Until a few days ago, Antonietta Moccia, a 61-year-old housewife, had little hope that the Italian authorities would ever tackle the illegal waste disposal that had long plagued her town and others just north of Naples.

Her daughter was diagnosed with a rare cancer at age 5 in an area where clusters of cancers have been linked to pollution. But her years of marches, sit-ins and comforting neighbors whose lives were upended by the untimely deaths of loved ones had yielded little.

Case in point, she nodded to a mound of garbage — construction debris, sundry objects and plastic bags stuffed with varied refuse — piled along a dusty back street in Acerra, her hometown.

“We need less talk, more action,” she said. “There’s been talk for years.”

Recently, the European Court of Human Rights let it be known that it felt much the same. The court based in Strasbourg, France, found that the Italian authorities had long been aware of the illegal dumping in an area colloquially known as “the land of fires” because of the persistent burning of toxic waste.

But it said that local and national authorities had repeatedly failed to act. The court cited a 1997 report to Parliament that said the dumping had been going on since at least 1988.

“Progress had been glacial,” seven judges ruled unanimously, saying that residents had been denied their “right to life.” It ordered the government to take immediate action and report back in two years.

Residents and environmental activists said they hoped the decision would finally break the logjam of inaction to clean up one of the poorest areas of Italy, where some three million people are scattered among 90 municipalities.

An ongoing study by Italy’s top heath authorities found in a 2023 report that the mortality rate for people in this part of Campania was 9 percent higher than the rest of the region. People had a greater chance of dying from malignant tumors (10 percent higher) or circulatory system diseases (7 percent higher), and in some cases the statistics were stark: Instances of liver tumors in women were 31 percent higher.

“We hope there will be a jolt of consciences in all Italian politicians,” said Enrico Fontana, who monitors environment and legality for Legambiente, Italy’s largest environmental group. “The hope is that this landmark ruling will trigger a real national unity with a national strategy that sees forces on every level react together to solve the problem.”

The case involved complaints by scores of residents seeking to know whether Italy had violated Article 2 of the Convention of Human Rights, the right to life, by failing to clean up the mess, and whether the Italian authorities had also violated people’s right to information about the pollution in the area.

Another 4,700 citizens have filed complaints in Strasbourg concerning the same issues, and those cases could move forward should Italy fail to prepare an overall strategy within the two-year deadline set by the court.

The Strasbourg case drew on the findings of several parliamentary commissions, scientific studies, reports by environmental groups and the opinions of experts, showing that the area had willfully been allowed to become a dumping ground.

Manufacturers in Italy, and beyond, experts said, cut secret deals with the Camorra, as the local mafia is known, to illegally dispose of hazardous waste for a fraction of the cost of legal disposal.

By burying the waste in its backyard, the Camorra could ensure a measure of protection, and silence.

“It’s what is known as a sacrifice area, a vulnerable, low-income, low-education community that was already struggling” socially and economically, said Marco Armiero, an expert in political ecology who weighed in on the case for the court.

The opening of an incinerator in Acerra in 2009 “added insult to injury to an already contaminated community” and brought no relief to toxic waste management, he said in telephone interview. As a result, he added, “these communities don’t trust the institutions much anymore.”

Rebuilding trust could only come from doing the court’s bidding, he said.

The European court gave Rome two years to draft a “comprehensive strategy” to address the situation, including the decontamination of areas where toxic waste had been buried and burned.

It calls for Italy to set up “an independent monitoring mechanism and a public information platform” for residents. The court found that “it was impossible to get an overall sense of where had yet to be decontaminated,” and called for better coordination among institutions to tackle this issue.

“The overall situation remains worrying,” said Lorenzo Bianchi, a researcher at the National Research Council Institute of Clinical Physiology in Pisa. Despite decades of delays, he said, time was still of the essence.

“The further we go on, if decontamination is not undertaken and the pressure on the territory is not mitigated, the more the negative effects will be felt,” he said.

Antonella Mascia, a lawyer who represented some of the people who filed a complaint, said it had been rare for the court to be so detailed with its recommendations to Italy, specifying a two-year time limit.

After that time, the court said it would also address the question of financial compensation for those who put in claims. “But it was not about money, but about the verification that there was a violation in order to bring about change — this is the spirit” of the claim, Ms. Mascia said.

Her colleague in Acerra, Valentina Centonze, said Italy had to make it a priority to find funds to fulfill the court’s recommendations, from decontaminating the territory to monitoring it so that new dumps are not developed. As it is, garbage is strewed along back roads throughout the area.

