Less than three years ago, Wassif Frahat spent $3 million to open a lavish, two-story restaurant, the Ali Baba. With an impressive, pillared entryway, polished stone floors, glittering chandeliers and colorful frescoes on the high ceilings, the restaurant was his commitment to a better future.

The Ali Baba, in Jenin, is just a few minutes’ drive from the Jalameh checkpoint, which in normal times allows Israeli Arab citizens entry to the West Bank. The atmosphere is Palestinian, and the shops, restaurants and services are significantly cheaper than in Israel. The crossing also allows Palestinians with valid entry permits to go to jobs in Israel.

But after Hamas invaded Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7, the checkpoint was closed. Israel withheld most tax revenue from the authorities in the West Bank, in an effort to weaken them and clamp down more broadly on Palestinians. The economy in the territory’s north collapsed, and the better future that Mr. Frahat expected now seems farther away than ever.

The war that followed the invasion is devastating Gaza, but it is also impoverishing the West Bank, which has become a kind of second front in Israel’s battle against Palestinian militancy.

The Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank but does not run Gaza, has been paying only about 50 percent of the salaries it owes its estimated 140,000 employees. In the West Bank as a whole, which has a population of about three million, 144,000 jobs have disappeared since October, and 148,000 Palestinians who were working in Israel have lost their jobs, according to the World Bank. Before Oct. 7, unemployment in the West Bank was about 13 percent, compared to 45 percent in Gaza.

Mr. Frahat, 51, once had 53 employees at his restaurant and an older one in the city center. “Now I only have 18 because business is down by 90 percent,” he said.

Israeli Arabs are not his only lost customers; local Palestinians have stopped coming, too. They lack money, he said, and fear continued incursions by Israel’s military. Its forces are trying to tamp down increasing militancy among young armed Palestinians who largely run the sprawling refugee camps in Jenin and the cities of Tulkarm and Nablus.

The Israeli army killed seven people in a raid in Jenin on July 5, after a larger operation in late May that killed 12.

“People are afraid to leave their homes,” Mr. Frahat said.

In large parts of Jenin, and especially near its refugee camp, Israeli troops using tanks and armored bulldozers have ripped up roads, cut water and sewage pipes, broken power lines and smashed many storefronts and U.N. offices, including a recently renovated medical clinic. The scene is similar in Tulkarm, with its two refugee camps.

Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli brigadier general and senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, said that the army was engaged in “preventive actions” to head off a new wave of suicide bombings carried out by “armed groups producing explosives.”

Jenin and some of the camps are bastions of armed resistance to the occupation. Israel has conducted frequent raids over the years, but they have become more common since Oct. 7. Israeli officials say the raids are part of counterterrorism operations against Hamas and an extension of the war. Hundreds of Palestinians have been detained.

The raids have piled only more misery on a failing economy. Amar Abu Beker, 49, the chairman of the Jenin Chamber of Commerce, which represents 5,000 businesses, said that 70 percent of them were struggling to stay afloat.

The chamber is working to repair the key roads that Israeli forces have wrecked because the Palestinian Authority has little money for such work, Mr. Abu Beker said. In addition to the damage done by the checkpoint closure, the economy had been constricted by monthslong general strikes in 2022 and 2023 in sympathy with Palestinians killed in Israeli raids.

“The Palestinian Authority is holding on by its fingernails,” Mr. Abu Beker said. “Without money, you can’t operate.”

In a recent report, the World Bank said that the authority’s financial health “has dramatically worsened in the last three months, significantly raising the risk of a fiscal collapse.” It cited the “drastic reduction” in tax transfers from Israel and “a massive drop in economic activity.”

The measures to starve the Palestinian Authority of funds, pushed by far-right members of the Israeli government who want to annex the West Bank and resettle Gaza, have alarmed the Biden administration. U.S. officials want the authority to play a role in running postwar Gaza and worry that an economic crash in the West Bank could lead to more violence.

U.S. officials have pressured the Israeli government to release withheld taxes, which make up about 70 percent of the authority’s income. On July 3, Israel agreed to release $116 million, but the Palestinian Authority said it was owed nearly $1.6 billion.

Anas Jaber, 27, is among the Palestinians who have lost their jobs in Israel. He had been making up to 7,000 shekels a month, or about $1,870, as a housekeeper at a Tel Aviv hotel.

“Now I sit at home and live off savings,” he said. “I’m not married, thank God.” His job has been filled by Filipinos and Indians, and he has applied to move to Canada. “Inshallah,” he said. “I’m sick of checkpoints, and I want to sleep at night.”

There has been no water for a week, he said. Near his mother’s house, where he is staying, is graffiti in Hebrew and Arabic on a bullet-pocked wall that says, “Alleyways of death.”

Um Ibrahim, 60, said she used to get 750 shekels every three months from the Palestinian Authority for medicine to treat her diabetes and high blood pressure.

“For the past nine months, nothing,” she said. “The authority is having an economic crisis, so I’m scared I won’t get any help.” And if it collapses? She laughed bitterly. “OK, then, bye-bye.”

The governor of Jenin, Kamal Abu al-Rub, 58, admitted that with checkpoints closed, first during the Covid pandemic and now after Oct. 7, the city is struggling.

“The veins that let us live are Palestinians from Israel, our lifeblood,” he said, sitting in his large office as an American armored personnel carrier guarded the entrance. The city’s Arab American University is mostly shut now, with only a third of its regular 6,000 students, who in normal times pay rent and shop in stores.

Israel did allow the Jalameh checkpoint to open in late May, but only on Friday mornings, when the shops are closed and most people are at mosques, and on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

A large photograph of Mr. Abu al-Rub’s son Shamekh hangs in his office. A doctor who trained in Jordan, Shamekh, then 25, was shot and killed by Israeli troops in November, in nearby Qabatiya, when trying to reach his brother, Muhammad, who had been shot in the leg, Mr. Abu al-Rub said. “They shot my two sons in front of my house,” he said.

