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When Aleksei A. Navalny was alive, the Kremlin sought to portray him as an inconsequential figure unworthy of attention, even as the Russian authorities vilified and attacked him with a viciousness that suggested the opposite.

In death, little appears to have changed.

President Vladimir V. Putin has not said a word in public about Mr. Navalny in the two weeks since the opposition campaigner’s death at age 47 in an Arctic prison.

Russian state television has been almost equally silent. Coverage has been limited to a short statement by the prison authorities the day of Mr. Navalny’s death, plus a few fleeting television commentaries by state propagandists to deflect blame and tarnish his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, who has announced that she will carry on her husband’s work.

And on Friday, as thousands gathered in the Russian capital for Mr. Navalny’s funeral, cheering his name, official Moscow acted as if the remembrance was a nonevent. State news ignored it altogether. When asked that morning if the Kremlin could comment on Mr. Navalny as a political figure, Mr. Putin’s spokesman responded, “It cannot.”

Referring to Mr. Navalny, Sam Greene, a professor of Russian politics at King’s College London, said, “Part of the approach from the Kremlin was to not give him any more oxygen than absolutely necessary, or if it was possible, to give him no oxygen at all.”

Mr. Putin for years refused to say Mr. Navalny’s name. State television almost never mentioned him. The authorities barred him from running for president in the 2018 election and largely thwarted him from engaging in the Western-style democratic retail politics he wanted to see in Russia.

Greg Yudin, a Russian sociologist who is now a research fellow at Princeton University, called the Kremlin’s strategy one of “strategic omission.”

By removing Mr. Navalny from official public life, the Kremlin signaled that he was not a legitimate alternative politician, but rather an extremist, a terrorist or an enemy of the state, operating outside the bounds of the nation’s orchestrated politics, Mr. Yudin said.

“The way they create a perception of politics in Russia is that whatever is absent from official discourse is irrelevant, because it has no chance to materialize anyway,” Mr. Yudin said. “If you aren’t talked about on TV, you don’t exist.”

At the same time, Russia’s coercive apparatus went after Mr. Navalny with an increasing ferocity, poisoning him with a nerve agent in 2020, imprisoning him in inhumane conditions and ultimately sending him to a remote former gulag facility above the Arctic Circle. Along the way, he was maligned in a film, attacked with green dye and subjected to a multitude of criminal cases, all while being demonized as Western puppet.

“There was simply nothing to be gained by the Kremlin from having him mentioned on television, but that doesn’t mean that Navalny couldn’t smolder in the underbrush,” Professor Greene said. “And what they were concerned about was this fire spreading.”

Even without the power of television, Mr. Navalny managed to make a name for himself in Russia using the internet — and that continued to be the way millions of Russians followed news of his death and funeral.

Mr. Navalny’s online presence undermined the Kremlin’s suggestions about his irrelevance. In 2021, he amassed more than 100 million viewers for his exposé of a secret palace built for Mr. Putin on the Black Sea, leaving little doubt about the opposition leader’s latent power.

Mr. Navalny maintained his stature as the face of the opposition even from prison, communicating through written messages that his team published as social media posts and through courtroom speeches that his team turned into YouTube videos.

Mr. Yudin, the Princeton sociologist, said, “Russian politics had narrowed down a long time ago to a kind of standoff between two men, between Putin and Navalny.”

“That was absolutely clear to any honest observer of Russian politics,” he added.

But not according to Russian television.

Vyacheslav Nikonov, grandson of the Stalin-era foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, briefly announced Mr. Navalny’s death on Russia’s flagship station, Channel One.

Mr. Nikonov, a pro-Kremlin member of the Russian Parliament, interrupted his political talk show to read the statement by the prison authorities and to say that the cause of death, according to preliminary medical information, was a detached blood clot.

He quickly returned to praising the Russian military’s progress in Ukraine, quoting a famous war cry by his grandfather before handing the broadcast over to the news. There, Mr. Navalny’s death was buried as story No. 8 — after a segment about one of the state war correspondents personally delivering drones to Russian soldiers at the front.

Over the subsequent hours and days, Russian state channels gave attention to Mr. Navalny’s death only in a few quick commentaries, while spawning a few bizarre conspiracy theories.

Margarita Simonyan, head of the state news network RT, said on one talk show that the timing of the death raised “big questions” because Mr. Navalny’s wife was attending the annual Munich Security Conference at the time and made a statement “without her mascara even running.”

“It shows me that at a minimum this woman didn’t love her husband that much but very much loves power and everything it entails,” Ms. Simonyan said.

She and other propagandists suggested that the West had organized Mr. Navalny’s death to overshadow the impact of Mr. Putin’s recent interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. They did not explain how the West could arrange for Mr. Navalny’s death while he was in Russian custody.

They argued that Mr. Navalny’s death was the last thing the Kremlin would want, given that it provided another impetus for the West to pressure Russia.

“What could be better for whipping up accusatory pathos than the sudden death of the main critic of the Kremlin, as the deceased was called in the European press?” the state news commentator Dmitry Kiselyov asked on his show.

After the initial news cycle, state television channels went silent, keeping Mr. Navalny’s death and the unanswered questions about it largely under the radar, even as his face stared out from the covers of newspapers and magazines around the world.

In a poll by the independent Levada Center released on Friday, 21 percent of Russians said that they had not heard about Mr. Navalny’s death, and another 54 percent said that they had heard something, but only in vague terms.

Separately, Kremlin-aligned online trolls sprang into action to amplify criticism of Ms. Navalnaya after she announced that she would take up her husband’s mantle.

Research by Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous volunteers who monitor Russian troll activity, and by the London-based nonprofit Reset, which focuses on democracy and technology, described a coordinated campaign to smear her online, including by promoting doctored photographs and making spurious allegations about “boyfriends.”

That approach by the Russian authorities continued during Mr. Navalny’s funeral on Friday.

