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Thousands of innocent people killed. Tens of thousands more pro-democracy protesters locked up. The return of military rule has wreaked havoc in Myanmar in recent years.

Now the junta is growing increasingly brutal as a rebel uprising has gained ground in the countryside.

It has put new effort into imprisoning dissidents and the men and women who refuse to join its forces. And it is meting out increasingly lethal treatment to those already in custody. In the first two months of the year, more than 100 prisoners perished, either from torture or neglect, human rights groups and former detainees say. Conditions in military-run prisons have deteriorated further, they say, with prisoners being deprived of food, proper sanitation and health care, and facing horrific torture.

“Since November, conditions have been getting worse and worse,” said Myar Reh, a pro-democracy student activist who was released from a prison in Karenni State in January after being held for nearly three years. “They punched me in the face, hit me with the butt of the gun. My whole body was covered in blood. They also threatened to shoot me in the head, and shot live rounds beside my head.”

Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the military spokesman, did not respond to requests for comment.

In February, the military announced a mandatory draft, in a sign it was on the defensive. That order could be used as a pretext by the military to launch a new campaign of arrests because anyone resisting conscription faces up to five years in prison.

The junta has said that it will start clearing out prisons, releasing thousands of detainees. But any such freedom is likely to be temporary: Rights groups point out that last year, the junta made similar “amnesties,” but soon went on to rearrest many of those released.

One rights group, Myanmar Witness, said it had studied satellite photographs that suggested that whole new prison complexes were being built, and that new buildings were going up near existing prisons.

For those who remain in the military’s hands, detention can be lethal. Ko Yar Shin, 43, who was beaten in prison and denied proper and timely health care, succumbed to his injuries in January, according to the Human Rights Foundation of Monland, a pro-democracy group of the ethnic Mon people of Myanmar. Ko Pyae Phyo Aung, 31, who had an unexplained stomach illness, also died in January under similar circumstances, it said. Both had been arrested by the junta for protesting its rule.

They are among the nearly 120 dissidents who died in the military’s custody in the first two months of this year, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), which tracks detentions and uses Myanmar’s former name. That compares with 602 similar fatalities last year.

Since the coup in February 2021, more than 1,500 people have died in the junta’s detention, according to the group. The current regime, it said, has tortured dozens of detainees to death. It estimates more than 20,000 people remain in the junta’s custody, while the civilian death toll has surpassed 4,500.

The governing military, known as the Tatmadaw, has long been known for bombing civilians, using them as human shields, persecuting minorities like the Rohingya people and torturing pro-democracy activists. It briefly allowed a democratically elected government under Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to share power before seizing full authority again three years ago.

“The military in Burma never stopped using torture in its decades-long existence as an institution,” said U Bo Kyi, the joint secretary of the A.A.P.P. “I was tortured by the military when I was arrested and sentenced as a political prisoner in the 1988 uprising.”

The military is now facing its biggest challenge since the coup. While the rebels have notched significant victories and it remains to be seen whether the alliance can overthrow the junta, the military’s response has been clear.

In November, the rebels attacked military positions in Loikaw, the capital of Karenni State, taking large sections of the city. Some junta troops retreated to a prison complex for safety.

They “took away what food we had left,” said Saw Eh Htaw Nay Sweet, 27, who was released in February. “This is when the conditions started getting much worse. And because we were political prisoners, they treated us badly. There was almost no clean food at all, it was like eating cat food.”

The armed conflict in Loikaw presents a new danger to detainees. “Political prisoners feel like they are hostages or human shields, used by the military at the cost of their lives,” Mr. Bo Kyi of A.A.P.P. said.

For many pro-democracy protesters detained by the military, the first stop is a so-called interrogation center. They are often taken there and tortured before they are formally arrested and thrown into prison.

“So much of this ill treatment happens in the interrogation centers even before they arrive at the prisons,” said Nai Aue Mon, the program director for the Monland rights group.

Sai Lin Oo, who spent more than two and a half years in the Loikaw prison, was set free in October.

“I was so lucky because I was released before Operation 1111,” he said, referring to the rebel attack launched in November. “But there are still 150 political prisoners in Loikaw prison today.”

By the time President Biden hung up the phone, he had finally delivered the threat he had refused to make for months: Israel had to change course, he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or the United States would.

But as the conversation ended on Thursday, aides to Mr. Biden said, the president had reason to hope that the message had gotten through and that he would not have to carry out his threat after all.

During the call, Mr. Biden outlined several specific commitments he wanted Israel to make to avoid losing his support for the war against Hamas. Rather than pushing back, according to people informed about the call, Mr. Netanyahu promised that he would announce more humanitarian aid for Gaza within hours and signaled that he would respond to Mr. Biden’s other demands in days to come.

Mr. Netanyahu’s government followed through later that night, authorizing the opening of a key port and another land crossing for food and other supplies. The White House expects Israel to soon issue new military procedures to avoid killing civilians and relief workers, and administration officials will be watching carefully this weekend when Israeli negotiators join William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, and Egyptian and Qatari intermediaries in Cairo to try again to broker a temporary cease-fire.

Whether it will be enough to avoid the rupture that Mr. Biden never wanted in the first place remains uncertain. Administration officials insisted that the president’s threat was not an idle one and that he was “very strident,” as one described him, in making his points to Mr. Netanyahu. At the same time, officials said, Mr. Biden did not specifically threaten to limit or cut off U.S. arms supplies during the call, as some Democrats have urged him to do, nor did he set a deadline for Israeli action. The “or else” remained unclear and undefined.

“Biden has put Netanyahu on probation,” said Aaron David Miller, a longtime Middle East peace negotiator now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The president “doesn’t want to fight and has given him a test he can pass, certainly on humanitarian assistance and perhaps on negotiations with Hamas. U.S. red lines have a way of turning pink. The only question is: Does Netanyahu want to fight?”

At least some in Israel suspect that he does not. Just as Mr. Biden can now tell restive members of his party that he is taking the stronger stance they have pushed him to take, Mr. Netanyahu may be able to use the heat from Washington to make changes that would otherwise be politically problematic for him.

“By signaling a potential shift in U.S. policy toward Israel, President Biden provided Prime Minister Netanyahu with the leverage to overcome the right-wing radicals in his government and secure its approval of a major increase in humanitarian aid for Gaza,” said Michael B. Oren, a former deputy minister under Mr. Netanyahu and Israeli ambassador to the United States.