He praises the Palestinian security forces, two of whose commanders were in the room monitoring the interview, for keeping law and order on badly reduced salaries. But he acknowledges that the security forces do not maintain a presence in the refugee camps, where Israel says the militants have established control, and he blames Israel for all the trouble.

Asked why young fighters from the camp, known as shabab, sometimes fire on his headquarters, Mr. Abu al-Rub said, “It is Israel that is giving the shabab weapons to fire at the P.A.”

Israeli officials deny such charges but would not comment on individual raids or deaths.

At the entrance to the camp, in the hot sun, Mahmoud Jalmaneh, 56, described how his life had changed as he tried to sell cheap tobacco from a dusty glass cabinet on wheels — 20 cigarettes for 4 shekels, about a dollar, compared to more than $8 for Marlboros, which he does not sell.

Born and raised here, he has seven children, and last July, Israeli troops were caught in a firefight in front of his house and blew it up, he said. “I was a homeowner and now I’m renting, and I have no more money to pay when the landlord comes,” he said.

“The checkpoints are closed; we can’t work in Israel or leave the country,” Mr. Jalmaneh said. “There’s no money, no salaries.”

“We are lonely. We are a people isolated and under occupation. We are fighting the whole world.”

Rami Nazzal contributed reporting from Tulkarm and Jenin, and Natan Odenheimer from Jerusalem.

After Daria fled from her Russian-occupied village to western Ukraine, she spent weeks restlessly wandering the streets. Whenever she grew tired of walking, she would sit on park benches and tell anyone who would listen — even perfect strangers — what the Russian soldiers did to her.

“I wanted to tell everyone, but there was no one to talk to,” recalled Daria, a 32-year-old illustrator. “I could not confide in my family members, and I did not know anyone in town. I had to somehow deal with it on my own.”

Daria said Russian soldiers raped her twice in March 2022 in Havronshchyna — a small village about 30 miles from Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital — where a range of alleged war crimes, including sexual violence, have been documented by Ukrainian authorities and international media.

For two years after the assault, Daria said, she wrestled with shame. She could not tell her father what happened, and she struggled to be intimate with her partner. She said in an interview that she was ready to tell her story, to erase the stigma of sexual assault and help herself and other victims heal.

Her plight resonates with many other Ukrainians. Behind the battlefields of Europe’s largest war in 80 years, the authorities and aid groups say, there are thousands of women, men and children who have been sexually assaulted by Russian soldiers and have been struggling to piece their lives back together.

Ukraine’s government, despite facing one of the toughest moments since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 with almost nonexistent battlefield progress, has made significant efforts to document and prosecute sexual violence cases.

But victims and advocates say that it has failed to put in place an adequate support system for survivors, leaving them largely on their own to deal with the financial and psychological effects of their trauma.

Some women said they had to pay for medical checkups or psychotherapy sessions from their own pockets. Many who were dealing with insomnia and panic attacks relied not on the government for help, but on charities, which organize group therapy sessions and connect women with volunteer therapists.

Sexual violence is a war crime under international law, but not under Ukrainian law. Because of that, many victims have not received the same legal status and financial support as victims of other war crimes. Parliament is currently considering a law that would create a legal definition of sexual violence while also establishing measures to provide free therapy for victims and rapid financial help for those in urgent need.

Despite evidence gathered by the United Nations suggesting that sexual violence by Russian forces in Ukraine has been widespread, it remains a mostly hidden casualty of the war. Of almost 137,000 reports of war crimes investigated by Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office, only 308 involve sexual violence.

Experts on sexual violence during conflict said that this was a significant number considering the challenges of operating during a war, and the authorities attributed the low percentage to the reluctance of most victims to report such crimes.

Anna Sosonska, the head of the division for conflict-related sexual violence in Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office, said the majority of victims do not want to relive their traumatizing experience, or risk the stigmatization that might come with speaking publicly. Many survivors live in territories occupied by the Russian Army, she said, further complicating attempts to prosecute.

“Rape is the most underreported and dismissed crime,” said Wiola Rębecka-Davie, a New York-based therapist specializing in conflict-related sexual violence. “Even more in the time of war, when carrying out statistics on sexual violence is never a priority.”

While atrocities since the invasion have received international media scrutiny, sexual assault by Russian forces has been a concern in Ukraine since Russian proxy forces poured into eastern Ukraine in 2014, igniting eight years of simmering hostilities and the occupation of parts of Ukrainian territory. Some victims are coming forward only now after dealing with shame and fears of stigmatization.

The New York Times interviewed almost two dozen women, sexual violence experts, psychologists and activists for this article. Seven survivors of sexual assault, aged 32 to 62, including a safety engineer and a theater director, provided accounts of their experiences. The earliest case involved a 56-year-old anesthesiologist, who said Russian troops sexually abused her in October 2017 in Donetsk. The most recent involved a 48-year-old civil servant, who said she was assaulted in August 2022 in Kherson.

The women agreed to speak using only their first names to maintain privacy involving a sensitive topic; several agreed to be shown in photographs. Their accounts have largely been corroborated by the prosecutor general’s office and SEMA, the global network for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence.

The crimes being investigated by Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office include rape, attempted rape, mutilation of genitals and forced nudity, among others. Some people were forced to watch the sexual abuse of loved ones. The cases concern people from 4 to 82 years old from a big swath of Ukraine’s territory, including the regions of Kyiv, Kherson, Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia.

When asked for comment, the press office of the Kremlin said, “Most often claims of Ukrainian representatives are groundless.”

Halyna, 61, a pensioner from Dmytrivka, said she was assaulted by a Russian soldier in his twenties.

“First, he raped me with his fingers,” Halyna said. “Then with the rifle. He laughed and laughed and laughed throughout the whole thing. Whenever I cried, he told me to shut up or else he would kill me.”

When he was finished, Halyna said, she was bleeding.

For over a year, she said, she could not sleep. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw Russian soldiers climbing her fence. Despite that, she still lives in the home where the assault happened.

“Where else should I go?” she said. “My pension comes down to 2,700 hryvnia,” or about $66, a month.

