The town in south Lebanon appeared deserted, its roads empty and its market shuttered, after months of fighting between Hezbollah and Israel across the nearby border made many residents flee.

But in a central square this summer, Hezbollah had erected huge banners for the triple funeral of a man the militant group claimed as its own and his two sisters, all killed when Israel bombed their home in this southern town of Bint Jbeil.

As the coffins arrived, martial music blared and a few hundred of the remaining residents came to pay their respects.

Watching the procession, Asmaa Alawiyeh, an accountant, said life was hard after months of clashes. Her two children were out of school. Her husband, a plumber, could not find work. And no one knew when life would return to normal.

“There is no plan,” said Ms. Alawiyeh, 32. “We have no idea what to prepare for because we have no idea what’s coming.”

Since the Gaza war began in October, Hezbollah has been fighting a second, smaller battle along the Lebanon-Israel border to bog down Israeli forces and help Hamas, its ally in Gaza. The violence there has killed hundreds of people and displaced more than 150,000 in both countries, leaving the border zone dotted with rubble-strewed ghost towns.

Now, fear has spread that a broader war could erupt, after Israel killed a senior Hezbollah official in response to an attack from Lebanon that killed 12 children and teenagers in an Israeli-controlled town in which the group denied its involvement. Hours after the killing, a Hamas leader was assassinated in Iran, which Iranian and Hamas officials blamed on Israel.

Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia and political party that is backed by Iran, and Tehran have vowed to retaliate against Israel. The situation has left many Lebanese anxious about when a response will come, how large it will be and whether it will set off a larger conflagration that leaves Lebanon extremely vulnerable.

For months, most people in Lebanon did not directly feel the fighting. Traffic clogged highways, and restaurants in affluent parts of Beirut filled up on weekends.

But as airlines have canceled flights and foreign embassies have warned their citizens to leave Lebanon, anxiety about the future has spread far beyond the border zone where the fighting has mostly been confined.

Diana Abi Rashed, 60, said her three adult children had been visiting Lebanon and trying to get back to their homes in other countries. But one of her daughters can’t get a flight before next week at the earliest.

Ms. Abi Rashed has decided to stay. “How can I leave my elderly mother here and go?” she said. “It’s not an easy decision. I will stay and choose the safest corner in my house.”

The fighting has already transformed south Lebanon. The government said more than 98,000 people had fled its towns and villages, many of which Israel has heavily damaged in strikes to kill Hezbollah fighters and degrade their military might. More than 515 people have been killed in Lebanon since October, including more than 100 civilians, the government said.

The south has long been Hezbollah territory. The militant group was founded in the 1980s to fight the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, which ended in 2000. Israel, the United States and other countries consider it a terrorist organization.

Now, it is clearer than ever that Hezbollah is in control. Journalists must coordinate visits to the area with Hezbollah, and the Lebanese army, which grants journalists permits, asks if the trip has been approved by “the group.”

Communities across the south are adorned with Hezbollah flags, banners and shrines to the group’s “martyrs,” meaning those killed fighting Israel.

Before the funeral in Bint Jbeil last month, men in black shirts and camouflage pants zipped through the town’s nearly empty streets on motorbikes. When we stepped out of our car, two men with walkie-talkies stopped almost immediately to ask who we were and why we had come.

Some residents were frank with us about how hard life had become, but wouldn’t give their names for fear of appearing to criticize Hezbollah.

At the funeral, Hezbollah officials lauded the departed as contributing to the struggle against Israel, a cause the crowd supported.

“God protect the party,” said Zainab Bazzi, 57, who had stayed in the south despite the war and did not intend to leave. She was cavalier about the possibility of a larger war.

“If they want to expand it,” she said of the Israelis, “we will expand it.”

Those sentiments were not shared in the nearby town of Rmeish, whose Maronite Christian residents live in an island of relative calm amid the Shiite Muslim villages where the fighting rages. More people were out and about and more shops open, including the hair salon where Rebecca Nasrallah, 22, had her hair done for her brother’s wedding.

Her family had considered delaying the ceremony, she said, but decided to go ahead because the war’s end did not appear imminent.

“People want to get married,” she said, adding that life should not stop for “Hezbollah and their war.”

Israel has not targeted the town directly, and Hezbollah’s fighters avoid it, but residents hear frequent booms from strikes on nearby villages, and many have fled.

Father Tony Elias, a local priest, said that just over half of the 11,000 residents remained.

The war had sapped the local economy, he said. Fighting kept farmers from their land, last year’s olive crop had died on the trees because it was too dangerous to harvest, and all construction had stopped.

Father Elias said that the community generally got along well with their Muslim neighbors but that it was powerless when Hezbollah decided to go to war.

“Did they come and ask, Should we enter a war?” he said. “Of course not.”

On the edge of town, Therese al-Hajj, 61, chatted over tea and coffee with her four adult daughters and some of their children about how many neighboring villages were now empty and would need to be rebuilt.

She considered Israel an enemy but opposed Hezbollah’s war.

“We hear the news and it makes us sad, but what do we have to do with Gaza?” she said. “We have no ties to this war, so why pull us into it?”

Both Israel and Hezbollah say they do not want an all-out war but that they are ready for it. Diplomats have sought ways to reduce the violence along the border, but Hezbollah has said it will not stop striking Israel while the war in Gaza continues.

“Because this war has an ideological and religious dimension, Hezbollah is free from all of these criticisms and is following its path,” said Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, a former head of Lebanon’s General Security Directorate who speaks with Hezbollah officials.

