Italy’s much-debated program of sending asylum seekers to Albania restarted on Sunday, the Italian Interior Ministry said, months after judges blocked the first transfers there.

An Italian Navy vessel was carrying 49 people to centers Italy built in Albania, the ministry said. A ministry spokeswoman added that those being transferred had been intercepted at sea before they reached Italy.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy has made the idea of holding new asylum seekers outside the country for assessment a flagship policy of her administration, describing it as an innovative way to fight illegal immigration and to deter migrants from taking risky boat trips across the Mediterranean.

Ms. Meloni restarted the program after she removed the case from the jurisdiction of the judges in Rome who had ruled against the initial transfers. That ruling cast doubt on the future of the program. Those judges said that the 12 migrants that Italy had sent to Albania in October were ineligible for the program because the countries they came from, Bangladesh and Egypt, might not be considered safe.

Since then, Ms. Meloni’s government also drafted a new list of countries it has deemed safe. Officials at the interior ministry did not provide a list of countries where the migrants came from, but said they were from countries considered to be safe.

The plan has attracted condemnation from human rights groups and the Italian opposition, which have denounced it as cruel and overly expensive. But some politicians across Europe, including from mainstream parties, see it as a potential model for migration policy at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment is increasingly widespread. The president of the European Union’s executive arm, Ursula von der Leyen, called it “an example of out-of-the-box thinking, based on fair sharing of responsibilities with third countries.”

The decision by the judges in Rome to stop the transfers started a bitter dispute between Ms. Meloni and the Italian judiciary. Italian judges, including the judges in Rome, have asked the European Court of Justice to clarify, among other issues, who determines what a safe country is. That court is expected to hear the case next month.

In Italy, the question of whether the migrants can be held in Albania has now been transferred to a court of appeals in Rome.

While the outcome of the attempt to revive the policy remains uncertain, Ms. Meloni has made clear that she intends to push it through one way or another.

“Trust me, the centers in Albania will work,” she said last month at her party’s gathering in Rome. “Even if I will have to spend every night on the case, from now to the end of this Italian government.”

Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting.

The Israeli military raided the Jerusalem home of a Hamas member released as part of an exchange for Israelis being held hostage in Gaza, detaining one person and roughing up others on Saturday evening, including a New York Times reporter conducting interviews at the scene.

A squad of soldiers forced its way into the house on the outskirts of Jerusalem and disrupted an event marking the early release of Ashraf Zughayer, a Hamas member imprisoned in 2002 for driving terrorists to the locations of their attacks. Among them was a suicide bomber who killed six civilians by blowing up a bus. According to court documents, Mr. Zughayer confessed to the charges.

Mr. Zughayer, 46, was released on Saturday afternoon along with 199 other prisoners.

Overseen by a colonel, the soldiers entered the Zughayer family’s building with their rifles raised and assaulted several people, including Mr. Zughayer’s father and a Times reporter conducting interviews. The soldiers detained Mr. Zughayer’s brother and expelled journalists, then left about an hour later.

For years, Israeli security services have discouraged and often broken up family events celebrating the release of Palestinian militants, saying that the gatherings provoke unrest, lionize terrorists and inspire support for violence. Critics say the interventions increase Palestinian antipathy for Israel, prolonging a cycle of violence.

Israel has been particularly assertive in suppressing celebrations for detainees released under the terms of the cease-fire in Gaza. Israeli officials are concerned that they may help bolster the popularity of Hamas, which led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that killed up to 1,200 people. Dozens of the Palestinians released on Saturday were sent into exile in Egypt instead of being allowed to return home, in part for that reason.

The Israeli military said in a statement that it had raided the Zughayer family’s house because it “received intelligence and videos of gunfire and incitement to terrorism in the area.” The statement said that the soldiers had been acting to “neutralize the threat of fire” and that they had raised their weapons at “armed individuals.” An Israeli military official said the brother had been detained for displaying a Hamas flag.

