He is an autocrat condemned inside and outside his country as having stolen the nation’s last election. Yet on Friday, Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president who has overseen his country’s dramatic decline — including runaway inflation, blackouts, hunger, mass migration and the unraveling of the nation’s democracy — is set to be sworn in for a third term in office.

If he serves the full six years, it will extend his party’s reign into its third decade.

Mr. Maduro will return to Miraflores, the presidential palace in Caracas, even after millions of Venezuelans used the ballot box to express a desire for change. And he will do so amid his harshest crackdown yet, with the police and military in riot gear blanketing the streets of the capital; journalists, activists and community leaders in prison; and a broad expansion of his surveillance apparatus.

The man the United States and others say won the election, Edmundo González, remains in exile, forced to flee to Spain or face arrest, while the country’s most important opposition leader, María Corina Machado, has been in hiding inside Venezuela.

On Thursday she emerged for the first time since August, joining street protests against Mr. Maduro in Caracas, the capital. She stood atop a truck while thousands of supporters, all risking detention, shouted “freedom! freedom! freedom!”

There have been few other recent protests against the government, and the ever-present threat that security forces will imprison civilians is likely to make it difficult for Ms. Machado to continue to rally supporters to the streets.

Mr. González has said he will return to Venezuela on Friday for his own swearing in — but the government has placed a $100,000 bounty on his head, and it’s unclear how he plans to avoid arrest if he does so.

For his part, Mr. Maduro faces the possibility that President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has filled his foreign policy team with Maduro foes, will take a hard line against him, possibly imposing more economic sanctions.

In response, the Venezuelan leader has spent the last six months amassing a cache of foreign prisoners, which analysts and former U.S. diplomats say he hopes to use as a bargaining tool in negotiations with the United States and other nations.

Since July, Venezuelan security forces have picked up about 50 visitors and dual-passport holders from more than a dozen countries, according to the watchdog group Foro Penal.

“They are pawns to be exchanged,” said Gonzalo Himiob, a founder of Foro Penal.

Mr. Maduro wants the removal of U.S. sanctions, which have battered the Venezuelan economy, and international recognition, among other policy changes.

Venezuelan officials say they have detained at least nine people with American citizenship or resident status, with officials accusing some of them of plotting to kill Mr. Maduro.

The United States has no diplomatic presence in Venezuela, and a State Department representative said the U.S. government was not even sure where its citizens were being held.

Relatives of three detained U.S. citizens said that they had not heard from their loved ones since they disappeared months ago and have received only limited communication from their own government.

David Estrella, 64, a father of five, had crossed into Venezuela by land from Colombia on Sept. 9, according to his former wife, Elvia Macias, 44.

Ms. Macias, who is close to her ex-husband, described him as an “adventurer” who — full of optimism that the situation in Venezuela was “not that bad” — had gone to visit friends.

He worked in quality control for pharmaceutical companies in New Jersey, was preparing to retire and had already visited Venezuela once before, she said.

Ms. Macias cried as she recounted celebrating Christmas without him.

“This situation has had a tremendous impact on our lives,” she said.

Mr. Maduro’s socialist-inspired movement has run the country since 1999, when his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, took office. In July, Mr. Maduro faced his most difficult electoral challenge yet, facing off against Mr. González, a former diplomat who became the surrogate for Ms. Machado when the government barred her from running.

Even amid a stepped-up repression campaign, many Venezuelans came out in force to support Mr. González. And in the days after the election, the opposition collected thousands of vote tally sheets, publishing them online and saying they showed that Mr. González had won by a landslide.

Mr. Maduro nevertheless declared victory, an assertion questioned by independent observers, including the Carter Center, the United Nations and a member of the country’s electoral council.

The United States has recognized Mr. González as the winner — and even Maduro allies like presidents Gustavo Petro of Colombia and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, both leftist neighbors of Venezuela, have distanced themselves.

Neither will attend the inauguration.

Mr. Maduro has held foreigners for political purposes before. But never has his government held so many at once, according to Foro Penal, the watchdog group.

Some analysts said Mr. Maduro had decided to arrest foreigners because he has seen that it gets him what he wants.

In 2022 and then again in 2023, the United States struck deals with the Venezuelan government, in which Washington released high-profile Venezuelan allies in exchange for U.S. citizens held by Mr. Maduro.

This was a part of a shift in American dealings with governments and others who capture Americans abroad.

