Mimicking the motion of combing locks of hair with a brush, Sama Tubail stares at her reflection in a mirror and begins to cry.

For the eight-year-old, the movement brings back memories of a life before October 7, 2023 – when she had long hair and played outside with her friends in northern Gaza’s Jabalya. But since then, Sama and her family have been among the estimated 1.9 million Palestinians forcibly displaced from their homes, fleeing first to the enclave’s southern Rafah region under Israeli military orders. As the violence escalated, Sama moved to a displacement camp in central Gaza’s Khan Younis.

Israel launched a war in Gaza after Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people – mostly civilians, according to Israeli authorities, and kidnapping more than 250. Israel’s military offensive, paused for almost two months under a fragile ceasefire deal, has killed more than 48,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s agency, estimated in a report last June that nearly all of Gaza’s 1.2 million children need psychological support, especially those exposed to repeated traumatic events.

A week after the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was announced in January, the UN’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, told the UN Security Council that “a generation has been traumatized.”

“Children have been killed, starved and frozen to death,” Fletcher said, adding that “some died before their first breath – perishing with their mothers in childbirth.”

‘Why won’t my hair grow?’

Last year, doctors diagnosed that Sama’s hair loss was a result of “nervous shock,” specifically after her neighbor’s house in Rafah was hit by an Israeli airstrike in August. The traumatic upending of her daily life since October 7 also likely contributed to her alopecia, a condition that causes hair loss, they said.

A report late last year by the War Child Alliance and Gaza-based Community Training Centre for Crisis Management highlights the severe psychological toll on children of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza over the past year. The report, based on a survey of more than 500 caregivers of vulnerable children, found that 96% of children in those circumstances felt that death was imminent and nearly half – 49% – had expressed a “wish to die” because of Israel’s assault.

Sama’s mental anguish intensified after she was bullied by other children for her hair loss, leading her to retreat indoors. Outside, she wears a pink bandana to cover her scalp.

“I want to die and have my hair grow in Paradise; God willing.”

With the tenuous ceasefire in place, tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians started moving back home toward northern Gaza. Sama’s house was flattened in Israel’s bombardment and she and her family remained in Khan Younis, unable to afford travel costs to return home.

“Transportation costs are too high, and even if we go, there is no water, and we don’t know where we would stay,” she continued.

Mental health in Gaza

Providing mental health services in Gaza has always come with challenges. But Dr. Yasser Abu Jamei, director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP), explained that during Israel’s 15-month assault his staff had also suffered trauma which made it difficult to treat others.

“They still carry on and try to bring some hope and support to families (while) working in shelters.”

One technique he said the GCMHP employs is drawing therapy, which allows children to express their feelings through non-verbal communication. He recalled an instance in which giving a child the space to draw enabled them to talk to a GCMHP psychologist about their pain.

“(The child said) my friends are in heaven, but one of them, they found him without his head,” Abu Jamei said. “How could he go to heaven while his head is not there? (The child) continued to cry.”

While the fragile ceasefire held, Abu Jamei said the GCMHP was employing a mental health plan to treat patients which could last for up to six months. GCMHP workers were “relieved” by the pause in fighting, he added, but still felt a “heaviness of the work that awaits them.”

‘A drone came and killed them’

Seven-year-old Anas Abu Eish and his sister Doa, aged eight, live with their grandmother Om-Alabed in a displacement camp in the Al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis. The siblings suffered the loss of their parents in an Israeli strike.

Om-Alabed said the children had been deeply affected by what happened and that Anas experiences moments of aggression whenever he sees other children being embraced by their mothers.

“I frequently remind people to be understanding, as he has lost not only his parents but also the safety, security, warmth, and affection (they) provided,” she said.

“They are interacting. I’ve seen children, they just look at you and they don’t say anything. They don’t cry, they just look at the space (around them), I worry about (those) children more,” Foa said.

Though their home is close by in Rafah, Anas and Doa remained in Al-Mawasi even after the truce was agreed, unable to return as it was under a “red zone” designation – an area considered likely to be targeted if hostilities resumed.

Om-Alabed said after the ceasefire was announced, they did travel back and found their house in ruins. It felt too dangerous to stay there. “We couldn’t handle it,” she said. “We are here waiting and dreaming that our red zone becomes a green zone so we can go back and put our tents over the rubble.”

