The protesters were closing in.

A convoy of about a dozen vehicles carrying Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh out of her sprawling official residence tried at first to escape through the usual gate, then spun around and took a different route — and still found itself facing a crowd of demonstrators.

Thousands had defied a curfew, pushed through police barricades and poured into the heart of the capital, Dhaka, enraged by the killing of nearly 100 protesters the day before.

Ms. Hasina’s security detail appealed for reinforcements. Armored vehicles rushed to clear a path, and her car sped to a helipad. A helicopter whisked her to an airfield, where she boarded the military plane that would take her out of the country.

In her chaotic final hours on Monday as Bangladesh’s leader — recounted in conversations with nearly a dozen diplomatic, security and government officials, some of whom were caught in its panic — Ms. Hasina clung to the idea that she could hold out against the throng converging on her. According to three people with knowledge of the discussions, she resisted the advice of her security chiefs, who told her that their crackdown on antigovernment protests had failed after claiming some 300 lives over a few weeks, that trying to suppress them would require much more bloodshed.

Her decision to let go after 15 years in office, and to make what appears to have been a hastily arranged escape to India, did not ultimately come because of international pressure or a diplomatic push. Instead, according to security officials and diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the delicate matter, her top security advisers appealed to her closest family members to persuade her that it was the end.

“At very short notice, she requested approval to come for the moment to India,” India’s foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, told the Parliament on Tuesday.

Bangladesh now is gripped by political uncertainty. Ms. Hasina had amassed unrivaled, increasingly autocratic power, and her departure leaves an enormous vacuum. The president, who largely holds a ceremonial role, on Tuesday appointed the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus to form an interim government, but it remains unclear who will take part in it, what authority it will wield or what role the military might play.

The army chief announced Ms. Hasina’s departure on Monday afternoon and said she had resigned, but so far no written resignation has been made public, and neither she nor her political party has commented. That silence, and reports that her plan to fly from India to London had been delayed by paperwork hiccups, has left some diplomats to wonder whether she is remaining close to home because she still harbors hopes of a return.

The army, which has promised to oversee the installation of an interim government, is struggling to contain the chaos on the streets. After Ms. Hasina’s flight on Monday, the police presence in the streets melted away and there was widespread looting, arson and revenge-taking that left dozens dead. Law enforcement officers, seen as an overzealous extension of her authority, were the targets of many attacks.

Late on Monday, protesters surrounded the international airport in Dhaka, in what diplomats said was an attempt to prevent Ms. Hasina’s officials from fleeing the country. The airport remained shut and out of operation for at least six hours. When it reopened on Tuesday, there were reports of at least two cabinet ministers being stopped from boarding flights and taken to detention.

Considering how thoroughly she had centralized power in her own hands, Ms. Hasina’s unraveling was swift — and largely of her own doing, critics said.

Student protests over a preferential quota system to give half of government jobs to specific groups had carried on for weeks peacefully, with little sign of loosening her grip on power. But the situation turned chaotic after Ms. Hasina unleased the aggressive youth wing of her party on the protesters, followed by a crackdown by all shades of security forces. What had been demonstrations became street battles, and the crowds were growing.

More than 200 people were killed in late July protests. She announced a curfew and shut down the internet as law enforcement swept more than 10,000 people into jails, and charged tens of thousands of others with crimes.

When the restrictions eased last week, the movement turned into a call for justice for the killings. The protesters, while ratcheting up their demands, still stopped short of demanding Ms. Hasina’s ouster. Her supporters, particularly officials in India, which enjoyed close ties with her, were optimistic that she would survive the moment.

On Sunday, all that changed, as protesters turned out in their largest numbers since the demonstrations began. Government forces responded with more violence than they had used before, making it the deadliest single day, with about 100 killed.

By nightfall, a dangerous showdown was set up: Protesters demanded her resignation, and called for a march on Dhaka. She promised an “iron hand” response to what she described as anarchism.

Publicly, Monday morning started with all the signs of official defiance: Another internet shutdown, heavy security presence on the streets and barriers to keep protesters from moving toward the city center.