In the past, U.S. policy was not to negotiate with captors, out of fear that cutting deals would encourage the taking of hostages.

But this left detained Americans with little hope of rescue, and critics said it even contributed to the deaths of people like James Foley, a journalist killed by ISIS in Syria in 2014.

The United States has since shown more willingness to negotiate. But some critics maintain that provokes the very practice Mr. Maduro is engaged in.

Tom Shannon, who served in a high-ranking State Department role in the Obama and Trump administrations, said he believed Mr. Maduro had been encouraged by recent hostage deals with Russia and Iran.

Still, he did not think cutting deals was a mistake.

“I think one of our jobs is to take care of American citizens abroad,’’ Mr. Shannon said. “And it’s very difficult just to write people off and say, ‘oh bad luck, so sorry.’”

Instead, he said the U.S. government should “inflict levels of pain on the kidnappers that make it clear that this is not going to happen again.”

Other U.S. citizens detained in Venezuela include Wilbert Castañeda, 37, a Navy SEAL who traveled to Venezuela to visit his girlfriend, according to his mother, Petra Castañeda, 60.

Mr. Castañeda, a father of four, was apprehended by the authorities in late August. By September his face had been plastered across state television, with Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela’s interior minister, accusing him and others of participating in a plot to assassinate the president.

Ms. Castañeda, who lives in California, said her son was innocent.

“The whole family is very worried, we are desperate,” she said. “We are clinging to the hope that the United States will be able to reach an agreement with Mr. Maduro.”

Stephen William Logan, 83, a retired teacher in West Virginia, said he did not even realize his son Aaron Barrett Logan, 34, had gone to Venezuela. Then, in September, his family got a call from State Department officials, notifying them that he had been detained.

Mr. Logan said his son worked in the United States for a major bank as a “penetration tester” — testing the bank’s security by trying to hack into its systems.

Mr. Cabello accused the younger Mr. Logan of being involved in the same assassination plot.

“I don’t even know how to visualize it,” the older Mr. Logan said of the conditions his son was living in, wondering if it was like “a concentration camp.”

Representatives of Mr. Trump’s transition team declined to comment. None of the U.S. detainees have been declared wrongfully detained by the State Department, a designation that could get them more help from within the U.S. government.

In Caracas, many attended Thursday’s anti-Maduro protest even though similar gatherings have been met with violence from security forces and ended in the deaths of participants.

Among those in the streets was Laura Matos, 21, who said “everyone” had told her “don’t go out.”

But “last night I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I said, ‘I want something to happen, I want President-elect Edmundo González to be sworn in, I want Venezuela to experience a change.’”

“We don’t deserve to be like this,” she went on, as fellow protesters blew plastic horns around her. “We deserve more, to have a better future. Young people like me deserve to be able to study and work and stay in our country.’’

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

The Kremlin said on Friday that Russia remains open to a meeting between President Vladimir V. Putin and President-elect Donald J. Trump, but that any concrete steps to set up such talks could be made only once Mr. Trump is sworn into office on Jan. 20.

Responding to comments made on Thursday by Mr. Trump, who said that Mr. Putin wants to meet him to discuss the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin’s spokesman reaffirmed Russia’s longstanding official position that Moscow is ready to talk.

“We need a mutual desire and political willingness to engage in a dialogue,” Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told reporters. “We see that Mr. Trump also declares his readiness to solve issues via dialogue. We welcome that.”

Mr. Peskov added that the Kremlin’s understanding is that there is a “mutual readiness for a meeting,” but, he said, “it looks like things will start to move after Trump enters the Oval Office.”

Mr. Peskov did not confirm that Mr. Putin had requested a meeting with Mr. Trump or that one was being set up, as Mr. Trump said on Thursday night.

While asserting its territorial claim over its five regions in Ukraine, the Kremlin has been insisting that it would prefer diplomacy over war.

Ukraine and some of its Western allies have questioned Russia’s seriousness in offering to negotiate, and said that the Kremlin’s conditions actually represent a demand for Ukrainian capitulation.

After being largely isolated from the West for almost three years since the invasion of Ukraine, a meeting with the American president would represent a chance for Mr. Putin to negotiate with a friendlier American administration.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly said that he could resolve the Russia-Ukraine war within 24 hours after entering office, without saying how, but this week suggested that it could take up to six months.

Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said that he was sympathetic with the Russian position that Ukraine should never join NATO, one of the main conditions put forward by the Kremlin to end the war.