“The struggle is about beliefs and religions,” he said. “That is why it is so dangerous and so hard to resolve.”

Displaced families have scattered across Lebanon, and although they are more numerous than those displaced from northern Israel, their plight has not become a political issue. That is partly because the Lebanese government is too weak to help them and because many of them support Hezbollah, which has distributed aid and cash stipends to the displaced.

Mostly it is because they have no way to pressure the party to change course.

“It is all out of our hands,” said Mahmoud Raslan, 51, who was staying with his family in a defunct and dilapidated hotel-turned-shelter southeast of Sidon. “Whether we speak out or not, what difference does it make?”

An excavator operator from the border village of Adasiyet Marjayoun, Mr. Raslan had fled the south and moved four times before arriving at the hotel, which volunteers run as a shelter.

He shared a single room with his wife and adolescent son and daughter. They cooked simple meals on a gas stove on the balcony.

He had returned to his village only once, for a funeral four months ago, and saw that explosions had blown out the doors and windows of his home.

“I have no idea what has happened since,” he said.

He felt safe at the hotel, but did not know how long his family would be there.

“We have no idea where we are going, what is ahead, when we will go back,” he said. “There is no horizon.”

Among Russians who oppose Vladimir V. Putin and his brutal Ukraine invasion, hopes are high that the Russian dissidents freed last week as part of a prisoner exchange with the West will breathe new life into a fragmented opposition force.

But if it promises an injection of energy into a movement struggling to effect change inside of Russia, it reignites a question older than the Russian Revolution — where is the more effective place to advocate for democratic change: from a prison cell inside of Russia, or in exile?

Either way, the challenge is daunting. For years, decades even, Russia’s opposition has been divided and beset with infighting; the Ukraine invasion has only exacerbated the grievances. And that was before the most influential opposition leader, Aleksei A. Navalny, died in an Arctic penal colony in February.

The most prominent dissidents who remained — Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, both freed last week — were serving long sentences, but they gained credibility from their willingness to forego the comforts of exile to speak their minds as inmates in Russia’s harsh prison system.

They were exchanged along with Andrei S. Pivovarov, who ran Open Russia, an organization founded by the exiled former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and three regional politicians with ties to Mr. Navalny. Its mission is to support Russian civil society.

In an interview over the weekend, Mr. Yashin lamented that he had not wanted to leave Russia, and that his release, which he called an “illegal expulsion,” deprived his words of the moral authority they carried from prison. But his supporters expressed cautious optimism in the days after the exchange, because of his unifying power and that of Mr. Kara-Murza, who won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for columns he had written in prison for The Washington Post.

Their release has raised hope in the country among antiwar Russians. “For the first time since the beginning of the war, there was hope for change,” Nataliya, 40, a painter in southwestern Russia, said in a text message. Like others inside Russia interviewed for this article, she asked that her last name be withheld because of possible repercussions.

Anna Karetnikova, an exiled human rights activist and former senior prison official in the Moscow region, worked with Mr. Yashin in the opposition movement in Russia. She said she believed that his years behind bars made him a stronger politician. “Maybe he will help to overcome the existing divisions in the opposition,” she said.

Mr. Yashin was warned when he left that if he tried to return to Russia, he would end up exactly like Mr. Navalny. But there are people who have high hopes that once political change is possible, he could return and assume a leadership role.

“I followed Yashin’s activities closely before he was imprisoned and was very glad to see his name on the exchange list,” said Semyon, an 18-year-old high school student in St. Petersburg. “My only remaining hope is for him,” he continued. “Some oppositionists have discredited themselves, therefore Yashin looks like the most sympathetic person who is able to represent an alternative to the Putin regime.”

That’s an opinion that Kremlin loyalists are working hard to snuff out. Pro-government propagandists seized on last week’s swap as evidence that the exiled Russians were not real patriots.

Dmitri A. Medvedev, a former president and prime minister of Russia, called the Russians heading west “traitors,” saying he wished they would have “rotted in a dungeon or died in prison.” He added that the exchange was worth it, however, because “our own people who worked for the Fatherland” had come home.

“These people who left us — little animals — good riddance!” Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of the Kremlin-controlled news outlet Russia Today, said on a talk show on Sunday.

The goal, analysts say, is to render the exchanged dissidents irrelevant in Russia — the greatest fear of any politician, especially one in exile.

“Of course, it is more effective to engage in politics when you are in the country,” Ekaterina Duntsova, who was barred from the ballot in presidential elections earlier this year but remains in Russia, said in a series of audio messages. “Those who remain in Russia are making a conscious choice. Without a connection to the Russian reality, it is very difficult to continue opposition activities. We look at those who have left and see how they gradually drift away from understanding what is happening here.”

Aleksandr Kynev, a Russian political analyst, said that the authorities have realized that the opposition is weakened abroad, so “they are thus actually squeezing people out of the country” who don’t agree with the Kremlin, in a bid to weaken them as well.

Still, the former politicians could make an important contribution, said Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist. She used the term “antiwar resistance” to describe what the exiles can do — negotiating prisoners swaps, helping people to flee the country, influencing Western policy on sanctions and maintaining contact with those staying in Russia.

They could do this, she said, despite the fractures in the opposition, which is so plagued by infighting that it was evident even during the hours of the swap: A Russian opposition politician, Maksim Katz, accused members of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Mr. Navalny’s organization, of trying to create a rift between him and Mr. Yashin.