“To resolve a problem, you have to invest in it,” she said.

The court was also clear that the local population should no longer be kept in the dark about what was happening in its territory, for better or worse.

“There has to be transparency about what was not done and what has to be done,” said Alessandro Cannavacciuolo, a local environmental activist.

He said he had been shocked into awareness about the pollution when lambs with two heads or two tails or one eye started to be born on the family farm.

The health authorities eventually ordered the entire flock to be put down. His uncle, Vincenzo, died within a few weeks of a lung cancer that had metastasized.

Earlier this month, he was invited to a meeting at the Prefecture of Naples with assorted health authorities, lawmakers, law enforcers and environmental activists to address the court’s ruling. He said tangible proposals had been in short supply.

“There is talk, talk, talk. Eh, this territory has already heard a lot of talk,” he said.

Attempts to reach the Campania regional authorities were unsuccessful.

Mr. Cannavacciuolo, who is 36, could leave his home region, but has chosen to stay and fight. “Our roots are here,” he said. “Why abandon a land that belongs to us? The people who have polluted it are the ones who should go away.”

Others can’t wait to leave. Maria D’Alise, 18, known to everyone as Miriam, was just 5 when she was diagnosed with a kind of brain tumor that affects about 650 children per year in the European Union. “In Acerra, a town of 60,000, there were three cases,” said Ms. Moccia, her mother.

Now cancer free but still dealing with the aftereffects of her treatment, Ms. D’Alise is in her last year of high school and hopes to become a tattoo artist after graduating. Not in Acerra.

“This is where I had what I had,” she said, “and should I have children when I grow up, I don’t want them to have my same experience, so I am leaving.”

Dozens of Maoist guerrillas were killed in central India by government forces on Sunday, one of the deadliest operations in recent years against leftist rebels who have waged an insurgency that has ebbed and flowed over several decades.

The operation, in the forested Bijapur area in the state of Chhattisgarh, was carried out against the so-called Naxalite movement, and left 31 rebels dead, along with two members of the police forces, according to the area’s police chief, Jitendra Kumar Yadav.

Chief Yadav said the authorities had also recovered a number of AK-47 assault weapons and several other automatic rifles after the clashes.

“We will completely eradicate Naxalism from the country, so that no citizen of the country has to lose his life because of it,” said Amit Shah, India’s home minister, referring to the left-wing insurgency.

The Maoist insurgency began in eastern India in the 1960s and spread widely in central and southern parts of the country.

The violence peaked in 2010, when more than 600 civilians and over 250 security forces were killed in the conflict.

In recent years, civilian deaths have dwindled, after government operations shrunk the space for the insurgents to operate. The insurgency’s leadership has also struggled, analysts say, in the face of targeted operations, old age and illness.

The Home Ministry told Parliament last year that the threat of leftist extremism had dropped significantly in recent years, in terms of the number of deaths as well as the amount of affected territory.

Deaths of civilians and security forces related to the insurgency in 2023 were 86 percent lower than at their peak in 2010, the ministry said, adding that the number of districts affected by the violence had shrunk to 38 from 126.

Niranjan Sahoo, who studies left-wing extremism at the Observer Research Foundation, an Indian think thank, said the Maoists were struggling to recruit members, among other problems.

He also said they were concentrated their activities in several districts around the Abujhmad forest, including Bijapur, after suffering losses over the years.

“The Maoists are at their weakest point, largely because they have lost a lot of their territory,” he said.

Israel’s military withdrew Sunday from a key corridor dividing the Gaza Strip, leaving nearly all of the territory’s north as required by a tenuous cease-fire agreement with Hamas.

The military’s departure from the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza came as the Israeli government sent a delegation to Qatar over the weekend to discuss the next group of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners to be freed during the cease-fire agreement’s initial phase, which came into effect last month and is ongoing. The gaunt appearances of three Israeli hostages who were released on Saturday, stoking public comparisons to Holocaust victims, heaped new pressure on the negotiations.

In a statement on Sunday, the Israeli military said troops were “implementing the agreement” to leave the corridor and allow hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to continue returning home to northern Gaza.

Two Israeli military officials and a soldier in Gaza who were not authorized to discuss the situation publicly or by name said the troops had already left the Netzarim Corridor by Sunday morning.

