The Russian missiles that tore into a Ukrainian military academy on Tuesday proved so lethal because cadets had barely two minutes to seek safety in a bomb shelter and because debris from explosions then blocked emergency exits, the academy director said Wednesday.

The director, Ihor Matsiuk, said that the strike on the academy, in the eastern city of Poltava, happened as lessons were in session and most of the cadets were in class. Many students in classrooms near the shelter survived, while those farther away suffered a higher toll in dead and wounded, Mr. Matsiuk said at a news conference.

Two of six emergency exits were blocked, he said, while interior corridors that students might have used for escape collapsed.

When the air alarm sounded, “everyone started running to the shelter,” said Andriy, a cadet who was interviewed at a hospital as he visited wounded friends and who asked to be identified only by his first name. He reached the shelter just as there was “a terrible roar and the ground shook,” he said, adding somberly, “I managed to get into the shelter, unlike others.”

Within seven minutes of the alarm’s sounding, the academy had evacuated more than 1,000 people, Mr. Matsiuk said.

By late Wednesday, the death toll had risen to 53, with 297 people wounded and five missing and believed to be under the sprawl of bricks and beams at the site, emergency workers said. A medical clinic that was part of the military complex was also damaged.

Ukraine’s Parliament plans a hearing on Thursday to investigate of the strike. But the attack highlighted Ukraine’s challenge of preparing soldiers to wage war, because any gathering of soldiers, even far from the front lines, becomes a target.

A top lawmaker said that having so many military personnel in a single known location, vulnerable to ballistic missiles that fly at many times the speed of sound, raises questions for Ukrainian military’s leadership.

“Military education was taking place in a building everybody knew about,” the lawmaker, Roman Kostenko, the chairman of the defense and intelligence committee in Parliament and a colonel in the Ukrainian Army, said in an interview. “That is the biggest problem.”

Already in the war, he said, soldiers have been killed by missile strikes on barracks at bases used for years. Closer to the front lines, Ukrainian soldiers fan out, often living in abandoned houses in villages.

Andriy, the cadet at the hospital, and two other cadets said no students were standing at formation or gathered for a ceremony before the strike.

Russian missile strikes can be capricious, sometimes hitting with precision and lethal effect and other times straying from targets, merely gauging gaping craters in parking lots or fields.

Since Russia began an intensified barrage of long-range strikes on Ukraine nine days ago, hundreds of missiles and drones have streaked into the country. A strike on the western city of Lviv on Wednesday killed seven people, including four members of one family. None were as deadly as the attack on Poltava.

The rescue operation in the city Tuesday night and Wednesday was gruesome and exhausting as emergency workers covered in dust pulled bodies, some missing limbs, from the rubble. The work was interrupted by 13 air-raid alerts on Tuesday and Wednesday as Russia sent jets into the air that could have fired missiles; activity from Russian planes sets off alerts even if no missiles are fired.

A firefighter who asked to be identified only by his first name, Dmytro, said the repeated alerts had slowed the rescue effort but that he and his colleagues had learned to work while frequently leaving the site for short periods in case of a repeat attack. “We do this often,” he said.

Hospitals filled with wounded. At the Sklifosovsky regional hospital, a tearful mother tried to see her son in the intensive-care ward but was told his condition was too unstable for a visit. People moved in and out of the hospital, their voices trembling as they delivered news to their relatives by phone. “He is screaming of pain,” one mother said.

Emergency workers rescued a young woman still alive under the rubble around noon on Wednesday. It was more than 24 hours after the missile strike, when the chances of finding people alive diminish. An ambulance brought her, unconscious and bruised, to the hospital.

Hundreds of people turned up to donate blood, forming a long, snaking line under walnut trees in a hospital yard. On Wednesday, 255 people donated to the local blood center, said Volodymyr Rudikov, the chief doctor there, and Poltava hospitals were fully supplied with blood.

In the minutes after the explosion on Tuesday, Valeria Nor, 32, raced to a kindergarten near the military installation to check on her 3-year-old daughter. In the neighborhood around the school, she said, soldiers and cadets had spread out, some drenched in blood.