None of which means that the two sides are certain to avoid a climactic clash. Their respective outlooks, goals and political pressures regarding the war against Hamas are significantly different. Mr. Biden is ready for the war to be wrapped up as soon as possible, while Mr. Netanyahu has an interest in extending it. So many moments that looked like turning points over the last six months have proved illusory.

But the hope at the White House is the president may have bought some room to maneuver. On Friday, officials welcomed the initial Israeli announcements on humanitarian aid as evidence that Mr. Biden has been able to deliver.

“We have seen some welcome announcements from the Israelis,” John F. Kirby, a White House national security spokesman, told reporters on a briefing call. “They have acted on the president’s requests coming out of that call. You’re starting to see it for yourself.”

Even so, Mr. Kirby was careful not to declare victory. “These were just announcements,” he said. “We’ve got to see results. We’ve got to see sustainable deliverables here over time. It’s not enough just to announce it, but they have moved on some of the very specific requests that the president made.”

In his only public comments since the call, Mr. Biden did little to elaborate on his thinking. Asked by reporters before he boarded Marine One for a trip to Baltimore if he had threatened to cut off military aid if Israel did not respond to his concerns, the president said simply, “I asked them to do what they’re doing.” But he scoffed at the notion that he might be abandoning Israel. “Is that a serious question?” he said.

Some Republican critics accused him of just that. “The president’s ultimatums should be going to Hamas, not Israel,” Speaker Mike Johnson wrote on social media. “Hamas resisted a ceasefire, brought about needless bloodshed, and refuses to release Israeli and American hostages. Biden should not undercut our ally amidst an existential threat by conditioning our support.”

On the other side of the aisle, at least some Democrats were not convinced that Mr. Biden had gone far enough. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia praised the president for persuading the Israelis to facilitate more humanitarian relief. “But this was an obvious solution that should have happened months ago,” he said in a statement.

“The current approach is not working,” he added. The Biden administration should “prioritize the transfer of defensive weapons in all arms sales to Israel while withholding bombs and other offensive weapons that can kill and wound civilians and humanitarian aid workers.”

Mr. Biden’s threat to Mr. Netanyahu was prompted by the killing of seven relief workers for World Central Kitchen this week, which Mr. Kirby said left the president “shaken.” Israel forwarded the results of its investigation to the United States on Friday and removed or reprimanded five military officers involved in the strike, but neither move satisfied critics who called for an independent inquiry. Mr. Kirby said American officials will “review it carefully” before passing judgment on the Israeli investigation.

“This incident and the call between Biden and Bibi may represent an important shift in the order of priorities, with civilian protection and humanitarian aid rising higher,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname. “But it remains to be seen what effect this will have. We have to see how this all unfolds in the next few weeks.”

The extent of American influence on Israel’s conduct of the war is complicated. Mr. Biden has repeatedly defended Israel’s right to respond to the Hamas terrorist attack that killed an estimated 1,200 people on Oct. 7. But with the reported death toll in Gaza topping 32,000, Mr. Biden in recent weeks increasingly complained that Israel’s military operation has been “over the top,” as he once termed it.

He has particularly warned Israel against sending troops into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than one million refugees are sheltering from the war, without a credible plan to protect civilians. Mr. Netanyahu has unabashedly defied Mr. Biden in public, declaring that he planned to move against Rafah to pursue Hamas leaders regardless of American pressure. But some two months have passed and he has not done so yet, pending further consultations with Americans.

Khaled Elgindy, a former adviser to Palestinian leaders in past peace talks with Israelis, said Mr. Biden’s shift was notable if belated. “The tone of the president’s statement is definitely more terse and stern than what we’ve heard before,” he said. The linkage between U.S. policy and Israeli changes “is very different from what we regularly hear” from Biden administration officials about not telling a sovereign state what to do.

“Well, it seems we are telling them what to do now,” Mr. Elgindy said. “That said, it’s not clear exactly what the ‘or else’ will be. Will they actually withhold military aid? I have my doubts. Might they allow a more forceful cease-fire resolution” at the United Nations Security Council? “Possibly.”

Frank Lowenstein, a former special envoy for Middle East peace under President Barack Obama, said the killing of the World Central Kitchen workers provoked a visceral reaction in Mr. Biden.

“Biden was clearly angry enough to actually get Bibi’s attention,” he said. “But the jury is still out on whether anything has actually changed for us or the Israelis. At this point, it is still mostly rhetoric. Bibi’s political pendulum has temporarily swung from pandering to the extremists in his coalition to placating Biden.”

But the moves announced so far, Mr. Lowenstein added, “are really baby steps that will not meaningfully change the horrific conditions for civilians in Gaza. And it would be typical of Bibi to announce the minimum steps necessary to avoid significant consequences, then slow roll implementation after the heat has died down.”

Iran vowed on Friday to avenge Israel’s killing of senior commanders and other officers of its elite Quds Force, at a public funeral held for the dead men, elevating fears of open war but leaving unsaid how it would retaliate or when.

U.S. officials in Washington and the Middle East said on Friday that they were bracing for possible Iranian retaliation for the Israeli airstrike on Monday in Damascus, Syria. U.S. military forces in the region have been placed on heightened alert. Israel has also placed its military on high alert, according to an Israeli official, canceled leave for combat units, recalled some reservists to air defense units and blocked GPS signals.

Two Iranian officials who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly said that Iran had placed all its armed forces on full high alert and that a decision had been made that Iran must respond directly to the Damascus attack to create deterrence.

“Our brave men will punish the Zionist regime,” Gen. Hossein Salami, the commander in chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, told the crowd in Tehran attending the funeral of the officers killed in Damascus. “We warn that no act by any enemy against our holy system will go unanswered and the art of the Iranian nation is to break the power of empires.”

The Israeli airstrike hit a building that was part of the Iranian embassy complex in Damascus, killing three generals and four other officers of the Quds Force. The force, an arm of the Revolutionary Guards, conducts military and intelligence operations outside Iran, often working closely with allies that oppose Israel and the United States, including Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas.

Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Amir Saeed Iravani, said on Thursday that he would give interviews to U.S. news outlets “after Iran’s response to Israel.”

There are precedents for a forceful response by Iran. Four years ago, after the United States killed the chief of the Quds Force, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran fired missiles at U.S. bases in Iraq, injuring more than 100 troops.