Hamas also said that Israeli troops had departed from the Netzarim Corridor, saying in a statement that it was “a victory for the will of our people.”

The departure from the Netzarim Corridor means that Israeli forces have withdrawn from almost all of northern Gaza — except for a nearby buffer zone on the Israeli border. The Israeli military had ordered a mass evacuation of northern Gaza in the early days of the war and patrolled the corridor, in part to prevent Palestinians from returning.

Gaza’s interior ministry alerted Palestinians heading north on Sunday that their vehicles could still be inspected by foreign security contractors there to prevent weapons from being transferred from the south.

“We call on citizens to be careful and adhere to moving according to the currently permitted mechanism for their safety,” the interior ministry said in a statement Sunday.

Israeli troops had already partially withdrawn from the Netzarim Corridor, leaving the foreign contractors to fill the void. Their complete withdrawal was required under the first 42-day phase of the cease-fire agreement — which is now at the halfway point — and necessary to advance to the next stage of the deal to fully bring an end to the war in Gaza.

Significant new pitfalls to reaching an agreement for the next phase emerged over the past week, however, after President Trump said that the United States could take over Gaza and turn it into the “Rivera of the Middle East” by relocating its Palestinian residents.

On Sunday, Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry again rejected the proposal, repeating that no lasting peace agreement could be reached without creating a sovereign Palestinian state — a diplomatic goal for generations, but one that officials and experts now say is likely all but impossible to achieve.

The emaciated appearance of three Israeli hostages who were freed by Hamas on Saturday has also spurred widespread concern in Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had not acted quickly enough to ensure their or others’ release — increasing the pressure on the Israeli government to bring the rest of the captives home and advance to the second phase of a deal.

But despite the weekend meetings in Qatar, little to no progress was expected on negotiating the next stage until Mr. Netanyahu convenes a meeting of his top security officials in the coming days.

In an interview on Saturday in Washington, where he had been meeting with the Trump administration, Mr. Netanyahu said Hamas, not him, was to blame for the hostages’ conditions. He predicted that at least a half-dozen more hostages would be released by the end of next week.

“We have three war aims in Gaza,” Mr. Netanyahu said in an interview with Fox News. “One, destroy Hamas’ military and governing capabilities. Two, get all the hostages out. Three, make sure that Gaza never poses a threat to Israel again. And I’m committed to achieving all three.”

Even as Israeli troops left the key corridor in Gaza, they continued raids and patrols in the occupied West Bank. Palestinian health officials there said at least two people, including a woman who was eight months pregnant, were killed in the Nour al-Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm. The Israeli military did not comment on any casualties.

Hiba Yazbek contributed reporting.

Doron Steinbrecher vowed that she would never wear pink again when she made her first public comments in a video after being freed from more than 15 months in Hamas captivity in Gaza.

A year ago, she had appeared in a hostage video made by her captors wearing a pale rose-colored sweatshirt. When the Palestinian militant group Hamas released her last month, she was dressed in a bright magenta track suit and looked pale.

Sitting in front of a camera again took her back to the difficult moments when her captors filmed her in Gaza, Ms. Steinbrecher, 31, said in the video, looking composed and smiling at times.

“This time, I’m sitting comfortably on a couch with my family watching me in a warm and pleasant place,” she said. Trying to convey that she had not been broken, she said it was important for her to show everyone that “I’m OK.”

As families and sympathizers at home and abroad doggedly campaigned for the release of the Israeli hostages, most people knew them only as faces staring out from posters. Now, with 16 Israelis released since Jan. 19 under the cease-fire deal with Hamas, those haunting faces are coming to life in video clips, social media posts and statements from relatives that provide glimpses of the joy and relief of freedom as well as hints of the torment they have endured.

The brief messages they have sent out have mostly been expressions of gratitude to all those who worked for their release and pleas not to give up until the last hostage is freed.

The urgency of that message became even clearer on Saturday, when many Israelis were shocked to see the emaciated condition of the latest three hostages who were released: Eli Sharabi, 52; Or Levy, 34; and Ohad Ben-Ami, 56.

Some relatives have said that the hostages released earlier were often deprived of food, suffered severe loss of weight and muscle mass, and rarely saw sunlight. Family members said some of the hostages had at least occasional access to radio or television and heard or saw their relatives campaigning for their release, which helped them survive.