They bandaged one another’s wounds, and residents helped, she said. Some soldiers had blood coming out of their ears.

Ms. Nor’s husband, a doctor, ran to treat the wounded while she bought water and juice for the shocked cadets.

“At the beginning of this war, we thought we would take the children and run if there were just one bang nearby,” she said. “But we didn’t run. We came to the epicenter to help.”

In the hospital on Wednesday, the parents and a friend of a wounded soldier waited for news of his condition.

“I don’t know what his injuries are,” said the soldier’s mother, who gave only her first name, Natalia. “The main thing is that he is alive.”

Yurii Shyvala contributed reporting from Poltava, Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelensky pushed ahead with his sweeping overhaul of the senior government ranks as the head of Ukraine’s ruling party released a slate of nine candidates for top cabinet positions Wednesday evening.

If Parliament approves the new candidates, which is expected, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, who resigned earlier Wednesday, will be replaced by Andrii Sybiha, the first deputy foreign minister, according to the party head, David Arakhamia.

The political upheaval came after a series of blistering Russian missile attacks and battlefield gains in recent weeks and before a vital trip by Mr. Zelensky to Washington, where he plans to reveal a “victory plan” for the war.

Mr. Zelensky said Wednesday that he was acting to bring a “new energy” to state institutions, hours after rescue workers pulled bodies from the wreckage of an overnight missile attack that killed seven people in the historic city center of Lviv, near the Polish border.

In one heart-wrenching scene, Yaroslav Bazylevych stood on the ancient cobblestone streets, covered in dust and blood, being stitched up by paramedics as rescue workers pulled the lifeless bodies of his wife and three daughters from the ruins.

“I don’t know what words to use to support the father,” the mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadovyi, said in a statement.

More than a half dozen senior officials were asked to tender their resignations to the country’s Parliament this week, though many had been expected to remain in the administration with new portfolios.

Among the more notable changes, Alexander Kamyshin, the charismatic minister for domestic arms production, is slated to join the Presidential Office, where he “will continue to deal with weapons and infrastructure issues,” Mr. Arakhamia said.

Olha Stefanishyna, formerly Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, was expected to lead the Justice Ministry, a strong signal about the government’s commitment to battling corruption, analysts said.

But analysts also said the reshuffling did not appear to signal fundamental shifts in domestic or foreign policy.

While the changes had been under consideration since February, said Mykhailo Minakov, a senior adviser on Ukraine for the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, Mr. Zelensky acted now because “Ukraine has to prepare for a new phase of the war and a new phase of diplomacy.”

Mr. Zelensky himself did not offer any explanation for the activity, beyond saying that he expected that “certain areas of our foreign and domestic policies will have a slightly different emphasis.”

The Ukrainian leader said Russian strikes on civilian infrastructure, including a campaign to disable the country’s energy grid, underscored the need for “more interaction between the central authorities and the communities” in preparation for what promises to be a grueling winter.

“Autumn will be extremely important for Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky said in an address to the nation before the overhaul on Tuesday night. “Our state institutions must be set up in such a way that Ukraine will achieve all the results we need — for all of us.”

At the top of Mr. Zelensky’s priorities is American support for what he has described as his nation’s plan for victory.

Mr. Zelensky said last week that he planned to share the plan with President Biden when he travels to the United States at the end of the month. He said he would also pass the plan along to the presidential candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald J. Trump.

Given the intricacies of the current diplomatic moment, the decision to replace the foreign minister, Mr. Kuleba, surprised many analysts. He has played a central role in two major goals regarding the United States: pressing the Biden administration to lift restrictions on the use of western weapons to hit deep inside Russia, and ensuring that Ukraine does not alienate either candidate for U.S. president.

Some critics condemned the changes in the government as rash and ill-advised during a difficult moment in the war and as the continuation of a trend to concentrate power in Mr. Zelensky’s hands, especially if he installs loyalists reluctant to challenge him or the powerful head of the president’s office, Andriy Yermak.

