The Israeli military said on Thursday it had killed Muhammad Deif, the Hamas commander who is believed to have been a planner of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, in an airstrike last month, which would make him the third Iranian-backed militant leader slain in recent weeks.

The Israeli announcement confirming the death of Mr. Deif, the leader of Hamas’s military wing, came as thousands of mourners attended the funerals of another Hamas leader and a Hezbollah commander whose assassinations this week have amplified fears of a wider regional war.

Mr. Deif was killed in an Israeli airstrike on a compound in southern Gaza on July 13, according to the Israeli military. It said his death had been confirmed by an intelligence assessment, but did not provide further details. At least 90 other people were killed in the strike, according to Gaza’s health officials.

Hamas has not confirmed or denied Mr. Deif’s death. The No. 2 Hamas leader in Gaza, he would be the group’s most senior military leader slain by Israeli forces during the offensive in Gaza that has also killed more than 38,000 people, according to the territory’s health officials. Israel began its campaign in the enclave after a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, during which 1,200 people were killed and about 250 abducted to Gaza.

Israeli leaders, who have said they will continue fighting in Gaza until they destroy Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, celebrated the announcement of Mr. Deif’s death, the latest revelation in a dizzying two days that have shaken the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah, both of which are backed by Iran.

“Deif was responsible for the terrible massacre of Oct. 7 and for many murderous attacks against Israeli civilians,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said in a statement. “He was Israel’s most-wanted person for years. His elimination establishes a very clear principle — whoever harms us, we will retaliate against them.”

The announcement came as large public funeral processions were held in Iran’s capital, Tehran, for Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed on Wednesday by an explosion in Tehran; and near Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, for a Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike on Tuesday.

Israel has not admitted to killing Mr. Haniyeh, but American officials have assessed that it was responsible for the attack. Iran and Hamas blamed Israel, and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered a direct strike on Israel in retaliation, according to three Iranian officials briefed on the order.

The killings of Mr. Shukr and Mr. Haniyeh have threatened to engulf the Middle East in a wider war and to derail cease-fire talks aimed at stopping the fighting in Gaza and releasing the remaining hostages there.

As the region braced for a possible escalation, some major airlines suspended flights to Tel Aviv and Beirut, and some of the families of the hostages protested outside Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv, expressing concern that a cease-fire deal was slipping away.

“Prime minister, there’s a deal on the table — a deal that you proposed,” Ella Ben-Ami, whose father, Ohad, remains held captive by Hamas, said at a rally in Tel Aviv. “Please, don’t sabotage it. Don’t break this deal. Bring them home.”

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, during a stop in Mongolia on Thursday, did not directly address a reporter’s question about whether Mr. Netanyahu had misrepresented his desire to negotiate a cease-fire in Gaza, given the escalating tensions in the Middle East caused by the assassinations.

“The path that the region is on is toward more conflict, more violence, more suffering, more insecurity,” Mr. Blinken said. “And it is crucial that we break the cycle, and that starts with a cease-fire. It’s urgent that all parties make the right choices in the days ahead.”

Mr. Haniyeh, who was a top negotiator in the cease-fire talks, was killed by a bomb planted and remotely detonated in the guesthouse in Tehran where he was staying after attending the inauguration of Iran’s new president.

Hours before Mr. Haniyeh was killed, Israeli fighter jets flew over Beirut’s southern suburbs and killed Mr. Shukr, a senior member of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that has been exchanging strikes with Israel for months in what it calls a show of solidarity with Hamas. Israel has said Mr. Shukr oversaw Hezbollah’s campaign against Israel, including a rocket attack that killed 12 children and teenagers in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights last weekend.

On Thursday, throngs of mourners crowded the streets of Tehran for Mr. Haniyeh’s funeral procession, surrounding a canopied truck adorned with flowers and streamers and bearing his coffin. Many waved the flags of Iran, Palestine and Hezbollah.

Mr. Khamenei and Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, wiped away tears during prayers for Mr. Haniyeh, video of the funeral showed. The ayatollah also hugged and greeted Mr. Haniyeh’s son, who was in Tehran for the funeral.

The commander of Iran’s armed forces, Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, also vowed to avenge the killing, saying at the funeral, “We are currently examining how we and the resistance will avenge the blood.” He added, “Different actions will take place that will make the Zionists regret it.”

At Mr. Shukr’s funeral inside a packed auditorium in Beirut’s southern suburbs, the crowd chanted, “Death to Israel,” and shouted, “We are here for you, Nasrallah,” as Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, appeared on a video screen.

In his speech, Mr. Nasrallah said that Hezbollah would retaliate against Israel for the killing of Mr. Shukr. Hezbollah and its allies were working on “a true response, not a show response, as some are trying to suggest,” he said. His unusually brief remarks appeared to stop short of the full-throated pledge to escalate Hezbollah’s fight with Israel that some had been expecting.

