Israel, have often found themselves on opposing sides of conflicts in the region.

Since the fall of Mr. al-Assad, Israeli troops have marched into Syrian territory, seizing a 155-square-mile buffer zone and bombarding targets across the country. Israeli officials have denounced the new government in Damascus for its Islamist leadership and said that their forces will remain in Syrian territory for the foreseeable future.

The new Syrian president, Ahmed al-Shara, has called on the international community to pressure Israel to withdraw. He has also maintained that his government poses no threat to its neighbors or to religious minorities like the Druse because Syrians are weary of war.

The United States has imposed visa sanctions on several Thai officials over the surprise deportation of 40 Uyghurs back to China last month, a rare instance of punishment for countries that have repatriated members of the persecuted Muslim minority despite warnings that they might face torture and long-term imprisonment upon their return.

The visa restrictions could limit the ability of former and current Thai officials responsible for, or complicit in, the forced return of Uyghurs, to travel to the United States. The State Department did not disclose the officials’ names, citing confidentiality.

“We are committed to combating China’s efforts to pressure governments to forcibly return Uyghurs and other groups to China, where they are subject to torture and enforced disappearances,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement on Friday.

The move came a day after the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning the deportation and calling on Thailand to “halt any further forced returns of refugees to countries where their lives are at risk.”

The dual announcements could complicate matters for the Thai government at a tricky time. The Thai authorities are trying to ward off potential tariffs from the United States, with which the country has a $35 billion trade deficit. They are also trying to wrap up a free-trade agreement with the European Union.

China has used its power and influence to silence its critics abroad and pressure governments to repatriate citizens fleeing persecution. In recent years, the government has detained as many as one million Uyghurs and others in internment camps and prisons, stepped up birth control measures for Muslim women and placed Muslim children in boarding schools.

Julian Ku, a Hofstra University law professor who is a close observer of U.S. policy on Uyghurs, said on social media that the visa restriction policy was “a pretty dramatic step,” and that he could not “recall this kind of sanction on third-party countries before.”

Thailand’s vice minister for foreign affairs said this month that the deportation of the Uyghurs was in the country’s best interest because of the possibility of retaliation from Beijing if they were sent elsewhere. He said that some countries had offered to resettle the Uyghurs, but he described the offers as “unrealistic” given that resettling them would not shield Thailand from a potential fallout with China.

Global Times, a state-owned newspaper in China, denounced the U.S. visa policy as “hypocritical meddling in China’s internal affairs under the guise of human rights.”

Outside the Zadna Bakery in central Gaza one recent afternoon, the long lines of people waiting for bread were threatening to dissolve into chaos at any minute.

A security guard shouted at the crowds that pushed toward the bakery door to wait their turn. But no one was listening.

Just a few steps away, scalpers were hawking loaves they had gotten earlier that day for three times the original price. The sunset meal that breaks Muslims’ daylong fast during the holy month of Ramadan was approaching and across Gaza, bread, water, cooking gas and other basics were hard to come by — once again.

Lines had not been this desperate, nor markets this empty, since before the Israel-Hamas cease-fire took hold on Jan. 19. The truce had allowed aid to surge into Gaza for the first time after 15 months of conflict during which residents received only a trickle of supplies.

But no aid has gotten in since March 2. That was the day Israel blocked all goods in a bid to pressure Hamas into accepting an extension of the current cease-fire stage and releasing more hostages sooner, instead of moving to the next phase, which would involve more challenging negotiations to permanently end to the war.

Now, the aid cutoff, exacerbated by panic buying and unscrupulous traders who gouge prices, is driving prices to levels that few can afford. Shortages of fresh vegetables and fruit and rising prices are forcing people to once again fall back on canned food such as beans.

Though the canned food provides calories, experts say, people — and children in particular — need a diverse diet that includes fresh foods to stave off malnutrition.