In what seemed like a show of unity, members of Mr. Navalny’s foundation, best known by its initials F.B.K., were on the scene in Germany when the plane carrying Mr. Yashin and other dissidents landed. One of the first photos published of Mr. Yashin in Germany shows him with key members of Mr. Navalny’s team, Leonid Volkov and Maria Pevchikh.

“I hope that the opportunity to create a united political bloc together with F.B.K. will not be missed and that the opposition activity will become livelier than before,” said Elena, a 37 year old financial manager from Ekaterinburg.

Mr. Yashin said in an interview he had no plans to try to join any opposition group, but that he wanted to work with all forces who “oppose the war and seek the release of political prisoners.”

“I am going to do practical antiwar human rights work and will try to show what is possible by example, including that you can be a Russian oppositionist and not quarrel with anyone. I hope I can do it.”

The Kremlin’s counter to this is to paint the newly freed politicians as anti-Russian agents working for Western adversaries. A recent headline in the pro-government Komsomolskaya Pravda read: “Agents of influence of foreign intelligence services are returning to their bosses.”

The fact that the two primary countries involved in the exchange were the U.S. and Germany — both stolid supporters of Ukraine — makes their argument more convincing to a lot of Russians.

“Unfortunately, many people in Russia perceive all this as the Americans pulling out their own: not only their citizens, but also their own who worked for them,” said Marina Litvinovich, a Russian opposition activist.

Many Russians see Ukraine as the collateral damage in a war started by the U.S. and waged against Russia, she said.

“For those people who find it difficult to recognize Ukrainians as enemies, it is easier for them to recognize Americans as enemies, whom they have never seen in their lives and whom they do not know and who are alien and very distant to them,” she said.

Some have expressed hope that if and when political change does come, the released men would be ready to lead the country. But Mr. Kynev, the political analyst, said he doubted that opposition figures sent abroad could make a return to political life whenever Russia enters into a period of political change again.

“The places will just be occupied when the changes start, and people will emerge from within the system,” he said. “No one will reserve any special places for those who have left. When they return, it will be a different country.”

Valerie Hopkins reported from Cologne, Germany, Ekaterina Bodyagina from Berlin, and Alina Lobzina from London.

As the Ukrainian soldiers raced through the ruins of the destroyed city under the spying eye of Russian drones, the skeletal remains of blasted-out buildings cast eerie shadows in the light of a full moon.

Burned-out cars littered the road next to craters from artillery strikes in this city, Toretsk, in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, that is now on the front line of the war with Russia.

The hot July night smelled of violence — smoke and dust from destroyed buildings mixed with the sulfurous scent of explosives. The only signs of life were the soldiers of the 32nd Mechanized Brigade, who were trying against the odds to hold their positions in an abandoned pharmacy under withering Russian bombardment.

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Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s life, as well as her politics, had been defined by an early trauma at once personal in its pain and national in its imprint.

In 1975, her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s charismatic founding leader, and most of their family were massacred in a military coup. Ms. Hasina, who was abroad at the time, was forced into exile in India.

Her eventual return and elevation to prime minister embodied Bangladesh’s hopes of a better, more democratic future. She was celebrated as a secular Muslim woman who tried to rein in a coup-prone military, stood up to Islamist militancy and reformed the impoverished country’s economy.

But in time, she changed. She grew more authoritarian, crushing dissent and exuding an entitlement that treated Bangladesh as her rightful inheritance. Then, on Monday, the years of repressive rule finally caught up with Ms. Hasina, and her story came full circle: She resigned under intense pressure from a vast protest movement and fled once again into exile.

Student-led protesters enraged at her deadly crackdown on their initially peaceful movement stormed her official residence and plundered nearly everything inside. They defaced her portraits and tore down statues of her father around the city, and attacked the homes and offices of her party officials.

Ms. Hasina’s hasty exit comes just months after she had secured a fourth consecutive five-year term in office and thought her grip on power was unbreakable. In her wake she leaves a Bangladesh plunged back into the chaos and violence that have marked the country from the beginning, when her father helped bring the nation into being.

Beyond the immediate jubilation among the protesters over her departure are more worrisome questions.

For now, this country of 170 million appears leaderless. Law enforcement agencies that killed at least 300 protesters have been discredited. The animosities between Ms. Hasina’s party and the opposition are unlikely to fade soon, and revenge for years of harsh suppression under her will be on the minds of many. There is also fear that a streak of Islamist militancy in Bangladesh society could resurface in the political vacuum.

“We are finally free of a dictatorial regime,” said Shahdeen Malik, a prominent constitutional lawyer and legal activist in Dhaka, the capital. “Earlier, we had military dictators. But this civilian dictator was more dictatorial than previous military dictators.”

Mr. Malik said that Ms. Hasina, during an initial term as prime minister in the late 1990s, was a breath of fresh air. Bangladesh’s politics had been marked by coups, counter-coups and assassinations. Ms. Hasina was democratic, and her party was trying to act with more accountability.

But after her return to power in 2009 — following electoral defeat, exile and an attempt on her life that left more than 20 dead — she appeared driven by darker instincts. In her opponents she saw an extension of the forces that had caused her lasting trauma.

She embarked on a mission to shape Bangladesh in the vision of her father, who had been accused before his assassination of trying to turn the country into a one-party state. Ms. Hasina cast seemingly everything in that light, in that vocabulary, as if the country had never gotten over those long-ago days.