Mr. Trump’s victory in November produced a wave of cautious optimism that the war could end soon, even if in an unstable cease-fire. But analysts have said that the process will be hard and tedious, and many in Ukraine and elsewhere fear that Mr. Trump might want to push through a deal at the expense of its capitulation.

In Russia, Giorgy Bovt, a political analyst, said that if a meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin happens too early, when “the conditions for peace have not yet matured,” it could “lead to greater escalation.”

“Both warring parties are still betting on continuing military action,” Mr. Bovt wrote in a post on Telegram, a popular messaging app. “They do not consider their forces exhausted.”

Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote on social media that “the higher the expectations” from the meeting “the riskier the game, most of all for Trump.”

The Israeli military said on Friday that Hamza Ziyadne, an Arab citizen of Israel held hostage in Gaza, had been killed in the Palestinian enclave, as efforts by mediators to broker a truce between Israel and Hamas to free hostages have seen little success.

Over 15 months after the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023 prompted the war in Gaza, around 98 hostages remain in Gaza; roughly 36 are presumed dead by the Israeli authorities.

The confirmation of Mr. Ziyadne’s death comes just a day after family and friends buried his father, 53-year-old Youssef Ziyadne, who was also taken hostage. The Israeli military said their bodies been found together in a tunnel under the southern Gaza city of Rafah alongside their dead captors. It was not clear when they were found.

Before they were found, neither hostage had been designated as presumed dead by Israeli officials, who have sought to use intelligence to assess the condition of the remaining hostages. That was likely to further escalate fears among the families of the remaining captives in Gaza that their relatives might have already suffered the same fate.

It was not immediately clear how the Ziyadnes died: Some hostages have been killed in Israeli airstrikes, while Israel has said that others were executed by their captors. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, said on Wednesday — after Youssef’s death was confirmed — that the military was still investigating.

Israel’s Arab citizens, like Mr. Ziyadne, were not spared in Hamas’s attack. At least 17 were killed and several others taken hostage. Around 1,200 people were killed in the assault and 250 taken hostage, according to Israel.

Many, like Mr. Ziyadne, belonged to the Bedouin Arab minority, a group that has long lived on the margins of Israeli society. Historically nomadic herders, many Bedouins now reside in a constellation of cities and hamlets throughout southern Israel, some of which lack basic government services like running water and electricity.

Hamza Ziyadne, 23, was taken hostage alongside his father and two younger siblings, Bilal and Aisha, while at the Israeli kibbutz where his father worked. Bilal, 18, and Aisha, 17, were freed during a weeklong truce in November 2023 in which 105 Israeli and foreign hostages — mostly women and children — were freed in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners.

The Hostages Family Forum, which represents the captives’ relatives, said that Hamza Ziyadne was survived by his wife and two children. In a statement, the group described him as a “nature lover who had a deep affection for animals and was beloved by his friends.”

“Four family members were kidnapped, with only two returning alive,” the group said in a statement. “Youssef and Hamza, who survived a period in the hell of Gaza captivity, could have been saved through an earlier agreement.”

Months of efforts to bridge the gaps between Israel and Hamas on a cease-fire and hostage release deal have failed to bear fruit. Qatar and Egypt have led the talks, which are also being brokered by the Biden administration.

On Thursday, Mr. Biden said that “real progress” was being made in the negotiations, without providing further details. Officials on all sides have repeatedly voiced optimism over a breakthrough over the past several months, only to see hopes dashed a few days later over new obstacles.

For months, Israel and Hamas have leveled seemingly irreconcilable conditions for an agreement. Hamas has demanded an end to the war and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza as part of any deal to release hostages. Israeli leaders have said they will not end the war before Hamas is destroyed in Gaza and vowed to maintain overriding security control there.

Michael D. Shear in Washington contributed reporting.

For decades, Hezbollah’s grip on Lebanon was iron tight.

With its vast arsenal, the militant group was more powerful than the country’s national military. It controlled or held sway over Lebanon’s most important government agencies as well as critical infrastructure, like its border with Syria and commercial port. Almost no major political decisions could be made without its backing, and no political party could seriously challenge any move it, or its patron Iran, made.

But that longstanding status quo has now been shaken — a turnabout for Hezbollah that has opened a new political chapter in Lebanon.

Fourteen months of fighting against Israel has left the once untouchable Shiite Muslim group battered. Rebels toppled its main ally in neighboring Syria, the dictator Bashar al-Assad. Iran also now finds itself weakened as it and its allies have been hit hard by Israel.