“All the buildings are crashed into each other,” Om-Alabed continued. “To walk from here to there, you have to climb rubble as if you are climbing a mountain, just to get to our area.”

‘There was sand in my mouth, I was screaming’

In the same displacement camp, six-year-old Manal Jouda calmly recalls the night her home was destroyed, killing her parents and trapping her under the rubble. She described the terror of waiting to be rescued.

“There was sand in my mouth, I was screaming, they dug with a shovel, our neighbor was saying ‘this is Manal, this is Manal.’ I was awake, my eyes were opened under the rubble, my mouth was opened, and sand was coming into it,” she said.

“This is the kind of child I would follow to see if there was a way of reducing the pain her brain will hold later on,” Foa said of Manal.

Even with a ceasefire, children need stability to help aid their healing, Foa said. But she believes that with the right treatment, Palestinian children can make a partial recovery.

“They will never be the same as before the war, but they will recover in the sense that they could be functional,” she said.

“They can be content most of the time, not be distressed, not being dysfunctional and go on with their life.”

But for children like Sama, stability remains out of reach.

‘My friends have hair, and I don’t’

Heavy rain and strong winds have battered displacement camps, destroying makeshift tents and leaving the young girl and other Palestinian families with little shelter.

Even with a truce in place, her hair didn’t grow back and she wonders if it ever will.

“Every time my hair starts to grow, I look at it with hope, but then it falls out again,” she said.

Her mother explained that Sama feels ashamed of having no hair, even in front of her sisters, and feels she can’t restart her life until it regrows.

“Sama always told me ‘I want to go to the north to find my clothes and my memories,’” Om-Mohammed said.

“But now she has changed her mind and says ‘where would we go? We don’t have a home anymore; all my friends have hair, and I don’t.’”

A “no” is not a “yes” when it is a “maybe,” a “probably not,” or an “only if.”

This is the painfully predictable lesson the Trump administration’s first real foray into wartime diplomacy with the Kremlin has dealt. They’ve been hopelessly bluffed.

They asked for a 30-day, frontline-wide ceasefire, without conditions. On Tuesday, they got – after a theatrical week-long wait and hundreds more lives lost – a relatively small prisoner swap, hockey matches, more talks, and – per the Kremlin readout – a month-long mutual pause on attacks against “energy infrastructure.”

This last phrase is where an easily avoidable technical minefield begins. Per US President Donald Trump’s post and that of his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, the agreement concerned “energy and infrastructure.” These are two entirely different sets of ideas.

Russia says it will not attack Ukraine’s electricity grids and gas supplies, as it has mercilessly over the past years, to the extent that Ukraine’s winters have always been a dicey dance with icy families and reserve power sources. The White House, confusingly – in a disagreement, typo or translation nuance – has extended this truce to potentially every part of Ukraine that is considered infrastructure: bridges, perhaps key roads, or ports, or railways. It has created conditions that are almost impossible for Russia’s relentless pace of air assaults – which resumed, as they do every night, on Tuesday night – to adhere to.

Arguably, with summer close and the urgent need for Ukrainians to have heating reduced, Moscow ceasing energy infrastructure attacks is less of a concession. For Kyiv, however, the demand they stop hitting Russia’s energy infrastructure removes one of the most potent forms of attack Ukraine has. For months they have used long-range drones and missiles to strike Russia’s oil refineries and pipelines, causing serious damage to the Kremlin’s main fundraising tool: the export of its hydrocarbons, principally to China and India. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appeared amenable to the idea of a pause Tuesday, but said he still needed to know the “details.”

It is important to emphasize that Trump’s long-heralded call with Russian President Vladimir Putin yielded almost nothing bar the predictable fact that the Kremlin head feels he can outmaneuver his counterpart effortlessly. The swap of 175 prisoners and return of 23 seriously wounded Ukrainians is a minor arrangement, and smacks of something already in the works, given the frequency of similar past swaps and the fact it is due to happen as quickly as Wednesday.

Outside of this and the pause in attacks (whichever ones they agreed), Russia used this week-long delay and phone call to emphasize it wants all foreign aid and intelligence sharing halted as part of a deal and a series of “working groups” on Ukraine and Russia-US relations established. “Working groups” is a Russian diplomatic euphemism for fervid disinterest. Putin evidenced as much by apparently executing a pause in energy attacks immediately, but leaving all the stuff he didn’t want to do to another set of meetings at an undefined time. Putin seems set on returning to the idea that all aid to Ukraine be stopped, something which Trump has already done once, for about a week. It will return to their conversation again.

