Middle East Crisis: Israel Strikes School Complex Turned Shelter in Gaza, Killing Dozens, Local Health Officials Say
The airstrike hit as people were gathered in a prayer hall, local officials said.
An Israeli airstrike early Saturday hit a school compound in northern Gaza where displaced Palestinians were sheltering, killing dozens of people, according to Gazan officials.
The Israeli military said Hamas and another armed Palestinian group were using the facility for military operations and attacks on Israel.
The strike in Gaza City, the latest in a string of attacks on schools turned into shelters, drew strong condemnation from the European Union and the United Nations, with Josep Borrell Fontelles, the top E.U. diplomat, saying that “there’s no justification for these massacres.”
The series of strikes has taken place alongside mounting international pressure on Israel to conclude a deal for a cease-fire and an exchange of hostages held in Gaza and Palestinian detainees, with President Biden and the leaders of Egypt and Qatar saying this week that “the time has come.”
The Gaza Civil Defense emergency service said more than 90 were killed, but that number could not be confirmed, and two doctors at one hospital in the area gave slightly lower totals.
It was not clear whether any of those killed were combatants. The Israeli military did not provide a death toll, and questioned the Gaza authorities’ statements.
The Civil Defense emergency service said the strike hit as more than 200 people who had gathered before sunrise in a prayer hall to worship. More than 2,000 displaced people had been staying at the shelter, the Al-Tabaeen school in the Al-Daraj neighborhood, Civil Defense said.
The Israeli military says that Hamas embeds itself among civilians to use them as human shields, and uses school buildings as centers of operations — while international law experts have said Israel still has a responsibility to protect civilians. At least 17 school buildings in Gaza have been targeted in the past month, with at least 163 Palestinians killed in the attacks, the U.N. human rights office said in a report this week.
The Civil Defense spokesman, Mahmoud Basal, said 11 children and six women were among the dead, adding that many people were seriously wounded.
The airstrike hit two floors, one of which was used for communal prayers and the other for sheltering women and children, Mr. Basal said. He said the prayer hall inside the school complex has been used for worship since the beginning of the 10-month war.
Many of those wounded in the Israeli strike, including children, were arriving with severe burns covering much of their bodies, said Tayseer al-Tanna, a surgeon at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, who called the scene “very difficult to watch.”
Fadel Naim, a medical official at Al-Ahli Hospital who served for years as dean of the medical college at the Islamic University of Gaza, widely seen as a Hamas stronghold, said the hospital had received at least 70 bodies since Saturday morning. The strike was followed by a flood of people searching for loved ones missing in the wake of the explosion, he said.
Khamis Elessi, a doctor at the same hospital, in Gaza City, said more than 73 identified bodies were brought to the hospital morgue, as were another 10 who have yet to be identified because they were disfigured in the explosion.
Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, said that based on intelligence assessments, approximately 20 militants from the Hamas and Islamic Jihad armed groups, including senior commanders, were operating from the school and using it to carry out attacks.
“The compound, and the mosque that was struck within it, served as an active Hamas and Islamic Jihad military facility,” he said, without providing details. He added that the information released by Gaza authorities in the past has “proven to be sorely unreliable.”
The Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers are believed to be broadly reliable, though there is often uncertainty in the immediate aftermath of specific strikes, and the destruction of the territory’s health system has made tolls harder to track.
Israeli forces have recently been scaling up military attacks throughout Gaza in areas where they had previously fought Hamas, saying the fighters had regrouped.
Troops had previously moved in on the Al-Daraj neighborhood in early July as part of a renewed ground offensive in Gaza City. But the Israeli military appears to have wound down its ground operation there, even as it continued to conduct airstrikes in the area.
Many of its offensives in recent days have targeted school grounds — a large number of which have been converted into makeshift shelters. The U.N. has said that strikes were escalating and that it was “horrified by the unfolding pattern.”
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, called the deadly attack “another day of horror” in Gaza. He called on all sides not to harm civilians or use schools for military purposes.
“It’s time for these horrors unfolding under our watch to end,” he said on social media. “We cannot let the unbearable become a new norm.”
The U.N. and other rights organizations have repeatedly said that there is no safe place in Gaza as areas people are ordered to evacuate to are subsequently targeted by Israeli airstrikes. Almost the entire population of Gaza — more than two million Palestinians — has been displaced, many people multiple times.
Ameera Harouda, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
Stay or go? Israeli strikes on schools pose a life-or-death choice for civilians seeking shelter in Gaza.
A deadly Israeli strike on a school turned shelter in northern Gaza on Saturday exposed an agonizing dilemma for civilians in Gaza seeking safety after 10 months of war.
They could stay at the schools turned shelters, hoping for a modicum of security in the desperate conditions of Gaza. Or they can flee, knowing that the shelters themselves can become targets.
The school year has been abandoned in Gaza, and tens of thousands of civilians have flocked to the compounds since the earliest days of the war, trying to build temporary lives in classrooms and corridors, or pitching makeshift tents in schoolyards.
Conditions are atrocious, residents have said, but the schools, which offer walls and access to limited plumbing, are attractive for the simple reason that the alternatives are worse. Israel’s airstrikes and ground assaults continue around the territory. Extreme hunger is widespread. And diseases are spreading fast in squalid, crowded camps and the ruins of former homes.
As a result, schools have been preferable options for many because they have offered the promise of better security in a conflict that has killed nearly 40,000 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Ahmed Tahseen Abd Shabat, a 25-year-old who had been living at the Hafsa government school in Gaza City with his two brothers and parents, told The New York Times by phone that they arrived there as a last resort after fleeing 10 times since Oct. 7, when Hamas led a deadly attack on Israel that began the conflict.
“I don’t consider moving out of the school despite the constant targeting of schools because there is no safe zone in Gaza,” said Mr. Shabat, who said he had been completing a master’s degree in law at Palestine University before the war. “Areas previously officially declared as safe zones are now the complete opposite.”
In recent weeks, he said, people had moved to sleeping inside classrooms rather than in the open air, believing that would offer a degree of protection against shrapnel in the event of a strike. As a result, he said, classrooms were becoming more crowded.
At present, his family was sharing a classroom with three other families, totaling around 20 people, and some of the men were sleeping in hallways to give the women and children more space.
“There is a complete lack of privacy,” he said.
Israel’s strikes on school grounds, which are just one element of its current campaign, appear to reflect a shift in its efforts to root Hamas out from Gaza. Military analysts say that the Israeli military has largely destroyed Hamas’ main battalions as fighting units and that it has also destroyed the group’s network of tunnels, forcing more fighters above ground.
The Israeli military says that Hamas had “cynically exploited” schools, hospitals and shelters, using them as bases and civilians as human shields. It has said its strikes “against this infrastructure are conducted in accordance with international law.”
With each of the strikes it has launched on school areas in recent weeks, the Israeli military has said that it has taken steps “to mitigate the risk of harming civilians.” On Saturday, the military said in a statement that those steps included the use of precise munitions, aerial surveillance and intelligence information.
In previous high-profile attacks, such as one in July that Israel says killed an important Hamas commander, the military appears not to have issued warnings to civilians in advance to avoid alerting its target. At least 90 people in the vicinity of the strike were killed that day, according to the Gazan health ministry.