State television almost entirely ignored the event, while Kremlin-friendly online outlets and social media accounts engaged in countermessaging aimed at Russian-speaking audiences.

The pro-government Telegram channel Readovka tried to raise doubts about the size of the crowd. It suggested that Mr. Navalny was being used by the West, because “jokes in English” were being made by mourners.

While Mr. Putin refuses to say Mr. Navalny’s name to avoid giving him status, “the trolls have no status” and thus cannot bestow an elevated profile by mentioning him, said Abbas Gallyamov, a Kremlin speechwriter turned political consultant. He dismissed Moscow’s attempts to trivialize Mr. Navalny.

“He was a threat, of course,” said Mr. Gallyamov, who is now living in Israel. “Navalny was the only opposition politician who was able to bring people out into the streets.”

Israel’s reluctance to fill the current leadership vacuum in northern Gaza formed the backdrop to the chaos that led to the deaths on Thursday of dozens of Palestinians on the Gazan coast, analysts and aid workers have said.

More than 100 were killed and 700 injured, Gazan health officials said, after thousands of hungry civilians rushed at a convoy of aid trucks, leading to a stampede and prompting Israeli soldiers to fire at the crowd.

The immediate causes of the chaos were extreme hunger and desperation: The United Nations has warned of a looming famine in northern Gaza, where the incident occurred. Civilian attempts to ambush aid trucks, Israeli restrictions on convoys and the poor condition of roads damaged in the war have made it extremely difficult for food to reach the roughly 300,000 civilians still stranded in that region, leading the United States and others to airdrop aid instead.

But analysts say this dynamic has been exacerbated by Israel’s failure to set in motion a plan for how the north will be governed.

While southern Gaza is still an active conflict zone, fighting has mostly ebbed in the north of the enclave. The Israeli military defeated the bulk of Hamas’s fighting forces there by early January, leading Israeli soldiers to withdraw from parts of the north.

Now, those areas lack a centralized body to coordinate the provision of services, enforce law and order, and protect aid trucks. To prevent Hamas from rebuilding itself, Israel has prevented police officers from the Hamas-led prewar government from escorting the trucks. But Israel has also delayed the creation of any alternative Palestinian law enforcement.

Aid groups have only a limited presence, with the United Nations still assessing how to increase its operations there. And Israel has said it will retain indefinite military control over the territory, without specifying exactly that will mean on a day-to-day basis.

“This tragic event reflects how Israel has no long-term, realistic strategy,” said Michael Milstein, an analyst and a former Israeli intelligence official. “You can’t just take over Gaza City, leave, and then hope that something positive will grow there. Instead, there’s chaos.”

Since Israel invaded Gaza in October, following the Hamas-led attacks that devastated southern Israel earlier that month, Israeli politicians have debated and disagreed about how Gaza should be governed once the war winds down, a period that they describe as “the day after.”

In northern Gaza, that moment has essentially already arrived.

When U.N. officials toured the area last week to assess the damage there, they did not coordinate their visit with Hamas because it no longer exerts widespread influence in the north, according to Scott Anderson, the deputy Gaza director for UNRWA, the main U.N. aid agency in Gaza.

Reports have emerged of some Hamas members trying to reassert order in certain neighborhoods. But aside from limited services at several hospitals, Mr. Anderson said he saw no sign of civil servants or municipal officials. Uncollected trash and sewage lined the streets, he said.

“The leadership in Gaza is underground, literally or figuratively, and there is no structure in place to fill that void,” Mr. Anderson said in a phone interview from Gaza. “That creates a prevailing aura of desperation and fear,” which makes events like the disaster on Thursday more likely, he said, adding, “It’s very frustrating and difficult to coordinate things when there’s nobody to coordinate with.”

Video has emerged of armed groups attacking convoys, and diplomats say criminal gangs are beginning to fill the void left by Hamas’s absence.

Without any plan, “the vacuum will either be filled by chaos and lawless gangs and criminals,” said Ahmed Fouad Khatib, an American commentator on Gazan affairs who was brought up in Gaza, “or by Hamas, which will manage to re-emerge and attempt to reconstitute.”

Power vacuums are inevitable after most wars. But critics of the Israeli government say the vacuum in northern Gaza is worse than it could have been because Israeli leaders don’t agree about what should happen next.

The country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, released a plan in late February that suggested that “the administration of civilian affairs and the enforcement of public order will be based on local stakeholders with managerial experience.” But beyond noting that these administrators could not be affiliated with “countries or entities that support terrorism,” Mr. Netanyahu gave no further details.

His plan was so vague that it was interpreted as an attempt to postpone a looming decision about whether to prioritize the goals of his domestic political base or those of Israel’s strongest foreign ally, the United States.

Vocal parts of Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing base are pushing aggressively for the re-establishment of Jewish settlements in Gaza, nearly two decades after Israel removed them. Such a plan would necessitate long-term Israeli control over the territory, making it impossible to re-establish Palestinian governance there.

Conversely, the United States and other Western powers and Arab states are pushing for Palestinian leaders in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to be allowed to run Gaza, as part of a process toward creating a Palestinian state spread across both territories.

Pulled between those two contradictory paths, Mr. Netanyahu has opted for neither.

“He’s trying all kinds of maneuvers to keep his government calm,” said Mr. Milstein, the former intelligence official. “Because of all the tensions and all the problematic configurations in his government, he cannot take any real dramatic decision,” Mr. Milstein added.

The office of Mr. Netanyahu declined to comment for this article.

Nadav Shtrauchler, a former strategist for Mr. Netanyahu, dismissed concerns about Mr. Netanyahu’s strategy.

“If someone thinks he doesn’t have any plan in his head, they’re wrong: He has a plan,” Mr. Shtrauchler said. “I think he has two plans. But I’m not sure which one he will choose in the end, and I’m not sure he knows.”