Col. Avi Benov, a doctor and deputy chief of the Israeli military’s medical corps, told reporters that several of the recently released female hostages had spent the last eight months underground in Hamas tunnels in Gaza. Some hostages who were released in November 2023 have described suffocating humidity in the tunnels that made it difficult to breathe.

Colonel Benov said the first seven women recently released were all were suffering from “mild starvation,” while some still had shrapnel in their bodies from injuries they sustained on Oct. 7, 2023.

That was the day Hamas led an attack from Gaza on southern Israel that ended with about 1,200 dead and about 250 people taken back to Gaza as hostages. The attack ignited a 15-month war, with Israel’s offensive in Gaza killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and devastating the territory.

Of the roughly 250 captives, scores were released during a weeklong truce later that year while some have been killed in captivity. More than 70 hostages have not yet been returned, including at least 35 who are believed to be dead, according to the Israeli government.

A total of 25 hostages are expected to be released, along with the bodies of eight others, during the initial six-week cease-fire that took effect last month.

They are being exchanged for about 1,500 Palestinian prisoners, some of them convicted of killing Israelis. Released Palestinians, many of whom had been held without charge, say they faced harsh conditions in Israeli jails and detention facilities.

Some of the Israeli hostages had been forced to appear in videos filmed by their captors in Gaza — a practice that rights groups have denounced as inhumane treatment that could amount to a war crime. Israeli officials have called these a form of psychological warfare.

A few months ago, Hamas’s military wing issued a statement claiming that a hostage had been killed and released blurry images apparently showing a body wrapped in a shroud. One close-up shot showed a tattoo identical to one belonging to Daniella Gilboa, one of a number of female lookout soldiers captured from a small military base near the Gaza border.

But Ms. Gilboa, 20, was freed on Jan. 25. Days later, she was singing at a party marking the discharge of the army lookouts from Beilinson Hospital near Tel Aviv.

She reflected on her ordeal in a lengthy Instagram post on Feb. 2. She said her faith and observance of Jewish rituals had gotten her through. She thanked her supporters for not believing the rumors that she had been killed in Gaza.

Liri Albag, another one of the lookouts, celebrated her 20th birthday while recovering at the hospital.

Ms. Steinbrecher was kidnapped from her home in Kfar Aza, a rural community near the Gaza border.

In the video she released, her appearance contrasted sharply with hostage videos made when she was pale, with blond hair pulled back in a braid. Her hair was now dark and neatly styled in a shoulder-length bob, and she dressed in black, wearing long necklaces, a dog tag and a yellow pin in solidarity with the hostages. She said she was no longer that person in the videos from Gaza.

“I’m Doron. I’m 31. I’m no longer in Hamas captivity, and I’m home,” she said.

The recently released hostages have remained largely protected from the glare of the news media and have not given any interviews so far. Medical and mental health professionals say that preserving their privacy is essential to the long healing process.

Footage released by the military of the hostages’ emotional reunions with close family members have given a sense of the elation surrounding their return.

“Dad, I came back alive!” another freed hostage, Romi Gonen, 24, shouted into a cellphone after being reunited with her mother on Jan. 19.

Experts say that the long captivity caused physical and psychological harm, and that full rehabilitation will take time.

“We are walking a very slow path,” said Prof. Noa Eliakim-Raz, the head of the returnees’ ward at Beilinson Hospital. “Of course, we see ups and downs. Every day is different.”

Some of the freed hostages returned with injuries from the Oct. 7 assault. Emily Damari, 28, lost two fingers after being shot in the hand and was also shot in the leg.

She is a fan of the Israeli soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv, and at one of their matches on Monday, a video message from Ms. Damari was projected on a huge screen. She thanked the players, the management and the supporters for fighting for her freedom.

Ms. Gonen is still suffering from an arm injury and will need complicated surgery, her mother has said.

Gadi Moses, 80, an agronomist who was kidnapped from his home in Nir Oz, a village near the Gaza border, was released on Jan. 30, appearing gaunt. Almost as soon as he returned to Israel, he pledged to do all he could to rehabilitate his ravaged community.

His niece, Efrat Machikawa, later told reporters that Mr. Moses had been kept above ground throughout his captivity but was frequently moved around.

Shut in rooms alone, she said, he exercised by counting steps and pacing up to six miles a day, kept his mind active with calculations and other techniques. And he remained positive.

When she first met him in the hospital, he reassured her, “I’m alive. I’m normal!”

“Loneliness becomes an enemy,” Ms. Machikawa said. “He managed to create a routine that kept his sanity.”