Though its proxy militias around the Middle East have launched a number of attacks on Israel since the war between Israel and Hamas began on Oct. 7, Iran has taken care to avoid a direct conflict that could lead to full-fledged war.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, delivered a video speech that was broadcast in Iran and in Lebanon during the funeral, saying that a response from Iran could come any time and that “we must be prepared for all eventualities.”

“Be certain that the Iranian response to the targeting in Damascus is inevitably coming,” Mr. Nasrallah said.

In the past few months, Israel has killed at least 18 members of the Quds Force, among them four senior commanders who were veterans of Middle East wars, according to Iranian media. But the airstrike in Damascus was far out of the ordinary, both in killing so many senior figures at once and in hitting a diplomatic building, normally considered off limits in conflicts. Israeli officials said the building functioned as a Revolutionary Guards base and so was a legitimate target.

The building housed the official residence of Iran’s ambassador to Syria, who said on state television that he and his family had left the building when it was hit.

The final decision on a matter as important as a strike against Israel rests with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is also the commander in chief of the armed forces. It was Mr. Khamenei who ordered the 2020 attack in retaliation for the killing of General Suleimani.

U.S. military analysts assess that it is more likely that Iran would strike Israel itself than that it would have its proxies attack U.S. troops in the region, including in Iraq and Syria, as they did more than 170 times in the four months after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 assault against Israel. Those attacks against American targets stopped in early February, but Pentagon officials said they were watching the situation closely.

An Israeli defense official said that Israeli analysts had reached the same conclusion, that Iran itself would attack and not act through Hezbollah, its closest militant ally, which has been engaging in regular exchanges of fire with Israeli forces since the war began.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, before a security cabinet meeting about a potential Iranian attack, said on Thursday, “We will know how to defend ourselves and we will act according to the simple principle of whoever harms us or plans to harm us — we will harm them.”

Lt. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, the top U.S. Air Force commander in the Middle East, told the Defense Writers Group in Washington this week.: “From a military perspective, the biggest concern that I have is, does this lead to some sort of regional escalation? We’re watching very carefully, we’re listening to what the Iranians are saying in terms of how they intend to respond.”

“I do continue to assess that the Iranians are not interested in a broader regional conflict,” he added. “They want to take advantage of the crisis as it exists, but they’re not interested in war with Israel, war with the United States or war with anybody else right now.”

The funeral ceremony in Tehran on Friday coincided with the annual Quds Day rally, a show of solidarity with Palestinians held on the last Friday of Ramadan in many Muslim countries. The crowd chanted, “Death to Israel,” and “Death to America,” and waved the Palestinian flag. In videos shown on state news media, an angry crowd stomped on an effigy of Mr. Netanyahu.

The Quds Day rally, held in many cities across Iran, draws families with children and usually has a carnival-like atmosphere. But this year, the event appeared to be more somber, overshadowed by the funeral, the heightened tensions with Israel and fears that a response from Iran could start a war between the two countries.

Iran’s president, Ibrahim Raisi, and the commander in chief of the Quds Force, General Ismail Ghaani, who was dressed in black civilian clothes rather than in uniform, marched with the crowd of mourners in Tehran, state media showed. Also present were Ziyad al-Nakhaleh, the leader of the Islamic Palestinian Jihad, and Abu Fadak al-Muhammadawi the head of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, a Shia militia aligned with Iran.

The coffins of the slain Quds Force officers, draped with the flag of Iran and placed on the back of trucks adorned with flowers and green leaves, slowly snaked down a long road in downtown Tehran, where thousands of people had gathered.

The night before, the coffins were taken to the residential compound of Mr. Khamenei, the supreme leader, and laid in an open hall where he performed the Muslim prayer for the dead over them. The ayatollah typically does such honors only for very close associates and senior officials who have been declared “martyrs” because they were killed by Israel or the United States.

Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting.

The body of a third construction worker who died in the catastrophic collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore was found on Friday morning, officials said.

The man, identified as 38-year-old Maynor Yasir Suazo Sandoval, was discovered by divers, according to a release from local authorities.

“The collapse of the Key Bridge is undoubtedly one of the most challenging tragedies we have faced as a law enforcement agency,” Col. Roland L. Butler Jr., superintendent of the Maryland state police, said in a statement announcing the recovery. “Along with our local, state and federal public safety partners, we will not give up.”

Mr. Suazo Sandoval’s body was found around 10:30 a.m., officials said, just hours before President Biden visited the site of the disaster and met with victims’ families. The bodies of three more victims have yet to be recovered more than a week after the bridge collapsed into the Patapsco River.

“While I take solace in knowing this brings us one step closer to closure, my heart continues to be with all the families still waiting anxiously for their loved ones,” Mayor Brandon Scott said in a statement.

The men were part of a construction crew working on the Baltimore roadway before dawn on March 26 when a gigantic cargo ship rammed into the bridge. Two workers survived the destruction, but six disappeared into the dark water. They were presumed dead by the evening.

A day later, two of their bodies were found inside of a red pickup underwater. But efforts to locate the other victims have been severely hampered by the colossal underwater wreckage.

Divers have been sifting through the ruins of the bridge, but they can barely see two feet in front of them as they navigate heaps of mangled steel and piles of crumbled concrete in murky water. With help from sonar renderings, they are working to survey and salvage the wreckage to ultimately clear the channel — a daunting project, of which recovering victims is only one part.

Still, “the recovery is not an afterthought,” Col. Estee S. Pinchasin of the Army Corps of Engineers said at a news conference on Thursday. “It’s integrated in that plan.”

The six men who died have been named by the authorities, relatives or advocacy organizations: In addition to Mr. Suazo Sandoval, who was from Honduras, the victims were Jose López, who was in his 30s and from Guatemala; Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, 35, who was from Mexico; Carlos Hernández, 24, from Mexico; Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, 26, from Guatemala; and Miguel Luna, who was in his 40s and from El Salvador. The bodies of Mr. Fuentes and Mr. Cabrera were recovered on March 27.

The men were working late at night to ensure that thousands of other Marylanders could use the Key Bridge to commute to their own jobs. “And they never came home,” said Lucía Islas, a community leader and president of Comité Latino de Baltimore, a nonprofit that assists the Hispanic community.

“They hailed from communities that have gone long overlooked and underappreciated,” Gov. Wes Moore said in a statement on Friday. “But their work had dignity — and their contributions will never be forgotten.”