Earlier that day, footage circulating on social media showed Mr. Zughayer wearing a Hamas scarf and being paraded in a car through his neighborhood, surrounded by a group of other men carrying Hamas flags — an action that is barred in Israel.

By the time reporters for The New York Times arrived in the neighborhood several hours later, the situation was calm. They saw Mr. Zughayer briefly wearing a slim Hamas scarf before a child ran off with it, roughly an hour before the raid. A second child who wore a cape bearing a Hamas logo left the house around the same time.

The roughly two dozen other attendees, including several small children, wore unmarked clothes and there were no flags on display. No one was armed, and Mr. Zughayer’s brother did not display a Hamas flag, the reporters said.

The home is owned by Mr. Zughayer’s father, Munir Zughayer, who is a well-known community organizer. Munir Zughayer liaises between residents of the impoverished neighborhood and the Jerusalem municipal leadership, as well as between the families of Palestinians in prison and the Israeli prison authorities. He said that he was not a member of Hamas.

After bursting into the family’s compound around 5:30 p.m., the soldiers moved through the yard, where the gathering was held, without stopping to assess the situation or the people inside, the reporters said.

One soldier immediately used the muzzle of his loaded rifle to strike Aaron Boxerman, a Times reporter who happened to be standing close to the yard entrance. Before Mr. Boxerman had a chance to identify himself, the soldier hit him in the rib cage, leaving a large bruise.

A second Times reporter, Natan Odenheimer, then identified himself as a journalist, video recorded by The Times shows. The same soldier told Mr. Odenheimer that he didn’t care, using an expletive to underscore his point. The soldier then pointed his loaded rifle at Mr. Odenheimer again, the video shows.

The soldiers also aimed their rifles at other attendees. The video shows the attendees quickly complying with the soldiers’ commands and appearing to pose no threat. The soldiers yelled profanities at Mr. Zughayer’s relatives; and shoved his father in the chest.

The military said in a statement that it regretted “any harm caused to journalists during operational activity,” and that it did not aim to target “uninvolved civilians, or journalists as such.” It said it was investigating the incident.

A spokesperson for The Times said it had lodged a protest with the Israeli military over the assault on Mr. Boxerman.

Arbel Yehud is the female Israeli hostage at the center of the crisis testing the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas. She was seized during the Hamas-led assault on Oct. 7, 2023, from her home in Nir Oz, a village in southern Israel near the border of the Palestinian enclave.

Ms. Yehud, who was 28 at the time, was kidnapped along with her partner, Ariel Cunio, who also remains in Gaza.

Ms. Yehud is the last female civilian hostage that Israel believes is most likely alive. Another civilian woman, Shiri Bibas, remains in Gaza after she was abducted from Nir Oz with her two young sons, Ariel, who was 4 at the time, and Kfir, who was 9 months. The Israeli military has expressed grave concern for the lives of Ms. Bibas and her children, though their deaths have not been confirmed.

Ms. Yehud’s brother, Dolev Yehud, was missing for months and was also assumed to have been kidnapped. It later became clear that he never made it into Gaza: In June 2024, the Israeli authorities declared him dead after his remains were identified in Nir Oz through new testing.

Under the terms of the cease-fire deal, Ms. Yehud should have been among the first two groups of hostages released on Jan. 19 and Jan. 25, according to the Israeli authorities. Israel had demanded that its female civilians be released before the captive female soldiers, four of whom were released on Saturday.

It appears Ms. Yehud may be in the custody of another group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. An official with that group told The New York Times on Sunday that she would be released before next Saturday.

Just after midnight on Monday, Israel, Qatar and Hamas announced that a resolution had been finalized for the release of Arbel Yehud and two other Israeli hostages by next Friday, with three more hostages to be released on Saturday. In exchange, Israel would begin allowing Palestinians in Gaza who had been displaced to return to the north of the enclave, the officials said.

Ms. Yehud has deep roots in the community of Nir Oz as a third-generation member of her family to reside there, according to the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a grass-roots organization that advocates for the release of the hostages. She worked in the community’s education system before becoming a guide at GrooveTech, an innovative learning center in southern Israel that focuses on space exploration and technology.

