The mediating country Qatar on Saturday announced a time for the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas to take effect the next day, setting off final preparations for a truce that much of the world hopes will end 15 months of destruction in Gaza.

The deal should go into effect at 8:30 a.m. local time on Sunday, said Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry of Qatar, which spent months alongside the United States and Egypt struggling to broker an agreement.

Israel’s government approved the deal early Saturday morning after hours of deliberations and amid internal rifts in the governing coalition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The approval cleared a final obstacle, raising hopes for Israelis who want to see loved ones returned and Gazans who have survived one of the most intense bombing campaigns of the 21st century.

“It’s a mix of joy, sadness and longing for a new beginning,” said Mariam Moeen Awwad, 23, who has been displaced from her home in northern Gaza six times since the war began.

Ms. Awad had planned to move into her newly furnished apartment with her husband in November 2023. The war derailed those plans, leaving the couple in an overcrowded property and eager to return home, she said, “if it’s even still there.”

In Israel, the authorities have started preparations to welcome home dozens of hostages, without knowing whether they will return malnourished, traumatized or dead.

In his first remarks since the cease-fire’s approval, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an address on Saturday night that 33 hostages would be released in the first phase of the deal, “most of them alive.”

Defending the deal, he argued also listed that Israel had made major strategic gains over the past several months, including the killing of top Hamas leaders. “As I pledged to you — we have changed the face of the Middle East,” he said.

Three reception points have been established to receive the hostages along the Gaza border, according to an Israeli military official. Those will be staffed by Israeli soldiers, as well as doctors and psychologists, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in accordance with protocol.

The hostage release is expected to be the first such major exchange since a weeklong cease-fire early in the war.

“The ones who were freed back then were already poorly nourished,” Hagar Mizrahi, a senior Israeli health ministry official, said of the hostages freed during the 2023 truce. “Imagine their situation now, after an additional 400 days. We are extremely worried about this.”

Of the women, older men and other hostages set to be returned, many are believed to have been held in Hamas’s network of tunnels in Gaza, under conditions likely to leave physical and psychological scars. Israeli hospitals are preparing isolated areas where the hostages can begin recuperating in privacy.

“Last time, we saw the Red Cross transferring the hostages, and some of them were running to the relatives, hugging them,” said Einat Yehene, a clinical psychologist working with the Hostage Families Forum, an advocacy group. “It’s not going to be easy and similar this time, given the physical and the emotional conditions we expect.”

In exchange, hundreds of Palestinian prisoners are to be freed. The total number of prisoners to be released and their identities were among the many contentious points involved in the negotiations for a deal.

The new deal also calls for allowing 600 trucks carrying aid to enter Gaza daily and negotiations on the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territory and a permanent end to the war.

Those negotiations are likely to be bitter and difficult, like the months of talks that yielded this week’s cease-fire agreement. Mr. Netanyahu is already facing an internal revolt within his governing coalition, which his far-right partners have threatened to quit over their opposition to the deal.

They have called for the war to continue to eradicate Hamas, which led the October 2023 attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, took another 250 hostage and started the war.

Mr. Netanyahu also faces pressure from the many Israelis who want all the hostages returned, and from the outgoing U.S. president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., and the president-elect, Donald J. Trump, who both want the war ended.

In his address, Mr. Netanyahu said the agreement preserves Israel’s right to return to the war against Hamas if it so chooses. The agreement also allows Israeli forces to remain in a buffer zone along Israel’s border with Gaza and Gaza’s border with Egypt, he added, at least during the initial phase.

“If we need to go back to fighting, we will do it in new ways and with great might,” he said.

Another uncertainty in how the deal might unfold arises from the chaotic, ruined conditions within Gaza, where tens of thousands of people have been killed since the war began and hundreds of thousands of others live without homes, clean water or ready supplies of food or medicine.