For now, Mr. Netanyahu is using the ambiguity to postpone inevitable confrontations with both his right-wing coalition allies and the United States for as long as possible, Mr. Shtrauchler and other analysts said.

Israeli officials have spoken of empowering clans in different pockets of Gaza to keep the peace in their immediate neighborhoods and protect aid supplies. But the plan is unproven and enforced — and foreign diplomats are skeptical about its effectiveness.

Some Palestinians and foreign leaders say that several thousand former policemen from the Palestinian Authority, the body that ran Gaza until being pushed out by Hamas in 2007, could be retrained to fill the void. Others suggest that Arab countries like Egypt and Jordan could send a peacekeeping force to support the authority’s policemen.

In the meantime, “the Palestinians who stayed in the north of Gaza are starving to death,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor from Gaza City. “And basically, they are trying to find food in any possible way.”

The 5-year-old looked nervously at her older brothers, scanning their faces for any sign of distress as needles were swiftly stuck into their upper arms, the syringe plungers pushed in and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine administered. Whether it was for her benefit or not, they barely flinched.

Then it was her turn. The girl, Oma Nnagbo, looked wide-eyed at the cheerful nurse who a moment later declared, “All done, very brave!”

Michael Nnagbo, 40, had brought his three children to this pop-up vaccine clinic in Wolverhampton in England’s West Midlands after receiving a notice from their school about a measles outbreak in the nearby Birmingham area.

“It’s what we have to do, and it’s important to do,” Mr. Nnagbo said. “I just want them to be safe. And it was easy, you could just walk in.”

Cases of measles, a highly contagious but easily preventable disease, have begun to crop up in clusters as the number of children getting the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine has declined globally. The trend worsened after the coronavirus pandemic because of a lack of access and hesitancy among some groups. The measles virus can cause serious illness and, in the most extreme cases, death.

Across Europe, measles cases rose more than 40-fold in 2023 compared with a year earlier — from less than 1,000 to more than 40,000 — according to the World Health Organization. And while much of that increase was concentrated in lower-income nations like Kazakhstan, more prosperous nations, where higher vaccination rates had long made cases measles rare, are also experiencing worrying outbreaks.

In Britain, 650 cases of measles were confirmed between Oct. 1 and the end of February, according to the U.K. Health Security Agency, which declared a national incident in January. The rise in cases was initially driven by an outbreak in the West Midlands, but it has spread elsewhere around the country. Most of the cases in Britain are in children under 10.

Vaccine coverage has waned to precarious rates in some communities, particularly those facing the highest levels of deprivation. That was less the result of a surging anti-vaccine movement, experts said, than a lack of resources, lack of awareness, and some culturally driven hesitancy.

The percentage of children being immunized through the country’s routine vaccination program has fallen over the past decade across all illnesses, including whooping cough, measles, mumps and rubella, polio, meningitis and diphtheria.

England no longer has the levels of vaccine coverage recommended by the World Health Organization, which advises that more than 95 percent of people must have had two doses of a measles vaccine that contains weakened amounts of the virus to prevent outbreaks.

England had 84.5 percent measles vaccine coverage by the end of 2023, but in some areas it was far lower. London had a coverage rate of 73.1 percent overall, even lower than the West Midlands, where the coverage was 83.6 percent at the end of last year.

Jenny Harries, the chief executive of health security agency, said in a statement that the lower vaccine rates were linked to inequality.

“While the majority of the country is protected, there are still high numbers of children in some areas that continue to be unprotected from preventable diseases,” she said. “Unless uptake improves we will start to see the diseases that these vaccines protect against re-emerging and causing more serious illness.”

Carol Dezateux, a professor of pediatric epidemiology at Queen Mary University of London, said the current measles outbreak was “entirely predictable,” as immunizations had fallen to alarmingly low levels even before the pandemic. The causes were complex, she said, but the lockdowns and worries about exposure to the coronavirus made the problem worse.

Vaccination rates for children in England have been steadily declining over the last decade, partly because of vaccine hesitancy but also because of a lack of resources and logistical issues in the most deprived areas. It’s not just the M.M.R. vaccine, Dr. Dezateux said, as there is evidence of widening inequalities between wealthy and poor children across Britain in all five of the key childhood vaccinations.

“There’s a failure to think about how we can move the dial on this,” in a more coordinated way, Dr. Dezateux said, adding, “You might like to climb a high mountain, but if you’ve got no prospect of even getting up to the first base camp, you’re never going to try it, you know?”

The coverage gap has been difficult to close in some areas, Dr. Dezateux said, because so much pressure has fallen onto general practitioners in the country’s National Health Service who are already severely stretched.

Still, the cost of prevention in the form of vaccines is about 4 percent of the cost of an outbreak, she said, showing the need for a cohesive and coordinated plan to work toward better vaccine uptake.

“We know that where resources are brought in, then people can do more. It’s not rocket science,” Dr. Dezateux said.

Dr. Milena Marszalek, a research fellow at Queen Mary who is a general practitioner in northeast London in an area that has one of the country’s worst vaccination rates, said it was a logistical struggle to combat dropping vaccine coverage.

“There is a real problem with lack of capacity, lack of appointments,” she said. “We haven’t got the resources needed to bring the kids in for vaccination.”

Still, some things worked, she said, citing pop-up clinics and outreach with local imams to relay information about the safety of the vaccine to the large Muslim South Asian community in the area.

Local Haredi Jewish families told her that flexible hours at clinics and walk-in appointments also removed a barrier.

Still, it is often only after a significant outbreak that the issue of vaccination takes on greater urgency. Nicole Miles, the lead nurse for Vaccination UK, a group commissioned by Britain’s National Health Service to deliver childhood vaccines and who ran the Wolverhampton clinic, said that an accessible, sensitive and tailored approach was important.