“We have entered a new phase,” Mr. Nasrallah said. Addressing Israel, he said, “You do not realize the red lines you have crossed.”

Hezbollah has dialed back its attacks along Israel’s northern border since the killing of Mr. Shukr, and Mr. Nasrallah said in his speech that he had ordered his fighters to remain calm. But he said that the group would resume operations on Friday and that retaliation for Mr. Shukr’s death would come later.

After Mr. Nasrallah’s speech, Mr. Shukr’s coffin was carried to the street outside and met by a sea of mourners, pumping their fists in the air. “No escape, no retreat,” the crowd shouted.

Mr. Netanyahu said in his statement that the Israeli military was prepared for an attack.

“Israel is in very high readiness for any scenario — both defensively and offensively,” he said. “We will impose a very heavy price for any act of aggression against us from any front.”

Reporting was contributed by Lara Jakes, Qasim Nauman, Ephrat Livni, Hwaida Saad, Johnatan Reiss and Edward Wong.

As the Biden administration and its allies try to secure an elusive cease-fire in Gaza, Israel appears to have gone rogue.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, came to Washington last week to give a defiant speech. Despite international condemnation, he vowed to continue the war against Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, where Israel is killing and imprisoning scores of Palestinians each week, without any clear idea of its endgame.

The assassinations of senior Hezbollah and Hamas figures abroad have now sharply raised the risks of a larger regional war as Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah prepare retaliation, analysts say.

But the deaths of Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah commander, and Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, will not change the strategic quandary Israel faces over how to end the war, govern Gaza or care for the civilians there. They are more likely to intensify the conflict than diminish it, making progress on a Gaza cease-fire even more difficult.

Israel says it does not want to occupy Gaza, but has no other solution to provide order; Hamas refuses to surrender, despite the thousands of dead. While Washington sees a cease-fire followed by a regional deal as an answer, Mr. Netanyahu is contemptuous of the idea. He believes only force will compel Hamas to concede and restore Israel’s strategic deterrence toward Iran and its proxies, especially Hezbollah.

Absent a clear goal in the war, however, Mr. Netanyahu’s defiance is dividing Israel from its allies and the country itself. It has further shaken trust in his leadership. It is fueling suspicions that he is keeping the country at war to keep himself in power. It is intensifying a deep rift inside the society — about the fate of Israeli hostages, the conduct of the war and the rule of law — that is challenging the institutional bonds that hold Israel together.

“Israel’s international image continues to take hits since October — despite nine months of war, its military objectives are unmet, and its reputation socially and domestically is also damaged,” said Sanam Vakil, a Middle East analyst at Chatham House.

To form a government and stay in power, Mr. Netanyahu has empowered deeply religious, pro-settlement far-right politicians who oppose a Palestinian state of any kind. He has given powerful roles to Itamar Ben-Gvir, a convicted criminal, who now heads the police and is influential in how the West Bank is run, and to Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister.

Both men have moved to weaken the Palestinian Authority, support expanding settlements in the West and oppose any deal with Hamas — while putting their own followers into key positions in the Israeli bureaucracy.

They represent a populist revolt against the country’s traditional democratic ethos and institutions, including the army and the judiciary. Much like former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Netanyahu, despite his long period in power, rides that anti-elitist wave, arguing that he is the only politician who can stand up to the United States and the United Nations and prevent a sovereign Palestine dominated by Hamas.

“We’re in a very dangerous process that can cast a shadow over the basic DNA of this country,” said Nahum Barnea, one of Israel’s most prominent journalists and commentators. “Cultural confrontation is fine, but not so fine with politicians who are messianic or radical populists and not only become part of the government but hold crucial posts there.”

The far-right politicians have an agenda, he said: “They want a real revolution in our regime and in our values.”

The most visible recent example came this week, when protesters massed outside two military bases to support soldiers who had been arrested on suspicion of torturing and sodomizing a Palestinian prisoner at Sde Teiman, a military jail.

Hundreds of protesters, including at least three far-right legislators from the ruling coalition and soldiers in uniform, gathered outside that jail and a second base where the men had been brought for interrogation. Dozens of protesters surged into both bases, brushing aside guards, while Mr. Ben-Gvir’s police forces arrived late and in small numbers.

Hours later, Mr. Netanyahu criticized the protests, but also seemed to justify them, comparing them to the months of anti-government demonstrations against his effort to diminish the power of the judiciary and the Supreme Court in favor of Parliament.

“State institutions are being challenged even by people in uniform,” said Natan Sachs, the Israeli American director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, a centrist research institution. “It’s a symptom of something very worrying, a challenge not just to the institutions but to the connective tissue of a society that has always been closely knit despite its fissures.”