Experts say Ukraine has had an impressive track record when it comes to advancing investigations to actual criminal proceedings, despite the difficulty of prosecuting soldiers from an opposing army. As of this month, Ukrainian investigators have sent 30 indictments of Russian soldiers to the court; five have been convicted in absentia.

But experts said that by focusing primarily on the legal process, the state has neglected the material and psychological needs of the survivors.

“Legal avenues take a lot of time, and they are expensive,” said Emily Prey from the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a Washington D.C.-based research institution. “What’s needed is interim reparations, access to free health care and access to free housing.”

Kateryna Pavlichenko, Ukraine’s deputy interior minister, said that documenting sexual crimes has become a priority for the government. The authorities trained special police units to work with survivors, she said, and set up nine support centers across the country offering psychological and medical help.

She said that over the past few years, the government had developed new investigation methods, putting priority on the protection of victims and witnesses, including their safety, privacy and dignity.

Some women who gathered the courage to speak to the authorities said that instead of getting help, they found more humiliation.

Halyna, the pensioner, said that as soon as the first Ukrainian soldiers arrived in her village, she started asking them to take her to a hospital. She was suffering from a high fever that she believed was caused by infected wounds from the rape. But it was not until nearly a month later that she was taken to Kyiv to see a doctor and two investigators from the prosecutor’s office.

“Take off your clothes and lie down on the chair,” one of the investigators instructed her, Halyna said, recounting the episode. “The doctor won’t be looking at you, I will.”

She said she had to beg the gynecologist to be properly examined and tested for H.I.V. and venereal diseases, and she paid for it from her own pocket. There were no witnesses in the room, but several months later she recounted the episode to SEMA, the survivor’s network.

Despite her frustration, she said she can understand why she was treated this way. “The full-blown war had just begun,” she said. “There were no services in place, no one was prepared.” She said she believed support for survivors had improved since then.

Daria, the illustrator, said that after she reached relative safety, she went to a few psychotherapy sessions, which she paid for herself, but that they did not help. So she just kept walking.

After about six months, something shifted. She was determined to move on from surviving to living.

She picked up new hobbies. She finally confided in her mother and her boyfriend — and this past spring, she told her father what happened to her.

One day, during a train commute, Daria felt a sudden need to draw. Back home, she sketched two pairs of eyes — hers and her father’s — lurking through gaps in the attic wall, and watching Russian soldiers enter Havronshchyna in March 2022.

Over the following months, she drew scenes of the occupation and of the assault on her. Representing her trauma on paper empowered her to finally report her case to the authorities.

She also decided to confront her shame head-on, and displayed some of the deeply personal sketches at an exhibition in Kyiv this past spring.

“This is my personal reflection and self-therapy,” she said of the exhibition. But she hoped that it would alleviate the stigma and help others deal with their trauma.

“It is important to testify about crimes,” she said, or else “other people will speak for us.”

Like most vice presidents, Kamala Harris was not given much runway on foreign policy. President Biden prided himself on his international expertise and relished his rapport with global leaders. But in the role she did fill, Ms. Harris made an impression.

In more than 30 interviews with officials on four continents, including foreign heads of state, senior diplomats and activists who have personally interacted with her, a consistent picture emerges. Ms. Harris can be many things at once: warm but steely on occasion; authoritative but personable.

She has represented the United States frequently during trips to Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, and has met with more than 150 world leaders. And she has attended three Munich Security Conferences — an annual staple for top-level foreign policy officials to meet and set the Western defense agenda. In recent months, she has also become more directly involved in discussions with global leaders on the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.

At home, she has struck a stronger tone on the plight of Palestinians than Mr. Biden, while sticking with his general stance on Israel’s right to defend itself. In what amounted to her debut on the world stage as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee this past week, Ms. Harris declared after meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Washington that she would “not be silent” about the suffering of civilians in Gaza.

What foreign policy remit she has had has been focused on Central America. Mr. Biden tasked her with working to improve conditions there — such as by fighting poverty and corruption — to discourage families from fleeing to the U.S.-Mexico border. As illegal crossings at the border soared, she has been criticized by Republicans and some Democrats who say she should have been more involved in enforcement efforts; her team argues that was not part of her role.

Foreign policy is a crowded field in any administration, with the secretary of state and the national security adviser playing day-to-day roles, and, according to some foreign officials, Ms. Harris did not emerge as a key point person for global leaders.

Still, the consensus among foreign officials and diplomats is that Ms. Harris has a firm grip on international affairs.

“She is a competent and experienced politician who knows exactly what she is doing and has a very clear idea of her country’s role, of developments in the world, and of the challenges we face,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany said this past week while speaking to the news media.

A senior Israeli politician, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to freely relay impressions about interacting with Ms. Harris, said that she could be scripted when delivering talking points, but would noticeably come alive when moving away from her prepared remarks, noting that she was probably at her best when being spontaneous in meetings with global dignitaries.

Nice, Unless Otherwise Necessary

Ms. Harris does have a steelier side that she deploys when needed.

In 2021, she took the lectern at the Palacio Nacional de la Cultura in Guatemala City to deliver a blunt message to undocumented migrants hoping to reach the United States: “Do not come.”

Less noticed were her comments supporting an anticorruption office that the president of Guatemala at the time, Alejandro Giammattei, had verbally attacked for weeks.

“We will look to root out corruption wherever it exists,” Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor, said during a news conference while standing only feet from Mr. Giammattei.

She also made a point to meet with anticorruption activists. “It was a difficult time to make the U.S. government understand that the way to stop corruption was to address profound democratic backpedaling,” said Claudia Samayoa, a prominent Guatemalan human rights defender. But she said Ms. Harris was an exception and came across as very knowledgeable.

Still, only a month after Ms. Harris’s trip, the country’s top anticorruption prosecutor was fired and fled the country.

The vice president jumped in again as part of a Biden administration effort two years later to try to ensure that Mr. Giammattei respected election results.

Amid signs that his allies wanted to disrupt the handover of power to the newly elected president, Bernardo Arévalo, Ms. Harris called Mr. Giammattei twice to tell him that the White House was watching closely, according to two senior U.S. officials, and later sent her national security adviser to deliver a strong message that the United States was running out of patience.