Her father’s image was everywhere. She lauded her supporters as the inheritors of the legacy of the country’s liberation from Pakistan — when Bangladesh gained independence — and demonized her opponents as traitors from that old war.

“It is undeniable that she suffered almost the highest degree of trauma, the death of her whole family,” Mr. Malik said. “We have always felt that her personal trauma reflected in her political actions and activity.”

In recent years, Ms. Hasina’s power relied on two pillars: a relentless crushing of the opposition to the point that it could not mobilize and an entrenching of an all-encompassing patronage network that would protect her to protect its own interests in turn.

When asked about her tactics, she would reply that the political opposition had in the past done even worse to her, and public sympathy for her traditional opponents remained limited. But what was clear was that the true test of her power would come over a bread-and-butter issue beyond power politics.

Last year, ahead of the election, the opposition showed some signs of regrouping around the stagnating economy. Ms. Hasina’s image as the architect of the country’s economic transformation had long dissolved, as its overreliance on the garment industry became clear and inequality deepened. Food prices were shooting up, and the country’s foreign reserves were dwindling to a dangerous low.

But her government had enough money to scrape by, and she turned to China and India diplomatically and economically as friends in time of need. She used her control over the security forces to break the opposition’s momentum, bogging her opponents down in dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of court cases in front of judges beholden to her.

The student protest that began last month was over a seemingly small issue: a quota system that gave preferential treatment in government jobs. But the anger was a manifestation of the wider economic stress.

In response to the demonstrations, Ms. Hasina, 76, turned to the repressive playbook that had thwarted all previous challenges. This time, though, it would lead to her downfall.

At first, she dismissed the students, describing them as the descendants of those who had betrayed Bangladesh in the war of independence that her father had won. When that angered the students, she resorted to a crackdown.

She sent her party’s aggressive youth wing to target what had been peaceful protesters. When clashes broke out, she sent more force into the streets — the police, the army and even the Rapid Action Battalion, an antiterrorism unit that has been accused of torture and disappearances.

Her situation turned precarious once the streets turned to carnage late in July, with more than 200 people, most of them students and other young people, killed. She deepened the crackdown — declaring a curfew, cutting off the internet, rounding up 10,000 people into jails and accusing tens of thousands more of crimes. The protest movement appeared dispersed.

“Ultimately, of course people will be silenced if this goes on forever,” Naomi Hossain, a scholar of Bangladesh at the School of Oriental and African Studies, said as the crackdown intensified. “How long can you keep protesting when your friends are being gunned down? But the cost may be so high that, you know, all support” for Ms. Hasina is lost.

When the curfew and the communications blackout eased, it quickly became clear that the protest movement had not been snuffed out and that it had expanded to seeking accountability for the earlier bloodshed.

On Sunday, the protesters gathered in their largest numbers yet. When Ms. Hasina responded once again with force, and nearly 100 people were killed in the deadliest single day of the protests, it became clear that the fear she had long engendered had been broken.

When the protesters on Sunday called for a march on her residence the next day, her response seemed defiant — she called on the nation “to curb anarchists with iron hands.”

In the early hours of Monday, the roads leading to her residence in Dhaka were heavily barricaded. The internet was shut down and public transport halted. The security forces tried to hold back the large crowds at the city gates.

But by midday, it became apparent that those tactics were meant only to buy time for what was happening behind the scenes. Ms. Hasina had resigned and was leaving the country, and the army chief was in consultations with the political parties over an interim government.

Grainy cellphone videos showed Ms. Hasina getting out of a black S.U.V. at a military air base, where a helicopter was waiting. She departed for India, where she is expected to stay before moving on to another destination, most likely London.

The army chief, Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman, addressed the nation, announcing the end of her rule. He promised “justice for all the murders and wrongdoings.”

For the protesters, jubilation was immediate. They poured into the streets and stormed her residence — to take selfies and souvenirs. One protester walked away with a plant, another some chickens and yet another a single plate. One had a giant fish from the prime ministerial pond.

But signs of lingering anger were evident as night fell. Protesters pulled down statues of Ms. Hasina’s father, set fire to the museum erected in his name (at the house where he had been assassinated) and attacked the homes of her ministers and party officials. There were also reports of attacks against the homes and places of worship of minority Hindus, raising fears that the Islamist elements she had contained might be emboldened.

“It will not be enough for Sheikh Hasina to flee,” Nahid Islam, one of the student protest leaders, who was detained twice during the crackdown and tortured, said after the prime minister fled. “We will bring her to justice.”

Saif Hasnat and Shayeza Walid contributed reporting from Dhaka, Bangladesh.

A day after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh dramatically resigned and fled the country, the student groups that led the popular uprising against her proposed a notable name to help lead the interim government: Muhammad Yunus, a microfinance pioneer who received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mr. Yunus, one of Bangladesh’s best-known citizens, was among those Ms. Hasina considered a political threat for years, her critics say. Now, those who ousted her want Mr. Yunus, 84, to hold one of the most powerful positions in the new government.

“We have decided that an interim government should be formed with Nobel laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus as the chief adviser,” Nahid Islam, one of the student leaders, said on Tuesday morning. “We have spoken with Dr. Yunus, and he has agreed to take on this significant responsibility.”

However, it remains unclear how much the student groups can influence the new governing arrangement and Mr. Yunus’s role in it. The country’s powerful military and other political parties will also have a say.

Here’s what to know about Mr. Yunus and his rise in Bangladesh.

He received the Nobel as a microfinance trailblazer.