For the first six weeks of the cease-fire, aid workers and traders delivered food for Gazans, many still weak from months of malnutrition. Medical supplies for bombed-out hospitals, plastic pipes to restore water supplies and fuel to power everything also began to flow in.

Data from aid groups and the United Nations showed that children, pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers were eating better. And more centers started offering treatment for malnutrition, the United Nations said.

These were only small steps toward relieving the devastation wrought by the war, which destroyed more than half of Gaza’s buildings and put many of its two million residents at risk of famine.

Even with the sharp increase in aid after the truce began, Gaza health officials reported that at least six newborn babies had died from hypothermia in February for lack of warm clothes, blankets, shelter or medical care, a figure cited by the United Nations. The reports could not be independently verified.

Most hospitals remain only partly operational, if at all.

Aid groups, the United Nations and several Western governments have urged Israel to allow shipments to resume, criticizing its use of humanitarian relief as a bargaining chip in negotiations and, in some cases, saying that the cutoff violates international law.

Instead, Israel is turning up the pressure.

Last Sunday, it severed electricity supplies to the territory — a move that shuttered most operations at a water desalination plant and deprived about 600,000 people in central Gaza of clean drinking water, according to the United Nations.

The Israeli energy minister has hinted that a water cutoff might be next. Some wells are still functioning in central Gaza, aid officials say, but they supply only brackish water, which poses long-term health risks to those who drink it.

Israel had already closed off all other sources of electricity that it used to provide for Gaza, a measure that followed the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel that began the war. That left essential services to run on solar panels or generators, if power was available at all.

Now there is no fuel coming in for anything, including generators, ambulances or cars.

Israel argues that about 25,000 truckloads of aid that Gaza has received in recent weeks have given people sufficient food.

“There is no shortage of essential products in the strip whatsoever,” the Foreign Ministry said last week. It repeated assertions that Hamas is taking over the aid entering Gaza and that half the group’s budget in Gaza comes from exploiting aid trucks.

Hamas has called the aid and electricity cutoffs “cheap and unacceptable blackmail.”

Gaza residents say that, for the moment, at least, they do have food, though often not enough.

But supplies that humanitarian groups amassed in the first six weeks of the cease-fire are already dwindling, aid officials warn. That has already forced six bakeries in Gaza to close and aid groups and community kitchens to reduce the food rations they hand out.

The order to block aid also cut off Gaza’s access to commercial goods imported by traders.

In the city of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, a street market was quiet this week as the vendors’ stocks of fruits, vegetables, oil, sugar and flour ran low. Vegetable sellers said the price of onions and carrots had doubled, zucchini had nearly quadrupled and lemons cost nearly 10 times as much. Eggplants were hard to find and potatoes impossible.

As a result, the sellers said, the few customers who still came bought only a couple of vegetables, not by the kilogram as many once did. Others had not had the means to buy anything for months.

Many Gazans lost their jobs and spent their savings to survive the war. When prices skyrocketed, they were left almost completely reliant on aid.

Yasmin al-Attar, 38, and her husband, a driver, wandered from stall to stall in the Deir al-Balah market, looking for the cheapest prices on a recent day. They have seven children, a disabled sister and two aging parents to support.

It had been hard enough to afford the bare minimum of ingredients for iftar, the meal that breaks the daily fast during Ramadan, Ms. al-Attar said. But with fuel blocked, it was also getting tough to find fuel for her husband’s car and for cooking.

“Just three days ago, I felt a little relief because prices seemed reasonable,” she said. Now, the same money would only be enough for a much smaller quantity of vegetables.

“How can this possibly be enough for my big family?” she said.

That night, she said, they would probably make do with lentil soup, with no vegetables. And after that? Maybe more canned food.

Stall owners and shoppers alike blamed large-scale traders for the shortages, at least in part, saying they were hoarding supplies to push up prices and maximize their profits. Any vegetables available at reasonable prices were being snapped up and resold for much more, said Eissa Fayyad, 32, a vegetable seller in Deir al-Balah.