In the days since the collapse, friends and relatives of the victims have been preoccupied with unanswered questions, said Donna Batkis, a clinical social worker in Baltimore who has helped the victims’ families.

The families of the men whose bodies have not been found have been left to wonder where their loved ones are. “Waiting is a very hard space to be in,” Ms. Batkis said.

It was only a matter of time before a college would have the nerve to quote its cost of attendance at nearly $100,000 a year. This spring, we’re catching our first glimpse of it.

One letter to a newly admitted Vanderbilt University engineering student showed an all-in price — room, board, personal expenses, a high-octane laptop — of $98,426. A student making three trips home to Los Angeles or London from the Nashville campus during the year could hit six figures.

This eye-popping sum is an anomaly. Only a tiny fraction of college-going students will pay anything close to this anytime soon, and about 35 percent of Vanderbilt students — those who get neither need-based nor merit aid — pay the full list price.

But a few dozen other colleges and universities that reject the vast majority of applicants will probably arrive at this threshold within a few years. Their willingness to cross it raises two questions for anyone shopping for college: How did this happen, and can it possibly be worth it?

Who Pays What

According to the College Board, the average 2023-24 list price for tuition, fees, housing and food was $56,190 at private, nonprofit four-year schools. At four-year public colleges, in-state students saw an average $24,030 sticker price.

That’s not what many people pay, though, not even close. As of the 2019-20 school year, according to federal data that the College Board used in a 2023 report, 39 percent of in-state students attending two-year colleges full time received enough grant aid to cover all of their tuition and fees (though not their living expenses, which can make getting through school enormously difficult). At four-year public schools, 31 percent paid nothing for tuition and fees while 18 percent of students at private colleges and universities qualified for the same deal.

Those private colleges continue to provide hefty discounts for people of all sorts of incomes. A National Association of College and University Business Officers study showed private nonprofit colleges and universities lowering their tuition prices by 56 percent from the rack rate during the 2022-23 school year.

Vanderbilt provides discounts, too, and its financial aid is extraordinarily generous. This year, it announced that families with income of $150,000 or less would pay no tuition in most instances.

Still, over 2,000 students there who get no need-based or merit aid will soon pay $100,000 or more. Why does Vanderbilt need all of that money?

Where the Money Goes

At a few small liberal arts colleges with enormous endowments, even $100,000 would not cover the average cost of educating a student, according to the schools. Williams College says it spends roughly $50,000 more per student than its list price, for instance.

In other words, everyone is getting a subsidy. Perhaps its list price should be over $100,000, too, so that its endowment is not offering unneeded help to wealthy families. Or, perhaps, a price that high would scare away low-income applicants who do not realize that they might get a free ride there.

According to Vanderbilt, its spending per undergraduate is $119,000. “The gap between the price and cost of attendance is funded by our endowment and the generous philanthropy of donors and alumni,” Brett Sweet, vice chancellor for finance, said in an emailed statement.

No one at the school would meet with me to break this figure down or get on the phone to talk about it. But Vanderbilt’s financial statements offer clues to how it spends money. In the 2023 fiscal year, 52 percent of its operating expenses went to faculty, staff and student salaries and wages, plus fringe benefits.

Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman, two academics who wrote “Why Does College Cost So Much?,” explained in their book why labor costs were so tricky at these institutions.

“The critical factors are that higher education is a personal service, that it has not experienced much labor-saving productivity growth, and that the wages of the highly educated workers so important at colleges and universities have soared,” they said. “These are economywide factors. They have little to do with any pathology in higher education.”

Critics of the industry still believe that a kind of administrative bloat has set in, driving up tuition with outsize salaries. But what is bloat, really?

Administrators oversee compliance, like the laws that have made it possible for disabled people to get to and through college and keep schools from discriminating against women. If we don’t like regulation, we can vote for different legislators.

Similarly, families in a free market can make alternative choices if they want fewer mental health practitioners and their bosses, computer network administrators, academic advisers or career counselors. And yet the first (prescreened) question that Vanderbilt’s chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, answered on family weekend this past fall was about whether Vanderbilt should invest even more in career advising in the wake of the school’s five-spot decline in the annual U.S. News rankings.

Is It Worth It?

If many families are not exactly lining up for a cut-rate residential undergraduate education, they’re still asking plenty of good questions about value. So is a $400,000 college education ever worth it?

It depends, and you knew that answer was coming, right?

Most college shoppers wonder about income outcomes, and it’s possible to search by undergraduate major on the federal government’s College Scorecard website. This program-level data exists for alumni who are four years out from graduation, though only for those who received any federal financial aid.

Vanderbilt’s biomedical/medical engineering majors have median earnings of $94,340 four years out. English language and literature majors are earning $53,767.

Those are fine results, but are they exclusive to Vanderbilt? “You could get an engineering degree at a state flagship university that’s just as valuable as something you’d get at Vanderbilt,” said Julian Treves, a financial adviser and college specialist whose newsletter tipped me off to the goings-on there.

I spent a few days trying to get Vanderbilt’s vice provost for university enrollment affairs, Douglas L. Christiansen, to talk to me and answer these questions squarely and more expansively, but I did not succeed. A university spokeswoman sent me some generalities in his name. “We are committed to excellence at all levels, from the quality of our faculty, programming, facilities and research labs to the services we provide to support the academic, emotional and social well-being of our students,” went the statement.

In anticipation of the absence of a substantive reply, I attended a group information session for 125 or so prospective students and asked there, too. The senior admissions officer who took the question refused to answer. I’d never seen that before, and I’ve been to these sessions at dozens of schools over the years.

But really, why should an actor in a competitive marketplace answer that question if the person doesn’t absolutely have to? Without publicly available, industrywide quantitative data on quality — happiness scores, customer satisfaction, measures of learning, return on friendship, the strength of career networks — the list price alone serves as a signal of excellence, to some shoppers at least.

And thousands of applicants respond to the signal each year by volunteering to pay the list price, even as the school rejects the vast majority of applicants. Or maybe they volunteer precisely because Vanderbilt and schools like it reject the vast majority of applicants.

So a $100,000 list price is not our highest-priority outrage. The spectacle of wealthy people freely purchasing luxury services is nothing new, even if it is a totally worthy object of scrutiny (and an understudied phenomenon by academics themselves, ahem).

What is a problem, then? Brent Joseph Evans, an associate professor of public policy and higher education at Vanderbilt’s college of education and human development, started his career as an admissions officer at the University of Virginia. There, he sold the institution to boarding school students in New England and teenagers in the Appalachian foothills.