“People are very much on edge,” said Shalom Lipner, a former prime ministerial aide from 1990 to 2016 and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, also a centrist research institution. “And not just about how others look at Israel, but Israelis themselves are frightened about what this means for the country itself. If this is how we behave, how is this project sustainable?”

To be sure, while a sizable majority of Israelis want Mr. Netanyahu and his far-right coalition gone, a sizable majority also wants Hamas defeated and dismantled as the power in Gaza, to ensure that what happened on Oct. 7 can never happen again. There is widespread agreement that Israel must remain strong and has the right to attack its stated enemies.

But there is inevitable disagreement about the best way to attain a more lasting peace, with many fearing that an independent Palestinian state of the kind the Israeli elite had hoped to negotiate would be dominated by more extreme factions, like Hamas.

The revolt against the elites has been building for years. It was most visible in the proposed new law that would have diminished the power of the judiciary system and the Supreme Court in favor of Parliament, which prompted nine months of street protests and highlighted the divisions in the country.

The Hamas attacks on Oct. 7 pulled the country together, even as they absorbed the shock of a huge failure of the intelligence services and the military, largely sacred institutions. But the long war has also pulled the country apart, with the far right trying to weaken key institutions and infiltrate them. Discipline in the army has also suffered.

And even as the army leadership tries to maintain its standards, Mr. Ben-Gvir and Mr. Smotrich label those who want to punish the abusers of Palestinian prisoners as traitors.

Although representing a minority, the two men have become the face of Israel to the world nearly as much as Mr. Netanyahu, his own image tainted by his political dependency on them and his toleration of their actions and excesses.

There has always been a tension between the rule of law and Israel’s security and counterterrorism operations, said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster and analyst.

“Israelis have become habituated to the idea that law is selective,” she said. “There are too many who are above the law, like the settlers, who are beyond the law, like the ultra-Orthodox and the security forces, and who are pushed out of the law, like the Palestinians and many Arab citizens of Israel, who are often under martial law.”

The protests at the military bases were the “closest I’ve ever experienced to state breakdown,” Ms. Scheindlin said, calling the internal divisions on display a victory for Hamas and Hezbollah.

There are many Israelis “who have no belief in diplomacy but think of Israeli security only in terms of pre-emption, intimidation and deterrence, and who think that they must always have the back of the military in the face of an implacable cruel enemy you’re always confronting,” said Bernard Avishai, an Israeli American analyst. “So anything you do to the enemy is justified.”

There were violent protests by settlers and the right against the army in 2005 over the forced withdrawal of Israelis from settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. But many Israelis point to a later controversial episode as the real turning point for the country.

In 2016, an Israeli soldier, Elor Azaria, killed an incapacitated Palestinian who had attacked an Israeli with a knife. Despite angry protests, he was convicted of manslaughter but served only half of his 18-month sentence. He was considered a hero by people on the right, while those on the left argued he deserved a harsher sentence.

Mr. Azaria has since supported soldiers accused of beating Palestinian prisoners and has been the target of sanctions imposed by the United States.

“After Azaria, the lines were drawn,” said Mr. Avishai. Settlers and those who favor force over diplomacy were mobilized against “the statists,” like the military chiefs and the current minister of defense, Yoav Gallant, “who feel that national morale is a function of the rule of law and that the army must observe international law,” he said.

The statist view is “disappearing under Netanyahu, and the cultural war is fundamental now,” he said. “A continuing war of attrition and pre-emption in Gaza and elsewhere is good for them politically.”

In the protests on Monday, he said, “for the first time you have violence between these two rival conceptions of Israel’s future.”

It is common for autocrats to hold elections. As I’ve written before, winning an election can allow an autocratic leader to claim a popular mandate and to demonstrate to the military and to the political elite that the government’s hold on power is strong enough to make loyalty their safest bet.

If autocrats agree to hold elections, it is usually because they think they are going to win, according to Gretchen Helmke, a political scientist at Rochester University in New York who studies democracy in the Americas. “Or at least come very close to winning so that tilting the outcome in their favor is not seen as so egregious,” she added.

Holding elections is therefore typically not a risk to autocratic power but a means of trying to legitimize and strengthen it. These leaders usually use the tools of state to manipulate and control the election in ways that are “upstream” of the actual vote, such as arresting opposition leaders, barring opposition candidates from the ballot and cracking down on the media.

But sometimes that playbook fails. Even stage-managed contests can produce surprises, delivering a win for the opposition instead of a ratification of the incumbent’s power. When that happens, elections can go from being an autocrat’s tool to an autocrat’s nightmare.

The Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, for instance, expected a 1988 plebiscite to grant him a new mandate, but instead it proved his undoing, ousting him from office and ushering in a return to democracy.

It is still very unclear what the election results will mean for the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, who has proved adept at hanging onto power. He claimed victory in Sunday’s election after the government-controlled electoral body declared him the winner.