“What people don’t realize is how sick it makes you,” Ms. Miles said of the measles virus. “There is this idea that, ‘Well it’s just measles,’ because we haven’t seen cases of measles for years like we are now. So people don’t realize how dangerous it can be, since it just hasn’t been here.”

Ms. Miles, 34, and two other nurses who were working to distribute the vaccines discussed how vaccine hesitancy among their patients was actually quite rare.

“There are always going to be cohorts of people who don’t want to be vaccinated,” Ms. Miles said. “And essentially, there’s nothing we can do about that, is there? But we need to vaccinate the people who do want to be vaccinated and who have been missed along the line somehow.”

At the Wolverhampton clinic, many of the families coming in said that they were not opposed but had not gotten vaccinations for one reason or another. Like Mr. Nnago, many had heard about the vaccination push through schools.

The Okusanya family, originally from Nigeria, has been living in Wolverhampton for two years. Oluwafunmilayo Okusanya, 42, said none of her three children had received the M.M.R. vaccine in their home country, so when she heard of the measles outbreak locally, she knew it was important to bring them in.

“When the opportunity came, I felt it was a good thing for them to have it,” she said. “It’s made it very convenient. Although some might not see the need to come around for it, we just need to protect the kids.”

Look closely at this tiny, idyllic island: Victorian-era fortifications dot the windswept coastline. A concrete anti-tank wall disrupts a quiet beach. Overgrown greenery covers bunkers and tunnels.

This is Alderney, where the 2,100 people who call the island home do not lock their cars. Where the streets are quiet and the pubs (nine of them) are lively, and the roads don’t have traffic lights. And where reminders of World War II hide behind most corners.

This fiercely independent island in the English Channel, roughly 10 miles from France, is at the center of a debate about how to remember Nazi atrocities and live mindfully among sites where misdeeds occurred — and how to reckon with the fact that Britain never held anyone responsible for running an SS concentration camp on its soil.

Alderney, a British Crown Dependency and part of the Channel Islands, has an independent president and a 10-member parliament. (King Charles III is its monarch, but Rishi Sunak not its prime minister.) The Channel Islands were the only British territory occupied by the Germans during World War II, and Alderney was the only one evacuated by the British government. Shortly after, as Germany occupied parts of Northwest Europe in June 1940, German troops moved to the island.

The Nazis built four camps on Alderney. Helgoland and Borkum were labor camps run by the Nazis’ civil and military engineering arm. The SS, the organization that was largely in charge of the Nazis’ barbaric extermination campaign, took control of two others, Norderney and Sylt, in 1943.

How many people died on Alderney has never been clear. While an official estimate from decades ago is about 400, experts say there could have been thousands. A report due this spring is meant to offer answers, but not everyone who studies Alderney’s past believes it will.

The closest thing to an official count found that at least 389 people died on Alderney, a number based on a report by Theodore Pantcheff, a British military intelligence interrogator who researched the atrocities shortly after the war. Other historians’ estimates range from hundreds to thousands.

No matter the number, the Nazis’ intention of what to do with the prisoners and slave laborers on the island seems clear. Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust, ordered a commander on Alderney to kill his prisoners if the Allies invaded. Other stories include drills in which prisoners had to march into tunnels they had built themselves to practice for their own executions.

Lord Eric Pickles, Britain’s special envoy for post-Holocaust issues, announced last summer that a panel of experts would attempt to settle a debate that has long vexed the island.

“It seemed to me perhaps a way of bringing closure to the island,” Mr. Pickles said. “We need a clear idea of the number of prisoners and slave laborers who were on the island of Alderney,” he said.

But one thing is clear, Mr. Pickles added: the Nazis’ “operation of annihilation by labor was practiced there.”

While many locals want to get to the bottom of the island’s history, the panel hasn’t been received well by everyone. Among the team are academics who have already published conclusions on the topic, raising questions about whether they are going to produce new findings or merely restate old ones.

The panel is focused on numbers, said Gilly Carr, a historian and member of the team who has published books about the islands’ Nazi occupation, “not the whys and the wherefore. Just the numbers.”

Some residents, whose families have been on the island for generations, have expressed a feeling that the British government is encroaching on their territory, telling them what to do.

“There have been suggestions that we are in denial, that we do not recognize what went on,” William Tate, the island’s president, said in an interview in his office. But islanders are aware of Alderney’s history because it can’t be missed, he said: “You only have to step outside the door here to see that the occupation was real.”

While Mr. Tate welcomes the review, he acknowledged the difficulties it faces because of incomplete records and a lack of access to Russian archives, which may hold more information.

“We don’t know whether this inquiry will be able to come to a definitive answer,” Mr. Tate said. “I suspect not.”

Missing an institutional memory

The type of work that the panel is doing is often done by historians connected to an official institute, said Robert Jan van Pelt, another historian on the team. But Alderney has no such institutional steward of its wartime history, he said.

Alderney holds two annual remembrance ceremonies, one in May to commemorate the official end of the war and one on Dec. 15, the anniversary of the islanders’ return after its liberation.

The main memorial for victims sits in the middle of the island and was erected in the 1960s by the family of a resident, Sally Bohan, who walks by most days. Apart from the memorial, Ms. Bohan said, “there’s no focal point on the island.”

The camp locations have few, if any, remnants of their wartime history. Sylt had 10 barracks to house about 1,000 prisoners from mainland Europe and Russia. It “wasn’t big enough, and people had to sleep outdoors,” said Colin Partridge, a resident and local expert who is also on the panel.

“If you stand here on a day like this, you can’t imagine brutality going on here,” he said, looking at the entrance of the Sylt camp on a sunny afternoon last fall. A tunnel from Sylt, connecting the commander’s villa to the camp, still exists.

Norderney also held hundreds of Jews who had come from France. Only eight were officially recorded as having died on the island, a number that Michael James, who grew up on Alderney and who has spent years poring over documents, says is unrealistically low.