The former group might pay $100,000 per year, though many of them won’t get into the Vanderbilts of the world in the first place. They will surely find their way somewhere.

But that latter group? Professor Evans is worried about their access to any school at all.

“We should care about whether they get into a state university system at a low cost and find a well-paying career that can keep them in the middle class,” he said. “I do think that sometimes any tension over what elite colleges are doing moves us away from what we should be caring about as a society.”

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when we reached peak chile crisp in the United States, but if you were to inspect my kitchen today you’d see, alongside an old jar of Lao Gan Ma — years ago, the only chile crisp I could easily find in the food shops nearby — at least a half-dozen others.

While each jar contains a spicy crimson sediment under oil, some have the sweetness of star anise, while others are deepened with tiny dried shrimp or fried shallots. Some have the delicate crunch of fried sesame seeds, garlic or crushed peanuts, or the mouth-numbing tingle of Sichuan peppercorns.

Some of these preparations are rooted in regional Chinese or diasporic traditions, family customs or someone’s idiosyncratic taste, and each is different from the others. (Yes, I really do need them all!)

You might call these condiments chile oil or chile crisp or chile crunch, and the truth is that I didn’t give the precise language of the category too much thought until Thursday.

That’s when The Guardian reported that Momofuku, the global culinary company founded by the celebrity chef David Chang, owned the trademark for the term “chile crunch” and was moving to protect it, while seeking similar trademark status for “chili crunch,” spelled with an “i.”

Momofuku has been sending cease-and-desist letters to other food companies that use either phrase in their marketing, and several have already stopped, fearing a costly legal fight, according to The Guardian.

But how can anyone presume to own the English translation for a basic condiment? Like mustard and mayonnaise, chile crunch might inspire feverish brand loyalty, but surely it’s impossible to own.

All kinds of battles play out in the condiment aisle, where immigrant foods are strategically packaged for American consumers. The more success a condiment finds and the more identifiable it becomes to consumers, the more intense these skirmishes become.

Perhaps the best-known recent branding tussle involved sriracha. Though Huy Fong Foods popularized its version of the squeezable chile sauce in the United States, David Tran, the company’s Vietnam-born owner, hadn’t trademarked the word, which he’d borrowed from Thai cooks.

By the time he realized its popularity, it was too late. Sriracha had leveled up. It was in fast-food restaurants and fine-dining and packaged foods and ramen. By then, “sriracha” had become a shared cultural reference point in the United States. For better or for worse, it didn’t belong to anyone.

Momofuku is a big company doing what big companies do, protecting its brand; it contends that its chile crunch is so distinctive and has become so well-known since it debuted in 2020 that it defines the term. Notably, it acquired the trademark for “chile crunch” in a legal settlement after a rival company accused it of trademark infringement, according to The Guardian. (Mr. Chang did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“It should never have been trademarked,” said Jing Gao, who owns the company Fly By Jing, whose Sichuan chile crisp helped popularize the condiment. “It’s a descriptive, generic, cultural term, but in Chinese, there are numerous ways of referring to sauces like these with tons of variations, regional styles and techniques.”

Chile crisp and chile crunch have become the American vernacular for all of them. Though Lao Gan Ma, with its recognizable red label, was one of the few commercialized versions of chile crisp available in the United States a decade ago, that condiment opened the door for a competitive, fast-growing category in the last few years.

Ownership seems antithetical to its pleasures. Chile crisp isn’t a precise condiment with a rigid definition, but one translation for an extended family of condiments with infinite variations, a basic template that seems to invite playfulness, variation and adaptation across kitchens.

At least five businesses that received letters from Momofuku have desisted, but not Homiah. Michelle Tew is the tiny company’s owner and only full-time employee, and Ms. Gao is an investor in it. Ms. Tew’s shrimp-rich chile sauce is a Malay product that she wasn’t sure how to market when she started raising funds through Kickstarter in 2021.

How could she translate her family’s condiment for American consumers? She settled on “sambal chile crunch” because it clicked for people and caused the least confusion.

“I’m going to chance it and see how it goes,” said Ms. Tew, whom Momofuku gave 90 days to respond. “If I don’t stand my ground, it would be a very successful strategy for Momofuku.”

Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.

The deadly Israeli strike on an aid convoy that killed seven workers for the relief group World Central Kitchen in the Gaza Strip shook official Washington this week. It prompted President Biden to issue his sharpest public criticism of Israel to date and spurred Israel’s military to make a rare admission of fault.

It also revealed the power of something that is usually an afterthought in national and global politics: food.

José Andrés, the celebrity chef who built World Central Kitchen from a scrappy outfit feeding hurricane victims to a $500 million relief organization operating in war zones, dialed up political pressure on both Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. He spoke directly with Biden, White House officials said on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, in an interview with Reuters, he accused the Israel Defense Forces of “systematically” attacking the three-car convoy.

On Thursday, Biden held a tense call with Netanyahu, threatening to place conditions on future support for the country. Hours later, Israel said it would permit more aid deliveries in Gaza. It also promised new steps to reduce civilian casualties and broker a temporary cease-fire in exchange for the release of hostages who are being held in Gaza by Hamas militants after they attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people.

I spoke with my colleague Kim Severson, a reporter who covers food for The New York Times and has written extensively about Andrés, about the celebrity chef’s political activism and why the deaths of these seven workers have drawn so much attention in a war that has already been so deadly. The interview was edited and condensed.

JB: We know José Andrés as a celebrity chef who brings relief efforts all over the world, and who doesn’t hesitate to wade into politics. How did his message evolve over the course of this week?

KS: He began the week by expressing heartbreak about the deaths, and urging Israel to open more land routes for food and medicine. But after the Israeli government said the deaths had been an accident, one that, according to Netanyahu, “happens in war,” he began to call it a targeted act. He was clearly trying to hold the Israeli government and, I think, the Biden administration to a degree, accountable for all this. His organization studied how the hits were done, and they were able to go back and retrace the approvals they got from the Israeli military before they started.

That’s when, I think, he really went into full José Andrés mode.

JB: What is “full José Andrés mode”? What kind of political activism have we seen from him before?

KS: Andrés fought with Donald Trump and his administration on numerous occasions, including when he backed out of a restaurant he had planned to open in a Trump-owned hotel after Trump used anti-immigrant rhetoric as a presidential candidate. He tangled with the Federal Emergency Management Agency over hurricane relief efforts he was part of, especially after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico in 2017.