But exit polls and the opposition’s tabulation of paper tallies from 81 percent of the country’s voting machines suggest that the opposition candidate, Edmundo González, actually won by a landslide. (The Times has not been able to verify that data independently, but my colleagues from the Upshot wrote a helpful analysis of why there is reason to believe that González won a substantial majority.)

And the government has refused to release any paper tallies, further undermining confidence in its claimed result.

Protests erupted around the country. At least 16 people have been killed and 750 people have been detained by the security forces. Colombia and Brazil, two of Venezuela’s most important allies, have distanced themselves somewhat from Maduro, calling on him to release the full paper tallies of the election results. On Thursday the United States recognized González as the winner of the election, though it is not clear how that might affect Maduro’s grip on power.

Still, analysts say, there have been no defections in the military, and Maduro has held power for years even though he has at times faced intense international pressure to step down.

Not what the “autocrat’s handbook” recommends

Overt, day-of-election manipulation carries high political costs domestically and abroad.

“If you go to consult the autocrat’s handbook, there’s a whole chapter on what not to do in stealing elections,” joked Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist who studies democratic backsliding in Latin America and elsewhere. Last-minute interference with voting tallies would certainly be in it. The Venezuelan authorities “practically wrote that chapter,” having successfully manipulated previous elections, which makes the extent of the apparent last-minute fraud in this one “stunning,” he said.

One possibility is that Maduro underinvested in upstream manipulation because he (or the government) actually believed that they would win and that the polls were wrong, said Dorothy Kronick, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Venezuela’s opinion polls had long suggested that the opposition was extremely popular, but its candidates have consistently underperformed relative to their polling in the past, according to a recent analysis by Francisco Rodríguez, an economist at the University of Denver.

Given that, Kronick said, “I don’t think it was delusional for Maduro to expect that, given all his capacity for pre-election manipulation, he would actually get more votes on Sunday.”

Sometimes, electoral surprises can stem from one of the biggest problems autocrats face: getting accurate information. Members of the government’s inner circle are often reluctant to convey bad news or inconvenient data, making it difficult for leaders to know the true scale of the risks they face.

What could happen next?

The biggest question is whether the vote might ultimately force Maduro to step down. He has, after all, held onto power even amid broad domestic discontent and despite the exodus of millions of Venezuelans who have essentially given up living in their home country under his rule.

This is not even the first time the United States has recognized an opposition figure as Venezuela’s legitimate leader. In 2019, the Trump administration recognized Juan Guaidó, then the head of Venezuela’s legislature, as the country’s president after Guaidó cited a section of the Venezuelan Constitution to claim the mantle of leadership.

Dozens of countries supported the move, but in the end the momentum behind Guaidó faded. Last year he fled to the United States and Maduro emerged stronger than ever.

But there are cases where unexpected election results usher in genuine improvements to democracy. (I still think that this should be called “democratic forwardsliding” because it reverses democratic backsliding, but thus far that term has failed to catch on.)

Guatemala has followed that path this year, for example, as did Ukraine in 2004. Neither case produced an immediate return to full democracy, but in both countries, opposition leaders were able to take office, despite incumbent efforts to keep them out. And in the 1980s, elections brought an end to military dictatorships in Argentina and Chile.

But it doesn’t always work that way. In Russia in 2011, protests broke out over alleged fraud in the legislative elections, but the result was a severe crackdown on dissent and political opposition that continues to this day and that ultimately hardened Vladimir Putin’s hold on power.

Venezuela’s future will probably depend on whether other elites in the government, and particularly its military, remain loyal to Maduro. “So far, the opposition has done an incredible job coordinating and unifying, but it is not clear that there are any actors in the government — within Maduro’s inner circle, within the military, or within the judiciary — who have sufficient incentives to break off from Maduro,” Helmke said.

The lack of even low-level defections or mutinies within the military, Levitsky said, was notable: “It is extraordinary, if it stands, the degree to which the security forces have remained with the government.”

That points to a larger problem, Helmke said. “The more lawless the regime becomes, the harder it is to get underlings to strategically defect. It’s really hard to make any predictions at this point, but the stakes for all Venezuelans could not be higher.”

For the 16 people released from Russian captivity on Thursday in a landmark prisoner swap, the exchange brought a moment of momentous relief. But many others were left behind.

Hundreds of prisoners in Russia — including Americans and prominent Russian political activists, journalists and artists — are still waiting, hoping that another diplomatic agreement or turn of events might secure their release.

One of them is Marc Fogel, an American history teacher who worked for almost a decade at the Anglo-American school in Moscow. In 2021, when trying to enter Russia, Mr. Fogel was arrested and accused of smuggling drugs after a small amount of medical marijuana was discovered in his luggage. His relatives have said it was to treat severe pain.

In June 2022, Mr. Fogel, a native of Western Pennsylvania, was sentenced to 14 years in prison for drug smuggling. In Russia, lesser sentences have often been given to convicted murderers.