It did not help that people rushed out to buy more than they needed as soon as they heard about the Israeli decision to blockade aid again, said Khalil Reziq, 38, a police officer in the city of Khan Younis in central Gaza whose division oversees markets and shops.

Hamas police officers have warned businesses against price-gouging, vendors and shoppers said. In some cases, Mr. Reziq said, his unit had confiscated vendors’ goods and sold them for cheaper on the spot.

But such measures have done little to solve the underlying supply problem.

Beyond the immediate challenge of supplying food, water, medical supplies and tents to Gazans — many thousands of them still displaced — aid officials said their inability to bring in supplies had set back longer-term recovery efforts.

Some had been distributing vegetable seeds and animal feed to farmers so Gaza could start raising more of its own food, while others had been working on rebuilding the water infrastructure and clearing debris and unexploded ordnance.

None of it was easy, aid officials said, because Israel had restricted or barred items including the heavy machinery required to repair infrastructure, generators and more. Israel maintains that Palestinian militants could use these items for military purposes.

For many Gazans now, the focus is back on survival.

“There’s no bombing at the moment, but I still feel like I’m living in a war with everything I’m going through,” said Nevine Siam, 38, who is sheltering at her brother’s house with 30 other people.

She said her sister’s entire family had killed during the fighting. Her children ask her to make Ramadan meals like the ones they remember from before the war. But without an income, she can get nothing but canned food in aid packages.

Where she is, she said, there are no celebrations and no festive decorations for the holy month.

“It feels as if the joy has been extinguished,” she said.

Erika Solomon, Ameera Harouda and Rania Khaled contributed reporting.

To hear President Trump and some of his closest supporters tell it, South Africa is a terrible place for white people. They face discrimination, are sidelined from jobs and live under the constant threat of violence or having their land stolen by a corrupt, Black-led government that has left the country in disarray.

The data tell a different story. Although white people make up 7 percent of the country’s population, they own at least half of South Africa’s land. Police statistics do not show that they are any more vulnerable to violent crime than other people. And white South Africans are far better off than Black people on virtually every marker of the economic scale.

Yet Mr. Trump and his allies have pushed their own narrative of South Africa to press an argument at home: If the United States doesn’t clamp down on attempts to promote diversity, America will become a hotbed of dysfunction and anti-white discrimination.

“It plays into the fears of white people in America and elsewhere: ‘We whites are threatened,’” Max du Preez, a white South African writer and historian, said of Mr. Trump’s description of his country.

But, Mr. du Preez added, white people have flourished since the end of apartheid in 1994.

The parallels between South Africa’s attempts to undo the injustices of apartheid and the long struggle in the United States to address slavery, Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial discrimination have become a common refrain among some Trump supporters.

Ernst Roets, a white activist and author in South Africa, said that when he spoke to like-minded conservatives in the United States, they often told him, “Oh, yes, we need to look at South Africa, because that’s what’s in store for us if we’re not cautious.”

After apartheid fell three decades ago, South Africa’s democratic government rose to power on a promise to undo the inequities of a system that had left much of the country’s Black majority in squalor. Yet President Nelson Mandela largely allowed white South Africans to keep their wealth, in an effort to maintain a peaceful transition to democracy.

His party, the African National Congress, has passed laws to try to close the gap for Black people. Most recently, South Africa enacted one that allows the government to take private land in the public interest, sometimes without providing compensation.

The law has not yet been used, but some white South Africans — and Mr. Trump — say it unfairly targets the country’s landowners and commercial farmers, who remain mostly white despite decades of anti-apartheid policies.

Mr. Trump has built his political identity in part as a protector of white America. He has fought to save symbols of the Confederacy in the South, blasted racial sensitivity training as “un-American propaganda” and publicly defended white supremacists.

Cutting off aid to most of Africa while championing Afrikaners — the white ethnic minority in South Africa that led the apartheid government — appears to be the latest illustration of Mr. Trump’s commitment to white interests.

