Chinese New Year, Israeli hostages freed, Palestinians return to Gaza & more: Top 10 pictures of the week

Performers create sparks with molten steel at a Lunar New Year lantern festival in Nantong, in China’s eastern Jiangsu province on January 27, 2025. The Year of the Snake begins on January 29. The Year of the Snake begins on January 29, 2025.

A man offers prayers at the Amurva Bhumi Vihara temple on the eve of the Lunar New Year of the Snake in Jakarta on January 28, 2025.

US President Donald Trump arrives to speak about the mid-air crash between American Airlines flight 5342 and a military helicopter in Washington, in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on January 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. Divers pulled bodies from the icy waters of Washington's Potomac river Thursday after a US military helicopter collided midair with a passenger plane carrying 64 people, with officials saying there were likely no survivors.

Left to right: Four Israeli hostages, Naama Levy, Liri Albag, Daniella Gilboa and Karina Ariev, wave from a stage before Hamas fighters hand them over to a team from the Red Cross in Gaza City on January 25, 2025. Four freed Israeli women hostages were home in Israel January 25, ending more than 15 months of captivity after Hamas militants handed them over to the Red Cross under a truce deal in the Gaza war.

People walk along Gaza's coastal al-Rashid Street to cross the Netzarim corridor from the southern Gaza Strip into the north on January 27, 2025. Displaced Palestinians began returning to northern Gaza on January 27, an official at the territory's Hamas-run Interior Ministry told AFP, after a breakthrough in negotiations between Hamas and Israel.

A devotee reacts at the site of a stampede amid the ongoing Maha Kumbh Mela festival in Prayagraj on January 29, 2025.

A resident holding her dog stands in a flooded street in Pont-Rean, western France, on January 28, 2025. The Loire-Atlantique and Morbihan regions, as well as Ille-et-Vilaine where 600 people have been evacuated since January 26, were placed on red alert for flooding by Meteo-France on January 28, following storm Herminia.

This photograph shows an albino red-bellied turtle resting next to a sibbling at the Ferme aux Crocodiles, in Pierrelatte on January 28, 2025. The birth of an albino individual of this aquatic species native to Australia and New Guinea is an extremely rare phenomenon.

A gate with the lettering in German "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Will Set You Free) is pictured early in the morning at the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, at the site of the former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp, in Oswiecim, Poland, on January 27, 2025, the day of commemorations on the 80th anniversary of the camp's liberation by the Red Army.

France's President Emmanuel Macron gives a speech in front of the painting "La Joconde" (the Mona Lisa) by Italian artist Leonardo Da Vinci at the Louvre Museum in Paris on January 28, 2025. Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa will be moved to a new special space in the Louvre, accessible independently from the rest of the museum and for this reason provided with its own access ticket, Emmanuel Macron announced on January 28, 2025.