On Thursday, upon hearing the news of the prisoner swap, Mr. Fogel’s spouse, Jane, and the couple’s two sons, Ethan and Sam, objected to Russian nationals being released before some Americans. Of the 16 prisoners released by Russia, three were American, six were from other Western countries and seven were Russian.

In an emailed statement, Ms. Fogel and her sons said that it was “inconceivable” to them that “Russian dissidents would be prioritized over U.S. citizens in a prisoner exchange.”

“Marc has been unjustly detained for far too long and must be prioritized in any swap negotiations with Russia, regardless of his level of notoriety or celebrity,” the statement said.

Mr. Fogel, 63, was tried by the same court as Brittney Griner, an American W.N.B.A. star who was exchanged in December 2022 for Viktor Bout, a convicted Russian arms dealer. Ms. Griner was accused of a similar crime as Mr. Fogel and sentenced to nine years in a penal colony.

Mr. Fogel’s family has been campaigning for his release, pointing out that his case was similar to Ms. Griner’s and arguing that the U.S. government has not paid enough attention to his situation. They said that Mr. Fogel had been suffering from “severe health issues” and that “this may be our last opportunity to bring him home and save him from potentially dying in a Russian prison.”

Apart from Mr. Fogel, many other Westerners are still being held in Russian custody.

Ksenia Karelina, 32, a Russian American citizen, was detained in February and accused of state treason for donating about $52 to a Ukrainian charity in the United States. In June, a court in Yekaterinburg, about 850 miles east of Moscow, began hearing her case.

That same month, Russian investigators detained Laurent Vinatier, a French national, on suspicion of collecting intelligence about Russian military activities.

In July, Michael Travis Leake, an American rock musician, was sentenced to 13 years after prosecutors accused him of organizing a drug-trafficking ring.

Scores of Russian prisoners have also been sent to penal colonies across the country on what rights activists describe as politically motivated charges.

More than 300 people are considered to be political prisoners in Russia, according to Memorial, a prominent Russian human rights group. At least 400 have been prosecuted for their religious beliefs, the group said. At least 3,000 people are implicated in politically motivated criminal cases, according to OVD-Info, a Russian human rights and legal aid group that tracks them.

In June, a Russian court sentenced Yevgenia Berkovich, 39, and Svetlana Petriychuk, 44, two accomplished Russian theater artists, to six years in prison for “justifying terrorism” in a play that they wrote and directed about ISIS. That same month, Russian law enforcement officers arrested Artyom Krieger, a journalist for Sota Vision, a Russian news outlet. He was accused of working for an anti-corruption foundation that had been run by Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in prison in February. The organization had been outlawed as extremist in Russia.

In June 2023, a Russian court sentenced Igor L. Baryshnikov, 65, a Russian engineer and activist, to seven and a half years in a penal colony for spreading what the Russian state considered false information about the Russian Army by criticizing the invasion of Ukraine.

In 2022, Russia sentenced Ivan Safronov, 34, a prominent journalist, to 22 years in prison on treason charges and Aleksei Gorinov, 63, a deputy at a municipal council in Moscow, to seven years in a penal colony for denouncing Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“Hundreds of people are in cells and prisons for their convictions,” Kirill Goncharov, a Russian politician, said in a post on Telegram, a messaging app. “They are not as popular with the media, so our main task now is to shed light on their cases and names, help their relatives and seek, if possible, their release.”

Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.

Nigerians struggling to afford food and earn a living have taken to the streets in nationwide protests that have already left at least 13 people killed, according to Amnesty International.

Witnesses said that four of those were bystanders — gas station attendants eating lunch at their workplace — killed by security forces.

Organizers have called for 10 days of protest in cities across Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, a response to rising inflation and hunger caused by policies that the government argues are necessary to revive what it has called a dead economy.

“Life cannot continue like this,” said Usman Abdulhamid, a protester in the northern city of Kano, where many have been unable to afford food, medicine or even bus fares to the hospital. “People cannot survive without eating.”

The long-planned demonstrations in the West African country drew inspiration from recent huge protests in Kenya, some observers said. Persistent demonstrations there forced President William Ruto to abandon planned tax hikes and fire his cabinet last month.

The economy is even worse in Nigeria, where about 40 percent of its more than 220 million people live in extreme poverty, and inflation has reached a 28-year high of 34 percent. Many Nigerians blame President Bola Tinubu for devaluing the currency and removing an expensive but popular fuel subsidy — even though it was later partly reinstated.

In the lead-up to the protests, the government’s main priority appeared to be to head them off, recruiting influencers, pastors and imams to try to persuade people not to turn out. The government even arranged so-called anti-protest protests, of people demonstrating against the main protests which, as with most modern Nigerian movements, had a hashtag — in this case #EndBadGovernance.