Around 200 U.N. buildings have been hit since the start of the conflict, a number not previously seen in the organization’s history, said Juliette Touma, the director of communications for the main agency that aids Palestinians, UNRWA. During a more limited conflict in Gaza in 2014, she said, only one U.N. building was hit.
U.N. experts in April expressed concern about what they said was the “systemic destruction” of the enclave’s education system — a process they called “scholasticide.” Ms. Touma argued that the more recent attacks would have a longer-term impact once the war is over.
“Many of those schools cannot be used because they were bombed or they might have unexploded ordnance in them,” she said, adding “What will that mean for the education journey of children in Gaza?”
The United Nations has submitted the coordinates of all of its buildings in Gaza to the warring parties, Ms. Touma said, adding that it has also called for an independent investigation to determine whether the schools have been used as military bases.
“U.N. facilities must never be used for military and fighting purposes, and they should be protected in times of conflict,” she said.
White House assails ‘extremist’ Israeli minister for opposing cease-fire.
The White House sharply rebuked a far-right Israeli cabinet minister on Friday for making what it called “ridiculous charges” against a U.S.-brokered cease-fire proposal and declared that the minister “ought to be ashamed” for impugning President Biden’s longstanding support for Israel.
In a prepared statement delivered by John F. Kirby, a national security spokesman for Mr. Biden, the White House went after the cabinet member, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, in unusually explicit terms, denouncing his opposition to a possible cease-fire and even accusing him of being willing to sacrifice the lives of Israeli hostages.
“Some critics, like Mr. Smotrich, for example, have claimed that the hostage deal is a surrender to Hamas or that hostages should not be exchanged for prisoners,” Mr. Kirby said at the start of a briefing for reporters. “Smotrich essentially suggests that the war ought to go on indefinitely without pause, and with the lives of the hostages of no real concern at all. His arguments are dead wrong.”
The statement came a day after Mr. Biden and the leaders of Egypt and Qatar declared that “the time has come” for Israel and Hamas to finalize a cease-fire agreement that would free Israeli hostages held by Hamas in exchange for a halt to the war and the release of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel agreed to send a delegation back to the talks next Thursday, Mr. Smotrich called it “a dangerous trap” that Israel should not fall into and objected to equating hostages with convicted prisoners.
“It is definitely not the time for a surrender deal that would stop the war before the destruction of the Nazis of Hamas-ISIS, enabling them to regroup and return to murdering Jews again,” Mr. Smotrich said on Friday. Mr. Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister and a far-right ally, have threatened to quit Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition if he signs a deal ending the war.
The Biden administration’s pushback was striking because rarely does a White House spokesman go after a minister from another country so directly and by name in an official briefing. That it came in a planned statement that Mr. Kirby volunteered without prompting, rather than in response to a reporter’s question, indicated how much Mr. Smotrich’s opposition to a cease-fire has irritated the White House.
The reproach of Mr. Smotrich was clearly a warning to Mr. Netanyahu not to cave into pressure from the right wing of his governing coalition at the cost of an agreement that could ultimately lead to an end to the war. But whether it could help Mr. Netanyahu to have the Americans weigh in on his domestic politics was not as clear.
Mr. Kirby expressed particular umbrage that Mr. Smotrich had suggested that Mr. Biden was forcing Israel to sign a surrender agreement at a time when the president had ordered more warships and aircraft to the region to defend Israel in case of an anticipated attack by Iran in the coming days.
“The idea that he would support a deal that leaves Israel’s security at risk is just factually wrong,” Mr. Kirby said of the president. “It’s outrageous. It’s absurd. And anybody who knows President Biden and how staunchly he’s been a defender for Israel for the entirety of his public service ought to be ashamed for thinking anything different.”
“Simply put,” he added, “the views being taken against this agreement, the views expressed by Mr. Smotrich specifically would in fact sacrifice the lives of Israeli hostages, his own countrymen and American hostages as well.”
Mr. Kirby added that Mr. Biden would not be deterred. “He won’t allow extremists to blow things off course — including extremists in Israel making these ridiculous charges against the deal,” he said.
The U.S. says it won’t halt aid to an Israeli military unit accused of abuses, after Israel took remedial steps.
The Biden administration will not block U.S. security assistance to an Israeli military unit found to have committed human rights violations, after Israel’s government took steps to prevent further offenses, the State Department said on Friday.
The department determined in April that the unit, the Netzah Yehuda battalion, had committed abuses in the Israeli-occupied West Bank that were serious enough to prompt the invocation of the Leahy Law, which bans U.S. training or the provision of U.S. equipment for foreign troops who commit “gross human rights violations” like rape, murder or torture.
In April, when it became public that the United States was considering imposing sanctions on Israeli battalions accused of human rights violations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders called the possibility “the peak of absurdity and a moral low” at a time when Israeli forces were fighting a war in Gaza against Hamas.
But Israel took sufficient action to meet the Leahy Law’s criteria for “remediation,” in the form of justice and accountability, to make the unit eligible for continued American assistance, the State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, said in a statement on Friday. The statement did not specifically name Netzah Yehuda, but officials have said it was the only Israeli unit under such scrutiny.
After spending months evaluating information provided by Israel’s government, Mr. Miller said, the department found that the unit’s violations — which occurred in the Israeli-occupied West Bank before the current war with Hamas in Gaza — had “been effectively remediated.” It added: “Consistent with the Leahy process, this unit can continue receiving security assistance from the United States of America.”
A U.S. official said that Israel had provided the Biden administration with information showing that two soldiers who Israeli military prosecutors said should be disciplined had left the Israeli military and were ineligible to serve in the reserves.
The official also said that the Israel Defense Forces had taken other steps to prevent further offenses, including enhanced screening for new recruits and the implementation of a two-week educational seminar for such recruits.
Netzah Yehuda, created to accommodate the religious practices of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community, has been repeatedly accused of mistreating Palestinians. The charges against the unit include binding and gagging a 78-year-old Palestinian American who died of a heart attack while in military custody in January 2022.
The unit was transferred in 2022 from the West Bank to the Golan Heights in northern Israel, according to an April letter on the matter that Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken sent to the House Speaker, Mike Johnson.
That letter revealed that the State Department had found that two other units with the Israel Defense Forces and two civilian authority units had committed gross human rights violations, but that Israel had also taken adequate remedial steps in response to those cases.
The State Department notified Congress this week of its intent to disburse $3.5 billion in new military aid to Israel from a supplemental budget bill approved earlier, the department said in a statement. The disbursement was expected to go forward in 15 days. Israel is expected use the money to purchase arms from the U.S. government or from American companies.
Edward Wong contributed reporting.
China’s Great Wall of Villages
Qionglin New Village sits deep in the Himalayas, just three miles from a region where a heavy military buildup and confrontations between Chinese and Indian troops have brought fears of a border war.
The land was once an empty valley, more than 10,000 feet above the sea, traversed only by local hunters. Then Chinese officials built Qionglin, a village of cookie-cutter homes and finely paved roads, and paid people to move there from other settlements.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, calls such people “border guardians.” Qionglin’s villagers are essentially sentries on the front line of China’s claim to Arunachal Pradesh, India’s easternmost state, which Beijing insists is part of Chinese-ruled Tibet.
Many villages like Qionglin have sprung up. In China’s west, they give its sovereignty a new, undeniable permanence along boundaries contested by India, Bhutan and Nepal. In its north, the settlements bolster security and promote trade with Central Asia. In the south, they guard against the flow of drugs and crime from Southeast Asia.
