Israel told the United Nations on Friday that its relief agency known as UNRWA, a critical lifeline to two million Palestinians during the 15 months of war in Gaza, had six days to stop all operations in East Jerusalem.

Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, said in a letter addressed to the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, “UNRWA is required to cease its operations in Jerusalem and evacuate all premises in which it operates in the city, no later than 30 January 2025.”

The letter was Israel’s first official notice to the U.N. about how it planned to enforce legislation passed by the Israeli Parliament in October banning UNRWA, known formally as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, from operating in Israeli territory. The measure also prohibited Israeli officials from engaging with officials and employees of UNRWA.

The move came after months of tensions between the Israeli government and the U.N. agency, which provides food, shelter, health care, vocational training and education to Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza, especially in the aftermath of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel that set off the war. The agency also aids Palestinians who live in neighboring countries like Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, where Palestinians displaced in the founding of Israel have lived for decades.

Israel has accused UNRWA of being infiltrated by members of Hamas. But two U.N. investigations found that fewer than 10 employees out of nearly 13,000 were affiliated with the armed Palestinian group, and they were fired.

Two hundred and sixty-nine of UNRWA’s staff members have been killed in Gaza — the largest loss of life among U.N. employees in any conflict, officials say.

Mr. Danon said in the letter that Israel would continue to cooperate with the U.N. and “any of its agencies that have not been infiltrated by terror organizations.”

Asked for comment, Farhan Haq, a U.N. spokesman, referred to previous statements by Mr. Guterres fiercely defending the work of UNRWA as irreplaceable and essential, particularly in Gaza, where Israeli bombardment to root out Hamas has displaced most of the population and killed about 47,000 people, according to Gazan officials, who do no distinguish between civilians and combatants.

A spokeswoman for UNRWA also referred requests for comments to Mr. Guterres’s office, since the letter was addressed to him.

Mr. Guterres told a meeting of the U.N. Security Council earlier this week on the situation in Gaza, “First, United Nations entities — including the backbone of our humanitarian response, UNRWA — must be able to perform their functions without hindrance.”

UNRWA’s chief, Philippe Lazzarini, also asked the Council last week to intervene to stop Israel from enforcing the legislation outlawing his agency. He said such actions “will massively weaken the international humanitarian response” in Gaza and “immeasurably worsen already catastrophic living conditions.”

Before the letter was sent, Mr. Lazzarini told reporters last Friday that his agency had received no clear directive from Israel on how the measures would be carried out. He also said that he expected UNRWA to continue its work, albeit with enormous logistical challenges in the West Bank and Gaza, and that its work in Jerusalem would be compromised.

In the letter, Israel demanded that UNRWA evacuate two sites in the Maalot Dafna and Kfar Aqueb neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which is considered by international law to be part of the West Bank and under occupation. Israel considers all of Jerusalem to be part of Israel.

UNRWA was established in 1949 to assist Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

The agency has widespread support among U.N. member states, and they have urged Israel not to ban the agency’s work. After Israel accused Hamas of infiltrating the agency, the Biden administration suspended millions in annual funding to UNRWA, and Congress in March prohibited U.S. funding to the organization for a year.

During his first presidential term, Donald J. Trump withdrew funding for UNRWA in 2018, and he is expected to continue restricting funding.

Mr. Trump’s pick to be U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Representative Elise Stefanik, criticized the relief agency as “antisemitic” in her Senate hearing this week, and said she supported Israel’s “biblical rights” over the West Bank.

That position is at odds with the U.N.’s stance that the West Bank is occupied Palestinian territory.

Mr. Lazzarini said in a post on X on Friday that preventing UNRWA from operating “might sabotage” the provisional cease-fire recently struck between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, “failing once again hopes of people who have gone through unspeakable suffering.”

He said that, in the first three days of the truce, UNRWA brought in food for one million people in Gaza and had already distributed it to about 3,000 people in northern Gaza, where the U.N. and aid agencies have warned that people were at the brink of famine.

“The work of UNRWA must continue in Gaza + across the occupied Palestinian territory,” Mr. Lazzarini said.