Hezbollah is on its shakiest ground in years, as power dynamics are being realigned across the Middle East after more than a year of war and turmoil. And while the group remains powerful — it still has many thousands of fighters and commands the loyalty of most of the country’s Shiite Muslims — analysts say one thing is clear: The era of Hezbollah and Iran’s unshakable dominance in Lebanon appears to be over.

“It’s a new political reality,” said Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “It will take time for this new reality to unfold,” he added, “but what we’ve seen so far is enough to show us that the tide has turned.”

Those shifting political sands were laid bare on Thursday, when Lebanon’s Parliament elected a new president, overcoming years of political gridlock that many critics attributed to Hezbollah’s efforts to block any attempt at resolution. The political paralysis has left the country under the direction of a weak and ineffectual caretaker government for more than two years.

In Lebanon, many saw the election on Thursday of Gen. Joseph Aoun, the commander of the Lebanese military, as a crucial step toward bringing stability to the country. It was also seen as a concession by Hezbollah and, some analysts said, an acknowledgment that the group was no longer in a position to paralyze the state.

Since Lebanon’s founding, a multitude of factions and sects from the country’s more than a dozen religious groups have jockeyed for power and influence. Its fragile political system relies on agreements among parties and sects, as well as their foreign backers. That system has held the country together by a thread as it has careened from crisis to crisis since a 15-year civil war ended in 1990.

Over the past three decades, Hezbollah — which is both a political party and a militant group — has outmaneuvered its domestic foes and struck strategic alliances to cement its position as the real power underpinning the country’s weak and fractious state.

Even as the government struggled to keep the lights on and water running, Hezbollah built up a vast network of social services — including high-quality health care and free education — for its mostly Shiite supporters.

But over the past three months, the group has been dealt a series of devastating blows.

Its war with Israel wiped out Hezbollah’s top brass, destroyed large chunks of its arsenal and left the country with a multibillion-dollar bill for reconstruction. Its stinging defeat also shattered Hezbollah’s promise to Lebanese that it alone could defend Lebanon from Israel — a claim that served as the group’s official raison d’être.

Then last month, the group lost its main land bridge for weapons and cash, as well as a political ally, when Syrian rebels, whom Hezbollah had once fought, toppled the Assad government.

Hezbollah’s patron Iran has also been on the defensive since Mr. al-Assad’s ouster and given its own escalating tension with Israel, including direct conflict through rocket fire.

Iran’s web of anti-Israel militias, known as the Axis of Resistance — Hezbollah was a key player — has unraveled, taking with it Tehran’s ability to project power as far west as the Mediterranean and south to the Arabian Sea.

Without those pillars of support, Hezbollah’s ability to influence Lebanese politics has diminished, even as the group and its allies try to present themselves as the country’s agenda setters. Their dwindling sway was evident even before the vote when, late Wednesday night, the presidential candidate backed by Hezbollah withdrew from the race.

Hezbollah’s “narrative has been seriously discredited, its military has been seriously weakened and, in my view, politically it will have to start paying the price,” said Sami Nader, the director of the Political Sciences Institute at Saint Joseph University of Beirut.

Most experts agree that even in its weakened state, Hezbollah remains Lebanon’s most dominant political force. But that, they say, is less a testament to the group’s hold on power and more a reflection of the country’s political dysfunction and infighting. That dysfunction was on full display during the parliamentary vote on Thursday, which frequently descended into shouting matches before the votes were cast.

The election on Thursday of General Aoun as president is the first step in determining a new political map for the country and the region, analysts say. General Aoun is widely considered to have the backing of the United States and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis once vied for influence in Lebanon before being eclipsed by Iran and Hezbollah.

In his victory speech, General Aoun hinted at the vision he and his allies share for a new political era in Lebanon, and said the day marked “a new phase in Lebanon’s history.”

He referred to Arab countries, once pushed out of Lebanon by Iran, as “brotherly” nations. He spoke of the state’s “right to monopolize the possession of weapons” — a subtle reference to calls for Hezbollah to be disarmed after its 60-day cease-fire with Israel ends later this month. And he envisioned a state that could be defended by its own national army, absent the militias like Hezbollah that have long dragged the country into infighting and war.

“My pledge is to call for a defensive strategy and the establishment of a state — I repeat, a state — that invests in its army, controls all borders and implements international resolutions,” General Aoun said.

