The horde of helmeted players raced up the field like warriors headed into battle, with the slap of a ball against the wooden sticks they wielded, known as hurleys, ringing out as they sped toward the goal posts.

With powerful grace, the players deftly switched between passing, carrying and smacking the small leather ball, which sometimes whizzed through the air half the length of the enormous pitch to the delight of the crowd.

It was the All-Ireland Hurling Senior Championship, the pinnacle of the sport, with County Clare eventually winning the final against County Cork in front of about 82,000 spectators at Croke Park stadium in Dublin.

Hurling — one of Ireland’s national sports — has long been known as “the clash of the ash” for the sturdy hurleys that craftsmen have fashioned for centuries from Ireland’s ash trees. The formidable, three-foot-long sticks are core to the game, which to an outsider can look like a cross between baseball, lacrosse and rugby. They are used not only to pass the ball, but also to carry it, and of course to score, either by whacking the ball over the goal’s crossbar or whipping it into the net below.

But when the country’s elite players took the field in Dublin in July, the hurleys in the hands of some of them were made of an innovative material not native to the island: bamboo.

After hundreds of years of players using ash hurleys almost exclusively, the shift has been borne of necessity. A disease known as ash dieback has decimated forests across Europe and is expected to wipe out 90 percent of Ireland’s ash trees within the next two decades.

For a traditional sport like hurling, woven deeply into the fabric of Irish life, the prospect was alarming, threatening the very heart of the game. But the early adapters of the new sticks had good news.

“There’s no difference,” said David Fitzgerald, one of the victorious Clare players who switched to bamboo from ash a few years ago. “If anything, from my point of view, it’s a positive, because it’s more consistent.”

When it became clear that the future of ash was bleak, and with the price for the wood skyrocketing across Europe, those who fashion the hurleys were under pressure to come up quickly with an affordable alternative while also knowing that whatever material they settled on would be scrutinized by the sport’s old guard.

“The journey from ash to anything else needed to be as short as possible in every way,” said Sean Torpey, a second-generation hurley maker. “It could be new but not outrageous.”

It took years of trial and error to find a product that felt true to ash — the balance of strength and flexibility, the color, the weight, even the sound it made when striking the ball, said Mr. Torpey, 41. He and his father eventually settled on a bamboo composite imported from Asia, and in 2020, they launched their “Bambú” hurley — using the Irish word for the plant.

At least nine players in the championship match last month used bamboo hurleys made in Ireland by his company, Torpey.

Although the use of bamboo hurleys is still not widespread, the embrace of the ash substitute at the pinnacle of the sport should help ease the inevitable transition — and so ensure the survival of hurling, featured in ancient Irish folklore and whose mythical origins date back more than 3,000 years. After centuries of nonstop play in many communities in Ireland, hurling began dying out early in the 19th century, with the game continuing only in rural pockets.

It was revived in the 1880s, with the formation of the Gaelic Athletic Association, or G.A.A., coinciding with a renewed push to restore Irish culture as the country made its way toward independence from Britain in the decades that followed.

The sport, played only by amateurs even at its highest level, is strongly rooted in a pride of place. In smaller villages, hurling often has a rich local history, a passionate following and a place at the heart of the community.

On a sunny evening in late summer, a crowd gathered in the village of Ballyagran, County Limerick, as two local teams squared off. Children ran the perimeter of the field with small hurleys in hand, skillfully smacking the sliotar, the hard ball used in the sport, off the wide end of the stick as they watched the match.

“I suppose hurling is in our blood,” said Joe O’Kelly, leaning against a fence on the sideline of the game. “For some of these players, the hurley is like an extension of their arm.”

Mr. O’Kelly, who volunteers with the local G.A.A., said he wasn’t entirely sold on the idea of bamboo, which is still used by just a small fraction of players.

“It’s a good thing they are trying it,” Mr. O’Kelly added. “But it’s hard to replace the ash.”

Playing that night was Seán Finn, 28, something of a celebrity in hurling circles for his part in a series of recent championships won by Limerick. He had tried bamboo hurleys, but reverted to ash, explaining that he was a bit of a traditionalist.

“I’m using the ash for give or take 20 years,” Mr. Finn said. “I never really warmed to the bamboo.”