But thousands of people across the country demonstrated anyway.

In Abuja, the capital, protesters carrying branches symbolizing peace blocked a highway. In the northern town of Daura, they burned tires in the street outside the home of former President Muhammadu Buhari, who is widely blamed for Nigeria’s economic situation.

In several cities, there were reports of looting, and government buildings were set on fire. In the southeastern state of Akwa Ibom, a man in one of the anti-protest protests broke ranks and began complaining about high prices in a video that went viral.

Everywhere, hunger was the protesters’ main complaint.

“One day, the poor will have nothing else to eat but the rich oppressors,” one of the placards at a Lagos protest read.

The police were quick to squash the demonstrations, deploying tear gas and live ammunition, according to witnesses. Amnesty International said that security personnel killed 13 people across the country: six in the northern state of Jigawa, three in Kaduna, the state just north of Abuja, and four in northeastern Borno, the state at the epicenter of the Boko Haram insurgency for the past decade.

In a statement, Amnesty said that security personnel “deliberately used tactics designed to kill while dealing with gatherings of people protesting hunger and deep poverty.”

Two witnesses described security forces firing and throwing what appeared to be a grenade from a vehicle in Maiduguri, Borno’s capital, killing four gas station attendants as they were quietly eating their lunch of instant noodles sitting on wooden benches.

One of the attendants, 21-year-old Ahmadu Garba, had been trying to save his pay to enroll in college but, like most Nigerians, was struggling. He often sent money to his father, Garba Maina, who collapsed on Thursday when he heard that his son had been killed.

“The police that were supposed to protect them turned against them in the most gruesome manner,” Mr. Maina said in an interview.

But the police described what happened very differently, saying that an explosion “occurred in the crowd of protesters,” instantly killing four people.

Kayode Egbetokun, Nigeria’s inspector-general of police, accused many of the protesters of trying to destabilize the country.

“What was being instigated was mass uprising and looting, not protest,” he said, addressing the nation from the police headquarters on Thursday evening. “Hoodlums have been let loose on innocent Nigerians.”

In the southwestern city of Ibadan, Ahmed Shittu said skyrocketing prices had left him unable to support his younger siblings and their sick mother. Mr. Shittu, 29, a former mechanic, had protested before, in 2020. That was during protests against police brutality using the hashtag #EndSARS, during which dozens of people were killed.

Mr. Shittu lost his hand then, he said, while demonstrating in Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city. He had raised his fist in the air, he said, and men he described as “hoodlums” attacked him with a machete and cut it off.

Unable to continue working as a mechanic, Mr. Shittu said he retrained as a watch repairer. But with many no longer able to afford watch repairs, his income has collapsed, and he said that he often earns only 1000 naira, or 60 cents, a day. So he turned to protest again.

“Things are too hard for me,” he said on Thursday.

Pius Adeleye contributed reporting from Ibadan, Nigeria, Ismail Auwal from Kano, Nigeria, and Nelson C.J. from Lagos, Nigeria.

In almost every corner of Pakistan, anger at the ruling elite is nearing a boiling point.

Thousands have protested soaring electricity bills just outside the capital, Islamabad. In a major port city in the southwest, dozens have clashed with security officers over what they described as forced disappearances of activists. In the northwest, protesters have admonished the country’s generals for a recent surge in terrorist attacks.

The demonstrations over the past few weeks reflect frustration with Pakistan’s shaky, five-month-old government and with its military, the country’s ultimate authority. The unrest threatens to plunge Pakistan back into the depths of political turmoil that has flared in recent years and that many had hoped would subside after the February general election.

Pakistan’s leaders are confronted with a monsoon of problems. The economy is suffering its worst crisis in decades. Anger at an election widely viewed as manipulated by the military remains palpable. Militant violence has roared back after the Taliban’s return to power in neighboring Afghanistan. And Pakistani politics are more polarized than ever, with the country’s most popular political figure sitting in jail after a bitter rift with the military.

The administration of the current prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, has struggled to establish its legitimacy and has been criticized as little more than a front for the military.

Since Mr. Sharif first came into office in 2022, Pakistan’s generals have wielded an increasingly heavy hand to quash dissent. A national firewall has been installed to censor internet content, the social media platform X has been blocked, security forces have arrested political opponents in droves, and generals have been installed in key positions in the civilian government.

“It’s more than hybrid rule,” said Zahid Hussain, a political analyst in Islamabad, referring to the old informal power-sharing dynamic between civilian and military leaders. “This arrangement is military rule with civilian facade.”

Government officials have pushed back against that characterization of their relationship with the military and sought to remind the public that dealing with the storm of challenges will take time. They have stressed that the economy in particular is on the path to recovery. Inflation is easing, the state bank recently lowered interest rates, and government officials are expected to hammer out the details of a new bailout from the International Monetary Fund in the coming months.