Last month, the president signed an executive order granting refugee status to Afrikaners and suspending all aid to South Africa, partly in response to its land-reform law. He said on social media last week that the United States would offer a rapid pathway to citizenship to South African farmers, many of whom are Afrikaner. Then on Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, Ebrahim Rasool, “a race-baiting politician who hates America” and expelled him.

“Trump is signaling to white people everywhere that he will use his power to protect and advance their interests, no matter the facts,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University.

Some Afrikaners have welcomed Mr. Trump’s embrace. Activists traveled to Washington last month to lobby his administration for more support. A White House official described the Afrikaner delegation as “civil rights leaders.”

Many of Mr. Trump’s allies have long spotlighted the grievances of Afrikaners. Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa but is not of Afrikaner descent, has accused the country’s government of promoting racist laws, and falsely claimed that white farmers in South Africa were being killed every day.

After Mr. Roets appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in 2018, Mr. Carlson posted on social media that “White farmers are being brutally murdered in South Africa for their land.”

Mr. Carlson later ran a segment describing land seizures and homicides. Mr. Trump, who was in his first term at the time, then tagged Mr. Carlson in a social media post in which he said he was ordering an investigation into farm seizures “and the large scale killing of farmers” in South Africa, though to this day no farms have been seized by the government.

In Mr. Trump’s orbit, these themes are now being recirculated as warning signs for the United States.

Mr. Roets said in an interview that he had become close to Jack Posobiec, the American far-right influencer who recently accompanied Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on a trip to Europe.

During an earlier conversation with Charlie Kirk, an influential Trump ally, Mr. Posobiec said that South Africa was in shambles because of its laws meant to produce racial equity. He added that the United States was headed down the same path by hiring “on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation.”

Many South African voters, regardless of their race, agree that the African National Congress has created a country plagued by corruption, poor infrastructure, high crime and inequality, with persistent poverty among Black people. In the last election, the party lost its outright majority in Parliament for the first time since the end of apartheid.

Analysts note that the party went to great lengths to embrace market-oriented policies that allowed white South Africans to maintain their economic power. In fact, many South Africans criticize Mr. Mandela for not requiring a more aggressive redistribution of white-owned land to Black South Africans, whose families had been forced off of it during apartheid and colonial times.

Supporters of the new land law hope that it will speed up the long-held goal of giving back more land to Black South Africans.

But to Mr. Trump, it is Afrikaners who are the “victims of unjust racial discrimination,” as he said in his executive order signed last month.

Descended primarily from Dutch colonizers who arrived in southern Africa in 1652, Afrikaner people became international darlings in the early 1900s as a small tribe that stood up to the mighty British Empire in battles over territory (though they ultimately lost the war). The ruling British then looked down on Afrikaners as uncouth, and those fights sowed bitter divisions between South Africa’s two largest white populations that exist to this day.

While the president has generally tried to prohibit refugees or asylum seekers from entering the United States, he has carved out a special avenue for some white Africans to come into the country.

That has not necessarily lined up with the wishes of his target audience. Many Afrikaners have said that while they appreciate Mr. Trump supporting their claims of persecution, they would rather stay in South Africa, which they consider their rightful home.

Willem Petzer, an Afrikaner online influencer whose social media posts have been shared by Trump supporters, said he was considering Mr. Trump’s offer. But he said he hoped more than anything that South Africa’s government would end what he called its racism toward people who look like him.

“By the time I was a conscious human being, apartheid had been long gone,” Mr. Petzer, 28, said. “All I have ever known is discrimination against white people.”

That sort of rebranding of Afrikaners as victims has great resonance among the American far-right, said Mr. du Preez, the Afrikaner writer and historian, who founded the first anti-apartheid newspaper in Afrikaans.

“They’re playing on the thing of the white Christian civilization being threatened,” he said. “And that has a lot of appeal among the evangelicals and others in the United States.”

Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting from Washington.