In a rare and perilous public show of anger against Hamas, hundreds of Palestinians marched through Beit Lahia in northern Gaza this week, demanding that the militant group relinquish control of the territory and end the war with Israel, according to four witnesses.

The march on Wednesday appeared to be the latest of a handful of such protests that have broken out in the last two weeks, despite Hamas’s efforts to suppress dissent with threats and shows of force. Witnesses said it was the first of the protests in Beit Lahia that women joined, some bringing their children.

Taken together, the demonstrations, while small and scattered, represent the most serious challenge to Hamas’s iron-fisted 18-year rule of the Gaza Strip since the war began when Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023. The overwhelming Israeli response that followed has ripped apart the territory and residents’ lives, killing tens of thousands. The bloodshed resumed after Israel ended a two-month-old cease-fire agreement in mid-March, citing Hamas’s refusal to accept Israeli demands.

Palestinians began marching about a week later in Beit Lahia, a farming community in the northernmost part of Gaza, and then in other parts of the enclave. The protests lasted for three days before appearing to fade.

Activists posted on social media this week calling for new rallies. Demonstrators assembled in Beit Lahia’s main square and marched toward another square, protesters said in interviews. They gave varying estimates of the rally’s size, from about 1,000 to 1,500.

“We have lost our homes, our loved ones, our hope and our future. Enough is enough,” said Abeer al-Radeea, 34, a homemaker who said she went to Wednesday’s demonstration with her husband and children. “We call on Hamas to stop this and leave us. We don’t know when this will end, but we want peace and democracy.”

The march went forward despite widespread fear in Gaza of Hamas, which in the past has cracked down violently on challenges to its rule. After the recent protests, however, Hamas’s response has appeared more muted, reflecting what analysts said was both the group’s fear of further inflaming an already angry population and its diminished ability to mobilize forces, with thousands of its members killed and with Israeli drones and warplanes overhead.

But the threat of retribution by Hamas remains.

On Friday, one of the protesters, Oday al-Rabi, 22, was abducted overnight by Hamas operatives from a shelter for displaced people in Gaza City, according to his brother, Hassan.

Hassan, 32, said he received a call hours later to pick up his brother from Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City. He said Oday was bruised, bloodied and barely able to walk or talk.

“My whole brother’s body was blood,” he said, adding that the Hamas operatives were dragging him with a leash. “It was as if I didn’t know him.”

The operatives said that anyone who “curses” Hamas’s military wing would meet the same fate, Hassan said. He took his brother to another nearby hospital, but Oday died a few hours later.

Hassan said he believed his brother had been targeted both because of his participation in protests and because of his history of criticizing Hamas. About a month ago, Oday was attacked by a group of Hamas members, but they ran away when he pulled a knife on them, Hassan said.

Hamas officials and a spokesman for the Hamas-run government in Gaza did not respond to requests for comment.

Protesters on Wednesday included Raed al-Masri, 44, who said that masked Hamas members had been stationed on some corners, holding truncheons and sticks.

Two days after a previous protest, the Hamas-run internal security force in Gaza summoned Sharif al-Buheisi, 56, to a tent in the courtyard of Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza. Mr. al-Buheisi is an activist in Fatah, Hamas’s rival political faction, and served as an administrator at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City before the war.

Two officers delivered a threat, suggesting he would regret participating in future protests, Mr. al-Buheisi said in a phone interview.

“This is not the time for protests — they’re stabbing the resistance in the back,” Mr. al-Buheisi recalled being told. “If you go out again, the result will not be good.”

After consulting with his family, Mr. al-Buheisi said he decided to stay away from further protests. It was a bitter reminder, he said, of how civilians in Gaza were trapped.

“We’re persecuted by both sides,” he said. “Israel bombs us without mercy and Hamas doesn’t care if we die.”

Mr. al-Masri said that several of his cousins had also received Hamas threats after recent marches. One received a phone call from a private number summoning him to meet on Tuesday with Hamas security officials, who interrogated him about his involvement, asked about protest supporters and organizers, and forced him to sign a document saying he would stop protesting, Mr. al-Masri said.