Still, experts caution that the country is still in the early days of this new political chapter — and that Hezbollah may yet rebound. The coming months will be filled with critical litmus tests for the group, including whether it can help rebuild the large swaths of the country devastated by the war and whether it fully withdraws from southern Lebanon, as outlined in the cease-fire deal.

“Hezbollah has been dealt staggering blows in terms of its strategic powers and its ability to confront Israel,” said Paul Salem, the vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “But inside Lebanon, it remains a very heavily armed group, more powerful than any other in the country.”

Shiu Ka-chun, a former social worker and pro-democracy lawmaker in Hong Kong who devoted his last years to helping protesters imprisoned after a crackdown on dissent, died Friday in Hong Kong. He was 55.

His wife, Kelly Hui, said his death, in a hospital, was due to stomach cancer.

As a social worker, civil rights activist and for a time as a legislator, Mr. Shiu pushed for the rights of the marginalized, but his participation in a protest movement landed him in prison. He later emerged as a crucial supporter of those incarcerated in the aftermath of a national security crackdown that began in late 2019.

Mr. Shiu was born in June 3, 1969, to a working-class family in Hong Kong. He studied social work at Hong Kong Baptist University, and after graduating started his career as a social worker supporting young people. In 2007, he started teaching social work at the university, where he became known for his engaging lectures. He also honed his voice as a commentator, writing newspaper columns that analyzed social issues through the lens of philosophy and sociology.

Mr. Shiu got involved early on in the 2014 civil disobedience movement, Occupy Central with Love and Peace, which demanded democratic elections for Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese territory. He mobilized other social workers to take part in the protests that blocked traffic in the heart of Hong Kong’s business district. He reached out to people with disabilities or chronic illnesses, or who were homeless, helping to organize dialogues where they discussed what democracy meant for them.

In 2016, he was elected as a lawmaker. He focused on welfare issues such as poverty, homelessness and the conditions at homes for the elderly and people with disabilities.

In 2019, Mr. Shiu was convicted of public nuisance charges for his role in Occupy Central and sentenced to eight months in prison.

“I want to remind those who live in the dark to not get used to dark, not to defend darkness out of habit, and not to scoff at those who search for the light,” he said outside of the courthouse ahead of his sentencing.

Chan Kin Man, a sociology professor who led the Occupy Central Movement, recalled sharing a cell with Mr. Shiu on the day they were convicted and seeing how his health had deteriorated. He said he had known that Mr. Shiu had diabetes and high blood pressure, and had been hospitalized in 2014 during the street occupations.

“I watched him lie in bed, unconscious and vomiting,” Mr. Chan said in a phone interview from Taipei, where he lives now.

“With his health in such a poor state, he still took part in so many political activities. I really respected him,” Mr. Chan said.

When he was behind bars, Mr. Shiu filed complaints about prison conditions, even at the risk of making himself a target of the authorities. His efforts led to some marginal change: Prisoners were allowed paper fans in the heat of the summer.

Mr. Shiu’s teaching contract at Baptist University was not renewed after his release from prison. He founded a nonprofit, Wall-fare, focused on helping people imprisoned after the 2019 protests. The organization paired inmates with pen pals to ease their isolation, and helped supply them with prison-approved toiletries and snacks.

Wall-fare was forced to close in 2021, as activism grew more risky. Mr. Shiu deflected questions from reporters about the reason for the closure and what it would mean for prisoners. “Tears are our common language,” he said.

In the years that followed, he wrote several books about the condition of Hong Kong’s prisons and the mental toll of incarceration, drawing from his own experience. He continued to post updates on social media, relaying snippets from his visits to former lawmakers and activists who were in prison.

In November, he posted a photograph of himself in a hospital bed wearing a mortar board, saying that he had had to miss his graduation from a master’s degree program in Christian studies for health reasons. Later, he wrote that he had been diagnosed with cancer, and that part of his stomach had been removed.

In his final weeks, he posted essays that he titled as musings from a “stomach-less” person. He wryly observed that tube feeding was difficult for someone like him, who loved food. He also shared his reflections on suffering.

“Resilient people are able to maintain a positive attitude and develop coping strategies despite the pain of illness, regulate their emotions, stay positive, and learn to live as normally and ordinarily as possible,” he wrote in mid-November.

“However, I also need to add a caveat: My body is out of sorts, I need space for rest. I will stop if I have to; please forgive me.”