The warnings and moves by the State Department, which imposed visa restrictions on more than 100 members of the Guatemalan Congress for undermining democracy and the rule of law, appeared to have an effect.

Mr. Arévalo was eventually able to take office and made a point of meeting with Ms. Harris in March when he visited Washington.

She has also been prepared to displease people to focus on issues she cares about. Last year, British officials were putting the finishing touches on the agenda for a summit in London focused on the long-term safety risks of artificial intelligence, like national security dangers, working with the U.S. National Security Council, according to a senior British official involved.

But then there was a snag: Ms. Harris, who was designated as Mr. Biden’s point person on A.I., wanted more emphasis put on short-term risks — like job losses and discrimination, according to British and American officials involved in the conference. She made those risks central to her speech on the first day of the summit, frustrating British officials.

Her team also appeared concerned that the summit displayed an overly cozy relationship between policymakers and Big Tech, and insisted on allowing civil society groups like A.I. Now, a critic of Big Tech, to join policymakers and executives in a closed-door session, the officials said.

The Smoother-Over

Ms. Harris has, at times, been sent on missions to patch things up with slighted allies.

She was confronted by an early diplomatic test in the fall of 2021: Relations between the United States and France plummeted after America struck a deal to help Australia develop submarines, snatching a building order away from the French.

Ms. Harris, who had periodic lunches with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken to discuss foreign policy, was quickly off to Paris to make good with President Emmanuel Macron.

The vice president met for hours with Mr. Macron, but she stayed in Paris for five days, which the French appreciated, according to a diplomat and American officials. She toured the Pasteur Institute — a research facility where her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, once worked — before shopping at a famous cookware store, E. Dehillerin.

“I just want to buy a pot,” she told reporters before asking employees questions, in French, about the materials.

Lean Into Levity

Ms. Harris has combined serious state business with personal connections.

Last spring, she visited several African nations to bolster collaboration with them amid China’s growing influence on the continent. One stop was Zambia.

Ms. Harris’s grandfather and aunt had lived there, and she visited them as a child. On this trip, she visited their onetime home, and was met by several Zambians whose relatives knew her family, including Nankhonde Kasonde-van den Broek.

“I was expecting to meet somebody more formal,” Ms. Kasonde-van den Broek said. “And I met a warm, friendly, interested person.”

Ms. Harris sometimes relies on humor on the global stage, according to several foreign officials who used the adjectives “funny” and “witty” to describe her. She is also known to allow herself the occasional silliness that endears her to her fans, but is criticized by her detractors. One such moment came last month in Switzerland, where she was representing the United States at a 92-country conference on Ukraine and took the time to show a local Swiss politician a photograph of some chickens on her phone.

During an aperitif reception, Ms. Harris told the politician, Michèle Blöchliger, that she was surprised to see the chickens roaming freely rather than in coops, so she took pictures from her motorcade, Ms. Blöchliger recalled in an interview.

“She told me she’d never experienced something like this before — to ride to an international conference and see free-range chickens,” Ms. Blöchliger said, adding that she was happy that someone in so high a position noticed such things.

Ms. Harris also occasionally relies on her love of food and cooking to bolster relationships with foreign leaders.

In 2023, she hosted President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines for breakfast in Washington. A key topic of discussion that morning was China’s claims on the South China Sea, according to Jose Manuel Romualdez, the Philippines ambassador to Washington, who was present.

Despite the heavy topic of defense being the main course, Ms. Harris found a moment to tell Mr. Marcos about her love of adobo, a popular Philippine dish made with marinated meat or fish.

Mr. Marcos directed the embassy’s chef to deliver her adobo the way he would eat it, Mr. Romualdez said.

Women in Focus

Ms. Harris has consistently organized meetings with women’s groups during her travels to Latin America, Asia and Africa, according to multiple interviews with people who were present.

In 2022 in South Korea — where working women struggle against expectations that their focus should be on taking care of children and household duties — female leaders she met at the U.S. ambassador’s residence were moved by her visit — and by her message.

“I was most impressed when she said that a society that helps its women fulfill their dreams and pursue their professional careers without discrimination is an advanced society,” said Baik Hyun Wook, who at the time was the head of the Korean Medical Women’s Association and attended the gathering.

That same year in Mexico, while on an immigration-focused visit, she met with a small group of professional women. “She wanted to understand the difficulties that women in Mexico faced,” said Michelle Ferrari, the regional president of the Women Economic Forum, who was present.

Odile Cortés, an entrepreneur who also participated, said that most people thought Ms. Harris had come to Mexico only to “scold” Mexico’s president over migration. But in her meeting with the women, Ms. Harris sat quietly, taking notes and asking detailed questions, Ms. Cortés said.

“She wasn’t trying to lecture us about anything,” she added, “but rather truly listen to what we had to say.”

Reporting was contributed by Adam Satariano from London; Anton Troianovski and Christopher F. Schuetze from Berlin; Patrick Kingsley and Adam Rasgon from Jerusalem; Choe Sang-Hun from Seoul; John Eligon from Johannesburg; Michael D. Shear and Erica L. Green from Washington; Jody García from Guatemala City; Emiliano Rodríguez Mega from Mexico City; Camille Elemia from Manila; and Alexandra Stevenson from Hong Kong.

The Israeli army ordered the evacuation of several neighborhoods in southern Gaza on Saturday, the latest in a series of such directives recently that have forced tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians to relocate yet again.

The decision affects an area around the city of Khan Younis that Israel had previously designated a “humanitarian zone” for Palestinian civilians, who are weary from nearly a year of unrelenting war and a daily struggle to avoid disease and find enough food and clean water to survive.

“People aren’t being regarded as people,” said Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for UNRWA, the main United Nations agency providing aid to Palestinians in Gaza. “They’re being treated as pinballs and chess pieces.”

The Israeli military said its recent evacuations and operations in Khan Younis have targeted a renewed Hamas insurgency and accused Hamas of installing weapons infrastructure in the area under the latest evacuation order on Saturday.