Others ignored such calls.

At Wednesday’s protest, many demonstrators were driven to march by hunger, participants said. Israel has blocked aid from entering Gaza for a month, forcing bakeries to close, markets to empty and aid groups to cut food distribution. Gaza residents say that what produce remains is exorbitantly expensive.

One child at Wednesday’s demonstration yelled that he wanted something to eat, Ms. al-Radeea said. Another protester held up a piece of an onion, shouting that he had been eating only onions and radishes for more than a week, said Basem Hamouda, 47, a farmer who was there.

For their desperation, the protesters blamed Israel — but also Hamas.

“Those who cannot provide their people with a loaf of bread have no right to start a war in the name of liberation,” Mr. Hamouda said.

He and others said Hamas should do a better job of holding down food prices by stopping merchants from hoarding supplies, a common complaint in Gaza.

“Hamas has given Israel a pretext to continue this war while failing to regulate and control market prices,” he added. “That is the real cause behind these protests.”

Ameera Harouda contributed reporting from Doha, Qatar.

An American tourist set off alone last week on an inflatable boat for the remote island of North Sentinel in the Indian Ocean. He had packed a Diet Coke and a coconut as an offering for the highly isolated tribe that lives there, and had brought along a GoPro camera in hopes of filming the encounter, the Indian police said.

Guided by his GPS navigation, the man, Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, 24, reached the northeastern shore of the island at 10 a.m. on March 29, according to the police. He scanned the land with binoculars, but saw no one. So he climbed ashore, left the Diet Coke and the coconut there, took sand samples, and recorded a video, the police said.

Mr. Polyakov was arrested on March 31 when he returned to Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an archipelago more than 800 miles east of India’s mainland, the authorities said.

Few outsiders have been to the island of North Sentinel, which is a territory of India and is illegal to visit. Indian government regulations prohibit any outsider interaction with its isolated tribe, whose members hunt with bow and arrow and have killed intruders for stepping onto their shore.

In 2018, an American missionary, John Allen Chau, set off for the island with a Bible. He was shot with bows and arrows by tribesmen when he got onshore, the Indian authorities later said. Fishermen who helped take Mr. Chau to North Sentinel told the police that they had seen tribesmen dragging his body on the beach.

In 2006, the Sentinelese killed two fishermen who had accidentally drifted on shore.

But Mr. Polyakov was not deterred. He had planned his journey “meticulously,” the police said, studying sea conditions, tides, and accessibility from Khurmadera Beach, located on Andaman island.

Even after he pushed back from North Sentinel island, Mr. Polyakov tried to attract the attention of the Sentinelese people, by blowing a whistle from his boat, the police said.

He was accused of attempting to “interact with the Sentinelese tribe,” the police in Andaman said in a statement. Mr. Polyakov is being held on charges that include violating a law protecting aboriginal tribes and is scheduled to appear in court on April 17. The charges carry a possible sentence of up to five years in prison and a fine.

“His actions posed a serious threat to the safety and well-being of the Sentinelese people, whose contact with outsiders is strictly prohibited by law to protect their Indigenous way of life,” the statement said.

The police said that during their questioning of Mr. Polyakov, he disclosed that he was drawn to the island out of a “passion for adventure and his desire to undertake extreme challenges.” Officials added that his GoPro footage suggested entry into the island, and that he used GPS navigation throughout his voyage.

“He was particularly fascinated by the mystique of the Sentinelese people,” the police said, adding that the authorities had extracted footage from his GoPro camera.

The police statement said that the Ministry of External Affairs and the United States Embassy had been informed of the arrest.

A State Department spokesperson said that the department was “aware of reports of the detention of a U.S. citizen in India” but had no further comment because of privacy issues.

Mr. Polyakov’s family members could not be reached.

Mr. Polyakov has recorded his travel exploits on his YouTube channel, which includes videos of him in what he described as “Taliban-controlled Afghanistan,” some of which involve posing with and firing weapons.