The buildup is the clearest sign that Mr. Xi is using civilian settlements to quietly solidify China’s control in far-flung frontiers, just as he has with fishing militias and islands in the disputed South China Sea.
The New York Times mapped and analyzed settlements along China’s border to create the first detailed visual representation of how the country has reshaped its frontiers with strategic civilian outposts, in just eight years.
Working with the artificial intelligence company RAIC Labs, which scanned satellite images of China’s entire land border captured by Planet Labs, The Times identified the locations of new villages and checked them against historical images, state media, social media posts and public records.
The mapping reveals that China has put at least one village near every accessible Himalayan pass that borders India, as well as on most of the passes bordering Bhutan and Nepal, according to Matthew Akester, an independent researcher on Tibet, and Robert Barnett, a professor from SOAS University of London. Mr. Akester and Mr. Barnett, who have studied Tibet’s border villages for years, reviewed The Times’s findings.
The outposts are civilian in nature, but they also provide China’s military with roads, access to the internet and power, should it want to move troops quickly to the border. Villagers serve as eyes and ears in remote areas, discouraging intruders or runaways.
“China does not want outsiders to be able to walk across the border for any distance without being challenged by its security personnel or citizens,” Mr. Akester said.
The buildup of settlements fuels anxiety in the region about Beijing’s ambitions. The threat of conflict is ever present: Deadly clashes have broken out along the border between troops from India and China since 2020, and tens of thousands of soldiers from both sides remain on a war footing.
China’s Eyes and Ears
The first signs of Mr. Xi’s ambitions emerged in 2017, when state media told the story of a letter he wrote to two Tibetan sisters in the remote village of Yume, in a region near Arunachal Pradesh that is blanketed by deep snow for more than half the year.
He praised their family for having protected the area for China for decades, despite the inhospitable terrain: “I hope you continue your spirit as a patriot and border guardian.”
Over the next few years, workers built dozens of new homes in Yume, and officials moved over 200 people there.
Yume, also known as Yumai in Chinese, is among at least 90 new villages and expanded settlements that have sprung up in Tibet since 2016, when China began outlining its border village plan in the region, The Times found. In neighboring Xinjiang and Yunnan, The Times identified six new and 59 expanded border villages. (China says there are hundreds of villages like them, but few details are available and many appear to be mere upgrades of existing villages.)
Of the new villages The Times identified in Tibet, one is on land claimed by India, though within China’s de facto border; 11 other settlements are in areas contested by Bhutan. Some of those 11 villages are near the Doklam region, the site of a standoff between troops from India and China in 2017 over Chinese attempts to extend a road.
China makes clear that the villages are there for security. In 2020, a leader of a Tibetan border county told state media that he was relocating more than 3,000 people to frontier areas that were “weakly controlled, disputed or empty.”
Brahma Chellaney, a strategic affairs analyst based in New Delhi, said that in quietly building militarized villages in disputed borderlands, China is replicating on land an expansionist approach that it has used successfully in the South China Sea.
“What stands out is the speed and stealth with which China is redrawing facts on the ground, with little regard for the geopolitical fallout,” Mr. Chellaney said. “China has been planting settlers in whole new stretches of the Himalayan frontier with India and making them its first line of defense.”
In a written response to The Times, Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said that in dealing with border issues with its neighbors, “China always strives to find fair and reasonable solutions through peaceful and friendly consultations.”
India and Bhutan did not respond to requests for comment about the buildup. Indian officials have previously noted “infrastructure construction activity” by China along the border. Local leaders in Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh have complained to The Times that China was slowly cutting away small pieces of Indian territory.
India has responded with what it calls “Vibrant Villages,” a campaign that aims to revive hundreds of villages along the border.
But China is outbuilding India, says Brian Hart, an analyst for the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or C.S.I.S., who recently co-authored a report on border villages in Tibet.
Among other findings, the C.S.I.S. report identified what appeared to be a militarized facility in one such village, known as Migyitun, or Zhari in Chinese, an indication of the settlements’ dual-use nature. The Times studied satellite images of the same village and identified military trucks and tents, as well as what appeared to be a shooting range nearby.
The villages also serve as propaganda: a display of Chinese strength and superiority in the region, said Jing Qian, co-founder of the Center for China Analysis at the Asia Society.
“They want the Indians, Central Asians and others to see and think that Chinese villages are so good, that the China model is working very well.”
Uncertain Future, Unforgiving Terrain
The slice of the Himalayas where many Chinese villages have sprung up has been largely uninhabited for good reason. Its rocky, icy terrain is particularly forbidding in winter, with roads buried many months of the year by deep snow. The air is thin and cold. The land is barren, making farming difficult.
To persuade residents to move there, Chinese Communist Party officials promised them their new homes would be cheap. They would receive annual subsidies and get paid extra if they took part in border patrols. Chinese propaganda outlets said the government would provide jobs and help promote local businesses and tourism. The villages would come with paved roads, internet connections, schools and clinics.
A local government document reviewed by The Times indicated that some villagers may be receiving around 20,000 Chinese yuan a year for relocation, less than $3,000. One resident reached by phone said he earned an extra $250 a month by patrolling the border.
But it is unclear whether the villages make economic sense.
The residents become dependent on the subsidies because there are few other ways to make a living, according to Mr. Akester, the independent expert.
China’s relocation policy is also a form of social engineering, designed to assimilate minority groups like the Tibetans into the mainstream. Tibetans, who are largely Buddhist, have historically resisted the Communist Party’s intrusive controls on their religion and way of life.
Images from the villages suggest that religious life is largely absent. Buddhist monasteries and temples are seemingly nowhere to be found. Instead, national flags and portraits of Mr. Xi are everywhere, on light poles, living room walls and balcony railings.
“They want to transform the landscape and the population,” Mr. Akester said.
Over the years, the government has pushed many nomadic Tibetans to sell their yaks and sheep, leave the grasslands and move into houses, but often without clear ways for them to survive. Instead of herding, residents have to work for wages.
Interviews suggest that many nomads who have moved to the new villages are reluctant to adapt. Some herd yaks for half the year in the mountains; others return to their old homes to live for months at a time.
Residents are often not told about the challenges that moving can entail, Mr. Barnett said, including having to spend more to travel to towns and on electricity, water, food and other essentials.
“The major problem is they are moving them from one lifestyle to another,” he said. “They end up with no capital, no usable skills, no sellable skills and no cultural familiarity.”
When money isn’t enough, Chinese officials have applied pressure on residents to relocate, an approach that was evident even in state propaganda reports.
A documentary aired by the state broadcaster, CCTV, showed how a Chinese official went to Dokha, a village in Tibet, to persuade residents to move to a new village called Duolonggang, 10 miles from Arunachal Pradesh.
He encountered some resistance. Tenzin, a lay Buddhist practitioner, insisted that Dokha’s land was fertile, producing oranges and other fruit. “We can feed ourselves without government subsidies,” he said.
The official criticized Tenzin for “using his age and religious status to obstruct relocation,” according to a state media article cited by Human Rights Watch in a report.
In the end, all 143 residents of Dokha moved to the new settlement.
Russia Pushes Back at Ukraine’s Cross-Border Assault, but Kyiv Presses On
Russia is pushing back against Ukraine’s largest assault into Russian territory since the start of the war, sending troop reinforcements, establishing strict security measures in border areas and conducting airstrikes, including a strike on Ukrainian troops with a thermobaric missile that causes a blast wave and suffocates those in its path, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.