But behind the scenes, the conversation had shifted.

When Ms. Hasina’s security chiefs — the heads of the army, police, air force and navy — arrived at her residence midmorning, she met them along with her sister, Sheikh Rehana, who lives in London and had arrived just days earlier to visit. The two women were the only members of their family to survive the 1975 coup that killed their father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s founding leader.

Ms. Hasina insisted on beating back the protests, the people familiar with the conversations said. She held up the police’s performance as something the other forces should emulate. But her chiefs made clear that would be impossible. The numbers streaming into the city were in the hundreds of thousands. Many were already getting close to the neighborhood around her residence. To protect her would require carnage, and even then they weren’t sure they could repel crowds so big.

When Ms. Hasina still pushed back, her sister asked to speak to her privately. When they returned about 20 minutes later from a side room, the prime minister was quiet, but still reluctant. The army chief, Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman, who is related to Ms. Hasina by marriage, then dialed up her son, Sajeeb Wazed, who lives in Virginia, and asked for his help in getting his mother to accept the gravity of her situation.

The general passed the phone to the prime minister, and as he and the other military leaders watched, Ms. Hasina listened silently to her son. Then she nodded.

“She wanted to stay, she did not want to leave the country at all,” Mr. Wazed later told Indian news channels. “We were concerned for her physical safety first. So we persuaded her to leave.”

The generals estimated that she had less than an hour to get out.

Ms. Hasina and her sister descended from her upstairs quarters around 1 p.m., Ms. Rehana carrying a large photo frame tucked under her arm. Aides on the ground floor were preparing for a televised address they were told the prime minister wanted to make.

But confusion took over. The live broadcast truck that was meant to come to Ms. Hasina’s address had actually gone to the army chief’s headquarters, a sign that the power had shifted. Members of her staff watched as Ms. Hasina was quickly ushered into her vehicle before the convoy set off into a city already being overrun.

When television stations announced that the army chief would make an important address to the nation after hours of silence from the prime minister, the protesters sensed it was her end.

Yet the address was delayed, hour after hour. One senior diplomat said it was likely because the generals just weren’t sure she would follow through until her aircraft had actually taken off. The army chief then held hasty meetings with members of the opposition parties, including one Ms. Hasina had banned just days earlier, before announcing the end of her rule and the promise of an interim government.

“I promise you that we will bring justice for all murders and wrongdoings,” he said. “I promise that you won’t be disappointed.”

Sameer Yasir contributed reporting.

For the Venezuelan government, everything seemed to be falling in place.

Francisco Torrealba, a senior ruling party official, described being in an electoral command center in the country’s capital, Caracas, on Election Day last month, watching the computer monitors with confidence as the presidential vote neared its close.

The charts showed that a crucial party support base in Caracas had shown up in force.

The picture was much the same in other traditional government strongholds nationwide, he said. This assured officials that a combination of high turnout among loyalists and suppressing the vote for the opposition would propel Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, to a presidential election victory.

“We were calm,” Mr. Torrealba, a veteran lawmaker and a senior official of the ruling Socialist Party, said in an interview, describing the mood among government officials during the July 28 vote. “We did everything necessary to achieve a good victory.”

What happened next appears to have delivered a seismic jolt to the government’s expectations.

Vote tallies showed that the ruling party’s supporters in the public sector and poor neighborhoods had abandoned the country’s leader in droves, according to vote tallies obtained by the opposition. An electoral disaster loomed.

“We were betrayed, because they said they were going to vote for Maduro and what did they do? They voted for the lady,” said a ruling party activist in Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second largest city, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution.

The activist was referring to the popular leader of the opposition, María Corina Machado, who was backing Mr. Maduro’s rival, Edmundo González.

As electronic results poured into Caracas, the government-controlled electoral council suddenly interrupted transmission for approximately two hours, according to two people familiar with what happened. The delay, analysts said, seemed to give the government time to switch to a Plan B.

Shortly after midnight, the electoral council declared Mr. Maduro the winner, announcing vote totals that do not appear to have been based on the ballots recorded by the electoral system, according to many analysts, opposition leaders and a person with direct knowledge of the council’s decision.