Israel’s campaign has left a power vacuum across much of Gaza, and lawlessness has proved a dangerous factor in efforts to get aid to people in need. Organized looting has repeatedly stripped trucks of supplies, including from a convoy of 100 trucks holding U.N. aid late last year.

Israel has continued striking Gaza since the cease-fire was announced, and over the past 24 hours, 23 Palestinians were killed and 83 others wounded, Gaza’s health ministry said on Saturday morning. More than 46,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to the ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

Desperately needed aid is expected to pour into Gaza once the cease-fire begins. Egypt, which shares a border with the enclave, was intensifying preparations on Friday to deliver assistance including food and tents, according to Al Qahera News, an Egyptian state broadcaster.

Over the past year, a pair of legal bombshells have put India’s growing relationship with the United States to one of its biggest tests yet.

Just as the two sides were announcing unprecedented expansions in defense and technology ties, U.S. prosecutors accused Indian government agents of plotting to assassinate an American citizen on U.S. soil.

Months later, the Justice Department filed fraud and bribery charges against India’s most prominent business mogul, whose enterprises have soared to dizzying heights on the back of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s power.

Still, the relationship has held. After decades of mutual suspicion between the two countries, said Eric Garcetti, the departing U.S. ambassador to India, the fact that now nothing seems to derail their ties is proof of their strength.

“I don’t think there is anything out there big enough to threaten the trajectory of the U.S.-India relations,” Mr. Garcetti said on Saturday in an interview at the embassy in New Delhi, two days before President Biden leaves office and Donald J. Trump is sworn in as his successor.

“This is incredibly resilient and almost inevitable,” Mr. Garcetti added. “It’s really the pace and the progress that’s not inevitable, like how quickly we get there.”

The Biden administration’s doubling down on the relationship with India came after nearly two decades of efforts to shed Cold War-era suspicions that had culminated with U.S. sanctions on India’s nuclear program in 1998.

Washington sees great potential in India as a geopolitical counterweight to an increasingly assertive China. Already the world’s largest democracy, India took over from China as the world’s most populous nation in 2023. India’s demographic advantages and growing technological capacity could help diversify global supply chains away from China, a priority of the United States and other major powers.

Now comes Mr. Trump’s second presidency, with its America-first orientation and threats of steep tariffs on trading partners. While leaders of many countries are unnerved, Indian officials insist that they are not among them.

S. Jaishankar, the foreign minister, has said India enjoyed “a positive political relationship with Trump” that it hopes will only deepen. As he attended the opening of a U.S. Consulate on Friday in the tech hub of Bengaluru, also known as Bangalore, Mr. Jaishankar quoted Mr. Modi as saying that the two countries were overcoming “the hesitations of history.”

Mr. Modi has enjoyed a strong rapport with Mr. Trump, an important factor because of the incoming president’s personal approach to international relations. During Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Modi hosted him at a grand rally in his home state of Gujarat, as well as at a large gathering in Texas of the Indian diaspora — an increasingly crucial extension of the Indian influence in American politics.

But some analysts cautioned that Mr. Trump’s unpredictability and transactional approach could pose risks for India.

Two issues in particular are bound to test the relationship, and most likely soon. During the campaign, Mr. Trump criticized India as gaining an unfair advantage in trade by maintaining high tariffs. And India could be swept up in the controversy if Mr. Trump follows through on his promise of mass deportations of illegal immigrants.

Indians make up the third-largest group of illegal immigrants in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center. If Mr. Trump sends large numbers of Indians back to their home country, it could be a major embarrassment for Mr. Modi.

Amita Batra, a New Delhi-based economist and trade expert, said that India should see warning signs in Mr. Trump’s threat of higher tariffs even against America’s traditional allies, as well as his stated willingness to unravel deals with countries like Mexico and Canada that his own first administration had put in place.

“You may say we are on great terms with Trump, we have an easy relation with the United States, but how Trump views that at a particular time is a different question altogether,” Dr. Batra said at an event at the Center for Social and Economic Progress in New Delhi. “India has to be very cautiously approaching Trump 2.0.”