The police said he had made previous trips to the remote region. In October, hotel staff stopped his attempt to go to North Sentinel Island using an inflatable kayak, the police said. In January, he reached Baratang Island, in the archipelago, and “illegally videographed” another tribe, the Jarawa, the police said.

Survival International, a group that protects the rights of Indigenous tribal peoples around the world, said that Mr. Polyakov’s attempted contact with the tribal people of North Sentinel was “reckless and idiotic.”

“This person’s actions not only endangered his own life, they put the lives of the entire Sentinelese tribe at risk,” the group’s director, Caroline Pearce, said in a statement. “It’s very well known by now that uncontacted peoples have no immunity to common outside diseases like flu or measles, which could completely wipe them out.”

She said it was disturbing that he was able to reach the island at all.

“The Indian authorities have a legal responsibility to ensure that the Sentinelese are safe from missionaries, social media influencers, people fishing illegally in their waters and anyone else who may try to make contact with them,” she said.

Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday that Russia is running out of time to convince the Trump administration that it is serious about striking a peace deal with Ukraine and not just playing for time.

Speaking in Brussels after a two-day gathering of NATO ministers, Mr. Rubio said that the United States was losing patience with “talks about talks” and hinted that Russia was in danger of facing more American sanctions.

“We will know soon enough, in a matter of weeks, not months, whether Russia is serious about peace or not,” he told reporters. Members of Congress, he added, are already crafting new sanctions measures that administration officials are “not going to be able to stop” without signs of progress.

President Trump has vowed to end the war in Ukraine and is mediating talks between Moscow and Kyiv. Many observers had assumed that Russia would embrace such a deal and Ukraine would resist it, given that Russia occupies about one-fifth of its neighbor and has suffered staggering casualties.

But Mr. Rubio’s remarks were the latest sign that the Trump administration is coming around to a view long held by the Biden administration, and by Mr. Rubio himself when he was a Florida senator: that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia does not bargain in good faith.

Many analysts say the Russian leader is stalling for time to press his military and political advantage.

Mr. Rubio spoke after a NATO gathering whose collegial photo-ops and press statements masked deep tensions between America and Europe over Ukraine, Mr. Trump’s market-rocking tariffs and even the fate of Greenland.

Mr. Rubio also conveyed Mr. Trump’s expectation that NATO members dramatically increase spending on their militaries to 5 percent of their gross domestic product — a tough pill for Europe to swallow as Mr. Trump’s tariffs threaten its economy.

In remarks to reporters, Mr. Rubio defended Mr. Trump’s tariffs as necessary, but soft-pedaled the timeline for increased military spending as “a path of getting up to 5 percent at some point.” He said that other NATO members were “open to doing more” to make the alliance stronger and less reliant on the United States.

A senior State Department official acknowledged that the tariffs had come up when Mr. Rubio met with his fellow ministers to discuss Ukraine. But the official, speaking on background to discuss private diplomacy, insisted that the mood in the room had been collegial.

There were reasons to believe that U.S. officials hoped to smooth over the obvious tensions during the event, however.

After Mr. Rubio met on Thursday with Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, a bland State Department summary characterized the meeting as a “reaffirmation” of the U.S.-Denmark relationship. It made no mention of Greenland, the semiautonomous Danish territory that Mr. Trump has vowed to control by any means necessary.

But Mr. Rasmussen said in a pointed social media post that he had “made it crystal clear” to Mr. Rubio “that claims and statements about annexing Greenland are not only unacceptable and disrespectful. They amount to a violation of international law.”

In response on Friday, Mr. Rubio suggested that the United States would not need to seize Greenland because the island’s people, he said, already want to leave Denmark. “We didn’t give them that idea,” he said. “They’ve been talking about that for a long time.”

While it is true that Greenland has been on a path toward full independence, there is little sign that it hopes to become an American property.

Despite Mr. Trump’s talk that a peace deal in Ukraine could unlock a new U.S.-Russia relationship, the Kremlin has agreed only to very partial cease-fire terms, including a mutual pause on attacks against energy infrastructure sites which neither side has observed.