Some of these technical traps were laid by the basic nature of the initial Jeddah statement by the US and Ukraine. It was admirable but wildly simplistic to demand an immediate month-long stop to all hostilities in a three-year savage war. The proposal did not take into account how long such a step would take to enact with soldiers often cut off from their command, and made no mention of who would monitor adherence to it.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested “satellites” could provide all the surveillance needed. That is almost certainly true, but as an idea it assumes Moscow would be happy with the United States poring over its front-line positions in great detail and being the arbiter of who violated what. A cynic might say the Jeddah proposal was geared to pander to Trump’s simplistic, yet desirable, demand for immediate peace, but also allow Moscow’s customary and pedantic search for loopholes to get ensnared on its lack of technicalities. And Putin immediately sought to dangle the deal’s feet into these plentiful weeds.

Ultimately, the Kremlin did not seek to discuss “nuances” – the finer points, for example, of whether the OSCE or the UN would police the front line – but instead offered as few concessions as it could without providing Trump with a flat “no.”

But a flat “no” is what Trump has received. It is packaged as a “partial ceasefire,” but that is simply the first phase of Russia renewing its decade-long deceptive diplomacy. They have agreed to a pause in attacks that – largely from now on – will damage Moscow’s bank balance. Indeed, the initial and amateur confusion over what was agreed has opened a chasm in any future peace deal wide enough for Putin to drive another full-scale invasion through. Did both sides not set staffers aside after the call to prepare an identical readout of what was agreed?

The vaudeville theater of the past month should provide little comfort that the war is suddenly headed toward peace. Yes, the Trump administration has talked peace in a way that nobody has done so far in this war. But they have also managed to confirm, in short shrift, that Moscow looks for cracks of weakness and mercilessly drives a tank through them.

Trump felt he could either persuade, coax, or outsmart Putin. He has yet to do any of that. He has palpably lost in their first direct diplomatic face-off. For millions of Ukrainians his next choice defines their lives. Does he lose interest, apply pressure, or again provide concessions? It is a dizzying prospect.

His adversary is focused not on improved relations with Russia’s decades-long adversary, the United States, or with its current president, Donald Trump, but instead on victory in its most existential conflict since the Nazis.

These are not two similar perspectives to the deal. The art of one is more applied than the other.

A member of a small South African research team at a remote Antarctic base has accused a colleague of assault and pleaded for intervention, officials have said.

A “response plan to engage the individuals involved” was “immediately activated,” officials from South Africa’s Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE), which supervises the base, said in a statement – but added that they had no plans to bring any of the team back home.

The DFFE said it received complaints of alleged assault involving two members of the overwintering team of nine on February 27 and was further investigating an allegation of sexual harassment. The department did not mention the names of those involved.

The intervention was revealed after a report from South Africa’s Sunday Times newspaper detailed an email from the team that accused the man of attacking its leader and pleaded for help.

“His behavior has escalated to a point that is deeply disturbing,” the author wrote in the email, according to the Sunday Times, adding: “I remain deeply concerned about my own safety, constantly wondering if I might become the next victim.”

South Africa is the only African nation that operates a research station in Antarctica, the world’s coldest continent, where it established a scientific base in 1960. Its Antarctic station known as SANAE IV typically houses a team of scientists for 13 months, the DFFE said, adding that the current group was dispatched on February 1.

“The Department confirms that there were no incidents that required any of the nine overwintering team members to be brought back to Cape Town,” its statement said about the assault allegations. “If such incidents occurred, the management team of the Department would have replaced such an overwintering team member with immediate effect.”

This is not the first case of assault involving a South African expedition team. In 2017, at a research base in the remote Marion Island, a research team member was reported to have “vandalized another colleague’s laptop with an axe because of a love triangle they were involved in,” according to a South African parliamentary monitoring group.

The DPPE explained that members of its research missions are evaluated ahead of expeditions “to ensure they are able to cope with the isolation and can work and live with others in the confined space of the bases.”

However, it added, “it is not uncommon that once individuals arrive at the extremely remote areas where the scientific bases are located, an initial adjustment to the environment is required.”

A French politician has called on the US to give the Statue of Liberty back after suggesting that some Americans “have chosen to switch to the side of the tyrants.”