Over the past week, amid new evacuation orders, more than 190,000 people have fled the places where they were sheltering in southern and central Gaza, the United Nations said on Friday.

Dozens of people have been killed in fighting in the area, according to both Israel and Palestinian health officials. The Israeli military said on Friday that its forces had killed more than 100 militants in Khan Younis in recent days, while Palestinian health officials have said that at least some casualties arriving at local hospitals with severe blast wounds have been women and children.

There was also a new Israeli strike in central Gaza on Saturday, in an area some miles north of the zone under the latest evacuation order. Palestinian health officials reported that the Israeli military struck a school-turned-shelter that the Al-Aqsa hospital in the town of Deir al-Balah was using to provide medical services to Palestinians.

More than 30 people were killed in the Israeli attack and scores more wounded, according to Khalil al-Daqran, a spokesman for the Al-Aqsa hospital.

The Israeli military said its forces had struck a Hamas command and control center within the school grounds, which it claimed had been used to wage attacks against the Israeli military and store weapons.

Tariq Abutaha, 30, said in an interview on Saturday that he had fled his home in the Khan Younis suburb of Qizan al-Najjar — inside the zone under the new evacuation order — on Friday as rumors of an impending Israeli operation swirled. He last left there in December, expecting to return a week or two later. But he returned after five months of fighting in the city to find his home partially ruined.

On Friday evening, Mr. Abutaha said he paid $400 for a small truck to ferry 20 family members and whatever belongings they could load to the coastal area of Al Mawasi, which Israel has called a “safer zone” since the early days of the war. As they drove, he watched one scene after another of people fleeing on foot or camping out amid the rubble in the streets.

“We want to get back to our lives. By God, we’re exhausted,” said Mr. Abutaha, as he settled in, once again, in a crowded tent on Gaza’s coast.

Hassan Shehada, 61, a displaced person in Qizan al-Najjar, said he and 25 family members had failed to find a place to go and would remain in the evacuation area, at least until Sunday morning, despite Israel’s orders.

“We have no idea what to do. This is a real problem. We’re tired of moving over and over,” he said, likening life in Gaza to going through “a slow death.”

In any case, fleeing to comply with Israeli evacuation orders provides little guarantee of safety for Palestinian civilians.

The Israeli military has said it will target Hamas anywhere the armed group operates, contending it has used schools, hospitals, and the Israeli-designated “safer zone” for military purposes.

Israeli ground forces invaded Khan Younis in December, beginning a four-month battle that devastated the city. After the troops withdrew in April, some residents returned to their homes, began clearing streets, and sought to rebuild their lives as much as possible.

Then came another wave of Israeli evacuation orders in early July, followed by at least two more sets of instructions for Palestinians to flee their neighborhoods. For many, it was far from their first time fleeing their homes.

Kamal al-Madhoun, 66, said he saw hundreds of displaced people arriving in western Khan Younis on Saturday, carrying heavy bags and looks of desperation on their faces.

Watching the people trying to find a place to set up makeshift shelters worried Mr. al-Madhoun, who wondered whether he might find himself in the same situation next.

“Absolutely nothing is permanent,” he said. “We’re always full of fear that we’ll have to go through that miserable experience again.”

The Israeli military said another reason for the wide-scale operations in this area recently was an attempt to recover the bodies of Israeli hostages.

Israeli forces worked for almost 30 hours on Wednesday to extract the bodies of five hostages from a tunnel shaft nearly 200 meters long and 20 meters underground, the military said.

“We were right next to those bodies in the past” without knowing it, lamented Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military chief of staff. “We didn’t know how to reach them.”

The operation in Khan Younis was escalating again just days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel met with President Biden in Washington, where they discussed efforts to reach a cease-fire in Gaza that would also free the roughly 115 living and dead hostages there.

The negotiations appear to have ground to a halt in recent weeks, despite some renewed optimism. Israel has yet to formally issue its response to Hamas’s latest counterproposal, which the Palestinian group handed to Qatari and Egyptian mediators in early July.

Relatives of several American-Israeli hostages met with Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu on Thursday. After the discussions, they expressed hope that an agreement could yet go forward; in November, roughly 105 of the 250 hostages were freed in a weeklong truce.

“We feel probably more optimistic than we have since the first round of releases in late November,” Jonathan Dekel-Chen, whose son Sagui was abducted during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack, told reporters at a news conference.

Ronen Bergman contributed reporting to this article.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken pressed his Chinese counterpart Saturday on areas of sharp disagreement between the two nations, including China’s support of Russia’s military industrial sector, the State Department said in a statement.

Mr. Blinken met with the Chinese official, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of an annual international conference of Southeast Asian nations in the Laotian capital of Vientiane. Also in attendance was Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, who at one group session blamed the United States for provoking Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a senior State Department official told reporters traveling with Mr. Blinken.

In their meeting, Mr. Wang listened to Mr. Blinken’s criticisms, but pointed out that China has not sent weapons to Russia, said the State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe diplomatic talks.

President Biden and his aides have recently accused China of helping Russia rebuild its defense industrial sector, mainly through the export to Russia by Chinese companies of machine tools and microelectronics that have helped the Russian army persist in its war in Ukraine.

Mr. Blinken told Mr. Wang that defending Ukraine against Russia’s aggression was a “core interest” of the United States, using a term that Chinese officials often deploy to signal their own national priorities, the State Department official said.

The U.S. government has imposed sanctions on more than 300 Chinese entities as a result, but the Chinese government still has not curbed the exports, the official said. He added that Mr. Blinken presented specific examples of the exports, though the official declined to go into detail on that part of the conversation.

Mr. Blinken also said the two countries could try to make more progress on strengthening high-level military talks and on working together on counternarcotics. During a summit meeting last November outside San Francisco, Mr. Biden and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, had agreed that both areas held potential for cooperation.

The two officials also discussed the Gaza war, and Mr. Blinken raised separate issues involving North Korea and Myanmar. Mr. Blinken highlighted human rights issues in Tibet and Hong Kong, and Chinese military actions around Taiwan.