There are still dozens of small hurley makers dotted across the country, working out of sheds and primarily using ash. One of these makers, Willie Bulfin, 64, crafts the hurleys Mr. Finn uses.

In Mr. Bulfin’s workshop, tucked alongside his home in rural Limerick, the pale sawdust collects in small clouds around his hands as he smooths the surface of a hurley. For the past 24 years, Mr. Bulfin has been making them by hand.

“I’d still be hoping there’s another few years in it for me,” Mr. Bulfin said, speaking warmly of the relationships he has built with local players.

Hand-drawn hurley templates scrawled with the names of players and their exacting specifications are stacked on his workbench. Sawdust has collected on every surface, clinging to cobwebs and creating the effect of icicles dangling from the ceiling.

It’s a window into an earlier era, when local ash was handled by local producers in a cottage industry across the country. For a time, his two sons worked by his side, but both have now moved on.

“They loved being here,” he said, recounting how they shared stories of local matches as they worked. “But the money just wasn’t good enough, there wasn’t a livelihood in it for them.”

Now, he can point to the early sign of the effect of ash dieback on the wooden planks he handles — squiggling lines and stains that signal the disease — and he, too, has begun experimenting with new materials.

Mr. Bulfin said, a hint of sadness in his voice, that he wouldn’t start up this craft in the current climate.

“It would be too risky with the shortage of raw material,” he said.

In the late 1980s, Ireland’s government initiated an ash planting plan that it hoped would make the island self-sustaining in hurley production, while restoring forests cleared hundreds of years ago for farming.

As part of that effort, landowners were encouraged to grow ash for profit, with the base of the trees sold to make hurleys. Landowners like John Reardon, 72, planted seedlings on his family farm in Limerick in 1998 under the program. He saw it as an investment his children could benefit from when the trees matured.

“I planted 20,000 trees,” Mr. Reardon said, “and in the first five years, they had to be minded, like children.”

Then, in 2012, around the time he expected his trees to begin returning a profit, ash dieback was first found in Ireland. An airborne, fungus-like disease, it cuts off the circulation of the tree, and it begins to rot from the inside out.

The view across Mr. Reardon’s forest now has a touch of the apocalyptic — bare trees with leaves long fallen sway like lines of ghosts, their bark covered in dark lesions. The sight stretches for acres.

“It’s over, we are finished as far as hurleys are concerned,” Mr. Reardon said of his trees, adding. “If I was a crying sort of person, I would be in tears.”

There was no castle, nor were there throngs of exuberant crowds to celebrate this royal wedding. Nonetheless, the nuptials on Saturday of a Norwegian princess and an American self-described shaman attracted public fascination at home and a Netflix deal abroad.

The royal involved — Princess Martha Louise, daughter of King Harald V and Queen Sonja of Norway — wed the American, Durek Verrett, after years of often mocking public scrutiny, largely because of Mr. Verrett’s alternative views on health and wellness. The ceremony, a private affair in the remote, picturesque Norwegian village of Geiranger, attracted a gaggle of reporters and a modest crowd of curious residents.

The couple sailed into Geiranger, nestled in the majestic Geirangerfjord, a world heritage site, on the royal yacht on Friday, along with members of the royal family, including King Harald and Queen Sonja, according to an official statement.

The celebrations on Saturday began with brunch, with the option of a spa treatment available for all guests, according to a copy of the program seen by The New York Times. The day’s schedule also included an afternoon tea, early evening cocktails and a gala dinner. At 10:50 p.m., “the party begins,” the program said, promising late night snacks at 1 a.m.

The ceremony itself was held in a marquee on a farm whose meadows overlook the fjords. The couple, stung by the years of critical news coverage, had tried — and failed — to keep the location a secret. The three-day event was privately financed, the royal family said, but that did not stop reporters from speculating about the cost of security arrangements for those attending.

During the couple’s two-year engagement, the media in Norway often made fun of Mr. Verrett’s beliefs in alternative healing — he was even lampooned in an episode of an animated television show. The negative coverage has not, however, deterred the couple from planning to share their wedding with the world.

