The number of new marriages recorded in China fell to a record low last year, despite sweeping government efforts to encourage young people to tie the knot and have babies to halt demographic decline in the world’s second-largest economy.

Some 6.1 million couples registered their marriages in 2024, a plunge of 20.5% from the previous year, according to data released Saturday by China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs. It marks a record low since the ministry started releasing the statistics in 1986.

Plummeting marriages – and births – pose a severe challenge to Beijing, as it grapples with the pressure of a shrinking workforce and rapidly aging population on the country’s slowing economy.

The sharp drop in the number of marriages in 2024 resumed the decade-long decline since 2013, after a brief rebound in 2023 following the lifting of stringent Covid restrictions.

Last year’s figure was less than half of the 13 million marriages registered at the peak in 2013.

The data released on Saturday also showed a slight increase in the number of divorces. Last year, nearly 2.6 million couples registered for divorce, an increase of 28,000 from 2023.

China has mandated a 30-day “cooling-off” period for people filing for divorce since 2021, despite criticism that it could make it harder for women to leave broken or even abusive marriages.

China’s population has shrunk for three years in a row despite a slight increase in the birth rate last year.

The working population, classified as those between the ages of 16 and 59, also declined by 6.83 million last year, adding to an ongoing contraction. The population of those over 60, meanwhile, continued to expand, to account for 22% of the total population.

Chinese officials see a direct link between fewer marriages and falling births in the country, where social norms and government regulations make it challenging for unmarried couples to have children.

To reverse the decline, Chinese officials have rolled out a raft of measures, from financial incentives to propaganda campaigns, to nudge young people to tie the knot and have children.

Officials have organized blind dating events, mass weddings, and attempted to curtail the tradition of large “bride price” payments from the groom to his future wife’s family that put marriage out of reach for many poor men in rural areas.

Some local governments have even handed out cash incentives for young couples to get married.

Since 2022, China’s Family Planning Association has launched programs to create a “new-era marriage and childbearing culture,” enrolling dozens of cities to promote the “social value of childbearing” and encouraging young people to get married and give birth at an “appropriate age.”

But so far, these policies have failed to convince Chinese young adults who are grappling with high unemployment, the rising cost of living and the lack of robust social welfare support amid the economic slowdown.

Many are postponing marriage and childbirth – and a growing number of young people even choose to eschew them entirely.

“Life is so exhausting, how could there be the courage to get married? Sigh,” said a top comment on Chinese social platform Weibo on Sunday, in response to news of the record-low marriages.

The decline in both marriages and births is partly due to decades of policies designed to limit China’s population growth, which resulted in fewer young people of marriageable age, according to Chinese officials and sociologists.

In 2015, China announced an end to its decades-long one-child policy, allowing couples to have two children, then increased that to three children in 2021 – but both marriage and birth rates continued to drop.

The stubborn downward trend is also a result of changing attitudes to marriage, especially among young women who are becoming more educated and financially independent.

Faced with widespread workplace discrimination and patriarchal traditions – such as the expectation for women to be responsible for childcare and housework – some women are growing disillusioned with marriage.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returns from a week-long trip to Washington, toting a fantastical and radical Gaza plan from the American president, he finds a country at a crossroads.

Will Israel return to war in Gaza? Or will the ceasefire hold, and more Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners see freedom?

US President Donald Trump wants America to control Gaza and for the 2.1 million Palestinians who live there to leave. The gaunt appearance of three Israelis released from Hamas captivity has traumatized the nation. A month-old ceasefire expires in just over two weeks and talks to extend it have barely begun, if at all.

Memories and images of the Holocaust have always loomed over the Israeli psyche. But now, at a critical time in the 16-month-long Gaza war, a battle to define the lessons of that slaughter is being played out across Israeli society.

‘Holocaust survivors’

On Saturday, Israelis gathered around their televisions as they have every weekend for a month, to see their compatriots released from more than a year of captivity in Gaza.

Hamas’ highly staged handover ceremonies are fraught. Just a week ago, many Israelis got flashbacks to the scenes of October 7, 2023, as militants pushed Arbel Yehoud through a jostling crowd.

But the nation was not prepared for the image of three skeletal figures – Ohad Ben Ami, Eli Sharabi and Or Levy – as Hamas militants led them from a van in Deir al-Balah this weekend. Emaciated, with sunken faces, the three appeared barely able to walk on their own.

Ohad Ben Ami, Eli Sharabi and Or Levy are escorted by Hamas militants in Gaza on Saturday.

Ohad Ben Ami’s relatives react as he appears on stage during a handover ceremony.

To many, the image drew immediate parallels to the survivors of Nazi death camps. “The three who returned today are Holocaust survivors,” Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan is still held in Gaza, said later that day.

When the prime minister expressed outrage at their appearance, the opposition leader Yair Lapid hit back: “Netanyahu, did you just now discover that the condition of the hostages is dire?”

Hamas and its allies continue to hold 73 hostages taken on October, of whom at least 34 are believed to be dead by the Israeli government.

Netanyahu has long been accused, with some evidence, of deliberately blocking previous ceasefire deals. In a tell-all interview with Israel’s Channel 12 on Thursday, the former defense minister Yoav Gallant – fired by Netanyahu last year after months of tension – agreed.