The shake-up could bring “an increase of Yermak’s influence,” said Yevhan Mahda, a Ukrainian political analyst, who added that increased authority in the president’s office could come at the expense of the Parliament and cabinet ministers.

Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, the head of a parliamentary committee on integrating Ukraine into the European Union, said that key government positions had remained vacant for months, and she warned that the moves this week undermined checks and balances within the government.

“The society, which has no time for this now, is being thrown random people into key government positions, accustomed to the absence of people in these positions, to the absence of subjectivity of both the legislative and executive branches, strategy and legality,” she said.

Mr. Minakov of the Wilson Center said he spoke to several lawmakers on Wednesday morning who had no knowledge of the reshuffling until they read about it in the news. That underscored the diminished role Parliament has played since the outbreak of the full-scale war.

“By law, the cabinet and Parliament are as important as the president, but in practice we see all the decisions are made by the president’s office,” Mr. Minakov said.

But others were more charitable. “This is Zelensky’s style of work,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, a Ukrainian political analyst. “When he sees stagnation in the work, he changes people,” he added. “He thinks that new people will be more motivated and will bring new ideas.”

No education beyond the sixth grade. No employment in most workplaces and no access to public spaces like parks, gyms and salons. No long-distance travel if unaccompanied by a male relative. No leaving home if not covered from head to toe.

And now, the sound of a woman’s voice outside the home has been outlawed in Afghanistan, according to a 114-page manifesto released late last month that codifies all of the Taliban government’s decrees restricting women’s rights.

A large majority of the prohibitions have been in place for much of the Taliban’s three years in power, slowly squeezing Afghan women out of public life. But for many women across the country, the release of the document feels like a nail in the coffin for their dreams and aspirations.

Some had clung to the hope that the authorities might still reverse the most severe limitations, after Taliban officials suggested that high schools and universities would eventually reopen for women after they were shuttered. For many women, that hope is now dashed.

“We are going back to the first reign of the Taliban, when women did not have the right to leave the house,” said Musarat Faramarz, 23, a woman in Baghlan Province, in northern Afghanistan, referring to the movement’s rule from 1996 to 2001. “I thought that the Taliban had changed, but we are experiencing the previous dark times again.”

Since the Taliban regained power in August 2021, the authorities have systematically rolled back the rights that women — particularly those in less conservative urban centers — had won during the 20-year U.S. occupation. Today, Afghanistan is the most restrictive country in the world for women, and the only one that bans high school education for girls, experts say.

The publication of the regulations has ignited fears of a coming crackdown by emboldened officers of the so-called vice and virtue police, the government officials who don white robes and are stationed on street corners to ensure that the country’s morality laws are observed.

The manifesto defines for the first time the enforcement mechanisms that can be used by these officers. While they have frequently issued verbal warnings, those officers are now empowered to damage people’s property or detain them for up to three days if they repeatedly violate the vice and virtue laws.

Before the announcement of the laws, Freshta Nasimi, 20, who lives in Badakhshan Province in northeastern Afghanistan, had held on to any shred of hope she could find.

For a while, she was sustained by a rumor she heard from classmates that the government would broadcast girls’ schooling over the television — a concession that would allow girls to learn while keeping them in their homes. But that dream was snuffed out after the authorities in Khost Province, in the country’s east, banned such programs from the airwaves earlier this year. That signaled that other parts of the country could implement similar bans.

Now, Ms. Nasimi says, she is trapped at home. The new law barring women’s voices — they are considered an intimate part of a woman that must be covered — effectively ensures that she cannot leave the house without a male relative. She worries that no taxi driver will speak with her, for fear of being reprimanded by the Taliban, she said, and no shopkeeper will entertain her requests.

She has accepted that her aspirations of becoming an engineer — with the steady income and freedom it would bring — are finished.

“My future?” she asked, resigned. “I don’t have a future except being a housewife and raising children.”