Mr. Yunus was born in 1940 in the city of Chittagong. He went to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship in the 1960s and received a Ph.D. in economics from Vanderbilt University. He returned to Bangladesh in the early 1970s and launched a project that gave small loans to the poor. In 1983, that service became Grameen Bank.

The bank grew steadily in the next decade, and its success, especially in extending loans to women, inspired microfinance projects in dozens of countries and garnered praise from world leaders.

Mr. Yunus and Grameen Bank received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for what the prize committee described as their efforts to provide financial opportunities to the poor.

The model was not favored by all, though. Some microfinance operators faced accusations of charging exorbitant interest rates and of predatory lending to the poor.

His political party rankled some leaders.

With the success of Grameen Bank, Mr. Yunus’s stature grew internationally and at home.

Despite his popularity, he largely steered clear of politics, but that changed in 2007, when Bangladesh was under a military-backed interim government. Mr. Yunus launched a political party, offering an alternative to a corruption-riddled political establishment.

That party didn’t last long, and Mr. Yunus abandoned the idea. However, by then, analysts said he had offended some powerful figures, including Sheikh Hasina.

He is mired in a flood of court cases.

Ms. Hasina came to power through the 2008 election, winning a large majority and promising a prosperous return to democracy after years of political turmoil. But Ms. Hasina’s critics say she used her power during her 15-year tenure to launch a campaign of reprisals against her political enemies and others who may threaten her rule, including Mr. Yunus. Ms. Hasina accused microfinance lenders of “sucking the blood of the poor.”

Mr. Yunus’s leadership style at Grameen Bank was not always popular, and there were some questions about the bank’s conduct.

As of September, according to New Age, a Bangladeshi news outlet, he faced 174 court cases, including charges of corruption. However, for years, rights groups have said that dozens of cases against him qualify as intimidation and political retaliation.

Mr. Yunus has denied any wrongdoing. He could not be reached immediately on Tuesday to comment on the statement from the student groups about his potential role in the next government.

Saif Hasnat contributed reporting.

They came prepared for violence. A day after about 100 people were killed in antigovernment protests, hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, defying a curfew imposed by the government and demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

They got their wish. After 15 years of increasingly autocratic rule during which she crushed the opposition and brought the armed forces and the judiciary under her control, Ms. Hasina bowed to pressure and, according to the military, quit her post and fled the country in a helicopter.

The downfall of her government, in a country known for its messy and sometimes bloody politics, plunged the country into lawless uncertainty and all but guaranteed that there will be a fresh battle for power between leaders of her political party, the Awami League, and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, its main opposition.

It remained unclear what role the military, which has seized power in the past, will play — or whether it had a hand in persuading Ms. Hasina to leave. On Monday afternoon, Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman, the Bangladesh Army chief of staff, announced her departure and said he would request the formation of an interim government.

Neither Ms. Hasina, 76, nor the Awami League made any public comment on the head-spinning turn of events that few people had predicted.

The recent unrest began with student-led demonstrations against a quota system for government jobs, but they quickly broadened into protests against a government seen as increasingly authoritarian, and were met with a brutal crackdown. Thousands were arrested and scores were killed.

Student leaders had initially called for a march on Tuesday, but decided to accelerate that timetable, moving the event to Monday after around 100 people died in clashes on Sunday. In a video message, Asif Mahmud, a protest leader, said: “The time has come for the final battle. Come to Dhaka to be a part of history.”

The Hasina government declared a curfew on Sunday evening. However, protesters defied the curfew on Monday morning despite police barricades and heavy security. Later that day, the security forces made little effort to enforce the curfew.

In Dhaka, what could have been a day of street battles turned into a street party, as many jubilant protesters, shaking their fists in celebration, marched through the city center. Thronging alleys and streets, demonstrators waved national flags and bandannas, booed Ms. Hasina and called her a dictator, and then cheered the announcement that she was gone.

“It is the victory of the students, the victory of the people. After a long time, we are happy to be out of a dictatorial regime,” said one demonstrator, Towfiqur Rahman, who said he was preparing for an entrance exam for a government job. “You can suppress anger for a while, but it erupts. Today is proof of that.”

The celebrations soon descended into vandalism and rioting. Unchecked, the crowd stormed Ms. Hasina’s official residence and made off with its contents, including furniture, house plants and even the former prime minister’s chickens. A protester put up a Facebook post posing with what he said was “Hasina’s sari.”

Monsur Ali, a garment worker, said he was among the thousands who entered the prime minister’s residence, where he took a plate. “We went there out of anger,” he said. “Nothing is left there.”

Protesters attacked the offices and homes of other members of the Awami League. They stormed the Parliament building, setting seats on fire. Amid swirls of smoke, demonstrators stood on tables and chairs, and ran across the main parliamentary floor.

They also set fire to the residence where Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Ms. Hasina’s father, who played a key role in the founding leader of Bangladesh, was assassinated in 1975.

Video footage showed rioters entering the home of Salman F. Rahman, Ms. Hasina’s financial adviser, where they looted artwork and household items and set vehicles on fire. “Take whatever you can. Take everything,” a woman is heard saying in the video. “You are doing great work. Very good, very good.”

One of the deadliest clashes between protesters and security forces occurred on Sunday, even as the government declared an indefinite curfew and shut down the internet.

On Monday morning, protest leaders rallied their supporters, calling for the end of Ms. Hasina’s rule. “There is freedom or freedom. There is no alternative to this for the students and citizens,” Hasnat Abdullah, one of the leaders, said in a post.