Last week, Netflix announced that it was producing a documentary about the couple’s love story. The production, as yet untitled, was to be led by Rebecca Chaiklin, who was behind the pandemic-era streaming hit “Tiger King.” To make the show, a crew followed Princess Martha Louise and Mr. Verrett for more than a year as they prepared for their wedding.

The couple also sold their wedding pictures to the British tabloid Hello! in an exclusive deal that saw them pose in matching outfits to greet their guests and dance at a salsa party on Friday night. Apart from the financial rewards for the couple, the deals were also viewed as an attempt to shift the often negative portrayal of their relationship.

That might be a tall order. “I can’t imagine anything less interesting than that wedding,” Mads Hansen, a Norwegian television personality, told a local broadcaster. “The best thing for everyone would have been if no one mentioned it, and it quietly passed by. Ironically, I’m saying this in an interview, which contributes to a story that also adds to this coverage.”

On television and online, the wedding was the story of the day in Norway, despite the attempts to keep proceedings low key. The Norwegian public has become increasingly critical of the country’s monarchy, even if the 87-year-old King Harald remains popular.

A poll in August by the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK showed that 40 percent of respondents had an increasingly negative view of the royal family, with some pointing to the princess’ relationship with Mr. Verrett as one of the reasons. Princess Martha Louise is fourth in line to the throne.

The couple, who met in 2019, have leaned into a brand of alternative healing that has drawn criticism from some medical experts who deride it as pseudoscience, even as it has attracted tens of thousands of online devotees. Mr. Verrett, who says he is a sixth-generation shaman, counts as his clients the actresses Selma Blair and Nina Dobrev, and has described Gwyneth Paltrow as “family.”

Princess Martha Louise, who was previously married and has three daughters, has a long-documented interest in alternative treatments and celestial interactions, and has claimed an ability to communicate with angels and the dead. She once started a center where she encouraged her students to find their “inner source of truth,” and she has co-hosted a tour of healing workshops with Mr. Verrett called “The Princess and the Shaman.”

Two years ago, Princess Martha Louise stepped away from her official responsibilities as the bad press coverage mounted. She and Mr. Verrett were “seeking to distinguish more clearly between their activities and the Royal House of Norway,” the royal family said in a statement at the time.

Still, seeing the royal yacht glide down the fjord on Friday struck a chord with Oyvind Skodje, an engineer in his 30s who lives in a town near Geiranger.

“I think it says a lot about the king and queen,” Mr. Skodje said. “They are down-to-earth and inclusive, and supportive of their children, no matter what choices they make.

As hundreds of Russian missiles and drones streaked across Ukraine on Monday, the Ukrainian fighter pilot known as Moonfish was exactly where he had said he always wanted to be: in the cockpit of an F-16 giving chase.

“The F-16 is a Swiss Army knife,” the pilot, Lt. Col. Oleksiy Mes, told reporters while training on the warplane last fall. “It’s a very good weapon that can carry out any mission.”

Colonel Mes helped lead Ukraine’s intense lobbying effort to secure the F-16 fighter jets, a half-dozen of which joined the fight against Russia earlier this month. And he was among the dozen or so pilots trained to fly the sophisticated warplane in combat.

After shooting down three Russian cruise missiles and one attack drone in Monday’s assault, he was racing to intercept yet another target when ground control lost communication with his aircraft, Ukrainian Air Force officials said.

“The plane crashed, the pilot died,” the Ukrainian military said in a statement.

The death of a widely celebrated pilot and the loss of one of the long-coveted fighter jets so soon after their deployment cast a pall over the battlefield just as the giddy first days of the incursion into Russia’s Kursk region were fading away and concerns mounted over an advancing Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine.

As the nation mourned the death of the pilot, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine dismissed the head of the country’s Air Force and promised a thorough investigation of the incident, including the possibility raised by a Western official on Friday that it was the result of friendly fire from a Patriot missile battery.

But on Saturday, two senior U.S. military officials said that friendly fire was probably not the cause of the F-16 downing, and that American and Ukrainian investigators were looking at a variety of possibilities.

“The loss of a pilot is incredibly painful to bear, especially as he was among those who fought for Ukraine’s right to have F-16 aircraft,” said Anatolii Khrapchynskyi, a pilot and former Ukrainian Air Force officer.