Marcus Roberts, the founder and director of JTrails, the National Anglo-Jewish Heritage Trail, said that other documents show that the Nazis could have been planning gas chambers on the island. Multiple tunnels were constructed on Alderney, and two canisters of Zyklon B — the poison used by the Germans in the gas chambers — were found there, Mr. Roberts said.

Causes of death of the prisoners on Alderney included disease and starvation, as well as shootings and brutal beatings by Nazi guards, according to Mr. Roberts and other experts.

And in 2022, a plan to build an electricity link between Britain and France through Alderney was called off, partly over fears it might disturb Jewish remains.

Mr. James said he was outraged about the lack of justice for the atrocities on the island, and the lack of a response from the British government since.

The number of people on the island during the war is unclear. Mr. Partridge estimates that there were about 6,000 prisoners on Alderney in 1943, at the height of the four camps’ occupancy. It’s also unclear how many people were buried on Alderney. The German war graves commission exhumed an unknown number of bodies after the war, and according to Mr. James, Alderney still has two mass gravesites.

Nazi commanders forced prisoners to march for miles before working 12-hour days of hard physical labor on almost no food. Prisoners were forced to build fortifications that are still present, part of the Atlantic Wall that was supposed to protect against an Allied invasion of the island. That invasion never happened.

“The islands never had to be defended,” Mr. Partridge said. “All these people died for no purpose.”

Living amid history

The Nazis weren’t the first who saw the need to fortify Alderney. In the 19th century, Britain built structures along the coast to protect the harbor against France. Eighteen such forts and batteries survive. The Germans occupied most of them.

Remnants of the camps are less visible. The site of one is now a street with houses, its entry pillars blending into the streetscape. Another is a camping ground for vacationers. A third has a road running through it, past a dairy farm.

Safeguarding sites like these related to the Holocaust and protecting their history are among the goals of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

“Places tell the story in a very different way than any online tool or any exhibition or book could,” said Kathrin Meyer, the IHRA’s secretary general. Establishing facts, including numbers of victims, is an important part of fighting Holocaust distortion, she said.

She also acknowledged the difficulties of coming to a place like Alderney and telling residents how to deal with their history. “You need to find an agreement with people who also have to live there,” she said.

Alderney residents enjoy a deep love for the place, a yearning for a quiet lifestyle and low taxes.

To people like Mr. James, that idyll does not block out the history.

“Even though we were not to blame for the Holocaust, we are to blame for the diminishment and covering up of it,” he said. On Alderney, he said, “Jews were murdered, and we allowed the culprits to walk free.”

The Gaza aid convoy that ended in bloodshed this week was organized by Israel itself as part of a newly hatched partnership with local Palestinian businessmen, according to Israeli officials, Palestinian businessmen and Western diplomats.

Israel has been involved in at least four such aid convoys to northern Gaza over the past week. It undertook the effort, Israeli officials told two Western diplomats, to fill a void in assistance to northern Gaza, where famine looms as international aid groups have suspended most operations, citing Israeli refusals to greenlight aid trucks and rising lawlessness. The diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the matter.

Israeli officials reached out to multiple Gazan businessmen and asked them to help organize private aid convoys to the north, two of the businessmen said, while Israel would provide security.

The United Nations has warned that more than 570,000 Gazans — particularly in northern Gaza — are facing “catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation” after nearly five months of war and an almost complete Israeli blockade of the territory following the Oct. 7 attacks led by Hamas.

Some residents have resorted to raiding the pantries of neighbors who fled their homes, while others have been grinding up animal feed for flour. U.N. aid convoys carrying essential goods to northern Gaza have been looted — either by civilians fearing starvation or organized gangs — amid the anarchy that has followed Israel’s ground invasion.

“My family, friends, and neighbors are dying from hunger,” said Jawdat Khoudary, a Palestinian businessman who helped organize some of the trucks involved in the Israeli relief initiative.

The convoy that arrived in Gaza City before dawn on Thursday ended tragically. More than 100 Palestinians were killed after many thousands of people massed around trucks laden with food and supplies, Gazan health officials said.

Israeli and Palestinian officials and witnesses offered sharply divergent accounts of the chaos. Witnesses described extensive shooting by Israeli forces, and doctors at Gaza hospitals said most casualties were from gunfire. But the Israeli military said most of the victims were trampled in a crush of people trying to seize the cargo.

Israel also acknowledged that its troops had opened fire at members of the crowd who, the military said, approached the troops “in a manner that endangered them.”

The deaths sparked global outrage and increased pressure on Israel to reach a cease-fire agreement with Hamas that would let more aid into Gaza.

The United States has been trying to broker such a deal, and on Saturday, as the U.S. began its own effort to airdrop aid to Gaza, American and Israeli officials said that Vice President Kamala Harris will meet with Benny Gantz, a member of the Israeli war cabinet, at the White House on Monday.

Israel has agreed to a plan that would include a six-week cease-fire, the release of dozens of the most “vulnerable” Israeli hostages in Gaza and the entry of more aid convoys into the territory, an American official said.

The United States and other countries, including Egypt and Qatar, are trying to persuade Hamas to accept the deal, the American official said Saturday, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing diplomacy.

On Saturday afternoon, three U.S. Air Force cargo planes released 66 pallets containing 38,000 ready-to-eat meals over southwest Gaza — a tiny fraction of the food and other supplies needed in a territory of 2.2 million people. President Biden had announced the airdrops on Friday, saying, “Innocent lives are on the line.”

Izzat Aqel, a Gazan businessman who told The New York Times that he had helped coordinate trucks in Thursday’s convoy, said an Israeli military officer had asked him about 10 days earlier to organize aid trucks to northern Gaza with as much food and water as possible.

And on Thursday, an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, said that this particular convoy was part of humanitarian operations over several days in northern Gaza that Israeli troops were overseeing.