Hundreds of thousands of customers in Ireland were without power and more than 100,000 were without water on Friday, as a powerful storm moved across the island, bringing record-breaking winds and disrupting travel.

The storm, named Eowyn, brought gales to Ireland throughout Friday morning and afternoon, according to the Irish Meteorological Service. Northern Ireland, southern Scotland and the northern and western areas of England and Wales experienced strong winds, with gusts of up to 60 miles per hour, according to Britain’s national meteorological service. The agency issued a red warning, its highest-level alert indicating dangerous weather, for Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland, before downgrading it Friday afternoon.

After forecasters warned of gusts of up to 100 m.p.h. along the Irish Sea and in southwestern Scotland, a gust of 114 m.p.h. was recorded in western Ireland at Mace Head, County Galway, beating an Irish record set in 1945.

ESB Networks, an Irish state-owned power company, said that about 725,000 of its customers were without power on Friday, nearly a third of the utility’s roughly 2.4 million total customers. The power outages also disrupted the nation’s water supply, with about 138,000 people across the country without water by the evening and many more at risk of losing service, according to Irish Water.

“The widespread power outages at treatment plants and pumping stations continue to impact on supplies,” Irish Water said in a statement.

Eowyn will also bring rain showers and longer spells of rain across the north of Ireland, according to forecasters, and there was a chance of hail and snow in the hills of Scotland. Britain’s Meteorological Office warned of “very dangerous conditions with widespread disruptions and significant impacts.”

The strong winds disrupted travel across Ireland, Scotland and the north of England. Ireland’s National Transport Authority suspended all public transport on Friday. Northern Rail, an English train company, urged customers to avoid traveling on Friday and Saturday.

Hundreds of flights were grounded on Friday at airports across Ireland and Britain. Belfast International Airport, in Northern Ireland, urged travelers to stay home on Friday and said it was experiencing intermittent power outages. Travelers should check with their airlines on the status of their flights, the airport advised.

A strong jet stream — a high altitude current of fast-moving air that drives global weather patterns west to east (and can also speed up plane journeys) — helped Eowyn gain its strength. The jet stream, which is usually 190 to 220 m.p.h., increased to 260 m.p.h. this week, strengthened by a stark temperature contrast created by the arctic blast that has gripped the United States in recent days and the warm moist air in the Gulf of Mexico.

The same weather system plunged much of the United States into cold conditions this week, delivering low temperatures not seen in decades, and life-threatening wind chills.

The last time Britain experienced a storm of this strength was early December with Storm Darragh, which was also influenced by a strong jet stream. Wind speeds for that storm reached 93 m.p.h. in Wales.

For Ireland, Eowyn is the most severe storm since 2017, when one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the northeastern Atlantic killed at least three people.

Eowyn was expected to clear into the Norwegian Sea on Saturday, allowing a brief lull of drier and calmer conditions, but another storm system is forecast to bring similar hazards for Britain on Sunday and Monday.

Nazaneen Ghaffar contributed reporting.

Arthur Blessitt, whose fervent efforts to convert the hippies, freaks and addicts along Hollywood’s Sunset Strip were just a prelude to his decision to carry a 110-pound wooden cross from Los Angeles to New York City — and then to keep going, eventually traveling 43,340 miles through every country on the planet — died on Jan. 14. He was 84.

Mr. Blessitt’s death was announced in a first-person statement on his website. The statement did not say where he died or cite a cause of death. He had been living in the Denver area, and his ministry was based in the suburb of Littleton, Colo.

A Southern Baptist preacher who ran a Christian coffeehouse adjacent to a strip club, Mr. Blessitt started his journey on Christmas Day 1969, bearing his homemade 6-by-12-foot cross on his shoulder. He made adjustments along the way, swapping his sandals for boots and adding a 12-inch wheel to the base of his burden; he later swapped the heavy cross for a 42-pound version that he could split in two, making it easier to ship.

It took him six months to walk across the country. When he was done, he returned to Los Angeles, only to receive — in his telling — orders from Jesus to take his journey global.

“Go!” Jesus told him, he recounted on his website. “I want you to go all the way.”