“Regarding the aircraft, it’s important to understand that this is war, and unfortunately, losses are inevitable,” he said. “We are fighting a state that can launch over 200 weapons at Ukraine in a single strike, including cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and combat drones.”

Ukraine has swathed its F-16 program in secrecy, as both the airplanes and the pilots are prized targets for the Russians. In early August, in an effort to lift the nation’s morale, the new warplanes flew over television cameras and were shown maneuvering on the apron of an airfield.

Lt. Gen. Anatoliy Kryvonozhka, who was named the acting commander of the Air Force after the dismissal of Lt. Gen. Mykola Oleshchuk, said in an interview earlier this month that battle-hardened pilots like Colonel Mes were given priority to train on the advanced Western jets.

“They were shot at, they came through fights,” he said. “People who have gone through these episodes, they respond correctly” to emergencies, he said. “This combat experience will apply to new types of planes.”

When friends and family gathered to bury Colonel Mes on Thursday, one of his teachers said he knew what he wanted to do from a young age.

“I asked him, ‘What do you want to be?’” the teacher, Nadiia Mushtyn, said. “‘Actually, I dream of being a pilot,’” she said he replied, adding: “His dream came true.”

A former Republican House member, Adam Kinzinger, recalled meeting Colonel Mes when he came to Washington to lobby for the F-16s with another pilot, Major Andriy Pilshchykov, who died in a crash a year ago.

“They knew the risks, understood the stakes, and yet, they never hesitated,” he wrote in a tribute published on Substack. “They were young, full of life, and yet carried a maturity beyond their years — a maturity forged in the fires of war.”

Ukrainian military analysts said it was far too soon to speculate about what caused the crash. But they emphasized that Western air defense systems and F-16 fighter jets have never worked together in conditions as complex as the circumstances in Ukraine on Monday.

At the same time that Colonel Mes was chasing Russian missiles, teams manning three different defensive systems, including the Patriot missiles, as well as mobile groups with Stinger missiles and British Starstreak missiles, were all working to intercept the 127 missiles and 109 one-way attack drones, the Ukrainian Air Force said.

“Many things could have led to the loss of the F-16, including the technical condition of the plane, pilot error, external factors,” said Mr. Khrapchynskyi, the former Ukraine Air Force official.

For instance, he said, it was possible that fragments of a destroyed missile could have hit a vital part of the plane. “At this moment of the investigation, all versions are being considered, including friendly fire,” he said.

Mr. Zelensky did not offer a reason for his dismissal of the Air Force commander beyond saying his administration was taking every step it could to protect the lives of soldiers and civilians.

But one pilot, who asked not to be identified because he was on active duty and was not permitted to speak about operational matters, said “the structure of aviation management in Ukraine is outdated.” Yet it would be wrong to place all the blame on the former commander, he said, who had a background in air defense and performed his job capably.

The problems run deeper than that, he said, and relate to a command structure steeped in bureaucracy that too often rewards those who do not question authority and whose thinking may be outdated.

“Pilots have a variety of tasks, even on the ground, and bureaucracy is the cancer of aviation,” he said. “Today, I’ve been writing and typing all morning, following Soviet-era manuals.”

Andrew E. Kramer, Anastasia Kuznietsova, Eric Schmitt and Liubov Sholudko contributed reporting.

Residents of Tulkarm in the Israeli-occupied West Bank assessed the damage on Saturday from a raid by Israeli forces that has chewed up roads, brought sudden bouts of violence and left many Palestinians reeling. Israel’s military pressed on elsewhere in the territory amid signs that fighting with Palestinian militant groups could spread.

Hundreds of Israeli soldiers swept into cities in the northern West Bank this week with columns of armored vehicles and bulldozers, clashing with militants and leaving many people trapped in their homes without running water or internet. One family said that a relative with mental illness was shot dead during the raid, his body left untended for hours during the violence.

In the Nur Shams neighborhood — a focus of the raid — workers and residents cleared away dirt and rubble churned up by Israeli bulldozers searching for improvised explosive devices.

“Cars can’t move through the streets, everyone is making their way on foot, because the dirt is piled up in huge mounds,” said Suleiman Zuhairi, a resident of Nur Shams and a retired official in the Palestinian Authority.