The State Department official said that Mr. Wang did not ask about or comment on the upcoming November elections in the United States, which was shaken up by President Biden’s decision to drop out of the race and throw his support to Kamala Harris, the vice president, as the Democratic nominee to challenge Donald J. Trump in November. Mr. Wang did note that Mr. Xi values his relationship with Mr. Biden, the official said.

Mr. Blinken and Mr. Wang attended other meetings on Saturday on the sidelines of an annual conference of foreign ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which has 10 member countries. The top diplomats from other world powers, including the United States, China and Russia, also regularly attend. Laos is the host of the group’s various conferences and leadership summit this year.

Mr. Blinken did not arrive in Vientiane until Saturday morning. He left Washington a day later than he had originally planned, after Mr. Biden agreed to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Thursday at the White House.

Because of that, Mr. Blinken’s aides had to scramble to compress his schedule, and he spent only a few hours in total at the conference in Vientiane before flying to Hanoi, Vietnam, for meetings there and to visit the family of the Nguyen Phu Trong, the Communist Party general secretary who recently died. Mr. Blinken had missed the funeral because of his delayed departure from Washington. On Saturday night, Mr. Blinken gave the family a ceremonial fruit basket in their home, lit an incense stick and stood in prayer in front of an altar.

The forced scheduling change and shortening of Mr. Blinken’s Asia trip is emblematic of a tension at the heart of American foreign policy. Though U.S. leaders argue their nation is a Pacific power that can compete with China in Asia, the reality is that world crises — in particular the wars in Ukraine and Gaza — have absorbed much of their attention in the past year.

Since the start of the Israel-Gaza conflict last October, Mr. Blinken has made more trips to the Middle East than to any other region of the world, despite President Biden’s desire since the start of his administration to push the Middle East down on his list of foreign policy priorities.

Before meeting with Mr. Wang on Saturday, Mr. Blinken sought to make the case that the United States remained committed to Asia across economic, diplomatic and military realms. He had separate group meetings with foreign ministers from East Asia and those from Southeast Asia; took part in discussions among diplomats of the United States and Mekong River nations; and spoke to the leaders of Laos, which, like China and Vietnam, is ruled by a Communist Party.

At the start of his meeting with Saleumxay Kommasith, the foreign minister and deputy prime minister of Laos, Mr. Blinken praised efforts to deepen the U.S.-Laos relationship, and he said the United States wanted to ensure its “comprehensive strategic partnership” with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations “really fully takes flight, and we’re working very hard on that.”

The State Department said in a vague summary of the meeting that Mr. Blinken stressed the American government’s “shared vision of an Indo-Pacific that is free, open, connected, prosperous, secure, and resilient.”

That is coded language that U.S. officials use to signal disapproval of policies by China in the region, including its ambitious territorial claims in the South and East China Seas and maritime aggressions by coast guard vessels and other ships.

Railway workers in France rushed to wrap up delicate repair work on Saturday, a day after arsonists sabotaged three high-speed train lines and caused disruptions that have eased up but are expected to last through the weekend.

The sabotage upended travel plans for over a million end-of-week passengers and caused chaos just hours before the opening ceremony of the Paris Summer Olympics on Friday.

The ceremony itself unfurled across the Seine River without any major issue other than pouring rain, allowing French security officials to breath a sigh of relief.

“WE DID IT!” Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, exulted on X, adding that “after four years of intense work to prepare for the world’s biggest sport event, we have never been prouder of our security forces.”

But the railway sabotage cast a shadow over that elation. The French authorities have said little about who might be responsible or what the exact motives were.

No arrests have been made, and no one has publicly claimed responsibility for the attacks, which hit three separate locations on France’s vast railway network around 4 a.m. on Friday: Courtalain, southwest of Paris; Pagny-sur-Moselle, to the east; and Croisilles, to the north. All are over 60 miles from the French capital.

An attack on a fourth location, in Vergigny, about 85 miles southeast of Paris, was foiled when railway workers doing maintenance work stumbled upon suspicious individuals who fled before any damage was done, the authorities said.

The arsonists simultaneously cut and burned critical signaling and security cables, bringing traffic on three high-speed train lines to a halt. They targeted signaling stations right before the tracks split into two directions, ensuring maximum disruptions.

Each cable is split into dozens or even hundreds of fiber optic threads that must be repaired, reconnected and tested.

Video released on Friday by the S.N.C.F., France’s national railway company, showed workers clad in fluorescent orange hunched over clumps of charred cables as they painstakingly replaced them.

The company said in a statement on Saturday that its employees had “worked all night under difficult conditions in the rain” to undo the damage.

Traffic was back to normal on the line that connects Paris to eastern France, the company said. Seven out of 10 trains will run on the lines that connect the French capital to the north, west and southwest of the country, with delays of up to two hours, it said.

Traffic will remain disrupted on Sunday on the northern line but should improve on the others, it added.

“All team and accredited transport for the Olympic Games will be provided,” the S.N.C.F. said.

The Paris prosecutor’s office, which handles major cases of organized crime, has opened an investigation on a range of criminal vandalism and criminal conspiracy charges that carry the risk of up to 20 years in prison and hundreds of thousands of euros in fines.

The charges, which indicate how seriously the French authorities are treating the attacks, include “damage to property likely to affect the fundamental interests of the nation” and “damage and attempted damage by dangerous means in an organized gang.”

South Korea was investigating a leak from its top military intelligence command​ that ​local news media said had caused a large amount of sensitive information, including personal data on the command’s agents abroad, to end up in North Korea, its military said Saturday.

The military said in a brief statement that it planned to “deal sternly with” those responsible for the leak. But it declined to confirm the local media reports, pending its investigation of the Korea ​Defense Intelligence Command,​ where the leak took place.

The command, a secretive arm of the South Korean military, specializes in gathering intelligence on North Korea, a heavily militarized country that often threatens ​its southern neighbor with nuclear weapons.

It’s highly unusual for the South Korean authorities to publicly acknowledge a leak from the command​, which is one of South Korea’s top two spy agencies, along with the National Intelligence Service.