But even as Russia has halted the quick advances made by Ukrainian troops with a surprise cross-border attack five days ago into the southwestern region of Kursk, Ukrainian forces seem to be holding ground. They claimed on Saturday to have captured a small village in the neighboring Belgorod region, and analysts say their forces control most of the Kursk town of Sudzha, about six miles from the border.
Pasi Paroinen, an analyst from the Black Bird Group, a Finland-based organization that analyzes satellite imagery and social media content from the battlefield, said in an interview that evidence suggested that Moscow had been able to stall the major advances in Russian territory late in the week.
“We’re now entering the phase where the easy gains have been made,” he said of Ukraine’s initial advance. “This phase, for the first three days, saw the most rapid movement,” he added. “And yesterday, I think, we started to see the effects of the Russian response.”
What all of this means for Ukraine is not yet clear. In the third year of a war that has seemed largely frozen along a 600-mile front line in eastern and southern Ukraine, the decision by Ukrainian troops to cross the border into Russia apparently surprised not just Russia, but also the United States, other Western partners and analysts who spend their days following the war’s troop movements.
Some have speculated that Ukraine hopes to draw Russian troops away from the front lines in Ukraine, giving battle-weary Ukrainian troops a needed rest, although analysts say that has not happened.
But for Russia, the fallout from this past week’s incursion has been a public black eye for President Vladimir V. Putin.
Andrei Gurulyov, a retired military officer who is now a member of Parliament, on Friday condemned Russia’s response and level of preparedness.
“There is no military system in place for guarding the state border, no reserves and no second lines of defense,” he said on Telegram, adding, “If the Ukrainian Armed Forces spent two months preparing for this, how did we miss it?”
To counter the incursion, Russia’s military appears to be relying mostly on units that were already deployed near the area, according to an analysis by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank. Most of those units consist of military conscripts and irregular forces, as opposed to the battle-hardened soldiers fighting in Ukraine.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Friday that it was “continuing to repel” Ukraine’s military. And Alexander Kharchenko, a military correspondent for RIA Novosti, a Russian state-run news agency, said on Saturday on Telegram that while Ukrainian troops had easily entered populated areas in the region days earlier, “now they are met by a dense barrier in front of every village.”
Russian officials and the state news media have repeatedly claimed in recent days to have the situation under control, however, only to then lose more ground.
The new offensive has alarmed the Russian public, and if conscripts are killed, that could bring the war home in a way that losses along the front lines in Ukraine have not.
The conflict also threatens to spill over into neighboring Belarus: On Saturday, Belarus, a Russian ally, said it was sending more troops to protect its border with Ukraine, claiming that Ukrainian drones had violated its airspace during the incursion into Russia. Belarus’s defense minister said on Telegram that its air defense forces had destroyed several Ukrainian drones that violated Belarusian airspace on Friday.
Ukraine has managed to keep much of its troop movements hidden, telling soldiers not to say anything publicly or post any videos. But there have been exceptions, including when a group of soldiers posed in a video outside a facility run by Gazprom, the Russian state-owned gas monopoly, on the outskirts of Sudzha; the video was verified by The New York Times.
Satellite imagery showed several damaged or destroyed buildings in the center of Sudzha, including the office of the public prosecutor and what appears to be an apartment building. The Times reviewed additional satellite imagery that showed fighting continuing as of Friday, with visible smoke plumes and a fire.
Mr. Paroinen said that a few Russian troops were likely still holding out in the center of Sudzha, and that the Ukrainians were trying to set up defenses east of there. But he also said that Ukrainians had encountered stiff resistance when they tried several times to take control of Korenevo, a town about 30 miles to the northwest.
“This may have caused quite a bit of trouble for the Ukrainians,” he said.
Ukrainian officials have said little publicly about their decision to launch the cross-border attack on Tuesday, aside from pointing out that the country’s allies have supported the offensive, at least tacitly.
On Friday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine obliquely alluded to the offensive and cited one benefit from it: newly captured Russian troops who could be traded for Ukrainian prisoners of war. He thanked Ukrainian troops “who are replenishing the ‘exchange fund.’”
“This is extremely important and has been particularly effective over the past three days,” Mr. Zelensky said. “We must return freedom to all our people who remain in Russian captivity.”
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Kyiv’s allies have been wary of any Ukrainian incursions onto Russian soil, fearing that they could provoke Moscow and escalate the war. Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department, suggested this past week that the Ukrainian incursion did not violate American guidance.
It is not clear whether Russia will redeploy better-equipped forces from the front lines inside Ukraine to suppress Kyiv’s foray into Russian soil. That would take time. It would also relieve pressure on Ukrainian troops who are outnumbered and have been losing ground in eastern and southern Ukraine.
So far, Russian forces have not let up in their frontline pushes. In recent days, they have made some inroads near the embattled eastern Ukrainian towns of Chasiv Yar, Toretsk and Pokrovsk, the Institute for the Study of War said. On Friday, the British Defense Ministry said that Russian troops in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine had gained ground, pushing to about 10 miles from Pokrovsk.
After steadily losing ground this year, Ukraine’s success with this latest offensive has buoyed the country’s morale, at least if social media posts are any guide. The head of Ukraine’s Postal Service joked on Telegram that he planned to open a post office in Sudzha.
On Friday, the situation remained tense along the border, with both sides trying to evacuate residents. Russia declared states of enhanced security in the regions of Kursk, Belgorod and Bryansk. It said that would include counterterrorism operations, which allow for restrictive military and security actions inside Russia, as applied to parts of Chechnya for years during the war there.
The Ukrainian authorities, perhaps preparing for retaliation, said on Friday that they were evacuating 20,000 people from the Sumy region, across the border from Kursk.
Reporting was contributed by Anastasia Kuznietsova, Evelina Riabenko, Alina Lobzina and Christoph Koettl.
‘Operation Knock-Knock’: Venezuela Sweeps Up Dissenters After Disputed Vote
Frances Robles
Reporting from Caracas, Venezuela, and Florida
Hundreds of people gathered several days ago outside a detention center known as “Zone 7” in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, huddled around lists of prisoners, as they clutched plastic bags filled with meals they had packed for the inmates inside.
Eager for information about their detained loved ones, many told remarkably similar stories of sons, daughters and siblings arrested riding motorbikes, walking home from work, coming out of a bakery or stopping by a relative’s house in the days following Venezuela’s disputed presidential election.
They described arrests both sweeping and selective. And no one had been told what criminal charge their relatives faced.
The Venezuelan government has mounted a furious campaign against anyone challenging the declared results of the vote, unleashing a wave of repression that human rights groups say is unlike anything the country has seen in recent decades.
“I have been documenting human rights violations in Venezuela for many years and have seen patterns of repression before,” said Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, president of the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy and research organization. “I don’t think I have ever seen this ferocity.”
The country’s autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro, claimed victory in the July 28 election, but the government has yet to provide any vote tallies to support the announcement. The opposition, on the other hand, released tallies showing that its candidate had won in a landslide.
Now, experts say, Mr. Maduro, having seemingly been repudiated by a majority of his constituents, is bent on punishing those he considers disloyal.