Israeli troops largely pulled back from Tulkarm on Friday, and were continuing their operation in the flashpoint city of Jenin in the northern West Bank, while two episodes farther south prompted fears that the violence was worsening.

At least 22 Palestinians have been killed since the raid started on Wednesday, according to the Palestinian Authority’s Health Ministry, many of whom militant groups have claimed to be members. Israel says that at last 20 militants have been killed.

Late on Friday night, a Palestinian attacker was killed and three Israeli soldiers wounded after a car rigged with an explosive device blew up near a major junction between Jerusalem and Hebron, according to the Israeli authorities. The Israeli military said that another assailant was killed while trying to attack the settlement of Karmei Tzur.

Since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks left about 1,200 dead in Israel, setting off the war in Gaza, Israel has feared a similar attack from the West Bank, where roughly three million Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation. The Israeli military has stepped up raids there in an attempt to head off the threat; more than 600 Palestinians have been killed in West Bank clashes with Israeli forces and civilians since October, according to the United Nations.

The current Israeli raids have targeted Palestinian militants in Jenin and Tulkarm, who the Israeli military says have attempted more than 150 attacks on Israelis over the past year. Earlier this month, Hamas and Islamic Jihad — two major Palestinian armed groups — took responsibility for an attempted bombing in Tel Aviv that moderately injured one passerby and killed the assailant.

The Israeli operation in Tulkarm focused on Nur Shams, which lies on the outskirts of the city. Historically a refugee camp for Palestinians following the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s establishment, it is now a built-up neighborhood and a Palestinian militant stronghold.

Israeli forces have swept through it multiple times since Oct. 7, often for hours on end, tearing up roads and damaging buildings. Israeli drones launched attacks from the air — once rare in the West Bank but now common — targeting militants in cars and houses.

On Friday, one family marched through the area’s streets bearing the body of Ayed Abu al-Heija, an older relative killed during the raid. He lived alone, did not work and suffered from mental illness that left him unable to care for himself without help, his family said.

Haitham Abu al-Heija, a 53-year-old nephew, said he heard a gunshot ring out Wednesday as he huddled in his house, fearing he might be caught in the crossfire. He later peered gingerly out of a window and saw his uncle lying dead, the door of his house ajar, he said.

“He couldn’t understand the danger,” he said in a phone interview.

The following day, Israeli troops raided his own house, forcing him and his family outside, he said. The rattle of gunfire and intermittent explosions terrified his children, he said, as they waited, exposed, for roughly an hour in the open.

Surrounded by soldiers, he turned to see his uncle’s body still lying in the doorway, he said. When the soldiers let them go back inside, they found a massive blast hole in one of the rooms.

“May no one ever have to go through what we did these last few days,” he said.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Ayed Abu al-Heija’s death or his family’s account of the raid on their house. Israeli military officials have said that when they raid people’s homes, they are searching for suspects, weapons or other military functions.

Mustafa Taqatqa, the Palestinian governor in Tulkarm, said the operations undermined efforts by the Palestinian Authority, which administers some West Bank areas under Israeli occupation. The raids also strengthened armed groups who argue Palestinians’ lives will only improve through violence, he added.

“The young generation is seeing their future closed in every direction,” said Mr. Taqatqa. “And so they no longer believe in peace.”

During the raid, Israeli forces successfully killed Muhammad Jaber, a militant commander in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who had successfully evaded both Israel and the Palestinian Authority’s attempts to seize him for months. The Israeli military said he was responsible for “numerous terror attacks.”

Mr. Jaber had become a local hero for many in Nur Shams, where residents viewed him as striking a blow against the miserable status quo. On Friday, the commander’s relatives held a symbolic funeral for him, although his body is still held by Israel.

“He didn’t accept the humiliation,” said Nayez Zendiq, one of his cousins, referring to Israeli rule.

But Mr. Zuhairi, the former official, said that Palestinians living in the camp had inflated Mr. Jaber into an “icon of struggle,” giving him a reputation that exaggerated his actual activities.