Ms. Yehud and Mr. Cunio had returned from a tour in South America shortly before the 2023 attack, according to the forum.

Nir Oz has become a symbol of the Israeli military, intelligence and government debacle that led up to the attack and failed to protect the country’s citizens that day. It was a small kibbutz, or communal village, of roughly 400 people before the attack, during which more than a quarter of its population were killed or kidnapped.

Speaking at a protest on behalf of the female hostages in New York in December, Lian Weiss, a relative of Ms. Yehud, pleaded for their release. “Please close your eyes for a moment and imagine: Imagine it is you. You are ripped from your home,” she said, adding, “We cannot let this become their forever. Every moment we delay is another moment of agony for these women. We must act. We have the power to change their fate.”

The cease-fires in Lebanon and Gaza appeared increasingly fragile on Sunday after Israeli forces killed scores of people in southern Lebanon, Lebanese officials said, while in Gaza, Israel prevented Palestinians from moving back to their homes, saying Hamas had violated the terms of the truce.

In Lebanon, negotiators had hoped that the cease-fire, which was signed in November, would become permanent, securing a measure of calm in a turbulent region. Thousands of Lebanese displaced by the war have poured onto roads leading south, heading back to their homes.

But as a deadline passed on Sunday for the withdrawal of Israeli troops and the forces of the militant group Hezbollah from southern Lebanon, a very different scenario was taking shape. Lebanon’s Health Ministry said Israeli forces killed at least 22 people and injured 120 in southern Lebanon, making Sunday the deadliest day in the country since the war ended in November.

The Israeli military said in a statement late on Sunday that it had fired “warning shots in order to eliminate threats” — a formulation that suggested the shots may have been more than just warnings. It said that there had been “dozens of rioters” in the area. The military also said its soldiers had spotted a “a vehicle with Hezbollah flags” and that its forces had “operated in order to remove the threat.”

In recent days, Israeli officials have expressed concerns that Hezbollah remains active in southern Lebanon and it has doubts about the Lebanese Army’s ability to rein in the group.

Those claims could not be independently verified. The five-member committee overseeing the implementation of the cease-fire has not publicly released any information regarding Hezbollah’s compliance with the terms of the truce.

United Nations peacekeeping forces in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, warned in a statement on Sunday that it was “imperative to avoid further deterioration of the situation.” It called on the Israeli military to avoid firing at civilians, and for Lebanese to adhere to the directives of Lebanon’s military.

“Further violence risks undermining the fragile security situation,” the statement said.

In its statement late on Sunday, the Israeli military said it was “determined to continue to operate in accordance with the understanding between Israel and Lebanon, despite Hezbollah’s attempts to return to southern Lebanon.”

Tens of thousands of Israelis who were evacuated from their homes in northern Israel 15 months ago have been reluctant to return, fearing cross-border attacks from Hezbollah.

In the Gaza Strip on Sunday, civilians displaced by war were likewise stymied from returning to their homes. Israeli troops prevented them from doing so after Israeli officials accused Hamas of violating the terms of the cease-fire agreement that went into effect a week ago.

Officials on both sides said they were in contact with mediators to try to resolve the crisis, one of the most significant between the parties since the cease-fire brought at least a temporary halt in fighting after 15 months of devastating war.

Under the terms of the initial phase of the Gaza cease-fire agreed to this month, Israel had been expected to withdraw some of its forces and allow hundreds of thousands of uprooted Gazans to head north after a second hostage and prisoner exchange on Saturday.

The Israeli government said Hamas had violated the deal by not adhering to the agreed order of hostage releases and by failing to provide Israel with information about the status of the captives still in Gaza who were seized when the militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Israeli officials said that under the agreement, one of the hostages, Arbel Yehud, an Israeli civilian, was supposed to be among the women released on Saturday as part of the exchange for Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons. Hamas freed four female Israeli soldiers and Israel released 200 Palestinian prisoners — but the whereabouts of Ms. Yehud were unclear.