Still, European governments worry that Mr. Trump — an admirer of Mr. Putin and frequent critic of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky — may prioritize Russia’s interests in any peace agreement, and they are pressing their own efforts to protect Ukraine.

On Friday, French and British military leaders visited Kyiv to discuss a potential troop deployment to secure any cease-fire, the French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, told journalists in Brussels.

The discussions in Ukraine’s General Staff headquarters had been expected to focus on technical issues for such a peacekeeping force, Col. Pavlo Palisa, Mr. Zelensky’s top military adviser, told journalists earlier in the week. Such a deployment would serve both as a deterrent and guarantee the presence of allied military equipment such as air defenses, he added.

The Kremlin says it will not tolerate troops from NATO member nations in Ukraine.

In Brussels, Mr. Rubio also denied that the Trump administration’s shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development had prevented American disaster relief from quickly reaching Myanmar after the devastating earthquake there last week.

Mr. Rubio blamed the delay on Myanmar’s junta, without citing evidence, and said that other wealthy nations, including China and India, should contribute more. “We are the richest country in the world, but our resources are not unlimited,” he said.

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.

The cease-fire between Israel and Hamas collapsed last month, and the dead and wounded again pour into the hospital. The injured are triaged at a tent in the hospital’s courtyard, set up to relieve the pressure on the packed emergency room inside.

When people arrive, medical workers sort them into three categories: green, yellow and red. Those classified green are given basic treatment, like bandages, and are sent on their way. Yellow means treatment is required in the hospital. Red indicates an urgent case that requires immediate care, possibly surgery.

But nurses and doctors can only do so much. There is still a severe shortage of medical supplies and equipment — one of Gaza’s two CT scanners broke down there on Thursday — and many of the injured require extensive treatment.

Children are especially vulnerable to the injuries that can be caused by explosions in Gaza’s dense living conditions, experts say. Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which began after Hamas led the October 2023 attack that started the war, has packed even more people into close quarters around the territory as it has displaced people from neighborhoods and towns.

Many have fled to crowded encampments in the south or to schools converted into shelters, like the one hit in Gaza City on Thursday. At least 27 people were killed in the strike, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its casualty figures. Israel, as well as Palestinian civilians, have accused Hamas of embedding its forces in civilian spaces, including shelters and hospitals.

Videos verified by The New York Times showed an explosion and its aftermath at the shelter, the Dar al-Arqam school in the Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City. The videos showed people carrying victims, children among them, as fires burned in the background.

The Israeli military said on Thursday that it was looking into reports about the strike. As of Friday morning, it said it still could not comment.

President Trump and Europe are clashing over tariffs, the war in Ukraine and the very purpose of the European Union’s existence. But they are also divided over free speech — with potentially far-reaching implications for how the digital world is regulated.

The E.U. has been investigating U.S. companies under the Digital Services Act, a new law meant to prevent illegal content and disinformation from spreading online. In the first major case to near a conclusion, regulators as soon as this summer are expected to impose significant penalties — including a fine and demands for product changes — on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, saying the law was violated.

But Mr. Trump’s administration sees the law as a strike against his version of free speech: One that unshackles his allies to say what they want online, but restricts types of expression he does not agree with in the real world, like protests at universities.

The president has argued that Europe is at risk of “losing their wonderful right to freedom of speech.” Vice President JD Vance has accused European nations of “digital censorship” because of its laws, which he argues restricts far-right voices on the internet.

And both administration officials and their allies at big technology companies have suggested that Europe’s rules for curbing disinformation and incendiary speech on the internet are an attack on American companies — one that the United States could fight back against.

Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Europe and the United States have clashed repeatedly. On Ukraine, Mr. Trump has dialed back support and threatened not to defend European nations that do not invest enough in their own security. On trade, Mr. Trump this week announced wide-ranging tariffs on Europe. And as European regulators begin to enforce their new social media rules, free speech is becoming another flashpoint.

“We’re now at this impasse: The free speech debate is affecting every aspect of the trans-Atlantic relationship,” said David Salvo, a researcher at the German Marshall Fund who is an expert in democracy building. “It’s a mess.”