“My son grabbed a flag and participated in a protest, but I don’t think he will be convicted for that, will he?” said María Vázquez, 62, a Caracas street vendor who supports the government and urged her son not to protest. “It’s worrisome.”
The Venezuelan government says it has arrested more than 2,000 people for participating in protests disputing the election results.
People were taken both in indiscriminate roundups, amid the protests, and later from their homes in targeted arrests, as the government launched what it called “Operation Knock-Knock,” according to interviews with family members and human rights activists documenting the detentions.
The surge in detentions is particularly alarming, rights groups say, because some arrests came after the president urged his supporters to snitch on their neighbors, using a government app that was supposed to be used to report issues like downed power lines.
“Maximum punishment! Justice!” Mr. Maduro said at a rally last Saturday. “There will be no forgiveness this time!”
The result has been an aggressive crackdown on dissent designed to silence anyone who dares question the election results, human rights activists said.
At least two human rights lawyers are in jail, including one who was arrested when he went to inquire about other detainees. Another activist was taken from the Caracas airport when she tried to leave the country.
When the authorities showed up at the home of María Oropeza, an opposition party leader in Portuguesa, southwest of Caracas, she live-streamed it. “I think first you should show me whether you have a search warrant, no?” she could be heard telling a police officer. “Because this is my home, private property.”
Jordan Sifuentes, the mayor of Mejía, the only opposition mayor in the state of Sucre, in northeast Venezuela, has been held for a week on unknown charges. Mayor José Mosquera of Lagunillas, in Zulia State, was held for six days after being accused of posting a tweet against the government, which he had denied.
Human rights activists and journalists learned in recent days that the government had annulled their passports, effectively trapping them in Venezuela.
People are leaving their houses without their phones, fearing that the authorities will stop them on the street and look at their messages for objectionable content. One man in Zulia was arrested after the police found a meme critical of the elections on his phone, his family said.
“It’s difficult to express in words the intensity and the indiscriminate nature of this wave of arrests,” said Gonzalo Himiob, vice president of the Penal Forum, a human rights organization tracking arrests since the elections.
Though the government claims that more than 2,000 people are in custody, Mr. Himiob said human rights organizations have only been able to document nearly 1,300 people detained.
“Maduro speaks of 2,000 detained, but it doesn’t seem true,” he said. “It seems more like an instruction. He wants to reach that number.”
On July 28, Mr. Maduro faced off against a little-known diplomat named Edmundo González, a stand-in for a more popular opposition leader, María Corina Machado, who had been disqualified by the government from running for office.
About six hours after the polls closed, the elections council announced Mr. Maduro had won another six-year term. Nearly two weeks later, the government has yet to publish any precinct-level elections data proving it.
The tallies collected by opposition observers on election night show Mr. González won by millions of votes.
Spontaneous protests erupted the day after the race, some of which led to clashes between demonstrators, security forces and armed civilian groups that support the government. At least two dozen people were killed, according to human rights groups. Hundreds were arrested.
But arrests continued days after the protests, sometimes on the word of anonymous informers who reported them on VenApp, an app that the government had originally introduced to report public nuisances.
The app has been removed from Google Play and the App Store, but is still available for those who have already downloaded it, according to Amnesty International.
Using civilian supporters to inform on neighbors has echoes of what has happened in Cuba, where the Communist government has long deployed an extensive network of community-based informants.
“Operation Knock-Knock is just beginning,” Douglas Rico, the head of Venezuela’s criminal investigations unit, posted on Instagram. “Report if you have been the target of a physical or virtual hate campaign through social media.”
The government appeared to be employing a “pluralistic” approach to squash dissent, said Ms. Jiménez of the research organization, using all the methods at its disposal, including technology, security forces, intelligence services, armed civilians and the armed forces.
“The array of tools the government is using,” she said, “is something not seen in previous cycles of repression in the country.”
Mr. Maduro insisted that the detained people had participated in an extreme-right fascist plot to oust him. People were paid to burn electoral centers and knock down statues of former President Hugo Chávez, he said, adding that they had confessed to their crimes.
The people who have been arrested will be charged with inciting hatred and terrorism, the government said, and activists said they had been referred to a specialized terrorism court in Caracas. Some of those arrested were caught committing acts of vandalism such as taking down government statues, but many others were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time, civil rights lawyers said.
The attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
On Thursday, the family of the opposition party leader Américo De Grazia, 64, announced on Instagram that he had been missing for more than 24 hours.
His daughter, María De Grazia, 30, said that after receiving threats on social media, her father, a former mayor and congressman, left his house in Upata and traveled 450 miles to Caracas. After five days there, he suddenly disappeared.
The family learned he was in jail, but said they were not told why.
“They did not come to the house with an arrest warrant,” said Ms. De Grazia, who lives in exile in Houston. “If a family member had not gone looking under rocks for two days, we would still not know where he was.”
The government was clinging to power, she said, by arresting everyone from student leaders to well-known politicians to ordinary citizens. Opposition activists barely stood a chance against such an organized apparatus.
“We are going to war armed with a plastic fork,” she said.
Nayrobis Rodríguez contributed reporting from Sucre, Venezuela, and Sheyla Urdaneta from Maracaibo, Venezuela.
Bangladesh Puts Its Eggs in One Economic Basket. Now, a Reckoning.
Not long ago, Bangladesh was hailed as an economic miracle. Its singular focus on exporting textiles and apparel delivered rapid growth, lifting millions out of poverty and winning the country’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, fame and admiration.
But Ms. Hasina’s abrupt exit from power this week has exposed the limitations of that strategy, as Bangladesh struggles to combat steep inflation and joblessness that economists say are largely the result of poor policy decisions. Her increasingly authoritarian rule and Bangladesh’s widespread corruption only added to the frustration that boiled over and forced her ouster.
Now, Bangladesh must decide its future.
Student protesters who had called for Ms. Hasina’s resignation have brought in Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel laureate and microfinance pioneer, to oversee an interim government. Mr. Yunus faces a daunting task.
Most immediately, the country must restore order and stabilize its economy. In the longer term, Bangladesh will have to confront the wider economic stresses that had sent the protesters into the streets in the first place. All of that must happen on top of urgent demands to address the widespread abuses of Ms. Hasina’s repressive tenure.
It is unclear how long the interim government will remain in place and how broad a mandate it will assume. But it and Mr. Yunus have the “aspirations of many entrusted upon them to deliver justice, create a functional economy and democracy, and establish rule of law and a transparent and accountable government,” said Saad Hammadi, a fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Canada.
These challenges might be too much for an interim government whose main purpose is to ensure that new leaders are elected through a free and fair process, Mr. Hammadi said in an email. “Institutional reforms will be required across the administration,” he added.
Bangladesh underwent economic reforms starting in the 1970s, and the garment industry has been central to the country’s economy for decades. But Ms. Hasina, who came to power in 2009, narrowed the country’s focus to that single sector and expanded into new global markets, which drove much of Bangladesh’s growth.
Cheaply made garments were attractive to global clothing retailers, especially fast-fashion brands like Zara and H&M. At the same time, that demand created livelihoods for millions of people, especially women, and transformed living standards.
Ms. Hasina spent heavily on infrastructure, reassuring international companies that they could rely on the country to meet their demands.
“What she brought was a level of stability, which was attractive for foreign investors,” said Thomas Kean, a consultant on Bangladesh at the International Crisis Group. Garment buyers were unlikely to send business to Bangladesh if there were worker strikes, power cuts or other factors that made it unreliable, Mr. Kean said.