While Israel’s devastating war with Hamas in Gaza attracts the most attention, its military has also been fighting for months on several other fronts, making this one of the most complex periods of conflict in the country’s 76-year history.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the military has been raiding and striking militant groups in several Palestinian cities, killing about 600 people since October, in the deadliest campaign in the territory for more than two decades. On Wednesday, Israel began one of its biggest maneuvers in the territory in recent months, simultaneously invading three cities to capture or kill militants.

Along the Israel-Lebanon border, Israel has been exchanging rocket and missile fire with Hezbollah, a militia allied with Hamas and backed by Iran, in fighting that has displaced hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the border and killed hundreds.

And Israel’s yearslong shadow war with Iran has burst into the open, with each side striking the other directly in April, leading to fears that a relatively contained war in Gaza might end up setting off an all-out war involving Iran, its many proxies across the Middle East and even the United States.

Why are various groups fighting Israel, why is it using force to deal with them, and why is it taking so long for these wars to end?

Why Israel is still fighting in Gaza.

Despite the destruction of much of Hamas’s military infrastructure and tens of thousands of deaths, there is no end in sight to the war in Gaza, partly because Israel has set itself a high threshold for victory: the eradication of the Hamas leadership and the rescue of roughly 100 hostages still held by the group. By contrast, Hamas has a low threshold: It seeks to survive the war intact, a modest goal that allows it to weather a level of devastation that might have caused other groups to surrender.

Hamas’s extensive subterranean tunnel network also makes it hard for Israel to win. Some of the group’s leaders are thought to be deep beneath the ground, surrounded in some cases by Israeli hostages, making it challenging for Israel to find the leaders, let alone attack them without harming its own kidnapped citizens.

Israel’s tactics also make winning more difficult. Its military has swiftly retreated from most of the areas that it has conquered, allowing — in some cases — for Hamas to regroup there and preventing the war from ending in the way that most wars do, with one side capturing the other’s territory.

A cease-fire has also proved elusive, in large part because Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wants only a temporary truce, while Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, seeks a complete halt.

Why Israel is raiding West Bank cities.

While Israeli soldiers withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the army retained a wide presence across the West Bank, partly to protect roughly 500,000 Israelis living in settlements that are considered illegal by most of the world.

The Israeli military regularly raids and strikes Palestinian cities in the West Bank to quell armed Palestinian groups, including Hamas, that mount terrorist attacks on Israelis in those settlements and in Israel itself.

Many militant groups oppose Israel’s existence. They have become more active in recent years as Israel’s occupation has grown more entrenched, all but ending the dream of Palestinian statehood and increasing Palestinian resentment of Israelis. Rising violence by settler extremists against Palestinian civilians, coupled with a sense of growing impunity for those extremists and the expansion of their settlements, have also been cited by Palestinian groups to justify their militancy.

Since the war in Gaza began, Israel has increased its attacks on these armed groups, saying they became even more active amid a rise in arms smuggled from Iran. Israel also says that the Palestinian Authority, the institution that administers Palestinian cities in the West Bank, has become too weak to rein in the groups by itself.

It is unclear how effective the Israeli raids have been, as observers dispute the extent to which they are restricting or encouraging Palestinian militancy.

The Israeli military says its campaign has killed several key militant commanders and thwarted many attacks on Israeli civilians. Yet the militants appear to be honing their techniques: This past month, a Palestinian from the West Bank set off a bomb in Tel Aviv. It was the first incident of its kind in years, and was cited by the Israeli military as an example of why it needed to mount the extensive operation on Wednesday.

Why Israel is striking Lebanon.

Hezbollah, a Hamas-allied militia that controls large parts of southern Lebanon, began firing at Israel in solidarity with Hamas shortly after the Oct. 7 attack.

Ever since, Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging rocket and missile fire across the Israel-Lebanon border, while trying to avoid an all-out ground war that would most likely devastate both countries. Israel’s fighter jets could cripple Beirut, the Lebanese capital, while Hezbollah has thousands of precision-guided missiles that could wreck Israeli cities.

Israel has said it won’t stop targeting Hezbollah assets and operatives until it is safe for the residents of northern Israel, some 60,000 of whom have been displaced by the fighting, to return home. But that is a distant prospect because, in turn, Hezbollah has pledged to carry on firing until the implementation of a lasting cease-fire in Gaza.