“The economy is showing a positive outlook” and is “getting stable,” said Aqeel Malik, an adviser to the prime minister on law and justice. “We have only been in power for a few months,” he added. “We don’t have a magic wand.”

Still, the growing public unrest is a worrying sign for a weak coalition government that few expect to survive a full five-year term — a feat that no prime minister in Pakistan has ever pulled off.

On Monday in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a northwestern province bordering Afghanistan, hundreds of people gathered in the latest protest against the surge in terrorist attacks by groups including the Pakistani Taliban and the local Islamic State affiliate. “Go, go, go to the border,” protesters chanted, urging the military to focus on security rather than domestic politics.

The same day in Gwadar, a city in Baluchistan Province that is home to a port built and operated by the Chinese, at least three people were killed as security forces engaged in a standoff with thousands of protesters. The demonstration demanded an end to a paramilitary crackdown on activists from the Baluch ethnic minority, who oppose what they call outside exploitation of the region’s resources, and came weeks after the government announced that it would bolster security for Chinese workers at the port.

And in Rawalpindi, a city just outside Islamabad where the military’s headquarters is situated, thousands of protesters affiliated with an Islamist political party gathered for days to express anger over the rising cost of living. The government recently raised electricity prices by 20 percent, a step that officials called necessary to comply with a $7 billion loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund.

“The military establishment, ruling families, judiciary and bureaucracy have ruined our lives and our future,” said Muhammad Arif Bashir, a protester from Taunsa Sharif, a remote area of Punjab Province, who had traveled to Rawalpindi. “But now enough is enough.”

The recent focus on the economy and security concerns is a striking shift for a country that has been consumed by a single political issue over the past two years: the ouster and imprisonment of former Prime Minister Imran Khan.

Pakistani politics have been paralyzed by Mr. Khan’s fall from grace in 2022 after butting heads with the generals and his subsequent resurrection as a political force even from behind bars. After his ouster, Mr. Khan rallied hundreds of thousands to the streets and stirred a once unimaginable show of resistance to the military. Mr. Khan has accused the generals of orchestrating his ouster and his arrest last year, which military officials deny. He remains in prison on what he claims are politically motivated charges.

The drama that followed his removal from office — including violent protests targeting military installations, an apparent assassination attempt, his conviction and imprisonment on a long list of charges, and a military crackdown on his supporters — has dominated the country’s political conversation.

The swell of protests now over issues unrelated to Mr. Khan, and organized by civil and political leaders outside his party, shows how public outrage has spread far beyond his support base or political agenda.

Analysts say the unrest has deepened as the government and the military have neglected the issues driving the protests and focused instead on stamping out Mr. Khan’s political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or P.T.I.

Last month, the governing coalition said it would ban P.T.I. In recent days, the authorities have arrested several top party officials, including members of P.T.I.’s prolific social media team, which the Interior Ministry has accused of peddling “anti-state propaganda.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Khan said during a court hearing in Adiala Jail, where he is being held, that he was open to negotiating with the military, according to local media reports. Mr. Khan may see an opening, given the government’s deep unpopularity, to negotiate a deal that paves a way out of jail and back into politics, analysts said.

Even if he does so, it is far from certain whether that will satisfy the millions of Pakistanis who are not among his followers but are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo.

“We have been striving hard to make ends meet, and the ruling elite in Pakistan treats us like second-class citizens,” said Syed Khaliqur Rehman, a businessman from Karachi, the country’s largest city, who joined the protests in Rawalpindi. “We are done with all of this.”

Zia ur-Rehman contributed reporting.

As his nation’s lone athlete at the Paris Olympics, Winzar Kakiouea carries an additional burden: Most people have no idea that his country is a country.

Also, his homeland could one day disappear into the ocean.

First, a brief geography primer: Nauru, with a population of less than 13,000, is an island nation perched in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Once known as Pleasant Island, Nauru (pronounced NO-roo, not Nah-oo-roo) gained its independence in 1968, after a period of trusteeship by the United Nations. Its economy for decades depended on guano, or bird poop, a key ingredient in fertilizer. Mining destroyed parts of the island; chunks of Nauru slid into the sea. Climate change is nibbling at its shores, too.

“Most people don’t know about Nauru,” Kakiouea said. “When I tell them about it, they are shocked that this little, tiny place is a country.”

On Saturday, Kakiouea, 23, will compete in the preliminaries of the men’s 100 meters. He is very fast — the fastest man in the expanse of the Pacific known as Micronesia — but it is probably safe to say that his Olympics will be over in fewer than 11 seconds.

Still, Kakiouea’s presence in Paris is testament to one of the Olympics’ most charming features. During the Games’ parade of nations, smaller countries stand on equal footing with larger ones. China, Cape Verde, Canada, Curaçao and the Cook Islands cohabitate among the Cs. Both American Samoa and the United States of America get their due.