Ms. Hasina also instilled domestic confidence. Even as she brought the armed forces and judiciary under her control, quashed dissent and turned increasingly authoritarian, there was almost a “compact” between Bangladeshis and her government, Mr. Kean added. “There was a belief that she and the Awami League were the party that would deliver economic growth and development,” he said, referring to the political party Ms. Hasina has led since 1981.
For more than a decade under Ms. Hasina, the economy grew at a blistering pace, in some years crossing 7 percent. Garment exports drove more than 80 percent of the country’s earnings.
But that dependency was also Ms. Hasina’s undoing.
The pandemic reduced global demand for textiles and apparel. At the same time, supply chain disruptions and Russia’s war on Ukraine sharply raised prices for imported food and fuel. With so little diversification in its economy, Bangladesh was unable to pull in enough revenue from other industries to help pay the bills.
As inflation soared, the Hasina government’s efforts to control it backfired. While trying to prop up the value of its weakening currency, Bangladesh spent down its foreign exchange reserves, which dropped so low that it was forced to seek a loan from the International Monetary Fund in 2022.
By the time garment exports bounced back after the pandemic, Bangladesh was mired in its short-term troubles — a situation that also highlighted underlying problems. Bangladesh collects very little in taxes, partly because of a lax bureaucracy and an unwillingness by many citizens to pay their taxes. Its tax-to-G.D.P. ratio, a measure of a government’s ability to fund its priorities, is one of the lowest in the world. That meant it could not count on tax revenue to pay its steep bills.
Bangladesh still has a high growth rate, but economists and others say that the growth has been uneven, and that income inequality is high. The sense that the growth story on paper did not match up with the reality people saw on the ground fed into distrust of the government, said Iftekhar Zaman, the executive director of Transparency International Bangladesh.
Brazen corruption, including loan fraud and reports of money laundering by many in the business community who were seen as close to the prime minister, sowed further disaffection, Mr. Zaman said. “Everybody knew that this was being sustained by the people who were supposed to control corruption,” he said.
Perhaps the biggest long-term problem for Ms. Hasina was her government’s inability to create new jobs because of its narrow focus on the garment business. There aren’t enough new or better-paying jobs for the country’s large working-age population.
Last month, that cumulative frustration found an outlet when students began demanding an end to a preferential quota system for government jobs, which provide stability that Bangladesh’s private sector often does not. Once Ms. Hasina sent the armed forces to quell the protests, the bubbling frustration with a system that had failed to deliver boiled into rage against her.
On Thursday, Bangladesh swore in the new interim government, with Mr. Yunus, 84, as its leader. He called for calm and appealed to the nation to restore order and eschew violence. Although it’s unclear how long he will remain in office, Mr. Yunus — a social entrepreneur who married profit with development through the microlending operation he pioneered through Grameen Bank — is expected to institute market-friendly reforms.
‘They Are Burned Alive’: A Doctor Captures the Toll of War on Gaza’s Children
Dr. Ahmad Yousaf, an American pediatrician and the director of an intensive care unit in Arkansas, embarked on a medical mission to Gaza, believing his expertise could help patients receive the advanced health care he was accustomed to providing. But what he encountered far exceeded his worst expectations, compelling him to document the devastation.
“The primary thing that I did there was triaging and mass casualty,” Dr. Yousaf said. “This was not advanced I.C.U. care. We often never got there. Patients died.”
Dr. Yousaf volunteered with MedGlobal, a nonprofit based in the United States that provides humanitarian relief worldwide. After spending three weeks in one of Gaza’s last functioning hospitals, he described the severe toll of the war on medical workers and civilians, particularly children. He shared a record of what he witnessed, including rare footage from inside Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir al Balah, with The New York Times.
During his stay at the hospital, medical teams worked tirelessly to manage the trauma casualties flooding in as the Israeli military continued bombing neighboring areas, including humanitarian zones.
Operating at three times the hospital’s capacity, staff members often had to treat patients, many of them children, on pieces of cardboard on the floor. They lacked critical supplies, including blood, gauze and anesthesia. Many patients died from their wounds.
“Decisions were made second to second, and we tried our best,” Dr. Yousaf said. “The longer I stayed there, I realized my role wasn’t being a physician, it was being a witness.”
Dr. Yousaf began sharing daily reflections with his friends and family on WhatsApp. One entry from June 30 describes a teenage boy whose first words after being extubated were: “Please let me call my dad. I just want to make sure he’s OK and knows I’m OK.”
Officials in Gaza have reported that at least 10,000 Palestinian children have been killed since the war began, with many more facing lifelong physical and mental injuries. More than 500 health care workers have been killed in the past nine months, according to international aid organizations.
Dr. Yousaf’s entries reflect the increasingly dire reality of life in Gaza. On July 9, he wrote: “Every time I think it can’t get worse, it does.”
What We Know About the Plane Crash in Brazil
A passenger plane carrying 62 people crashed on Friday outside São Paulo, Brazil. No one onboard survived.
The plane crashed in the yard of a home, but it did not hit any residences and no injuries were reported among people on the ground, officials said.
Here is what we know about the crash:
The plane was on its way to São Paulo.
VoePass Flight 2283 took off from Cascavel, in southern Brazil, at 11:46 a.m., the airline said. It was headed east to Guarulhos airport, just outside São Paulo.
Near its destination, the plane’s transponder signaled that it was descending quickly from its cruising altitude of 17,000 feet, according to Flightradar24, a provider of flight data. For about a minute, the transponder reported losing altitude at a rate of between 8,000 feet and 24,000 feet per minute, the company said.
Officials said that the pilots sent no emergency signal.
There were 89 seconds between the indication of a problem to the final data received from the aircraft at 1:22 p.m., Flightradar24 said. The plane crashed in Vinhedo, a small city northwest of São Paulo, the airline said.
Videos showed the plane spiraling down.
Videos filmed by people on the ground in Vinhedo showed the aircraft slowly spinning horizontally as it fell from the sky. The loud rumbling of a plane’s engine could be heard. After the plane disappeared from view near a gated community, a giant plume of black smoke was seen rising from the spot.
One video showed a house on fire and a yard full of debris, including a shredded fuselage, twisted metal, and part of the cockpit.
The plane was an ATR 72.
The aircraft was a 14-year-old ATR 72, a twin-engine turboprop. Brazilian officials said that it was in compliance with the country’s regulations.
It was operated by VoePass, a small Brazilian airline serving midsize cities in Brazil. The airline said all of the plane’s systems were operating correctly when it took off.
The same plane had flown from São Paulo to Cascavel earlier on Friday, according to Flightradar24.
ATR is a joint venture of two European manufacturers, Airbus and Leonardo, specializing in turboprop planes. There were 1,200 ATR aircraft in service globally as of March 2023, according to the company.
The cause is unknown.
The airline and Brazilian officials said they were investigating what had gone wrong. Aviation safety experts regularly warn against speculating before investigations have concluded. Such inquiries typically take months and even years.
Previously, icy conditions have contributed to crashes of other turboprop planes. In 1994, an ATR 72 operated by American Eagle crashed in Indiana, killing all 68 people onboard. A federal investigation blamed the manufacturer for not disclosing enough about the model’s vulnerability to ice, leading ATR to add more ice protection equipment to the aircraft.