Even before the 2024 election, Mr. Vance argued in a podcast that America could consider tying its support for NATO to “respect” for American values and free speech. In February, Mr. Vance spoke at the security conference in Munich and warned that “free speech, I fear, is in retreat.”

Such comments come even as the American administration has itself quarreled with universities over speech on their campuses, arrested pro-Palestinian activists, ousted journalists from the White House press pool, canceled identity-related holidays at federal institutions and instituted policies that led to banned books in certain schools — moves that have alarmed free speech watchdogs.

And in Europe, officials have firmly objected to criticism of their laws, arguing that they help protect free speech, for instance by making sure that some ideas are not secretly promoted by platforms even as others are suppressed.

“We’re not a Ministry of Truth,” said Thomas Regnier, a spokesman for the European Union’s executive branch, the European Commission, referring to the dystopian force responsible for state propaganda in George Orwell’s “1984.”

Still, some fret that Europe’s latest policies surrounding digital services could come under attack. In February, the White House published a memo warning that E.U. tech laws were being scrutinized for unfairly targeting American companies.

“Of course our feeling is that they will use tariffs to push us to backtrack on tech regulation,” said Anna Cavazzini, an German representative from the Green party who was part of a trip to Washington for European lawmakers to meet with their American counterparts on the issues of digital policy and speech.

The tension goes back decades. Europe has long preferred more guardrails for speech, while America prioritizes personal rights over almost everything but immediate public safety. Germany has outlawed certain speech related to Nazism, while other countries restrict certain forms of hate speech toward religious groups. In Denmark, it is illegal to burn the Quran.

But while those nuanced differences have long existed, the internet and social media have now made the issue a geopolitical pressure point. And that has been sharply exacerbated by the new administration.

The Digital Services Act does not disallow specific content, but it requires companies to have safeguards in place to remove content that is illegal based on national or international laws, and focuses on whether content moderation decisions are made in a transparent way.

“This is a question about how to make sure that your services are safe to use and respecting the law of the land where you do your business,” said Margrethe Vestager, a former European Commission executive vice president from Denmark who oversaw antitrust and digital policy from 2014 to 2024.

Christel Schaldemose, who shepherded the law through negotiations for the European Parliament, said the law protects free speech. She added, “You don’t have a right to be amplified.”

The case against X will be the first major test of the law. In the first part of the investigation that regulators are now finalizing, authorities have concluded that X has breached the act because of its lack of oversight of its verified account system, its weak advertising transparency and its failure to provide data to outside researchers.

In another part of the case, E.U. authorities are investigating whether X’s hands-off approach to policing user-generated content has made it a hub of illegal hate speech, disinformation and other material that might undercut democracy.

This week, X said the E.U.’s actions amounted to “an unprecedented act of political censorship and an attack on free speech.”

E.U. officials have had to weigh the geopolitical ramifications of targeting a company owned by one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers.

“Are they going to fine the guy who’s buddy-buddy with the President?” said William Echikson, a nonresident senior fellow with the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

X is not the only major tech company in the conversation.

Meta, which is also under E.U. investigation, scrapped its use of fact checkers for Facebook, Instagram and Threads in the United States shortly after the election, and may eventually pull them back worldwide. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, has called the E.U.’s regulations “censorship” and argued that the United States should defend its technology companies against the onslaught.

This is not the first time America and Europe have had different standards for speech on the internet. European courts have upheld the idea that data about a person can be erased from the internet, the so-called “right to be forgotten.” American legal experts and policymakers have viewed that as an infringement on free speech.

But the alliance between Mr. Trump and big technology companies — which have been emboldened by his election — is widening the gap.

European officials have vowed that the Trump administration will not prevent them from standing by their values and enforcing their new legislation. The next few months will be a pivotal test of just how much they can stick to those plans.

When she visited Washington earlier this year to talk to lawmakers, Ms. Schaldemose said, she found little appetite for trying to understand the regulation that she helped to bring into existence.

“It doesn’t fit into the agenda of the administration: It doesn’t help them to understand,” she said. “We’re not targeting them, but it is perceived like that.”