The intelligence command runs a network of agents, including those disguised ​as South Korean diplomats or using other undercover identities, in China and other parts of Asia.

The agents often spend years recruiting North Koreans overseas as their contacts. The information they collect augments the intelligence that the United States and its allies collect on North Korea through spy satellites or by intercepting electronic communications.

If personal data about the agents ended up in North Korea, that could seriously damage South Korea’s ability to gather intelligence on the North.

The last time a major breach of security was reported at the command was in 2018, when an active-duty military officer affiliated with the command was found to have sold classified information to foreign agents in China and Japan through a retired ​South Korean intelligence officer. The information he sold reportedly included data on the command’s agents in China or data on North Korean weaponry.

North and South Korea run vigorous intelligence and counterintelligence operations against each other. South Korea still occasionally ​arrests people accused of spying for North Korea. In recent years, North Korea has also used an army of hackers to attack computer networks in the United States, South Korea and elsewhere to steal information or cryptocurrency.

On Thursday, the United States, Britain and South Korea issued a joint advisory warning that North Korea​’s hackers have conducted a global cyber espionage campaign to steal classified military secrets to support​ its nuclear weapons program​.

The U.S. Justice Department said ​on Thursday that a North Korean military intelligence operative had been indicted in​ a conspiracy to hack into American health care providers, NASA, U.S. military bases and international entities, stealing sensitive information and installing ransomware to fund more attacks​. A reward of up to $10 million has been offered for information that could lead to ​the arrest of the alleged North Korean operative, Rim Jong Hyok​.

An Olympic swimming champion who was one of 23 Chinese athletes who tested positive for a banned substance before the last Summer Olympics said on Saturday that she and her teammates had been wrongly accused of doping and insisted that China would never allow any athlete to use performance-enhancing drugs.

The remarks by the swimmer, Zhang Yufei, were the first public comments by a member of the Chinese swimming team at the center of the doping scandal, which has brought anger, accusations and resentment to the Paris Olympics, the sport’s grandest stage.

“I don’t think any athlete, Chinese or non-Chinese, would want to destroy the work they built up every day over the years on doping,” Zhang said at the Olympic pool after a fast swim in a morning race on the opening day of the swimming competition. The Chinese government, she said, “also does not allow us to dope on purpose.”

Zhang offered her responses in an interview in Mandarin that was translated into English.

Zhang and her Chinese teammates tested positive for a banned substance at a domestic meet in early 2021, but they were allowed to continue competing, including at the Olympics later that year, after a Chinese investigation declared that the positive test was the result of accidental contamination. Zhang went on to win four medals in Tokyo — two gold and two silver — and helped break a world record with her freestyle relay teammates.

On Saturday, Zhang reiterated what the Chinese authorities and the World Anti-Doping Agency have claimed for months: that the positive tests for the banned substance, trimetazidine, a prescription heart medication, were the result of food contamination traced to a hotel kitchen. Chinese officials and WADA officials declined to punish the swimmers and kept the results secret, despite rules at the time that should have led to their public disclosure.

Zhang said the furor over the case had altered her relationships with competitors from other countries and cast her and her teammates in an unfair light ahead of the Paris Games.

“I really hope everyone will not look at the Chinese swimming team with tinted glasses,” she said. “Before last year, and before the scandal broke out, I got along really well with competitors from other countries. Now at this Olympics, I’m really worried that my good friends will look at me differently, that they would be unwilling to compete with me or watch me compete.

“I’m even more worried that the French public would think that Chinese athletes do not deserve to compete at this stage, so I feel very misunderstood.”

Zhang said the Chinese swimmers in Paris had been tested 20 to 30 times over the past two months, averaging three to four times a week. World Aquatics, swimming’s international governing body, provided similar figures, but Zhang’s claims were significantly lower than the testing figures reported in the Chinese news media, which had been claiming some swimmers had been tested several times a day.

Per World Aquatics, the testing rate for Chinese swimmers since the start of the year is four times more than that for Australian swimmers and an average of six times higher than the rate for U.S. swimmers.

Zhang spoke after advancing to the semifinals of the 100 butterfly, an event in which she won a silver medal at the Tokyo Games. She is entered in two other individual events, the 50 freestyle and the 200 butterfly.

Qin Haiyang, another of the swimmers who tested positive before the Tokyo Games, declined an interview request after swimming in the prelims of the 100 breaststroke.

Weiyi Cai contributed reporting.

The French swimmer Léon Marchand understood that he would be his country’s marquee athlete at the Paris Games, and he surely is. Event workers stop him to sneak in selfies. A giant photo of him on the starting blocks adorns a skyscraper. Cameras are trained on him everywhere he goes.

But Marchand’s star turn didn’t begin just this week. Even in the months leading up to the Games, his growing fame was evident thousands of miles away in Arizona, where he was swimming for Arizona State. After a road meet at the University of Arizona, fans lined up to have him sign whatever they had handy — a swim cap, Nike Jordans, a scrap of paper.

He was asked if this happened at every meet.

“Just this year,” he said.

Marchand, 22, has ascended to the top of the swimming world just in time for his home country to host the Games, and as one of France’s best — and earliest — hopes for Olympic gold.

Carrying the weight of a nation’s hopes can be an uncommonly heavy burden for any athlete, and Marchand will not bear it alone, of course. Victor Wembanyama, the 7-foot-4 sensation who just completed his rookie season with the N.B.A.’s San Antonio Spurs, will lead France’s men’s basketball team. Teddy Riner, one of the best judokas in history, will look to claim a medal at a sixth straight Games. The World Cup winner Thierry Henry is coaching France’s men’s soccer team, and the pressure to deliver will be just as intense in a handful of sports — rugby, cycling, tennis — that France loves the most.

But swimming is one of the Olympics’ marquee events, and that is turning a different kind of spotlight on Marchand, whose profile has grown exponentially since the day last summer when he broke Michael Phelps’s last remaining world record by more than a second. He is entered in four individual events in Paris, and is a threat to win a medal in all of them.

His first chance could come Sunday in his signature event, the one he used to knock Phelps out of the record book: the 400-meter individual medley.