The decision to move the protest march to Monday in defiance of the curfew may have left Ms. Hasina unprepared to deal with the enormous throngs of protesters making their way toward her official residence, known as Ganabhaban.

The protests, which have become an outpouring of rage against Ms. Hasina, began more than a month ago when a Bangladeshi court reinstated a quota-based system for government jobs, many of which were reserved for descendants of those who fought for independence from Pakistan more than 50 years ago.

Despite the deadly crackdown of recent days, the protests kept growing, showing that fear of Ms. Hasina and her government was not enough to keep many people off the streets. Instead of backing down in the face of a new curfew and other restrictions, the protesters planned a march.

On Monday evening, leaders of the opposition and the country’s defense leaders met at the residence of Mohammed Shahabuddin, an Awami League supporter who holds the largely ceremonial post of president, to determine next steps.

After the meeting, Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, the secretary general of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, said that the current Parliament will be dissolved and the interim government will hold an election within three months.

Collectively, the leaders agreed to give the army the authority to stop any vandalism and civil disobedience. The group agreed to release Khaleda Zia, the chairman of the B.N.P. — the Awami League’s longtime opponent — from custody, along with thousands of people arrested in the recent protests.

The army announced that a new curfew would go into effect at midnight and lift early on Tuesday morning. Universities and educational institutions that had been closed since mid-July amid the unrest would open on Tuesday morning, according to a news release by the army.

Saif Hasnat and Shayeza Walid reported from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Anupreeta Das from New York. Mujib Mashal contributed reporting from New Delhi.

A rocket attack targeting U.S. personnel housed at a base in Iraq’s western desert injured several American troops late on Monday, according to U.S. defense officials.

The attack on Ain al Asad Air Base resembled previous ones carried out by Iran-backed Iraqi armed groups, which have targeted the base repeatedly over the past several years but intensified their attacks after Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza began in October.

The latest attack involved at least two rockets that hit inside the base’s perimeter, according to a U.S. official and Iraqi witnesses near the site of the attack. The base had been targeted at least twice in the past three weeks, and there was also an attack late last month on a small U.S. base in eastern Syria where U.S. special operation forces work with Syrian Kurdish troops to tamp down the Islamic State.

Initial reports were that at least five people were injured in Monday’s attack and that the wounded included both U.S. troops and contractors.

The attack comes as tensions are running especially high in the region, with Israel and its American, European and regional allies bracing for a reprisal attack from Iran in response to the killings last week of a Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, and a Hezbollah leader, Fuad Shukr, in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

Israel has said it carried out the attack on Mr. Shukr but has said nothing about the one in Iran. Iranian officials and Hamas have said that Israel was responsible for Mr. Haniyeh’s killing.

The Iranian government has said that any retaliatory attack will also involve its proxy forces, which include Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and militants in Iraq.

Those Iraqi militants have typically attacked U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria and targeted Israel using longer-range rockets. The region has been on high alert for a broad onslaught, similar to Iran’s attack on Israel in April, which was in response to Israel’s killing of three senior leaders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and four other Revolutionary Guard officers in Damascus, Syria.

It was not clear if the rocket attack on Monday at Al Asad Air Base was part of that response or a continuation of ongoing efforts by the Iran-backed groups in Iraq to target U.S. forces, who are stationed in the country at the invitation of the Iraqi government. The chief goal of Iran-backed groups in Iraq is to force the U.S. troops to leave the country entirely. No group has taken responsibility for Monday’s attack.

There is continuing negotiation between senior defense officials in Iraq and the Pentagon over how to reconfigure and downsize the U.S. and multinational forces, but they have not yet reached a decision. Within the Iraqi government, there is division, with factions close to Iran pushing for a speedy U.S. departure while others, including many Iraqi defense officials, are pushing for limited longer-term U.S. involvement.

There are about 2,500 American troops in Iraq, as well as 900 in Syria, where the Islamic State has once again become active.

The White House said in a statement that President Biden and Vice President Kamala D. Harris had been briefed on the attack and had discussed steps that the administration would take “to defend our forces and respond to any attack against our personnel in a manner and place of our choosing.”

After a July 16 drone attack on the U.S. area of the Ain al Asad base, which did not result in injuries, the U.S. military bombed a small drone factory in Jurf al Sakhar, an area south of Baghdad, which serves as a base for the Iranian-backed group Kata’ib Hezbollah and others. The U.S. attack killed four fighters — three Iraqis and a Houthi commander — at the site.

Diplomats across the Middle East worked on Monday to contain escalating tensions between Israel and Iran as fears grew of a widening conflict in the region and Tehran vowed to retaliate for the killing of a senior Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, on Iranian soil.

With Israel’s war with Hamas raging in Gaza, the killing of Mr. Haniyeh last week in Tehran has intensified concerns among Arab and American officials that an even broader regional conflict could erupt. Israel has not publicly taken responsibility for the killing, but Iran and Hamas have both blamed Israel, and American intelligence has assessed that Israel was behind it.

Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who was briefed on the country’s air-defense readiness on Monday during a visit to a military command center, said, according to a government statement, “We must be prepared for anything — including a swift transition to offense.”

In a separate statement, the Israeli government said Mr. Gallant had briefed the U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, overnight on Israel’s “readiness to defend Israel against potential threats posed by Iran and its proxies.”