Hussein al-Batsh, an official of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller armed organization and sometime rival of Hamas in Gaza, told The New York Times on Sunday that Ms. Yehud was in the custody of the Quds Brigades, the group’s military wing. He said that Ms. Yehud was not released on Saturday for “technical reasons.”

Mr. al-Batsh said that senior Islamic Jihad leaders were involved in the discussions with the mediators. A spokesman for the group, Mohammed al-Haj Mousa, then said in a statement that Ms. Yehud would be released before next Saturday to allow displaced Gazans to return to the north as quickly as possible.

Israel denied that any agreement had been reached on Ms. Yehud’s return. An official familiar with the details said on Sunday evening that contacts with the mediators were continuing and repeated that Israel would not allow displaced Gazans to move north until the issue of Ms. Yehud’s release had been resolved.

On Sunday, images of a large crowd of displaced Palestinians waiting near the Netzarim corridor — a zone built by Israeli forces that splits Gaza in two — to return north were circulating in Palestinian media.

Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, reported that one person had been killed and several others were wounded west of Nuseirat in central Gaza after Israeli forces fired at the crowd of people waiting to return north. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reports.

One Palestinian, Ghada al-Kurd, 37, said she had chosen to remain in central Gaza on Sunday despite longing to return to her home in the north. “I will not risk my life,” she said. “Those soldiers cannot be trusted.”

Ms. al-Kurd, who left her home and her two daughters behind in Gaza City in the early weeks of the war, was once again left wondering when she would finally get to see them. “Here we are just waiting, feeling stressed and anxious,” she said. “They are playing with our fate,” she added.

Similar sentiments were expressed among the thousands of Lebanese who were attempting to return home to towns and villages along the Israeli border, despite warnings by the Lebanese and Israeli militaries that it was not yet safe to do so.

On Sunday afternoon, hundreds of people waited anxiously outside Meiss al-Jabal, a village along Lebanon’s southern border.

Ibrahim Hamoud, 41, said he had recently seen a video sent by a friend in the Lebanese Army of his house inside the village: The structure was standing, offering him a measure of relief, though the video also showed an Israeli tank stationed just outside his front door, he said.

“I’ve been away from my village, from my house, for more than a year,” Mr. Hamoud said in a phone interview. “I never thought I’d be back.”

The crisis poses a critical test for Lebanon’s new leaders, President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister-designate Nawaf Salam, as they seek to wrest back some political control from Hezbollah and build a functioning state.

Experts warn that any prolonged Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon could breathe new life into Hezbollah, a group that was founded to liberate Lebanon from Israeli occupation and that has portrayed itself as the only force capable of protecting Lebanon’s borders.

“As long as Israel is occupying Lebanon, it’s reviving the narrative of Hezbollah,” said Sami Nader, the director of the Institute of Political Science at Saint Joseph University of Beirut.

For those who managed to enter their villages in southern Lebanon, the scale of destruction was overwhelming. Entire neighborhoods were reduced to rubble in the Israeli invasion that began on Oct. 1, 2024, which was aimed at crippling Hezbollah. The militant group began opening fire on Israel a day after the Hamas attack that set off the war in Gaza.

In the southern town of Aita al-Shaab, much of which now lies in ruin, residents walked through rubble-strewn streets and by flattened buildings. Among them was Mohamed Srour, the town’s mayor, who had been displaced more than a year ago after the strikes between Hezbollah and Israel began.

He said that Israeli soldiers had not yet fully withdrawn from the town and that they were firing sporadically at civilians. The claims could not be independently verified. Still, Mr. Srour remained resolute.

“Today, Aita is celebrating the long-awaited return,” he said. “The houses are destroyed and the livelihood is gone, but our will to live is stronger. We will build again.”

Reporting was contributed by Hiba Yazbek, Iyad Abuheweila, Johnatan Reiss, Gabby Sobelman, Myra Noveck, Hwaida Saad and Dayana Iwaza.