Kakiouea served as Nauru’s flag-bearer, and he was accompanied on the rainy ride down the Seine by his coach and two team officials.

“We were next to Nepal,” said Sheba Hubert, the chef de mission of the Nauru Olympic Committee. “And another country. I can’t remember which one.”

The country was Namibia.

There are four athletes in these Games who are their nations’ only athletes: Belize, Liechtenstein, Somalia and Nauru. Liechtenstein’s Romano Puentener raced in men’s cross-country cycling and Somalia’s Ali Idow Hassan is running in the men’s 800.

“I feel a little lonely, but I am proud of representing Somalia,” Hassan said.

Both Belize’s Shaun Gill and Kakiouea are competing in the 100 meters courtesy of an Olympic universality rule that reserves spots for athletes from underrepresented nations.

It wasn’t until June at the Micronesian Games, when Kakiouea won gold in the 100, 200 and the 4×100 relay, that he considered the possibility of an Olympic run. Nauru has no proper track, only what Kakiouea refers to as a “dirt oval.”

Besides, his racing career only began three years ago.

Today, Kakiouea, who fixes telecom cables for a living, shares the national record in the 100-meter dash. He has won a national power lifting competition. And he is, in his country, a heralded Australian Rules Football player.

“It’s not so impressive,” Kakiouea said of his accomplishments. “Nauru is very small.”

It takes 25 minutes to circumnavigate Nauru by car, and it is by size the world’s third-smallest nation, after Vatican City and Monaco. Its smallness — most everyone knows each other, or at least a cousin or two — compelled Kakiouea to hide his training regimen, lest people gossip about his ambitions. He stayed away from the dirt oval and went instead into the forested hills, where he shared an earthen straightaway with the occasional car. He had no coach, but a cousin came often to time him.

To fortify his body, he ate crab and noddy, a kind of tropical seabird. He fished and sliced the flesh into sashimi slabs.

“No salt, just raw,” he said. “It’s my favorite.”

Earlier this year, after Kakiouea participated at the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Glasgow, an Australian track coach messaged him on Instagram and offered his help. Within three months, Kakiouea’s time in the 100 had improved to 10.82 seconds from 11.04. The world record, set by Jamaica’s Usain Bolt in 2009, is 9.58.

“I like the 100 meters because it is short,” Kakiouea said.

The first Nauruan to compete in the Olympics was a weight lifter, Marcus Stephen. But in 1992 Nauru had no Olympic committee or any other Olympic infrastructure. Instead, Stephen competed for Samoa and finished ninth in the featherweight category. He later became president of Nauru and, like other Pacific island leaders, warned of how rising seas could imperil their nations’ survival. Stephen is now the head of the Nauru National Olympic Committee. The country’s first Olympic team was formed in 1996.

No Nauruan — the only nationality that is a palindrome — has ever won an Olympic medal. Even the International Olympic Committee seems confused about Nauru’s sporting profile: Its summary of the country’s Olympic presence in Paris highlights a women’s weight lifter who is not here.

None of this national anonymity has stopped Kakiouea from enjoying the Olympics. He has traded pins with Serena Williams and taken photographs with Sha’Carri Richardson, the reigning world champion in the women’s 100. He has relished the offerings at the Olympic Village, where most athletes are staying.

“That round bread is really good,” he said of the baguette. “I heard it’s a local food.”

During training sessions in the days leading to his 100-meter heat, Kakiouea mixed with a panoply of athletes. Brazilian race walkers wiggled past in the inner lanes. A Bahamian hurdler counted out steps.

In the section reserved for the sprint specialists, a Singaporean athlete strode in, accompanied by a crisply attired training squad. A runner from San Marino adjusted a set of racing blocks. A sprinter from the Federated States of Micronesia, whom Kakiouea had beaten at the Micronesian Games, nodded at him, a moment of Micronesian solidarity.

Amid the scrum, Kakiouea set up his towel close to the Jamaicans, as close to track royalty as any nationality can get. He looked as if he was meditating, visualizing each second of what he hopes will be a sub-11 second Olympic race. But, really, he said, he was eager for any scrap of training advice the Jamaicans might dispense.

“I thought my training now is really intense,” Kakiouea said. “But when I see the Jamaicans, I realize they are next level, and I want to learn from them.”

Before his turn on the track — a handful of starts each day, followed by the kind of physiotherapy he had never before enjoyed — he cranked up some Christian gospel music in his headphones. He laced up his pink running shoes, Nike spikes that cost him exactly 240 Australian dollars, he said, just over $150.

He has no endorsements. No coach was with him.

He tried to time himself with his watch, but it was an exercise in elastic island time when he needed millisecond accuracy.

“It’s OK,” he said of Saturday. “I’ll run as fast as I can for Nauru.”