His first trip abroad, in 1971, was to Northern Ireland; other parts of Europe, Africa, the Middle East and East Asia soon followed.

He carried a roll of stickers reading “Smile! Jesus Loves You,” which he handed out to curious passers-by. Not everyone was friendly: Police officers harassed him, malcontents jeered, and his cross was stolen in — of all places — Assisi, Italy, where St. Francis had once lived.

“Some people see me and shout, ‘You’re a nut!’” he said in the 2009 documentary “The Cross: The Arthur Blessitt Story,” directed by Matthew Crouch. “I say, ‘That’s all right, at least I’m screwed on the right bolt.’”

Mr. Blessitt kept meticulous notes abroad, detailing how long his boot soles lasted (about 500 miles) and how often he was arrested (24 times). He visited every continent, including Antarctica, as well as war zones, disaster zones and many other places where he was liable to get shot at, beaten or arrested.

He climbed Mount Fuji in Japan, confronted angry baboons in Kenya and was nearly blown up by a terrorist bomb in Northern Ireland — all while carrying his cross. He is listed in Guinness World Records for the “longest ongoing pilgrimage.”

It took him nearly 40 years, but in 2008 he completed his quest to visit every country when he was permitted to enter the last, North Korea. His “trek” there was largely symbolic: Authorities let him carry his cross from the front door of his hotel to the street and back.

There was a Forrest Gump quality to Mr. Blessitt’s journeying. Not only did he travel across country on foot; during his adventures he encountered a long list of historical figures — Yasir Arafat, Billy Graham, Bob Dylan — as well as people who tried to impress their own complicated agenda onto what he insisted was a simple and innocent message.

“In the third world, people’s first thought when they see me is that I’m a holy man,” he told The Independent newspaper in 1999. “In America, though, some people think of the Ku Klux Klan, women often think I’m an anti-abortion protester, other people that I’m a right-winger.”

His decades-long campaign made him a minor celebrity. Profiles invariably zeroed in on his combination of dogged perseverance and an aw-shucks approach to his task.

“You’d be amazed,” he told People magazine in 1978, “how much attention a man carrying a big wooden cross gets.”

Arthur Owen Blessitt was born on Oct. 27, 1940, in Greenville, Miss., to Arthur O.N. Blessitt and Mary (Campbell) Blessitt, and raised in rural northwest Louisiana, where his father managed a cotton farm.

He studied history at Mississippi College, a Christian institution in Clinton, Miss., but left in 1962 without a degree. He later studied at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary (now Gateway Seminary), in Oakland, Calif., but also left before completing his degree.

He started as an itinerant preacher around the Mountain West, spending time in Montana and Nevada before settling in Los Angeles in 1967.

He found himself in the middle of the 1960s counterculture, but he also encountered the early sprouts of what became the Jesus freak movement, blending hippie stylings and freewheeling Christian evangelism.

Mr. Blessitt began preaching in bars, clubs and concert halls, welcome — or just tolerated — by the era’s anything-goes ethos. He dressed the part, with long hair and sandals, and he mingled his sermons with references to drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

“Like, if you want to get high, you don’t have to drop acid. Just pray and you go all the way to Heaven,” he wrote in “Life’s Greatest Trip” (1970), one of his many religious tracts. “You don’t have to pop pills to get loaded. Just drop a little Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.”

Mr. Blessitt married Sherry Simmons in 1963. They divorced in 1990. That same year he married Denise Brown.

She survives him, as do his children from his first marriage, Gina, Joy, Arthur Joel, Arthur Joshua, Arthur Joseph and Arthur Jerusalem; a daughter from his second marriage, Sophia; his sister, Victoria; 12 grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.

With his flowing locks and giant cross, Mr. Blessitt was sometimes mistaken for a Jesus impersonator, and even for the son of God himself, including once in Liberia, when a village leader knelt before him.

“It’s the only time I ever considered stopping,” he told The New York Times in 1997. “I lay the cross against a tree and said, ‘Lord, I will never try to take your glory and portray myself as a religious leader.’ And I heard Jesus whisper to me: ‘Don’t worry about it. Just keep going down the road.’”