Mr. Austin on Friday ordered more combat aircraft and missile-shooting warships to the Middle East in response to the threats from Iran and its proxies, the Pentagon said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that Israel would “exact a heavy price for any act of aggression against us, from whatever quarter.”

Israel faces threats of retaliation not just from Iran, but also from Iranian-allied groups like the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah and Israel continued to trade cross-border fire on Monday, with an Israeli airstrike killing two people in southern Lebanon, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health.

But those attacks did not appear to be part of the major retaliation that Hezbollah had threatened in the wake of an Israeli strike last week that killed Fuad Shukr, one of the group’s senior commanders, in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

In anticipation of attacks, the commander of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, traveled to Israel on Monday to discuss “joint preparations in the region, as part of the response to threats in the Middle East,” according to an Israeli statement. He met with the Israeli military’s chief of the general staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the statement added.

President Biden also convened his national security team to discuss developments in the region and spoke with King Abdullah II of Jordan, according to a White House statement.

“The leaders discussed their efforts to de-escalate regional tensions, including through an immediate cease-fire and hostage release deal,” the statement said, referring to the phone call between Mr. Biden and the king.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told reporters that American officials were engaged in diplomacy around the clock to try to reduce tensions. “All parties must refrain from escalation,” he said. “All parties must take steps to ease tensions. Escalation is not in anyone’s interests.”

On Sunday, the Jordanian foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, traveled to Tehran for meetings with his Iranian counterpart. Jordan is a close Western ally and helped intercept Iranian missiles and drones in April during tit-for-tat attacks between Iran and Israel.

Foreign ministers from Islamic countries are to gather in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday for an “extraordinary” meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation that was called to discuss “the continued crimes of the Israeli occupation against the Palestinian people,” including Mr. Haniyeh’s killing, the organization said in a statement.

Iran requested the meeting, according to a spokesman for the country’s foreign ministry, Nasser Kanaani. During a news conference in Tehran, Mr. Kanaani blamed Israel for the escalating tensions in the region, according to the state-affiliated Iranian Students’ News Agency.

In case of a wider escalation, the World Health Organization said, it delivered 32 tons of emergency medical supplies to Lebanon.

Russia has also sent a high-level official to the region: Sergei K. Shoigu, secretary of the Security Council. Mr. Shoigu, a former defense minister, arrived in Tehran on Monday, though the purpose of the visit was not clear. Mr. Shoigu met with Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian; the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council; and the commander of the armed forces, Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, who is leading the planning for military strikes on Israel.

“We are ready for full cooperation with Iran on regional issues,” said Mr. Shoigu, according to Iran’s state media. He also said that those responsible for the killing of Mr. Haniyeh wanted to spread chaos in the region, state media reported.

The diplomatic maneuvers came as a rocket attack targeting U.S. personnel housed at a base in Iraq’s western desert injured several American troops late on Monday, according to U.S. defense officials.

The attack on Ain al Asad Air Base resembled previous ones carried out by Iran-backed Iraqi armed groups, which have targeted the base repeatedly over the past years and intensified after Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza began in October.

A White House statement said that Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris had been briefed on the attack at Al Asad Air Base and were discussing steps to defend American forces “and respond to any attack against our personnel in a manner and place of our choosing.”

Mr. Haniyeh was killed by an explosive device hidden in a heavily guarded complex in Tehran where he was staying, less than a day after the Israeli strike killed Mr. Shukr. Israel said Mr. Shukr had overseen Hezbollah’s campaign against the country, including a rocket attack that killed 12 children and teenagers in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.

There are already signs that the killings — and fears of the retaliatory violence they could unleash — could push Gulf governments closer to Iran and further from Israel as they seek to de-escalate tensions that threaten their own security.

On Friday, Anwar Gargash, a senior adviser to the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, expressed his condolences to Mr. Haniyeh’s family members in a social media post and thanked neighboring Qatar for hosting his funeral — an unusual statement from a government that despises Hamas and led a diplomatic push for Arab countries to establish relations with Israel.

“The Emirates rejects all forms of political violence and assassination,” Mr. Gargash wrote, adding that “there is no path to stability except through justice, wisdom and dialogue.”

Saudi Arabia re-established relations with Iran, its regional rival, last year, citing a desire to open direct channels of communication and reduce political tensions. The planned meeting of Islamic foreign ministers on Wednesday in Jeddah could showcase that trend, particularly if Iran and other countries in attendance issue a shared statement rebuking Israel.

Reporting was contributed by Johnatan Reiss, Thomas Fuller, Michael D. Shear, Eric Schmitt, Alissa J. Rubin, Helene Cooper and Edward Wong.

The Olympic medals have come in a flurry for Ukraine in recent days: golds at the track and on the fencing piste, a silver in gymnastics, two other bronzes.

“It’s a time to celebrate and think not about the war,” Mykhailo Kokhan, 23, a member of Ukraine’s national guard, said after winning a bronze in the men’s hammer throw on Sunday.

The Paris Games have been a welcome respite for a country where at least one bakery sells pastries shaped like anti-tank obstacles and there is now deep uncertainty over the nation’s sporting future.

Ukraine’s 140 Olympians have shown remarkable perseverance since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, preparing for the Paris Games either in other, safer nations, or at home to the grim soundtrack of air-raid alerts and missile attacks. Some high jumpers trained by flashlight during power outages. Another improvised his weight lifting by attaching car tires to a metal rod.