“Over the last four days, convoys like we conducted this morning — this morning was 38 truckloads — passed into northern Gaza to distribute food supplies which are international donations but on private vehicles,” he told Britain’s Channel 4 television.

The convoy that ended in disaster left the Kerem Shalom crossing between Israel and Gaza before heading for areas of northern Gaza that had not seen aid in weeks, Mr. Aqel said. In an attempt to ensure the trucks’ safety, he added, they ventured into northern Gaza in darkness at around 4:45 a.m.

Since the war began, Israel has been loath to take responsibility for caring for Gaza’s civilians. But its bombing campaign and ground invasion have decimated Hamas’s control over northern Gaza, leaving a gaping security vacuum amid a humanitarian catastrophe that worsens daily.

Conditions have deteriorated rapidly. The number of aid trucks entering Gaza dropped significantly in February, both because of rising lawlessness and Israel’s insistence on inspecting every truck, aid groups have said.

The signs of desperation have been growing more apparent as time passes. Gazan residents have resorted to eating leaves and animal feed, and the Gazan health authorities reported this week that some children have died of malnutrition.

President Biden had said on Friday that the United States would begin airdropping humanitarian relief supplies into Gaza, working with Jordan, which has been at the forefront of such efforts recently, as well as other allies.

But the plan met with immediate criticism from international aid groups who said it would be ineffective and distract from more meaningful measures like pushing Israel to lift its siege of Gaza.

“Airdrops do not and cannot substitute for humanitarian access,” the International Rescue Committee, a New York-based aid organization, said in a statement on Saturday. “Airdrops are not the solution to relieve this suffering, and distract time and effort from proven solutions to help at scale.”

Egypt, France, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates have participated in aid airdrops to Gaza, but experts say they are inefficient, expensive and cannot possibly deliver enough aid to avert famine. Given the drawbacks, as well as dangers to people on the ground, airdrops are typically a last resort.

The United States and other countries should instead focus their efforts on “ensuring Israel lifts its siege of Gaza” and getting Israel to reopen border crossings to allow the unimpeded movement of fuel, food and medical supplies, the International Rescue Committee said.

As hunger deepens across Gaza, United Nations officials have warned that famine is imminent. Categorizing a food crisis as a famine is a technical process requiring analysis from food-insecurity experts.

According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, known as the I.P.C., which is controlled by United Nations and major relief agencies, three conditions must be met before a food shortage is declared a famine: at least 20 percent of households facing an extreme lack of food, at least 30 percent of children suffering from acute malnutrition and at least two adults or four children for every 10,000 people dying each day from starvation or disease linked to malnutrition.

The I.P.C. has been selective in declaring famines, identifying only two since its founding in 2004: in Somalia in 2011 and in South Sudan in 2017. In Somalia, more than 100,000 people died before famine was officially declared.

Regardless of its technical classification, the situation in Gaza, particularly in the north, is dire. Two weeks ago, UNICEF said that one in six children in northern Gaza was severely malnourished. The Gazan Health Ministry said on Wednesday that at least six children had died in the territory from dehydration and malnutrition.

Arif Husain, the chief economist of the World Food Program, said his goal was to improve conditions before famine set in.

“For me, what is important is to basically say that, ‘Look, technically we haven’t met the conditions of a famine, and frankly we don’t want to meet those conditions,’” he said. “So please help, and please help now.”

Gaya Gupta, Vivian Nereim, Michael Crowley, Eric Schmitt and Erica L. Green contributed reporting.

For nearly an hour, the driver of a tractor-trailer was trapped in its cab as it dangled high above the Ohio River off the side of a Kentucky bridge after a multivehicle crash on Friday.

From the bridge, emergency responders shouted directions to the driver. Emergency crews set up a rope system and lowered a Louisville, Ky., firefighter, Bryce Carden, to rescue her.

“Thank God,” the driver said when Mr. Carden drew even with the truck’s cab, he recalled at a news conference on Friday.

Initially, Mr. Carden said, he struggled to free the driver from her seatbelt.

“We were given a free pocketknife during our trainings, and I had that pocketknife on me, so I was able to cut her out of her seatbelt,” he said in a phone interview on Saturday. “I was able to get her out and get the rest of the harness on her.”

The driver and Mr. Carden, who were now attached to each other, were about 100 feet above the river as they were lifted up to the bridge, a process that took about five minutes.

“I kept telling her ‘I have you, I have you,’” Mr. Carden said on Saturday. “She was just thanking God, and then I told her, ‘Let’s just keep praying together.’”

Unknown to Mr. Carden and the driver, news crews had gathered and drones captured riveting footage of the rescue, some of which was broadcast live.

“I had no idea just how many people were watching,” he said. “I was focused at the task at hand.”

He said the driver, who was not publicly identified, remained calm throughout the rescue until she made it back to top of the bridge, the George Rogers Clark Memorial Bridge, which connects Louisville, Ky., to southern Indiana.

“I think all the emotions kind of came over, and it hit her that, you know, she possibly could have died,” he said.

Mr. Carden said he had practiced the rope rescue technique so many times that it had become “second nature,” but Friday was the first time he had used it in an emergency.

At a news conference on Friday, the Louisville fire chief, Brian O’Neill, called the rescue a “once-in-a-career type of a thing.”

He said rescuers were dealing with a precarious and unpredictable situation given that the tractor-trailer was “essentially pinched onto the concrete, as well as one of the bridge abutments that was holding it in place.”

“We were very concerned with the stabilization there to make sure our people are safe,” he said. “We are willing to risk a lot to save a lot, so, yes, we are willing to take that risk to get her out, but it was a constant concern that the truck could shift at any moment.”

Chief O’Neill described Mr. Carden as one of the “nicest, happiest guys” and just the person to have led the high-stakes rescue.

“He is the exact right person to put down there to keep that patient calm, cool and collected and to understand that she is in safe hands so she doesn’t panic,” Chief O’Neill said.