“This offer from early July that Hamas agreed to is identical to the offer now, only less good in some respects,” he said of the ceasefire agreement adopted in January. “There are fewer live hostages, unfortunately. More time has passed. And we are paying a heavier price here, because there are at least 110 more murderers who will be released in this process.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to Israel on Sunday after spending a week in Washington.

Yoav Gallant, Israel’s former defense minister, said in an interview last week that a ceasefire proposal from last July “is identical to the offer now.”

Previous hostages have been freed in relative health – albeit, doctors say, malnourished and traumatized. With the release of the three gaunt men this weekend, Hamas appeared to be sending a message at a critical moment.

“Seeing the three hostages this morning as if they had been liberated from World War II concentration camps should compel us all to accelerate the release of all hostages,” the veteran Israeli negotiator-turned-peace activist Gershon Baskin said on Saturday.

It should be noted, of course, that many Palestinian prisoners who have been released from Israeli jails say that they were deliberately starved. Mohammad El-Halabi, an aid worker who was charged in 2016 with funneling money to Hamas in a case disputed by international human rights groups, was among those released earlier this month.

‘Total victory’

Just as some see in the Holocaust an argument to accelerate a deal for more hostages, others draw on a deep strain in Israeli culture – that, no matter what, Jews will never again be victims.

“We became a nation of victims – we were the perfect victim,” Netanyahu told Fox News this weekend. “I don’t seek wars – I seek to end wars. But if a war is foisted on me, like these monsters foisted on us, we will defeat them. And we will achieve total victory over them. No question about that.”

Speaking on Holocaust Remembrance Day last year, he said that “a straight line, as sinister as can be, connects the murderers of old to the murderers of today.”

Though his foreign minister, Gideon Saar, also drew the comparison between the Holocaust and the gaunt Israeli hostages released this weekend, Netanyahu has so far avoided their comparison.

His extremist finance minister is similarly skeptical. “The suffering of our hostages in Hamas’ brutal captivity is heartbreaking,” Bezalel Smotrich said this weekend. “But comparisons to the Holocaust are a grave mistake and are based on the contempt for the Holocaust.”

His opinions carry weight. Smotrich is at the height of his powers. After Itamar Ben Gvir quit his post as national security minister over the Gaza ceasefire, Smotrich’s right-wing Religious Zionism party became the keystone to Netanyahu’s ability to govern.

He has also threatened to quit, if Israel doesn’t return to war in Gaza. It is little surprise that Netanyahu waited until this weekend – a week after a deadline for further ceasefire talks – to send a delegation to Qatar. Israeli media is rife with speculation that he is simply running out the clock until phase one of the deal expires on March 1.

“We’re going to get 75% of the living hostages out,” he told Fox News, before hastening to add: “Which – and I intend to get all of them out.”

If Netanyahu does return Israel to war in Gaza, Trump’s desire for Palestinians to leave will become unavoidable.

Trump’s plan is radical. If Palestinians were forced to leave – or encouraged, by prolonging dire humanitarian conditions – it would almost certainly constitute ethnic cleansing under international law. But Trump has recognized, in the simplistic way of a populist, that paying lip service to the two-state solution has only entrenched the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“We’re going to finish Hamas off,” Netanyahu said in that interview. “And what happens then? Do we leave the people there with all that devastation? Do you say, ‘Well, they have to stay in, confined?’ Because nobody lets them leave. Everybody describes Gaza as the biggest open-air prison in the world. You know why? Because they’re not allowed to leave.”

Never one to waste an opportunity, Ben Gvir – a far-right politician who carries a conviction of incitement to racism and supporting a terror organization – also seized on the hostages’ appearance. “This is a holocaust,” he said. “Encourage voluntary immigration now.”

Abeer Salman, Lauren Izso, Dana Karni and Eugenia Yosef contributed to this report.

At least 31 suspected Maoist rebels and two police officials were killed on Sunday in the deadliest combat so far this year in central India, police said.

Hundreds of police and paramilitary soldiers launched an operation in the forests of the Indravati area of Chhattisgarh state based on intelligence that large number of rebels had gathered there, said state police Inspector General Pattilingam Sundarraj.

Sundarraj said as the troops conducted a search operation fighting erupted in the forest, killing at least 31 insurgents and two police officials. Two other police were injured. He said search operations were continuing in the area and the troops had recovered some arms and ammunition, including automatic rifles.

There was no immediate statement from the rebels.

Sunday’s fighting is the biggest so far this year and the second major clash in less than a month in Chhattisgarh, according to police officer Jitendra Yadav.

At least 16 rebels were killed in the state’s Gariband district on Jan. 23. According to Indian officials, the government had issued a bounty for 12 of them totaling about $345,000. Eight rebels were killed in a gunbattle with troops in the Bijapur district on Jan. 31.

Indian soldiers have been battling the Maoist rebels across several central and northern states since 1967, when the militants, also known as Naxalites, began fighting to demand more jobs, land and wealth from natural resources for the country’s poor indigenous communities. The insurgents are inspired by Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong.

Years of neglect have isolated many locals, who face a lack of jobs, schools and health care clinics, making them open to overtures by the rebels. The rebels speak the same tribal languages as many villagers and have promised to fight for a better future especially in Chhattisgarh, one of India’s poorest states despite its vast mineral riches.

The rebels have ambushed police, destroyed government offices and abducted officials. They’ve also blown up train tracks, attacked prisons to free their comrades and stolen weapons from police and paramilitary warehouses to arm themselves.