Raphael Glucksmann, a member of the European Parliament who represents the small left-wing party Place Publique, made the comments at a rally on Sunday.

“Give us back the Statue of Liberty,” said Glucksmann. “It was our gift to you. But apparently you despise her.”

The statue was a gift of friendship to America from France. Inaugurated in 1886, it represents Libertas, the Roman liberty goddess, bearing a torch in her right hand and a tablet in her left hand with the date of the US Declaration of Independence.

Broken shackles lie underneath the statue’s drapery, to symbolize the end of all types of servitude and oppression.

On Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt fired back at Glucksmann.

“My advice to that unnamed low-level French politician would be to remind them that it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now, so they should be very grateful to our great country,” she said.

Glucksmann then responded in a series of posts on X and Instagram.

He emphasized that his gratitude to the US “heroes” that fought against the Nazis in WWII is “eternal,” before making a contrast with US President Donald Trump’s recent attempts to negotiate a settlement between Russia and Ukraine, as well as Trump’s public spat with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“The America of these heroes fought against tyrants, it did not flatter them. It was the enemy of fascism, not the friend of Putin. It helped the resistance and didn’t attack Zelensky,” he wrote.

“It is precisely because I am petrified by Trumps (sic) betrayal that I said yesterday in a rally that we could symbolically take back the Statue of Liberty if your government despised everything it symbolizes in your eyes, ours, and those of the world,” said Glucksmann.

“No one, of course, will come and steal the Statue of Liberty. The statue is yours. But what it embodies belongs to everyone,” he said.

“And if the free world no longer interests your government, then we will take up the torch, here in Europe.”

Glucksmann is co-president of the Place Publique party, which currently holds three seats in the European Parliament, as well as one in the French parliament and another in the country’s senate.

Despite his party’s small size, Glucksmann has received an increasing amount of attention in the French media, including an in-depth interview in political magazine Le Nouvel Obs published March 5, in which he underlined the importance that European powers step up their defense spending amid a reorienting of US policy priorities.

It has also been rumored that Glucksmann is planning to run for president in elections scheduled for early 2027.

Keeping hope alive wasn’t easy. His morale dwindled along with his food supply. It reached a point where he thought he didn’t want to live anymore.

“I even got a knife three times. Three times I got the knife because I couldn’t take it anymore,” he said. “But I told myself: Calm down, Gatón. You can do it. You can do it.”

He said he had packed enough supplies to last him a month. And after those first 30 days at sea, he was ready to head back to land. But that’s when his boat’s motor stopped running. He tried many times to get it to work again, but to no avail.

From there, he knew he had to ration the few scraps of food and water he had left, hoping it would last him long enough for someone to find him. But after another month or so, his rations ran out. So, he turned to drastic measures.

“After January and February, that’s when I started eating roaches and birds, various kinds of fish that happened to jump into the boat.”

He said he had to hunt those birds in the middle of the night. Around 1 or 2 a.m. they would rest on top of his boat and fall asleep. Once they did, he got a club, snuck up behind them and “pop.”

“I didn’t want to do it but I didn’t have a choice. It was my life.”

At one point, he even had to hunt a turtle – not for its meat but for its blood since he didn’t have anything else to drink.

Not long after that, a hopeful sign finally arrived.

He was about to fall asleep inside his boat. But just 30 minutes later, he heard a loud voice screaming his nickname: “Gatón!”

It was a rescue worker on a helicopter.

“That’s when I said (to God): You did it! You did it!”

The people on board the helicopter gestured to him that another boat would arrive soon to take him home.

After about an hour, as night fell, he finally saw the lights of the boat. He was going home.

“It was something sensational,” he said.

After those excruciating 95 days, he now says he has a newfound appreciation for life.

“I will tell my story worldwide, so the world knows that God is everything in this life, that we put our hand on our chest and fill ourselves with love, give love. That is what we need here on Earth.”

A new anti-LGBTQ+ law banning Pride events and allowing authorities to use facial recognition software to identify those attending the festivities was passed in Hungary on Tuesday, leading to a large demonstration on the streets of Budapest.

Several thousand protesters chanting anti-government slogans gathered after the vote outside Hungary’s parliament. They later staged a blockade of the Margaret Bridge over the Danube, blocking traffic and disregarding police instructions to leave the area.