With no end in sight in Gaza, the Lebanon battle looks set to drag on, raising the chances of a miscalculation by either side that could cause the conflict to spiral out of control. A Lebanese strike on schoolchildren in July led Israel to kill a top Hezbollah commander in Beirut, leading analysts to predict a major escalation until both sides managed to step back from the brink last Sunday.

Why Israel is fighting with Iran.

For decades, Iran’s leaders have said they sought Israel’s destruction. Both countries have clandestinely attacked each other’s interests and both have built competing regional alliances to deter each other. Israel views Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear weapon as an existential threat and has frequently attempted to sabotage the program.

Until the war in Gaza, both sides tried to maintain plausible deniability for their attacks, mainly to avoid a direct confrontation that could escalate into all-out war. Israel had never claimed responsibility for its assassination of Iranian officials. Iran avoided major public provocations of its own, while encouraging proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, as well as Palestinian groups in the West Bank, to attack Israel.

The intensity and length of the conflict in Gaza has tempted both sides to be more brazen, bringing their shadow war into the open. In April, Israel struck an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria, killing several senior Iranian commanders.

Iran responded by firing one of the biggest barrages of cruise and ballistic missiles in military history in the first direct hit on Israel from Iran, raising the specter of a full-on war, but ultimately causing little damage. And when Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, visited Iran in July, Israel took a risk by killing him on Iranian soil, leading Iran to promise another direct strike on Israel.

How Israel explains its use of force.

Israel says it has been left with no choice but to defend itself against an Iran-led regional alliance that aims not only to end Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians, but to destroy Israel itself. Israeli officials highlight how Hamas and Hezbollah attacked Israel first, forcing Israel to respond, and they say that Iran’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah makes it necessary for Israel to attack Iran and its assets.

Many Israelis have also lost hope of using diplomacy to resolve their conflict with the Palestinians. In mainstream Israeli discourse, Israel is perceived as having made many concessions to the Palestinians during a failed peace process three decades ago, only for its best offers to be rejected by the Palestinian leadership.

Israelis often cite their withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 as an example of how Israeli good will fell flat: Hamas won legislative elections in 2006, wrested control of Gaza from Fatah, a rival group, a year later and used Gaza as a platform for attacks on Israel that culminated in the Oct. 7 raid, the deadliest day in Israel’s history. As a result, they see force as the only logical deterrent to groups like Hamas that ultimately seek Israel’s destruction rather than sincere coexistence.

Many Israelis yearn to be accepted within the Middle East without using force, and they see nascent economic and diplomatic ties with a growing number of Arab states as a step toward that goal. For now, though, their historical experience is that force often “works.”

More than diplomacy, it was force that helped the fledgling state survive the wars surrounding its creation in 1948. It was Israel’s strong military that allowed it to overcome three enemy states in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. And it was the same military that staved off a surprise Syrian and Egyptian attack in 1973, and helped Israel overcome a wave of suicide bombings in the 2000s.

Some Israelis even think their government is showing too much restraint, and should be striking back even more forcefully against Hezbollah and Iran.

How critics perceive Israel’s use of force.

In Gaza, opponents say that Israel displays too little concern for civilian life, accusing it of mounting a genocide, a charge Israel denies. In Lebanon, Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, Israel’s critics say it has been too provocative in its choice of targets and too reluctant to let diplomacy take its course. For example, some saw Israel’s recent strikes on Mr. Haniyeh and Fuad Shukr, a top Hezbollah commander, as irresponsible interventions that crossed too many red lines and risked turning a relatively contained war with Iran and its proxies into an uncontrolled disaster.

More broadly, Israel is also accused of having brought its predicament on itself by failing to agree to a peace deal with the Palestinians two decades ago.

Critics say that Israel conceded too little in the negotiations. They highlight how the young Palestinian militants who attack Israelis in the West Bank have often spent their whole lives under an occupation that has grown more expansive under the current far-right Israeli government, amid growing attacks by settler extremists and stifling restrictions on Palestinian movement within the territory.

Israel’s opponents also see the Oct. 7 attack in the context of Israel’s enforcement, along with Egypt, of a 17-year blockade on Gaza that prevented many Gazans from traveling abroad, stifled the territory’s economy and blocked access to everyday services like 3G internet and some kinds of complex health care.