What’s more, he’s a charismatic figure who owns lots of Washington restaurants and cuts a high profile there. He’s a presence in government in some really interesting ways that no other chef has ever been.

JB: It’s not completely new for chefs to engage in politics. You’ve written before about how Alice Waters, the California chef, talked the Clinton administration into planting a vegetable garden on the White House roof. But Andrés’s activism — and the way in which he seemed to shape policy both here and in Israel this week — goes way beyond that.

KS: There’s been a wave of chefs getting more politically involved. Tom Colicchio, the celebrity chef who co-founded the Gramercy Tavern in New York, has lobbied Congress around hunger and breaking the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s hold on the food system. Recently, the James Beard Foundation has put together boot camps specifically to train chefs on how to make political change in their communities. Andrés has been a model for it, and someone who has risen on this tide.

I think Biden realizes that Andrés is not somebody who’s going to be quiet about this — and actually knows a whole lot about how this is going.

JB: This war has been happening since October. Nearly 200 aid workers had already been killed in Gaza before these seven, according to the United Nations, as have more than 30,000 civilians, according to health officials in Gaza. Why do you think this particular attack has resonated so widely, politically?

KS: It’s really a curious thing. Aid was already fraught; there were reports of Palestinians drowning as they tried to retrieve military aid.

In the United States, José Andrés is a celebrity, someone who has a credible organization, someone who was one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2018. He’s well connected and wealthy, and he has a platform that he knows how to use.

No. 2 — and this is really key — what World Central Kitchen does is deliver meals cooked by chefs and people who know the local food. They’re delivering comfort food of the country to people, and it’s just such a simple and unbureaucratic mission. That’s something people can relate to, as well. They are cooking these meals, making thousands of pitas every day and handing them to people. They’re working in Gaza, and they’re working in Israel, too. It’s sort of pure in a philanthropic way, and you’ve got a dynamic celebrity at the head of it.

Read more from Kim:

How José Andrés and his corps of cooks became leaders in disaster aid

Among American chefs, the Israel-Hamas war has spread to food

Quote of the day

“You’re each going to have assignments of hundreds of people. Do you think wearing a MAGA hat attracts 50 percent of those people?”

— Tyler Bowyer, chief operating officer, Turning Point Action

My colleague Nick Corasaniti got access to a training led by Turning Point Action, the conservative political group, as it tries to erode Democrats’ mammoth advantage in early voting. This fascinating nugget shows how the right-wing group, which has spread falsehoods about past elections, is instructing its new staff members to dial down their outward displays of partisanship as they approach infrequent voters in a sprawling effort to get out the vote.

Read more about what Nick saw here.

Into the replies

On Monday, I used my inaugural newsletter to explain why I think the rerun election between President Biden and former President Donald Trump, a contest that can seem a little tired on its face, will be as captivating, revealing and utterly consequential as any in recent history.

And then I asked what you thought.

Hundreds of you wrote in. Some of you respectfully told me I was wrong. Some of you said that less respectfully. And lots of you told me that you, too, were thinking a lot about the stakes of this election, the role that you as voters will play and the course that 2024 will chart toward the future.

I want this newsletter to be a conversation with you, our readers, and in that spirit I’m going to share a slice of your responses.

Many of you wrote in to tell me the election feels as bleak or pointless as ever.

“I’m elderly,” Martha Tack of Sutton, Vt., said. “I’ve never seen this much ennui with the stakes so high, so I decided this morning that I will ask everyone I run into if they are registered and then ask them to vote.”

But you also saw a lot to look forward to. Like me, you expressed genuine interest in down-ballot races from California to Texas to New Jersey. And Nina Ruback of Blacksburg, Va., saw an upside to voters’ frustration.

“From their disappointment in Biden due to Gaza to their disdain for Trump, people are protesting more and becoming more involved not only with the national politics but their local politics by mailing their representatives, from the local level up to the national, and making their voices heard,” she wrote. “It’s beautiful.”

Some of you are excited about the growth in attention toward third-party candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent candidate and prominent anti-vaccine activist.

“I think this is the first time in my adult life that there is a viable alternative to the two-party system that has real momentum, and I’m curious to see what happens,” said Amanda Albertson of San Diego. (That same factor has caused others among you great dread.)

Many of you wrote in to express your excitement about vanquishing the other side. “There is now a real possibility of stopping the Democrats’ relentless surge to make America a socialist country,” wrote Jayson Levitz of Queens, N.Y. Kathleen Toomer of Miami said she was excited about the possibility of defeating Trump a second time.

And some of you are simply excited that this election will end.

“To be honest,” wrote Karin Kemp of Charlotte, N.C., “I will really be enthused to have this election over.”

— Additional reporting by Taylor Robinson

At a general store in New Jersey, near the epicenter of the earthquake, the sound was so loud that the staff thought a truck had crashed into the building.

Five miles away, at some riding stables, the ground shook so forcefully that it sent three horses galloping around the ring.

Within hours, a custom T-shirt shop in Manhattan was already selling a souvenir: a shirt emblazoned with, “I Survived The N.Y.C. Earthquake, April 5th, 2024.”

For most of the millions of people who felt the magnitude-4.8 earthquake that sent tremors from Philadelphia to Boston on Friday morning, it was a harmless novelty in a part of the country unaccustomed to seismic shaking.

But the rattling shook buildings in New York City and drove startled residents into the streets. Aftershocks continued throughout the day Friday, including one that measured 4.0 just before 6 p.m. and that was felt widely across New York and Jersey.

Aftershocks would likely “continue for several days and even a week,” said Kishor S. Jaiswal, a research structural engineer with the United States Geological Survey. There is also a small chance that an earthquake of similar or even larger magnitude could occur during such a sequence, he said.

Officials in New York said they had been in touch with counties as well as nuclear facilities across the state, with no reports of damage aside from a gas leak in Rockland County. “Fortunately here in the state of New York, we are masters of disasters,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said. “We know how to handle this.”

Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey, who is out of the state at a conference, said in a televised interview that reports of structural damage were “de minimis.”

Based on data from the U.S.G.S., the earthquake, with an epicenter in Whitehouse Station, N.J., about 40 miles west of New York City, was the third strongest within 250 miles of the city since 1950.