But no quick end to the war is evident. And once the Paris Games end on Sunday, Ukrainian officials will be left to try to repair and sustain the country’s ravaged sports system as they look ahead to participating in the Winter and Summer Olympics, as well as other international competitions, over the next decade.

“It’s hard to say a number, but we understand that Ukraine lost its next generation of athletes because many children left,” Vadym Gutzeit, 52, the president of the Ukrainian Olympic Committee, said in an interview in June in Kyiv.

Roughly 500 high-level current and former athletes and coaches have died in the fighting, according to Ukraine’s sports ministry and Olympic committee. At least 518 stadiums and training centers have been damaged or destroyed. Tens of thousands — or more — young athletes of various levels have been displaced inside and outside Ukraine.

The devastation has put severe pressure on the country’s sports system, challenges that were evident on a Friday in late June during a visit to the prominent Dnipro Sports College in east-central Ukraine. By midafternoon, the teenage students had sought cover in the school’s bomb shelter seven times because of air-raid alerts.

The alerts come so often in the beleaguered city that students who live full-time at the sports college — essentially a teenage Olympic academy — sleep in the sprawling shelter every night, seeking uninterrupted rest. They spend so much time there that the shelter has been upgraded with enhanced ventilation, the internet, television and school desks.

The students include Albina Musiienko, 16, one of four judo athletes who were injured slightly by flying glass in April when a missile — possibly shot down by Ukraine’s air defense system, according to the school’s director — hit the college. The explosion shattered school windows, blew out doors and effectively destroyed the facility’s kitchen.

“It was scary but not unexpected,” Musiienko said in a voice of weary teenage acceptance. “In our city, strikes happen often.”

The sports school in Dnipro has developed 49 Olympians, including Yaroslava Mahuchikh, who won the Olympic women’s high-jump competition on Sunday, and Oksana Baiul, the 1994 Olympic women’s figure skating champion. But so many top athletes have moved to other countries since the war began, the school has been forced to lower its entry standards, according to Oleh Derliuk, the academy’s director.

“They have better conditions elsewhere, so they think they have better results,” Mr. Derliuk said of the departed athletes. “It’s safer.”

Younger children use the Dnipro Sports College pool as much for therapy as for training. One mother said it helps to soothe her eight-year-old son, who screams during the night when he hears explosions. Another mother said her 10-year-old daughter gave up gymnastics because she lost confidence in the maneuvers at which she once excelled. She doesn’t want to give up swimming, too, her mother, Lyudmila Pysarenko, said.

“Our psychologist says it relieves stress for her,” Ms. Pysarenko said.

About 1,300 youth sports facilities have been kept operating to some extent in Ukraine, according to the sports ministry. This includes the Lokomotyv pool in the battered city of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine.

Last fall and winter, the twins and artistic swimmers Maryna and Vladyslava Aleksiiva, 23, trained there for the Paris Olympics. The pool facility, which they shared with younger swimmers, often lacked heat and electricity. The blown-out windows were covered by boards, and swimmers sometimes had to flee to the bomb shelter in their dripping suits.

Visits in June to stadiums and training centers in towns outside of Kyiv made it clear that anything resembling a normal sporting culture no longer exists in Ukraine.

At the Stadium of Champions in Irpin, a leafy suburb that served as a last line of defense for Kyiv early in the fighting, 12 craters, apparently from mortar fire, still blacken the artificial turf. “We’re used to them and avoid them,” Kyrylo Koliada, 17, said as he trained alone on the field. Official games had not been played on it since Irpin was first destroyed and then liberated. “Some of my friends left for Poland and western Ukraine and never came back,” he said.

At Jubilee Stadium in Bucha, a town that became synonymous with Russian atrocities, the grass soccer field had been resodded but the large scoreboard remained scarred, along with many seats and the stadium walls.

Officials said that the war will have to end before Bucha and other cities can begin rebuilding their sports fields and courts, particularly because the country first will need schools, hospitals and factories.

On the grass behind one goal at the stadium, Olha Konopatska, 23, gave her brother, Nazar, 11, his first tennis lesson, using an advertising banner as a makeshift net.

“There is only one set of courts and they are private and expensive,” said Ms. Konopatska, a cardiology intern.

At the Boreks sports complex in Borodyanka, a town northwest of Kyiv where some buildings remain hollowed out, boxers aged 14 and 15 trained in an outdoor ring. They belong to a youth program affiliated with a Ukrainian Army unit, the Third Separate Assault Brigade.

Three or four times a week, the teenagers meet after school for activities like boxing, wrestling and first-aid lessons. Because adult soldiers from the brigade are protecting the country, the youth boxing coach is only 15 himself. Asked why the boxers trained outdoors, the coach, who would identify himself only as Donbas, his cadet call sign, said, “There is no place indoors in Borodyanka.”

Elite coaches are in short supply even in some Olympic-level sports. Ukraine’s top instructor of female shot-putters, Yuri Revenko, is 80. He said he has needed 18 surgeries and medical treatments to help improve his vision and hearing after being trapped in basements for more than a month in Mariupol, in southeastern Ukraine, during a Russian siege as the war began. His story was confirmed by numerous people, including another coach he credits with saving his life.

He now instructs Olha Golodna, 32, a two-time Olympian, from a wheelchair in Brovary, a suburb of Kyiv, where a Russian tank column was ambushed and halted early in the war.

Mr. Revenko, whose youngest son was killed in 2022 while trying to flee that Russian assault, said he stayed on the job for a simple reason: “Because it keeps me alive.”

Anastasia Kuznietsova contributed research.