The driver was taken to a hospital and treated for injuries that were not life-threatening, the Louisville Metro Police Department said.

The tractor-trailer pierced the guardrail after a crash that involved three other vehicles around noon, the police said. Two other patients, who were not identified, were also taken to a hospital for injuries that were serious and potentially life-threatening, officials said.

The truck was removed from the bridge on Friday night. The bridge was scheduled to be partially reopened by Saturday evening, state transportation officials said on social media.

For Mr. Carden, after the rescue, it was a long night of taking calls, getting back to normal firehouse life, responding to text messages from loved ones and doing interviews with news outlets.

“We went straight back to work,” he said. “I didn’t have a chance to talk to my wife until three hours later.”

Former President Donald J. Trump capped off a clean sweep of Republican delegates in Michigan on Saturday during a raucous convention, which further exposed a deep fissure in the state party that threatens to fester in one of the most important battleground states.

Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner, amassed at least 90 percent of the vote in all but one of the state’s 13 congressional districts against former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, who was ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump.

A simple majority was needed in each district to win its share of delegates at the caucus-style event, giving Mr. Trump 39, to go along with the 12 that he won in Michigan’s primary, which was held on Tuesday. Ms. Haley emerged from that contest with four delegates.

Mr. Trump’s dominance earlier in the week left little doubt about the outcome of the convention on Saturday at the Amway Grand Plaza in Grand Rapids, Mich.

But a protracted fight over the state party’s rightful leader spilled over into the proceedings, where an estimated 200 Republican stalwarts from about 20 of Michigan’s 83 counties were denied credentials. Two groups boycotted the event and held breakaway conventions, one more than 100 miles to the north in Houghton Lake, Mich., and another more than 50 miles southeast in Battle Creek, Mich.

Many of those denied credentials were people aligned with Kristina Karamo, whom party leaders in January voted to remove as the state party’s chairwoman. They replaced her with Pete Hoekstra, a former U.S. representative who was Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the Netherlands.

Not all of Ms. Karamo’s backers were shut out on Saturday: A group from Saginaw County jeered and made thumbs-down gestures when Mr. Hoekstra spoke. He acknowledged the friction.

“It can be a little bit abusive,” Mr. Hoekstra told delegates during one of the caucuses, which took place in a ballroom replete with a chandelier and a portrait of President Gerald R. Ford, an old-guard Republican who was raised in Grand Rapids.

Mr. Hoekstra, speaking to reporters, denied that the credentialing snub was an act of retribution, saying that those turned away had not properly registered for the convention.

Ernest Dugan, a Saginaw County delegate and supporter of Ms. Karamo, said that he was disgusted by actions of party leaders, who have criticized her for money problems in the party and governance issues.

“The whole thing stinks to high you-know-where,” Mr. Dugan said.

As a Black Republican, he said he was troubled by the message that the party was sending with its ouster of Ms. Karamo, who is Black.

“A person of color wants to be in your group,” he said, adding, “Then you kick her to the curb?”

Until Friday, it had appeared that a rival convention, planned months ago by Ms. Karamo, might compete with the one organized by Mr. Hoekstra in Grand Rapids and recognized by the Republican National Committee. But after a series of court defeats disputing her removal as party chairwoman, Ms. Karamo scuttled her plans to hold the event in Detroit.

“We need to be united around Hoekstra,” said Jay A. Fedewa, chairman of the Genesee County Republican Party. “It’s disheartening that they don’t want to do that.”

Mr. Trump, whose victory in Michigan in the 2016 election propelled him to the presidency and who later lost the state to Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, has recognized Mr. Hoekstra as chairman during the power struggle.

Debra Ell, a party leader from Saginaw County, compartmentalized her loyalty to Ms. Karamo and the former president.

“Almost everybody, honestly — we love Trump, by the way — but everybody that Trump has endorsed in Michigan has not won,” said Ms. Ell, who wore a pin with Ms. Karamo’s picture on it. “So bless his heart. We love him, but stay out of our politics.”

At the convention, where one delegate went into cardiac arrest, Mr. Trump outperformed his showing in the primary on Tuesday. Mr. Hoekstra attributed the former president’s sweep to the fact that the process was limited to Republicans. Primaries in Michigan are open to all voters, regardless of party affiliation.

“These folks are focused on winning in November,” he said. “Right? Not fighting other Republicans.”

Still, a woman holding a “Hoekstra Is an Impostor” sign lingered nearby.

At the breakaway gathering in Houghton Lake, about 300 Republicans who boycotted the Grand Rapids convention held their own vote to award delegates, a move Mr. Hoekstra and the R.N.C. have said won’t count. All votes went to Mr. Trump.

Daire Rendon, a former state representative who faces felony charges related to a voting-machine breach after the 2020 election — one intended to overturn Mr. Trump’s defeat in Michigan — presided over the event. She wore a blue Trump cap with a Q pin — for the QAnon conspiracy movement — on it.

“This is not going to impact the national election,” Ms. Rendon said. “But what it does is impact the party here in our state because what we’ve done is we’ve gone back to the party of the old white guys when we had a new grass-roots party being led by Kristina Karamo, who was the younger, dynamic version of a rebirth of the Republican Party, embracing a set of values that the Republican Party has always said it stood for.”

The breakaway group then held what amounted to a straw poll, asking supporters of Ms. Karamo to stand. They did the same for Mr. Hoekstra; no one stood for him.

“We have a unanimous vote,” Ms. Rendon said.

It may have been a warmer than usual winter in Maine, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t gotten mighty cold. In mid-January in Farmingdale, a town outside Augusta where Kaylie McLaughlin lives, the temperature dipped to 6 degrees Fahrenheit. “The kind of cold that hurts,” she said.