Even as sirens could be heard across New York, the Police Department, Fire Department and Con Edison said they had no immediate reports of damage. Mayor Eric Adams, who was attending a gun violence prevention meeting at Gracie Mansion, said he did not even feel the earthquake and was informed of it by his staff members. “New Yorkers should go about their normal day,” he said at a midday news conference.

But the earthquake also revealed apparent shortcomings in New York’s emergency notification system, coming after the Adams administration has been criticized for a delayed response to floods and wildfire smoke. On Friday, beeping text alerts warning residents to stay indoors were received a half-hour or more after the earthquake hit. (In earthquake-prone areas like California and Japan, a network of seismic sensors detect shaking, so alerts can arrive seconds before the quake.)

Zach Iscol, New York City’s commissioner of emergency management, defended the city’s alerts, saying officials had to confirm with the U.S.G.S. that the shaking was in fact caused by an earthquake. The alerts were sent out in 14 languages.

By the standards of the biggest earthquakes that can cause mass devastation, Friday’s shaking was very minor. The magnitude-6.7 earthquake that struck the Northridge neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1994, causing billions of dollars in damages and killing 57 people, was more than 700 times as strong as the temblor in the northeast on Friday.

At its epicenter in New Jersey, Friday’s quake produced shaking of about V on the Mercalli Intensity Scale, an average of the intensity of shaking reported by people who felt it. The scale uses Roman numerals. Damage to buildings typically begins to occur at around VII on the scale, according to Ron Hamburger, one of the country’s leading structural engineers who specializes in seismic safety. Friday’s earthquake, he said, “would have been a nonevent in California.”

But around New York and New Jersey, the suddenness of the shaking and unfamiliarity with earthquakes left many people startled.

In Whitehouse Station, Valorie Brennan heard a rumbling that sounded like a train, before she felt any shaking.

“I thought my furnace exploded,” she said. “My dogs went running to the back of the house to hide.”

At the riding stables, in Califon, N.J., pictures of show jumping horses fell off the tack room walls and shattered, as the riders dismounted and tried to soothe their trembling horses while aftershocks rumbled beneath their hooves.

In the Marble Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, Ada Carrasco was washing dishes in her third-floor apartment when the shaking started. “I felt it, but at first, I thought to myself, Am I getting lightheaded? But then the shaking continued and I ran out the door,” she said in Spanish.

“I’ve never experienced this in my life,” said Kristina Feeley, who works behind the counter at the Oldwick General Store in New Jersey. The earthquake did not cause damage, but reverberated for 30 seconds throughout the shop. Everyone froze, Ms. Feeley said, and it was several minutes before the floor felt steady enough to move across.

Friday’s quake occurred along the Ramapo system of faults, the fractures between two blocks of rock in the Earth’s crust. The system runs through arms of the northern Appalachian Mountains in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

The magnitude of 4.8 was quite large for the fault system, according to Folarin Kolawole, a geologist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, which is in Palisades, N.Y.

“There’s been nothing close to this for a long time,” Dr. Kolawole said in an interview.

At Lincoln Center, the New York Philharmonic briefly delayed the start of its 11 a.m. performance because alerts were still going off on people’s phones.

At the United Nations in Manhattan, Riyad H. Mansour, a Palestinian diplomat, joked that Janti Soeripto, the president and chief executive of Save the Children U.S., was “making the ground shake” as she delivered an update to the Security Council on Gaza just as the quake struck.

While earthquakes in New York City are surprises to most, seismologists say the ground is not as stable as New Yorkers might believe. A study in 2008 found that a magnitude-5 earthquake occurs in the area roughly once a century. An even larger magnitude 7 is estimated to happen once every 3,400 years.

In the early 2000s, the city began requiring that building designers take seismic considerations into account. Before that, the major natural threat that the city’s building code covered was wind, which can exert very strong pressure on buildings, especially skyscrapers. The vast majority of the 1.1 million buildings in New York City were constructed before 2000 and thus not designed with earthquakes in mind.

Even the new requirements, though, are much less rigorous than those in California, where buildings must generally be designed for earthquakes three times as strong. The constellation of major seismic faults in the state can produce much more powerful quakes than those seen on the East Coast.

“I would describe the risk of a major earthquake disaster in New York of being very low — even given the inventory of old buildings,” said Mr. Hamburger, the structural engineer who specializes in seismic safety.

Hours after the earthquake on Friday it was business as usual. The New York Police Department’s chief of transit, Michael Kemper, said in a social media post that there were no reports of structural damage to the subway system, nor were there service disruptions as a result of the earthquake.

United Airlines said in a statement that “a few” flights had been diverted away from Newark Liberty International Airport, but that it was working to get those flights to the airport as soon as possible.

For Clara Dossetter, 23, and her father, David Dossetter, 67, the earthquake presented an opportunity. Mr. Dossetter was visiting New York from San Francisco, and they were preparing to go up the Empire State Building when the quake struck. Ms. Dossetter asked her father whether they should reconsider.

“He was like, ‘No, that’s better because no one will be there,’” she said.

Reporting was contributed by Lola Fadulu, Gaya Gupta, Hurubie Meko, Michael Wilson, William J. Broad, Kenneth Chang, Emma Fitzsimmons, Sarah Maslin Nir, Erin Nolan, Mihir Zaveri, Maria Cramer, Grace Ashford, Camille Baker, Liset Cruz, Michael Paulson, Patrick McGeehan and Troy Closson.

The Justice Department will reopen an antitrust investigation into the National Association of Realtors, an influential trade group that has held sway over the residential real estate industry for decades. The investigation will focus on whether the group’s rules inflate the cost of selling a home.

The renewed federal inquiry comes after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Friday overturned a lower-court ruling from 2023 that had quashed the Justice Department’s request for information from N.A.R. about broker commissions and how real estate listings are marketed.

Friday’s ruling was another setback for N.A.R., still reeling from a March 15 agreement to settle several lawsuits that alleged the group had violated antitrust laws and had conspired to fix the rates that real estate agents charge their clients. Pending federal court approval, N.A.R. will pay $418 million in damages and will significantly change its rules on agent commissions and the databases, overseen by N.A.R. subsidiaries, where homes are listed for sale.

Home sellers in Missouri, whose lawsuit against N.A.R. and several brokerages was followed by multiple copycat claims, successfully argued that the group’s rule that a seller’s agent must make an offer of commission to a buyer’s agent had forced them to pay inflated fees.

The Justice Department now has another chance to peel back the curtain on those fees and other N.A.R. rules that have long confused and frustrated consumers.