Flightradar24 said that there was an active warning for severe icing in the area where the plane lost control on Friday, in addition to meteorological reports of turbulence and thunderstorms.
The crash killed everyone on the plane.
There were 58 passengers and four crew members onboard. Initially, VoePass reported that 61 people had died, but the airline said on Saturday that an additional passenger was among the dead. That passenger’s name had not appeared before because of a technical error during boarding, the airline said in a statement.
VoePass has published a list of all those killed.
Lynsey Chutel contributed reporting.
As Ukraine Pushes Deeper Into Russia, Moscow Sends Reinforcements
Ukrainian forces pressed deeper into Russia on Friday, trying to capitalize on their surprise cross-border offensive, as Moscow moved quickly to shore up its defenses against the largest assault on Russian soil since the war began.
After capturing several small settlements the last few days, Ukraine was battling to take full control of a town near the border and sending small units to conduct raids farther into the southwestern Russian region of Kursk.
At the same time, the Russian military announced it was sending more troops and armored vehicles to try to repel the attack. Russian television released videos of columns of military trucks carrying artillery pieces, heavy machine guns and tanks.
Perhaps preparing for retaliation, Ukrainian authorities on Friday said they were evacuating 20,000 people from the Sumy region, which sits across the border from Kursk.
The flurry of movement underscored the extent to which Ukraine’s attack had introduced an unpredictable new element into a war that has been progressing in slow motion elsewhere on the battlefront. Ukraine’s success so far could provide a much-needed boost to a country whose forces have been steadily losing ground for many months, while bringing the war home to Russian civilians in a more serious way.
But military analysts have questioned whether the operation is worth the risk, given that Ukrainian forces are already stretched. It is also not clear whether the mission will help Ukraine improve its position on the rest of the battlefield by forcing Russia to divert troops from elsewhere to reinforce the border region.
The Ukrainian military has enforced a policy of silence about the operation, and it has not publicly acknowledged launching a cross-border attack.
Kyiv’s allies in the past have been wary of Ukrainian incursions in Russia, fearing that it could escalate the war, but there have been no public indications from Western capitals that they oppose the assault. The United States has said that the Ukrainian incursion does not violate American guidance.
However, senior American officials have said privately that they did not get a heads-up about the operation and were still seeking clarity about its logic and rationale.
The officials said they understood Kyiv’s need to change the optics and the narrative of the war, but that they were skeptical that Ukraine could hold the territory long enough to force Russia to divert significant forces from the offensives it is pressing in eastern and southern Ukraine.
“It’s a gamble,” said one senior administration official.
Still, Mykhailo Podolyak, a top presidential adviser, was upbeat about the international response. “Most quietly approve,” he wrote on social media on Thursday evening, adding that a significant part of the world now considers Russia “a legitimate target for any operations and types of weapons.”
The fighting in Russia showed no signs of abating on Friday, with the Ukrainian military saying that it had struck a Russian airfield in the Lipetsk region, which borders Kursk, hitting warehouses that contain guided aerial bombs. Local Russian authorities said a large drone attack had caused several explosions and that a fire had broken out at a military airfield.
The Ukrainian authorities also said a Russian strike on a supermarket in Kostiantynivka, an eastern Ukrainian town 200 miles south of the area of the fighting, killed 14 people and wounded 43 others. The claims from both sides could not be independently verified.
Military analysts said the attack across the border had involved elements of at least four brigades in a rare example of successful maneuver operations involving support from artillery, air defenses and electronic warfare, resulting in quick advances on the ground.
“It seems to be a fairly well-coordinated and planned combined armed operation,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst. “You have electronic warfare assets that were deployed to jam Russian command and control. You have air defenses that were moved in to create air defense bubbles around the Ukrainian advance. And then you have fairly effective mechanized formations moving forward at a fairly steady pace.”
Mr. Gady and other experts said the main question now is whether Ukraine can maintain the momentum and turn the success on Russian territory into useful gains. The Ukrainian Army has few reserves it can pour into the fight, and it continues to suffer from shortages of weapons and ammunition, analysts say.
It also remains unclear what Ukraine ultimately hopes to accomplish. A senior Ukrainian official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the operation said the goal was to draw Russian troops away from other parts of the front line where Ukrainian units are struggling. But military experts said that Russia would likely be able to respond with reserves who were not fighting in Ukraine.
“Does it really solve any of the larger military strategic problems that the other parts of the front line are suffering from?” Mr. Gady asked.
Mick Ryan, a retired Australian Army major general and a fellow at the Lowy Institute, a research group, said one objective may be to boost morale in the Ukrainian population. “Given the past eight months of defensive operations, constant aerial attacks on infrastructure and ongoing power shortages, the will of the people will be at the forefront of the Ukrainian government’s considerations about the trajectory of the war,” he said.
A map of the battlefield by the Black Bird Group, a Finland-based organization that analyzes images from the battlefield, shows that Ukrainian troops have gained about 100 square miles of Russian territory since the beginning of the attack, although it remains unclear whether they have secured control of all of it. They have advanced past two lines of Russian defenses.
In particular, the Ukrainian Army has entered Sudzha, a small town of about 6,000 people six miles from the Ukrainian-Russian border. On Friday, Ukrainian troops claimed in a video that the town was under their control. The claim could not be independently verified.
Emil Kastehelmi, an analyst from the Black Bird Group, wrote on social media that some Ukrainian units appeared to be conducting probing raids further north in the direction of Lgov, a town about 50 miles from the border, in what appears to be a test of Russian defenses.
A video posted on social media on Friday morning and verified by The New York Times showed a column of destroyed Russian military vehicles just east of Rylsk, a Russian town west of the border area captured by Ukraine.
It remains to be seen whether Ukraine will try to push further into Russian territory to solidify control over the area it has captured, or retreat after a few days, as has happened in previous, smaller-scale cross-border raids.
Mr. Kastehelmi said Ukraine could not continue further north without widening its flanks and exposing itself to Russian counterattacks. “Time is also running against Ukrainians,” he wrote. “Russians won’t be disorganized forever.”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, D.C.
Liverpool Sends a Message to Far-Right Rioters: Not Here
The residents of the southeast Liverpool neighborhood of Edge Hill had spent Wednesday preparing for trouble.
Parents were called to pick up children early from nursery school. Shop owners pulled their shutters down over glass storefronts. And in the semidetached brick houses on and around Overbury Street, where generations of the same families have lived alongside newer arrivals, locals pulled their curtains as evening approached.
What they feared was another night of the anti-immigrant violence that had rocked the country in the week since a deadly stabbing attack nearby in Southport that was falsely rumored as being carried out by a migrant.
What they got, instead, was a night of near celebration by people opposed to the racism and anti-immigrant sentiments that drove the week of rioting in cities and towns across Britain.
People in Liverpool had been especially unnerved since an online list of what were said to be new far-right targets for protests included a local charity that works with asylum seekers. Neighbors texted neighbors to head to the streets to counter any racist rioters. Local unions and leaders of neighborhood mosques also put out the word, as did a nationwide collective called “Stand Up to Racism.”
So as helicopters circled overhead on Wednesday night, and police officers on horseback patrolled the streets, young women handed out snacks and water bottles in front of the boarded-up windows of the targeted charity. Another group set up a makeshift first aid area across the street in case of emergency, given the unbridled violence of the past riots. And a white-haired man with a long beard propped a megaphone next to a speaker on his metal walker and played peace songs.