The move by Hungarian lawmakers is part of a crackdown on the country’s LGBTQ+ community by the nationalist-populist party of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who is an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump.

The measure, which is reminiscent of similar restrictions against sexual minorities in Russia, was passed in a 136-27 vote. The law, supported by Orbán’s Fidesz party and their minority coalition partner the Christian Democrats, was pushed through parliament in an accelerated procedure after being submitted on Monday.

Opposing legislators led a vivid protest in the legislature involving rainbow-colored smoke bombs.

At the protest outside parliament, Evgeny Belyakov, a Russian citizen who immigrated to Hungary after facing repression in Russia, said the legislation went at the heart of people’s rights to peacefully assemble.

“It’s quite terrifying to be honest, because we had the same in Russia. It was building up step by step, and I feel like this is what is going on here,” he said. “I just only hope that there will be more resistance like this in Hungary, because in Russia we didn’t resist on time and now it’s too late.”

What does the law say?

The bill amends Hungary’s law on assembly to make it an offense to hold or attend events that violate Hungary’s contentious “child protection” legislation, which prohibits the “depiction or promotion” of homosexuality to minors under 18.

Attending a prohibited event will carry fines up to 200,000 Hungarian forints ($546), which the state must forward to “child protection,” according to the text of the law. Authorities may use facial recognition tools to identify individuals attending a prohibited event.

In a statement on Monday after lawmakers first submitted the bill, Budapest Pride organizers said the aim of the law was to “scapegoat” the LGBTQ+ community in order to silence voices critical of Orbán’s government.

“This is not child protection, this is fascism,” wrote the organizers of the event, which attracts thousands each year and celebrates the history of the LGBTQ+ movement while asserting the equal rights of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.

Following the law’s passage Tuesday, Budapest Pride spokesperson Jojó Majercsik told The Associated Press that despite Orbán’s yearslong effort to stigmatize LGBTQ+ people, the organization had received an outpouring of support since the Hungarian leader hinted in February that his government would take steps to ban the event.

“Many, many people have been mobilized,” Majercsik said. “It’s a new thing, compared to the attacks of the last years, that we’ve received many messages and comments from people saying, ‘Until now I haven’t gone to Pride, I didn’t care about it, but this year I’ll be there and I’ll bring my family.’”

Government crackdown

The new legislation is the latest step against LGBTQ+ people taken by Orbán, whose government has passed other laws that rights groups and other European politicians have decried as repressive against sexual minorities.

In 2022, the European Union’s executive commission filed a case with the EU’s highest court against Hungary’s 2021 child protection law. The European Commission argued that the law “discriminates against people on the basis of their sexual orientation and gender identity.”

Hungary’s “child protection” law — aside from banning the “depiction or promotion” of homosexuality in content available to minors, including in television, films, advertisements and literature — also prohibits the mention of LGBTQ+ issues in school education programs, and forbids the public depiction of “gender deviating from sex at birth.”

Booksellers in Hungary have faced hefty fines for failing to wrap books that contain LGBTQ+ themes in closed packaging. Critics have argued Orbán’s campaign amounts to an attempt to cut LGBTQ+ visibility, and that by tying it to child protection, it falsely conflates homosexuality with pedophilia.

Hungary’s government argues that its policies are designed to protect children from “sexual propaganda.”

Is Orbán trying to distract the electorate?

Hungary’s methods resemble tactics by Putin, who in December 2022 expanded Russia’s ban on “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” from minors to adults, effectively outlawing any public endorsement of LGBTQ+ activities.

Orbán, in power since 2010, faces an unprecedented challenge from a rising opposition party as Hungary’s economy struggles to emerge from an inflation and cost of living crisis and an election approaches in 2026.

Tamás Dombos, a project coordinator at Hungarian LGBTQ+ rights group Háttér Society, said that Orbán’s assault on minorities was a tactic to distract voters from more important issues facing the country. He said allowing the use of facial recognition software at prohibited demonstrations could be used against other protests the government chooses to deem unlawful.

“It’s a very common strategy of authoritarian governments not to talk about the real issues that people are affected by: the inflation, the economy, the terrible condition of education and health care,” Dombos said.

Orbán, he continued, “has been here with us for 15 years lying into people’s faces, letting the country rot basically, and then coming up with these hate campaigns.”

The Peruvian government declared a state of emergency on Monday in the provinces of Lima and Callao to stem a rise in crime, in a move that follows the killing of a popular musician over the weekend.