During the interview, Mr. Garcetti described the bilateral relationship as “the most compelling, challenging and consequential” for both countries.

A former Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Mr. Garcetti arrived in New Delhi in April 2023, after the mission had remained without an ambassador for two years. His confirmation process had hit a wall over accusations that he had overlooked complaints of sexual harassment by an aide when he was mayor.

He made up for the time lost with a burst of energy and outreach like that of a politician in campaign mode.

He was everywhere, from cricket grounds to cafeterias to cultural programs. Sporting a leather jacket, he even got behind the piano to open for the jazz legends Herbie Hancock and Dianne Reeves, who had come to perform at the Piano Man Jazz Club in New Delhi.

But by the time Mr. Garcetti tried his hand at dancing to a viral Bollywood tune at a Diwali celebration, relations between the two countries had hit major obstacles.

In India, right-wing trolls had seized on the U.S. allegations of Indian government involvement in a plot to assassinate an American citizen advocating a separatist cause in India. That, along with the U.S. indictment of Gautam Adani, the business mogul, was evidence that the United States was trying to dampen India’s inevitable rise, the nationalist online voices argued.

The Biden administration appeared intent on addressing the assassination episode quietly with New Delhi, demanding accountability without allowing it to become a major diplomatic sore point.

“On Capitol Hill, within the White House, I think with those in the know it was a real moment of reflection and pause,” Mr. Garcetti said of the assassination case. “It didn’t pause the momentum — you know, relations between countries are always multifaceted and simultaneous and not just between governments. But I think it was an immediate gut check.”

Mr. Garcetti said that the Biden administration had been reassured by India’s response. New Delhi had accepted the U.S. demand, he said, “not just for accountability but for systemic reform and guarantees that this will never happen again.”

An Indian government inquiry that concluded last week recommended legal action against an unnamed person with “earlier criminal links.” It said that the action “must be completed expeditiously,” in what analysts saw as an attempt to begin the Trump era with a clean slate.

“If we want to cooperate in other areas that are important to us, intelligence sharing, et cetera, trust is the basis of everything,” Mr. Garcetti said. “But I’ve been pretty blown away with how trust can deepen through a challenge.”

One question hovering over the deepening ties between the two countries is whether India can truly emerge as an alternative to China in global supply chains — something that Mr. Garcetti also wondered.

India has reaped only a smart part of the windfall from the moves away from China, with businesses preferring places like Vietnam, Taiwan and Mexico, where it is easier to set up operations and where tariffs are lower.

Mr. Garcetti said India had made dramatic leaps after opening up its economy only in the 1990s, years after China. He picked up his iPhone to illustrate a widely highlighted recent success: About 15 percent of iPhone manufacturing now happens in India, a figure that could continue growing rapidly, he said.

More broadly, though, India still struggles to attract foreign investment, despite improvements in infrastructure and some streamlining of regulations. Manufacturing is not growing quickly enough to bring India the jobs it desperately needs.

“Where India’s leaving a lot of progress and jobs and growth on the table is figuring out a better way to make it seamless and frictionless to invest here for export,” Mr. Garcetti said. “Because it’s still, you know, for so many components of manufacturing, one of, if not the, highest tariffed economies.”

“They’re not wrong to look and say it used to be 95 percent worse,” Mr. Garcetti said. “But if that 5 percent is still double your competitor or 10 times your competitor — companies, you know, are like water. They flow where gravity takes them.”

After Iran elected a more moderate president last year, Cecilia Sala, an Italian journalist, thought something may have changed in the country, which she had been covering from afar.

For two years, Iran had rejected her application for a journalist visa, but it granted her one after the election. Colleagues and friends told her Iran’s new government seemed more open to foreign reporters as it sought to repair relations with Europe.

Ms. Sala, 29, had not traveled to Iran since 2021, before an uprising led by women and girls demanded an end to clerical rule. So she took a plane to Tehran, the capital.