People carried signs reading “Not in our city,” and “Will trade racists for refugees.”
“They all had one thing in mind; it was to not let this hate get a foothold,” said Ewan Roberts, who manages Asylum Link Merseyside, the charity that was on the target list.
And then, the far right was a no-show.
In some ways, the gathering of hundreds of antiracism demonstrators was not unexpected in Liverpool, a multicultural city with proud working-class roots.
But similar protests were staged in cities across England on Wednesday night as thousands of people angered by the earlier violence decided to make their voices heard. That violence had included rioters trying to set fire to a hotel in the city of Rotherham while asylum seekers and other guests were inside. Some rioters pummeled police officers so hard they had to go to the hospital. A fire was set in a community library on the northern outskirts of Liverpool over the weekend.
Some of the Liverpool residents who turned out in force Wednesday were especially angry that what set off the spasm of violence was a lie about the deadly knife attack that was promoted again and again online.
The teenager accused of killing three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class was not — as online agitators claimed — a migrant straight off one of the small boats that bring impoverished people across the English Channel to Britain’s shores. The suspect was born in Wales, to parents who the BBC says came from Rwanda, and the police have not disclosed a motive.
“They are using a tragedy to promote this hate,” said Jasmine Galanakis, 27, who put her young daughter to bed in their home up the street and then joined the crowd on Wednesday evening. “So many people in this community come from different backgrounds, and it’s ignorance driving this. It’s just an excuse for hate, and we won’t stand for it.”
Liverpool, in England’s north, has long been a stronghold of the Labour Party and has a proud working-class tradition. The city’s dock workers have a history of organized action, and particularly after World War II, diversity flourished, making the city among the country’s most multicultural.
The threats in this sliver of Liverpool had been made against Asylum Link Merseyside, the charity that Mr. Roberts manages. He and the staff decided to shut its doors temporarily at the start of the week and bring in carpenters to board up the windows and doors to minimize damage if the building was attacked.
As he watched people gather peacefully in the streets, he said he was moved by the diversity of those who came out to express their support for asylum seekers.
It was especially affirming after years of railing by the former Conservative government against the number of asylum seekers — and its attempt to deport them to Rwanda despite a Supreme Court ruling that the policy was illegal.
Nazehar Benamar, 42, and her cousin Wafa Hizam, 22, who grew up in Liverpool, both said they felt it was important to be there. But they also said they were angry about the violence that erupted in the city center a few days earlier.
“Liverpool is a very multicultural city, but as a person of color, you are always aware of racism and prejudice,” said Ms. Benamar, who is Muslim and wears a hijab. She recalled how as the only nonwhite child in her class, she had been subjected to racial slurs. She said she was saddened that racism and Islamophobia were still so potent so many years later.
“People are being terrorized by fear about this violence,” she said. “Today especially, I could feel it.”
Still, on Wednesday night she was reassured to see members of her local mosque standing alongside university students and retirees. The people of Liverpool had come together to show “what we are made of here,” she said.
What united many of them was the feeling that working-class people are in life’s struggles together. As the evening light turned golden and night slowly set in, one young woman raised a sign that read, “The Enemy of the Working Class Travels By Private Jet Not Migrant Dinghy,” to applause from many standing nearby.
Matty Delaney, 33, who lives just outside Liverpool, said he had heard on Instagram about the demonstration against racism and thought it was important to deliver a clear message to those who had rioted, particularly as a young, white, working-class man.
“We’ve got more in common with an Indian nurse, with a Black bricklayer than we do with the Elon Musks, the Nigel Farages, the Tommy Robinsons, of the world — all these people who are stoking violence,” Mr. Delaney said.
Mr. Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media platform X — where disinformation about the initial attack had been allowed to swirl — threw himself into the fray this week by saying, “Civil war is inevitable” and accusing the prime minister, Keir Starmer, of not protecting “all communities” in Britain.
Mr. Farage, the leader of the populist anti-immigration Reform U.K. party, initially stoked conspiracy theories that drove the riots, before coming out against the violence. And Mr. Robinson, an anti-Islam agitator who founded the English Defense League — originally a street movement, which now spreads Islamophobic and xenophobic views mostly online — was among the far-right figures who pushed for their supporters to take to the streets after the stabbing attack.
By Thursday morning, the rhythm of daily life had returned to Overbury Street. At St. Anne’s Church, next door to the charity for asylum seekers, a local family gathered for a funeral. Discarded placards from the night before lay on the ground nearby.
The staff of the charity was also regrouping, and Mr. Roberts said they were trying to figure out when to reopen. While he said he felt an overwhelming sense of relief that the center had not faced violence, it was difficult to know what would come next.
Speaking of the rioters, he said, “They are trying to damage trust between the community and new arrivals, more than the buildings or infrastructure.” But, he added, “What last night told me was we are a greater value in the community, more than we actually understood, and it was wonderful to see that.”
For now, his staff planned to send a letter of thanks to the community. But they also planned to reinforce the wooden boards that protect the center’s windows, just in case.
3rd Teenager Arrested in Planned Attack on Taylor Swift’s Vienna Shows
The authorities in Vienna have arrested a third teenager in connection with a foiled terrorist attack on a Taylor Swift concert in the city this week.
They said that they believe that the man, an 18-year-old Iraqi citizen living in Austria who is connected to the main suspect, was not part of the plan but had been in touch with the plotters and had recently sworn allegiance to the Islamic State.
Ms. Swift was scheduled to stage three concerts in Vienna from Thursday through Saturday, but all three performances were canceled after the authorities arrested two teenagers over a plan to attack the sold-out, 50,000-seat stadium. Chancellor Karl Nehammer of Austria said the plot had been designed to leave a “trail of blood.”
Since arresting two other teenagers on Wednesday, the authorities have been racing to investigate the planned attack, although after what the police said was a full confession by the main suspect, they said there was no longer an imminent danger.
The police are looking into a network of people around the main suspect, a 19-year-old Austrian citizen of North Macedonian descent who they said had radicalized himself online and sworn allegiance to the Islamic State.
Citing privacy rules, the authorities have declined to name the suspects publicly, but they said that both teenagers arrested on Wednesday were born in Austria and held Austrian citizenship.
On Friday, the interior minister, Gerhard Karner, announced that he was starting the process of revoking the Iraqi man’s residency permit, under a special provision designed to deal with dangerous refugees or immigrants, because of his recent pledge of allegience to the Islamic State.
The police have said that while he was not part of the plot, the man was in the same “social environment” as the main suspect and that he had contact with him.
During a raid on the main suspect’s house on Wednesday, the police said, officers found chemicals used to make bombs, as well as explosives, timers, machetes, knives and a functioning police siren, which investigators believe he planned to use to gain access to or move around the area around the stadium.
The police are currently in the process of forensically analyzing electronics and other items found in the search of the main suspect’s house.
The concert cancellations affected about 200,000 Taylor Swift fans, some of whom had traveled to Europe from other continents to see her perform as part of her Eras Tour. Ms. Swift has not commented publicly on the cancellations.
A 15-year-old boy who was held for questioning on Wednesday about the plot has been released and is being treated as a witness, the police said. They said that they had determined he was not part of the plot but that he knew many of its details and had helped corroborate some key elements of the main suspect’s confession.