But this winter, Ms. McLaughlin’s bungalow is toasty, thanks to two heat pumps she installed to replace her oil furnace. “I’m just so comfortable,” said Ms. McLaughlin, a pharmaceutical sales representative. She’s also saving money, no longer paying $400 every four weeks for an oil delivery.

Unlike a space heater, a heat pump extracts heat from outside air, even in subzero temperatures, and then runs it through a compressor, which makes it even hotter, before pumping it indoors. In the summer, it can operate in reverse, pulling heat from inside a building and pumping it outside, cooling the indoor spaces.

In 2023 heat pumps outsold gas furnaces in the United States for the second year running, a climate win. Electrical heat pumps are the cheapest and most energy efficient ways to heat and cool homes, and they do not emit the carbon pollution that is overheating the planet.

No state has adopted them faster than Maine.

That northeastern place of hardy types and snowbound winters is quickly going electric, installing electric heat pumps three times faster than the national average, according to Rewiring America, a nonprofit that promotes widespread electrical adoption. Last September, Maine met its goal of installing 100,000 heat pumps in households two years ahead of schedule, and is aiming to install another 175,000 by 2027.

Maine’s rapid adoption is being spurred by a combination of state rebates on top of federal incentives and a new cadre of vendors and installers, as well as mounting frustrations over the high cost of heating oil.

The $12,000 price tag for Ms. McLaughlin’s heat pumps was cut in half by state rebates, and she paid for the rest with low-interest financing. In the coldest months, her loan repayment and electricity bill was the same as her old oil bill, but she’s already saved $100 a month during the shoulder season, and gotten a $2,000 federal tax credit. Plus the heat is reliable, she said, unlike her rickety old oil furnace, which forced her to spend much of the winter bundled up indoors. And though she sets the pumps at 66 degrees, she said it feels toastier because the heat is more evenly spread throughout her house.

It’s a big conversion for a state where over half the households burned oil for heat in 2022, the highest percentage in the country.

The change marks a cultural shift, helped when then-governor Paul LePage, a conservative Republican, installed heat pumps a decade ago at both his official residence and waterfront home. Word of mouth spread among families, neighbors and even church communities where new heat pumps kept congregants warm. Even in frigid temperatures, they told each other, even in Maine, heat pumps worked.

“Ten years ago, they weren’t really popular,” said Josh Tucker, of Valley Home Services, a family-owned heating company outside of Bangor. “No one really knew what they were.” He first installed heat pumps in his sister’s new home in 2014, over the objections of her building contractor who, Mr. Tucker said, “was against it big time.”

“He thought she was going to freeze to death unless she had a furnace or boiler,” he said. She didn’t, and uses the same heat pumps today.

The new technology was embraced especially quickly in one northern Maine community after Mr. Tucker’s father installed heat pumps at a Methodist church there. The Tucker family still sells heating oil and propane, but less and less. Its heat pump business, meanwhile, grew from installing two to three units a week to 3,000 last year, a nearly 20-fold increase.

“We’ve done TV ads, advertising on social media, but the big one’s always been word of mouth and that’s how it exploded,” Mr. Tucker said.

According to Efficiency Maine, an independent agency that runs energy efficiency programs, replacing heating oil and propane with heat pumps saves a household over a thousand dollars a year.

They can also make a dent in the pollution that is driving climate change. By one calculation, if every single family home in the United States adopted heat pumps, annual greenhouse gas emissions would drop by 160 million metric tons, the same as taking 32 million cars off the road.

Heat pumps perform somewhat of a magic trick. They can take one unit of energy input to yield three to four units of heat.

Since nothing is burned, nearby air quality improves. Because heat pumps don’t use oil or propane, there are no fuel leaks. Heat pumps run on electricity and in Maine, much of that electricity comes from wind and other clean sources. In 2022, 64 percent of electricity generated in Maine came from renewable energy.

In a twist, the state’s fast adoption of electric heat pumps is related to its historic reliance on oil and propane for heat. Maine is rural and sparsely populated, and gas utilities concluded it wasn’t worthwhile to lay distribution lines in many areas of the state, according to Michael Stoddard, the executive director of Efficiency Maine. Instead of getting heating fuel from a utility, Mainers generally have to pick up the phone to arrange a delivery when they’re running low.

This was one of the reasons Michelle Whitmore, 60, a former monogrammer at L.L. Bean, signed up for a pilot program that installed a free heat pump in her mobile home two years ago. Ms. Whitmore is legally blind, and relied on a neighbor to read her fuel gauge. She was also tired of having to shovel snow so that fuel delivery workers could reach her oil tank.

“I figured I couldn’t be any colder with the heat pump than I was with my furnace,” she said. Now, she just has to hit a switch. The heating and cooling is also more consistent, she said, and though her electricity bills went up she’s still saving $200 to $300 a year.

There has been pushback from the oil and gas industry, which has backed campaigns fighting electrification and questioning the efficacy of heat pumps in the bitter cold. “Heat pumps have gotten thrown into the culture war of electrification versus staying with fossil fuels,” said Christopher Kessler, a state representative from South Portland who works as an energy auditor. Mr. Kessler said some home heating contractors who sell both oil and heat pumps still erroneously claim that heat pumps can’t be used as a primary heating source.

Mr. Stoddard of Efficiency Maine said while many Mainers use heat pumps in tandem with oil and gas heating systems, the hybrid approach reduces the effectiveness of the heat pump. His agency recently changed its program so only households that fully convert to heat pumps get state rebates. People can still keep fossil fuel heating systems but only as a backup or for household hot water, he said.

Smokey Bunn said he and his family had been paying up to $600 a month for oil, as well as going through three tons of wood pellets for their heating stove each winter. “It works fantastic,” he said, of the family’s new heat pumps. “People that get them rave.”

The household’s biggest fans, he said, might be the family’s two dogs, Ivan and Nahla, who regularly plant themselves on the couch in front of the system. “It pushes hot air onto them,” he said. “They love it.”