“I wanted to see with my eyes what had changed,” she said in an interview recently in Rome.

Instead, she got firsthand experience of what had not changed.

On Dec. 19, as she was preparing an episode of an Italian podcast that she hosts every day, two agents from the intelligence wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps came to her hotel room in Tehran. When she tried to grab her phone, she said, one of them threw it to the other side of the room.

They blindfolded her, Ms. Sala said, and took her to the notorious Evin prison, where most of Iran’s political prisoners are held and some are tortured.

At one point, when she asked what she was accused of, she was told, she said, that she had committed “many illegal actions in many places.”

Iran has used the detention of foreign and dual citizens as a cornerstone of its foreign policy for nearly five decades, since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The detainees — journalists, businesspeople, aid workers, diplomats, tourists — are effectively hostages whom Tehran leverages with other countries to swap prisoners and free frozen funds.

Ms. Sala feared from the start that she had been taken hostage for a swap.

She said she had read that Italy had arrested an Iranian engineer three days earlier at the request of the United States. The engineer, Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, was wanted for his alleged role in providing drone technology for Iran that was used in an attack that killed three American soldiers in Jordan.

“I was trapped in a game much bigger than I was,” she said.

Ms. Sala said she worried that if the United States insisted on extraditing Mr. Abedini, she might linger in prison for years, her release contingent on the decision of the incoming American president, Donald J. Trump.

At Evin, the guards gave Ms. Sala a prison uniform, she said — a gray tracksuit, a blue shirt and pants, a blue hijab and a long covering known as a chador. They seized her glasses, without which she is all but blind.

Her cell had two blankets and no mattress or pillow. The light was constantly on, she said, and she could not sleep.

Only after several days, when she closely inspected her cell’s light yellow walls inch by inch, did she notice a blood stain, parallel marks, she said, perhaps left by a previous inmate marking the days, and the word “freedom” in Farsi.

She was blindfolded during hours of nearly daily interrogations in which she sat facing a wall, she said.

Her interrogator spoke flawless English, she said, and signaled that he knew Italy well by asking whether she preferred Roman or Neapolitan pizza crust.

She was permitted to speak at times with her parents and boyfriend back in Italy, she said, and when her mother told reporters there about her daughter’s conditions in prison, the interrogator told Ms. Sala that because of those remarks, Iran would detain her for much longer.

“Their game is to give you hope, and then use your hope to break you,” Ms. Sala said.

Through a narrow opening in her cell door, she said she heard sounds of crying, vomiting, footsteps and banging that sounded as if someone was running and hitting his or her head against the door.

“I thought if they don’t take me out, I am going to also end up like this,” Ms. Sala said. She feared that if they kept her for long, she said, “I would come back an animal, not a person.”

On Jan. 8, Ms. Sala was on a plane home, and shortly after, Italy freed Mr. Abedini. Ms. Sala was released in part with the assistance of Elon Musk, two Iranian officials said. “I played a small role,” Mr. Musk later wrote on X.

Ms. Sala said she was eager to return to her work.

“I am in a rush to go back to being a journalist,” she said. “To tell someone else’s story.”

Her ordeal has reverberated widely, particularly for journalists wanting to travel to Iran.

“Obviously, I am not going back to Iran,” Ms. Sala said. “At least as long as there is the Islamic Republic.”

Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting from New York.

One man was known as a killer, sentenced to life in prison in 2009 for killing a 16-year-old London student in a gruesome confrontation at a bakery.

The other man was a balaclava-wearing rapper from South London, known as TEN, whose music in the drill genre about prison life, crime and bloodshed had gained him a small but emerging profile.

The two once disconnected identities became embroiled in Britain, after a tabloid investigation this week claimed that Jake Fahri, who had been conditionally released from prison in the bakery killing, and the artist TEN, were the same person.