“Real-estate commissions in the United States greatly exceed those in any other developed economy, and this decision restores the Antitrust Division’s ability to investigate potentially unlawful conduct by N.A.R. that may be contributing to this problem,” said Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, in an emailed statement. “The Antitrust Division is committed to fighting to lower the cost of buying and selling a home.”

Americans pay roughly $100 billion in real estate commissions annually. In many other countries, commission rates hover between 1 and 3 percent; in the United States, most agents specify a commission of 5 or 6 percent, paid by the seller. Those high commission rates have been at the heart of N.A.R.’s mounting legal challenges.

In an emailed statement on Friday, representatives for N.A.R. said the organization was “reviewing today’s decision and evaluating next steps,” adding that they remained “steadfast in our commitment to promoting consumer transparency and to supporting our members in protecting their clients’ interests in the home buying and selling process.”

Should N.A.R. wish to appeal the ruling, it will have to now take it to the Supreme Court.

With 1.5 million members, a powerful lobbying arm in Washington and $1 billion in assets, N.A.R. has an outsize influence on the real estate industry. It even owns the trademark for the word “Realtor,” and an agent must be a member to call themselves one.

The Justice Department sued the trade group in 2005, claiming that N.A.R. promoted anticompetitive practices and inflated commissions, and the two sides agreed to a 10-year settlement in 2008, during which time N.A.R. was required to change many of its policies regarding home listing sites.

After that settlement expired, the Justice Department reopened its investigation, issuing demands for documentation on how Realtors in the United States use N.A.R.-operated databases to list homes and discuss commission rates, as well as the rules on agent compensation that the organization enforces among its membership.

The department even issued statements of interest in two lawsuits against N.A.R., regarding anticompetitive practices, including the Missouri case, which N.A.R. settled in March.

In 2020, it looked like the case had ended — the Justice Department offered another settlement to N.A.R., this one requiring rule changes like more disclosure around broker fees. N.A.R. agreed, and the investigation was closed.

But in 2021, under the new Biden administration, the Justice Department backed out of its settlement and announced it was reopening its inquiry. N.A.R. took them to federal court in a bid to stop them, and initially was successful in January 2023. But the Justice Department appealed, and a three-judge panel of the appeals court sided with the department in a split ruling — with two judges in favor and one against.

In an interview with The New York Times, Michael Ketchmark, who was the lead lawyer in the Missouri home sellers’ lawsuit against N.A.R., called the renewed investigation “great news for homeowners and home buyers across the country,” which would expand upon the impact of the civil cases against the group.

N.A.R.’s agreement to settle came months after a jury verdict in October 2023 in favor of the home sellers that would have required the trade group to pay at least $1.8 billion in damages.

“Through our trial and our settlement with N.A.R., we advanced the ball as far as we could down the field,” he said. “This is an opportunity for the DOJ to continue to hold them accountable, and if they feel additional steps need to be taken through criminal prosecution or regulation, now they have the green light to do it.”

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said that the United States was looking for “results” in response to news that Israel would open up more routes for aid to flow into Gaza.

The Israeli decision to allow aid to enter through new routes came after President Biden made it clear in a call with the Israeli prime minister on Thursday that U.S. support for Israel would depend on its next steps to alleviate a humanitarian crisis in the enclave.

Mr. Blinken called Israel’s agreement to establish new aid routes “positive developments” on Friday, but he immediately added that the United States would be “looking to see” if Israel would make allowing more aid into the enclave a priority. One measure of Israel’s commitment, he said, will be “the number of trucks that are actually getting in on a sustained basis.”

“The real test is results, and that’s what we’re looking to see in the coming days and the coming weeks,” he told a news conference in Brussels on Friday, adding, “Really, the proof is in the results.”

Israel has been under rising pressure from U.S. officials and humanitarian agencies to increase the number of crossings into Gaza for aid as the United Nations warns that a famine is looming.

On Thursday, President Biden stepped up the pressure in a conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying future U.S. support for Israel depended on how it would address his concerns about a high civilian death toll and widespread hunger.

Hours later, the Israeli government announced additional aid routes, including through the port of Ashdod and the Erez crossing, a checkpoint between Israel and northern Gaza.

“I asked them to do what they’re doing,” Mr. Biden told reporters on Friday.

But the Israeli statement offered few details, and it was not immediately clear when those new routes would open — or how much aid could pass through them. In addition, moving aid through the Erez border crossing into northern Gaza is likely to present logistical hurdles, since most aid has been stored in Egypt, on the opposite side of the coastal enclave.

Aid officials also welcomed the news with caution, saying they needed to see how and when the new measures would go into effect.

Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesman for the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, said the news about more aid routes was positive. “But, of course, we will have to see how this is implemented,” he added.

The World Food Program said on Friday that it would seek to clarify with the Israeli authorities “their security and logistics arrangements so we can move swiftly to exploit any new opportunity to feed more Gazans as famine takes hold.”

And Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, echoed calls from humanitarian organizations for Israel’s government to carry out the new moves “quickly.”

“No more excuses,” she wrote on X.

Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, said that the new measures were simply “not enough” and that “urgent efforts are required to immediately end hunger.”

“Gazan children and infants are dying of malnutrition,” he wrote on X.

Since the start of the war, Israel has limited aid entering Gaza to two tightly controlled border crossings: Kerem Shalom and Rafah, both in the south of the enclave.

Most of Gaza’s international aid passes through warehouses in Egypt near El Arish, not far from the city of Rafah, which straddles the border with Gaza. Some aid has also been delivered through a different route from Jordan.

From El Arish, the trucks carrying aid have typically undergone security checks on the Egyptian side of the border in Rafah.

Aid agencies have faced challenges at every step of the delivery process, from lengthy Israel inspections at the border crossings to violence while distributing aid to Palestinians within Gaza.

Israeli checks on goods entering Gaza aim to weed out items that could potentially be used by Hamas. Aid officials have said the inspection process causes significant delays, while Israel has argued that disorganization by humanitarian groups and diversions of shipments by Hamas were to blame for any bottlenecks.

Mr. Blinken said Friday that the United States would be looking to see whether “the bottlenecks and other delays at crossings are being resolved.”

The most dire shortages are in northern Gaza, where hungry people have swarmed trucks carrying food and where aid groups say they have struggled to deliver supplies because of Israeli restrictions and widespread lawlessness.

Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Gaya Gupta and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.