The announcement plunged Venezuela into a political crisis that has claimed at least 22 lives in violent demonstrations, led to the jailing of more than 2,000 people and provoked global denunciation.

The government has refused to release any vote tallies to stand up Mr. Maduro’s claim of victory. His re-election has been rejected by the United States and many other countries in the Americas and Europe. It has also been debunked by statistical studies of vote tallies obtained by the opposition, including one conducted by The New York Times.

Mr. Maduro has responded to criticism by doubling down on his repression of opponents and breaking ties with nations that rejected his victory.

The election has left him facing one of the toughest decisions of his 11-year rule: whether to brazenly hold onto power no matter the cost, or accept a political compromise that could weaken his grip on the country.

This article is based on roughly two dozen interviews with party officials, poll workers, opposition activists and election experts.

Some of them are in hiding and many spoke on condition of anonymity. Some fear being swept up in a crackdown by the government since the election, while others do not want to jeopardize their political positions.

‘Politics Is What We Know’

Mr. Maduro faced a dilemma heading into the election. The vote needed to be free enough to convince the United States to lift crippling economic sanctions, but not so free as to endanger his rule.

A victory would deliver Mr. Maduro a third term in office and propel Chavismo, the movement founded by his predecessor and mentor, Hugo Chávez, into its third decade in power.

Mr. Maduro took few chances.

He allowed Mr. González, a little-known retired diplomat, to challenge him, while banning all major opposition leaders, including Ms. Machado, from running.

He then brought to bear the full weight of Venezuela’s state against Mr. González’s campaign. His government jailed dozens of his campaign workers, sowed confusion in the voting process and denied the opposition access to mainstream media and advertising.

To win votes for Mr. Maduro, the ruling party bet on its time-tested maquinaria, the political machinery that for years has used the financial muscle of an oil state to bring supporters to the polls through a combination of handouts, coercion and appeals to loyalty.

Technological advances had also broadened the government’s electoral tools. Party activists, from neighborhood organizers to government ministers, were charged with getting 10 voters to polling stations and updating their progress on an app monitored by campaign managers.

“Doing politics is what we know,” Nicolás Maduro Guerra, a ruling party lawmaker and the president’s son, said in an interview days before the election. “We are confident in the victory, not because we are triumphalists, but because we have done our homework.”

As the vote neared, the government’s internal polling showed Mr. Maduro within striking distance of Mr. González, a margin of error they believed could be overcome by maximizing turnout, according to two people familiar with those surveys.

In interviews, party officials said they had dismissed multiple public polls showing Mr. González far ahead as a mirage. Even some opposition-leaning experts urged caution, noting that millions of Venezuelans remained on the voter registry but have since gone abroad to escape economic depression.

But the triumphalism of senior party officials contrasted with the growing alarm among their grass roots organizers. The government’s move to shift much of the economy into private hands to revive growth had led to big public spending cuts, reducing the handouts and social services traditionally used to mobilize the vote.

The ruling party’s campaign this year lacked the financial resources of past efforts, said one party organizer in Maracaibo. In previous campaigns, she said, the government gave out everything from motorbikes to refrigerators. Ahead of this vote, all she got was boxes of poor-quality food and house paint.

“I knew what was coming,” she said.

Gripped by Euphoria

The opposition, on the other hand, was feverishly organizing and also using technology to try to even the playing field.

Ms. Machado, Mr. González’s political patron, organized tens of thousands of supporters into electoral clusters charged with obtaining printed tallies from the country’s 30,000 voting machines.

The tallies, the opposition believed, would allow them to recreate the results and expose any potential fraud. Ms. Machado’s team created its own app to allow volunteers to report turnout and upload the tallies.

Mr. Torrealba, the senior ruling party official, said he spent Election Day morning surveying voting centers in the rural state of Portuguesa, where he was encouraged by the long waiting lines.