That conclusion, in turn, cast TEN’s lyrics about killing, bloodshed and weapons in a new light. It also contributed to an ongoing debate over drill music, a contentious style of hip-hop that artists say is a creative outlet for their experiences. Officials however, have blamed the genre for playing a role in inciting violence.

Mr. Fahri was convicted of murder at the age 19 in the killing of Jimmy Mizen, who was fatally wounded after Mr. Fahri threw a glass baking dish at him during a fight. The dish shattered when it hit Mr. Mizen, severing an artery in his neck and causing him to collapse from blood loss.

At the time, Mr. Fahri said that he was not guilty and had acted in self-defense. He was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 14 years, and was released with conditions in 2023.

A day after the article appeared in The Sun on Wednesday, Mr. Fahri was detained for violating rules of his conditional release, a spokeswoman for the Probation Service said in a statement.

It did not identify the violations or explicitly link him to TEN. But it said the Mizen family deserved better than “to see their son’s murderer shamelessly boasting about his violent crime.”

TEN has rapped about being a “killer in the streets” and of “swinging around the blade.” One lyric, with an expletive, reads: “Ever see a man soul fly from his eyes and his breath gone? I wanted it more, it made it less wrong. Seen blood spilled the same floor he was left on.”

Barry Mizen, the father of Jimmy Mizen, in an interview on Saturday, said, “For him to be making money out of what he did to our son — making money out of murdering someone — feels wrong to me.”

Margaret Mizen, Jimmy Mizen’s mother, speaking of the experience of listening to TEN’s music and hearing apparent references to their son’s murder in the lyrics, said: “It was incredibly painful. He took Jimmy’s life.”

But the Mizens are also concerned, they said, that rap music like TEN’s promotes violence and drugs to impressionable young people.

“It’s almost like a war on our streets, and this kind of music is aiding and abetting that,” Ms. Mizen said.

The BBC, Britain’s national broadcaster, has come under criticism after a radio show that showcases new British artists included TEN’s music last year. The office of Prime Minister Keir Starmer told the BBC that the broadcaster needed to “answer some questions pretty urgently.”

A spokeswoman for the BBC said in a statement that it had played two of TEN’s tracks, which did not contain the graphic lyrics highlighted in the tabloid reports. There were no further plans to play TEN’s music, she said, adding, “We were not aware of his background and we in no way condone his actions.”

Efforts to reach Mr. Fahri on Saturday were unsuccessful, and accounts on Instagram and X that were linked to the TEN Spotify page were made private. A statement posted Friday on the Instagram account, appearing to be from Mr. Fahri, apologized to the Mizen family “if my words have caused any harm or distress.”

“I want to make it clear that none of my lyrics are aimed at the victim or his family,” it said, adding that the lyrics were an “artistic expression” of his life in prison. “I do not glorify those experiences but they are a part of my past that shaped me,” he said.

Since his release, he said that he had focused on rebuilding his life, and added that he had served his full sentence. He said he had never intended for anyone to die.

“All I want is a chance to move forward with my life,” he said.

Drill music, which originated in Chicago more than a decade ago, has spread to cities like London, New York and Stockholm, and prompted conversations about the balance of censorship with public safety.

Artists and fans say that the songs are a form of self-expression that reflect the frustrations of struggling communities, where issues like gang disputes, gun violence and poverty are a part of life. Some groups have criticized the focus on drill rap as discriminatory.

But officials and the authorities have blamed the music for glamorizing and inciting violence, and even scrutinized songs for evidence of potential criminal activity. Drill rappers say they have been banned from performing in New York and heavily policed in London, where violent crime has surged in recent years.

“It’s not a case of wanting him to stay in prison,” said Ms. Mizen, who said that Mr. Fahri could have chosen to write music expressing remorse for what he had done. “It’s a case of wanting him to change.”

She was troubled that this round of attention could bring her son’s killer more renown.

“In some people’s eyes, he will be a celebrity,” she said. “That’s the thing, the culture that we live in. And it is a worry.”