President Dina Boluarte also floated the possibility of extending the use of the death penalty in Peru to address the country’s security problems.

The declaration and Boluarte’s statements came after Paul Hambert Flores García, singer of the cumbia group Armonia 10, was shot dead while traveling with his bandmates in their bus.

Peru’s Interior Ministry said Sunday that police are treating the shooting as a deliberate attack.

On Sunday, the Ministry of the Interior said it had deployed several units of the Peruvian National Police to identify and capture those responsible for the shooting, which they have classified as a deliberate attack.

“To these damned murderers, I say that I am seriously considering the death penalty,” Boluarte said Monday at an event to mark the start of the 2025 school year.

It was the latest instance in which the president has publicly thrown her support behind extending the use of the death penalty. Previously she did so in December 2024, following the murder of a girl.

Peru’s death penalty is currently used only for crimes of treason in cases of war and terrorism, according to the Constitution. If it were to be extended to include other crimes, Peru’s Constitution and the Penal Code would need to be reformed. To move forward with that, Peru would also have to disassociate itself from the international Pact of San José, which establishes limits on the death penalty.

Furthermore, the president would need to secure the necessary votes from legislators, which she has been unable to obtain for some of her other initiatives.

Following Boluarte’s statements, the Council of Ministers declared a state of emergency in Lima and Callao for 30 days, authorizing the deployment of Peru’s Armed Forces to support the National Police.

Peru is experiencing a serious security crisis. Several public schools reported days ago that they were being extorted by criminals, prompting them to propose virtual classes, according to state television station TV Perú.

In September 2024, transportation unions, which also reported being extorted by criminals, carried out a workers strike as a warning to the Boluarte government and marched toward Congress. At that time, a state of emergency was also declared in several parts of the country.

Authorities imposed an indefinite curfew in parts of a western Indian city on Tuesday, a day after sectarian clashes were sparked by Hindu nationalist groups who want to demolish the tomb of a 17th-century Muslim Mughal ruler.

Clashes between Hindus and Muslims in Maharashtra state’s Nagpur city broke out on Monday during a protest led by Hindu nationalist groups demanding the demolition of the tomb of Aurangzeb, a Muslim Mughal ruler who has been dead for more than 300 years.

Lawmaker Chandrashekhar Bawankule said at least 34 police personnel and five other people were injured and several houses and vehicles were damaged during the violence. Senior police office Ravinder Singal said at least 50 people have been arrested so far.

Devendra Fadnavis, Maharashtra’s top elected official, said the violence began after “rumors were spread that things containing religious content were burnt” by the protesters, referring to the Quran.

Aurangzeb’s tomb is in Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar city, some 500 kilometers (310 miles) from Nagpur. The city was earlier called Aurangabad, after the Mughal ruler.

Aurangzeb is a loathed figure among India’s Hindu nationalists, who accuse him of persecuting Hindus during his rule in the 17th century, even though some historians say such stories are exaggerated.

As tensions between Hindus and Muslims have mounted under Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, scorn for Aurangzeb has grown. Modi has made references to Aurangzeb in the past, accusing him of persecuting Hindus.

Such remarks have led to anxieties among the country’s significant Muslim minority who in recent years have been at the receiving end of violence from Hindu nationalists, emboldened by a prime minister who has mostly stayed mum on such attacks since he was first elected in 2014.

Tensions over the Mughal ruler have intensified in India after the release of Bollywood movie “Chhaava,” an action film based on a Hindu warrior who fought against Aurangzeb. The film has been lambasted by some movie critics for feeding into a divisive narrative that risks exacerbating religious rifts in the country.

While there have long been tensions between India’s majority Hindu community and Muslims, rights groups say that attacks against minorities have become more brazen under Modi. They also accuse Modi of discriminatory policies towards the country’s Muslims.

Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party denies this.

Hindu extremists have also targeted Muslim places of worship across the country and laid claim to several famous mosques, arguing they are built on the ruins of prominent temples. Many such cases are pending in courts.

Last year, Modi delivered on a longstanding demand from Hindu nationalists — and millions of Hindus — when he opened a controversial temple on the site of a razed mosque in northern India’s Ayodhya city. The 16th-century Babri mosque was demolished in 1992 by Hindu mobs who believe Ram, one of Hinduism’s most revered deity, was born at the exact spot.