“It is sealed,” a mid-ranking party official in Mr. Maduro’s campaign texted a Times journalist in the early afternoon, reflecting the government’s belief that a high turnout would lead to victory. (Nearly 81 percent of Venezuela residents would end up casting a ballot that day, up from 48 percent in the last presidential vote, according to an analysis of demographic data and opposition tallies by Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist at the University of Denver.)

As the ruling party focused on getting supporters to the polls, it also tried to suppress the opposition’s ability to monitor irregularities. In many centers, electoral officials backed by soldiers told poll volunteers and opposition witnesses that they would not be given the printed tallies, in violation of electoral law.

Still, after the polls started closing after 6 p.m., activists in many voting centers were able to scan printouts and transmit them to the opposition campaign.

As the tallies accumulated, the opposition grew increasingly convinced that its candidate was headed for a historic victory.

Neighborhoods that had voted for Chavista candidates for decades — in Caracas’s poorest neighborhoods or in rural areas like Portuguesa — had turned from Mr. Maduro, an opposition election analysis shared with The Times found.

“We were gripped by euphoria,” said one opposition organizer, Andrés Schloeter. “Finally, we have done it!”

But, the opposition’s celebration was short lived.

‘They Are Going to Steal the Election’

About two hours after the polls closed, voting machines across the country suddenly lost connection to the electoral council’s headquarters, halting the transmission of results, according to two people familiar the process, as well as interviews with multiple poll workers who attempted to upload the results.

The government, without providing evidence, would later blame the technical glitch on a hacking attack from North Macedonia.

But many analysts and opposition leaders believe the government halted the transmission to switch to a new strategy.

Shortly after the transmission went down, Mr. Maduro’s campaign chief, Jorge Rodríguez, gave the first hint of what was coming. “Today has been a victory for everyone,” Mr. Rodríguez told reporters with a broad smile on his face.

“This is when we realized: They are going to steal the election,” said Mr. Schloeter, the opposition organizer.

As the electoral council remained silent, the ruling party held a victory concert next to the presidential palace. Several thousand public employees and Chavista activists danced to bands, including a Maduro tribute band whose songs include “Super Mustache,” and “Nicolás, Nicolás, Nicolás.”

Finally, just after midnight, Elvis Amoroso, the head of the electoral council and a ruling party official, proclaimed Mr. Maduro the winner to a stunned nation, saying he had come out seven percentage points ahead of Mr. González.

Yet the figures that Mr. Amoroso read aloud did not come from the electoral council’s database, according to a person with direct knowledge of events in the council’s headquarters on election night.

How those figures were arrived at remains a mystery.

Mr. Amoroso did not respond to a request for comment sent through the electoral council.

Vote Tallies Tell a Different Story

The government’s move had a crucial flaw: Its attempts to prevent the opposition from obtaining voting tallies largely failed, said Juan Barreto, a former leftist ally of Mr. Maduro who broke with him and supported a third-party candidate in the elections.

Ms. Machado’s poll volunteers managed to obtain about 30 percent of the tallies on Election Day, her campaign said, and more tallies kept trickling in over the following days.

The scale of the government’s defeat reflected in those tallies made it difficult to disprove, said one ruling party poll volunteer in Maracaibo.

“The votes were too many, we couldn’t invent anything or fight back,” she said.

By Tuesday, the opposition had posted 83 percent of the vote tallies online, showing Mr. González 37 percentage points ahead of Mr. Maduro.

Mr. Torrealba claims the opposition’s tallies are fake, but said the ruling party had no plans to publish its own tallies. He claimed the government was not obligated to do so and had never done it before.

But in 2013 the party did precisely that, publishing tallies to disprove the opposition’s fraud claims in a tight election won by Mr. Maduro.

Despite angry calls for accountability and transparency, Mr. Torrealba presented the July 28 elections as a fait accompli.

Mr. Maduro, at the ruling party’s victory concert on Election Day, proclaimed: “I can say before the people of Venezuela and the world: I am Nicolás Maduro Moros, the re-elected president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. And I will defend our democracy!”

Mariana Martínez contributed reporting from Caracas, Venezuela, and Sheyla Urdaneta from Maracaibo, Venezuela.

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.

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.”