“It does feel weird,” Marchand said. “Because when I went to Tokyo, I was nobody. I was just a random swimmer. Just happy to be in the final. This year is going to be different because I want to win gold. And it’s at home.”

Pool Genes

It is no surprise that swimming — or even butterfly, the sport’s most difficult stroke — came naturally to Marchand: Both his mother, Céline Bonnet, and his father, Xavier Marchand, were Olympic swimmers for France.

Marchand was 4 or 5 when his parents enticed him to swim 25 meters of butterfly in their local pool in Toulouse, France, by promising him McDonald’s if he could make it across without stopping or clinging to the edge. He easily earned his fast-food reward. But because his parents also had a keen understanding of the commitment the sport requires, they took care never to force it upon either of their two sons. (Léon’s younger brother, Oscar, found that he liked swim meets but not the training, so he decided to play basketball instead.)

Marchand even quit swimming for a couple years as a child, partly because he was bored: He was so much faster than his teammates in practices that he often found himself spending far too much of his time waiting at the wall, shivering, for them to catch up.

He eventually returned to the pool, but when Paris won the hosting rights to this summer’s Games in 2017, Marchand was only just starting to take the sport more seriously. The idea of swimming in an Olympics, let alone being a face of one, wasn’t tangible. Within two years, though, he began to break through on an international level, winning a bronze medal at the world junior championships in 2019 and setting a national record in the process.

In 2020, facing a crossroads, Marchand made two decisions: He began to work with a mental trainer to address the nervousness that he felt was holding him back. And he sent a cold email to a coach he thought might be able to guide him to the top.

That coach was Bob Bowman, a man who had plenty of experience with the Olympics and high expectations: He had coached Phelps for all 28 of his Olympic medals.

Marchand was looking to swim for a college program in the United States, and he asked Bowman, who was then the head coach at Arizona State University, if he might consider having him on his team. The coach’s only familiarity with the Marchand name at that point was Marchand’s father, Xavier, but he looked up Léon’s times and was excited by his potential.

“I had no idea he’d be this good,” Bowman said.

Success, though, was not a straight line. In the months after setting his first French record, and before he reached out to Bowman, Marchand said he began experiencing stress and nervousness before meets. In the spring of 2020, he began working with Thomas Sammut, a mental performance coach for the Olympic sprint champion Florent Manaudou and other top French athletes. Sammut said Marchand told him that he felt as if he was swimming in fear of performing poorly.

“When we first started talking, he had asked me if this high level necessarily meant living with this constant tension,” Sammut wrote in an email interview that was translated to English. “Not at all,” Sammut reassured him, adding that “he could choose his own path.”

They started speaking regularly. Marchand learned to use breathing exercises to focus himself before races and calm himself at bedtime. But the foundation of their work, Sammut said, was changing Marchand’s outlook from swimming in pursuit of results to seeking personal and professional happiness through a sport that challenged him.

That would jibe with the message Marchand was soon getting from Bowman: The challenge of the Olympics, the coach told his new star pupil, is not necessarily swimming the events. It is swimming the events in a noisy and high-stakes environment.

When Marchand arrived in Tempe, Ariz., it felt like “the other side of the planet” to him, but that was what he had in mind. He blended in among the other students his age, attending computer science classes, playing video games and learning to love hamburgers, and he began to shed his shyness. He built trust in Bowman, who in one of their first conversations had offered Phelps’ warm-up routine when Marchand mentioned he was struggling with warming up for races. He has used it at every meet since.

Putting aside the inherent unfairness of any Phelps comparison, Marchand has his own style in the pool. He’s equally talented in the 200-meter breaststroke and butterfly events, a pairing so uncommon that the finals of both will be contested on the same night. (The French swimming federation successfully lobbied for more time between the events to give Marchand his best chance for medals in both.)

His 6-foot-2 frame is not particularly imposing, but Bowman describes him as “fishlike” in the water. Phelps, who called Marchand’s record-breaking 400 I.M. race live for NBC at last year’s world championships, deemed it a “perfect” swim.

“Bob is giving him the tricks,” Phelps cheered from the broadcast booth as Marchand inched closer to erasing his last world record. He pointed out that even on the grueling event’s final turn, Marchand had undulated underwater for the full distance allowed by the rules, a sure sign of Bowman’s tutelage.

And before he presented Marchand with the gold medal, one of three he won at the worlds, they talked about how Marchand could go even faster. Marchand’s freestyle split, the former record-holder told the new one, was nearly a second-and-a-half slower than Phelps’s had been.

Showtime

Marchand’s first preview of what this Olympics may be like for him came last June in Rennes, France. He had returned for the qualifying meet for the world championships and found fans waiting for him outside the pool in the small city in northwest France.

“That was kind of shocking,” Marchand said. “I just wanted to focus on my races and stuff. But you can’t really do that. You can’t ignore people. I’m still learning.”

His parents said that Léon’s rising popularity over the last year sometimes scares them. “We try as hard as we can to protect him and keep him sane. Live like a normal family, in fact,” Xavier and Céline wrote in an email.

Other French athletes have spoken about the pressure they will face at this Games. In an interview with French media, Wembanyama said that if the French team doesn’t win gold, “I would see it as a failure if I think we could have done better.” Riner, the French judoka, acknowledged that all of his previous success now pales in comparison to the challenge — and the expectations — he will carry into a Games on home soil.

“I know the sensation, the feeling of winning a gold medal,” he said in an interview at a New York Times fashion conference earlier this month. “But, in Paris, with the family and friends, it’s very different. That means a lot of pressure. So I need to win this medal.”

That same challenge is in front of Marchand. It has been years in the making, but so has his preparation: in mile after mile in the pool under Bowman’s expert gaze, and in his sessions with Sammut, who has reminded him that pressure is subjective, and that Marchand can process it in his own way. His way?

“It’s going to be like a party, a swimming party,” Marchand said. “All the best swimmers will be there just to race as fast as they can.”

Steven Moity contributed reporting. Alain Delaqueriere contributed research.