The publication of the vice and virtue laws, analysts say, is part of a governmentwide effort to codify the workings of every ministry to ensure they adhere to the extreme vision of Shariah law institutionalized by the Taliban’s leader, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada. The document is also, analysts say, intended to stamp out any Western principles of the U.S.-backed government that ran Afghanistan before the Taliban’s return to power.

The Taliban have forcefully rejected outside pressure to ease the restrictions on women, even as the policies have isolated Afghanistan from much of the West. Taliban officials defend the laws as rooted in the Islamic teachings that govern the country. “Afghanistan is an Islamic nation; Islamic laws are inherently applicable within its society,” the spokesman for the government, Zabiullah Mujahid, said in a statement.

But the regulations have drawn widespread criticism from human rights groups and the United Nations mission in Afghanistan. The mission’s head, Roza Otunbayeva, called them “a distressing vision for Afghanistan’s future” that extends the “already intolerable restrictions” on women’s rights.

Even visual cues of womanhood have been slowly scrubbed from the public realm.

Over the past three years, women’s faces have been torn from advertisements on billboards, painted over in murals on school walls and scratched off posters lining city streets. The heads of female mannequins, dressed in all-black, all-concealing abayas, are covered in tinfoil.

Even before the new manifesto, the threat of being reprimanded by the vice and virtue police lingered in the air as women were barred from more and more public places.

“I live at home like a prisoner,” said Ms. Faramarz, the woman from Baghlan. “I haven’t left the house in three months,” she added.

The reversal of rights has been perhaps the hardest for the girls who came of age in an era of opportunity for women during the U.S. occupation.

Some girls, determined to plow ahead with their education, have found ad hoc ways to do so. Underground schools for girls, often little more than a few dozen students and a tutor tucked away in people’s private homes, have cropped up across the country. Others have turned to online classes, even as the internet cuts in and out.

Mohadisa Hasani, 18, began studying again about a year after the Taliban seized power. She had talked to two former classmates who were evacuated to the United States and Canada. Hearing about what they were studying in school stoked jealousy in her at first. But then she saw opportunity, she said.

She asked those friends to spend an hour each week teaching her the lessons they were learning in physics and chemistry. She woke up for the calls at 6 a.m. and spent the days in between poring over photos of textbooks sent by the friends, Mina and Mursad.

“Some of my friends are painting, they are writing, they are doing underground taekwondo classes,” Ms. Hasani said. “Our depression is always there, but we have to be brave.”

“I love Afghanistan, I love my country. I just don’t love the government and people forcing their beliefs onto others,” she added.

The classes and artistic outlets, while informal, have given girls, especially in more progressive cities, a dose of hope and purpose. But the reach of those programs goes only so far.

Rahmani, 43, who preferred to go by only her surname for fear of retribution, said that she began taking sleeping pills every night to dampen the anxiety she feels over providing for her family.

A widow, Ms. Rahmani worked for nonprofit groups for nearly 20 years before the Taliban seized power, earning more than enough to provide for her four children. Now, she says, she not only cannot provide for them after women were barred from working for such groups — but she has also lost her sense of self.

“I miss the days when I used to be somebody, when I could work and earn a living and serve my country,” Ms. Rahmani explained. “They have erased our presence from society.”

International mediators are finalizing a new cease-fire proposal to narrow the gaps between Israel and Hamas, U.S. and regional officials said, even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists he will not give up control of Gaza’s border with Egypt — a key stumbling point for a deal.

Qatar and Egypt have drafted a series of revisions that are being discussed with U.S. officials, according to a senior official from one of the mediating countries and two Israeli officials. David Barnea, director of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, was in Doha, Qatar, on Monday to discuss the document, the officials said.

The U.S. officials said that they expected to complete what they termed a “final” proposal with Egyptian and Qatari negotiators on Wednesday or Thursday. But a senior American official acknowledged that previous plans had also been called final, but were then revised.

In interviews, U.S. officials described two major sticking points that for months have delayed a deal to end the fighting in the Gaza Strip and to release hostages kidnapped by Hamas and Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

One remaining stumbling block is how many people each side would set free, and who they would be. On that question, Hamas has never come to an agreement, American officials said.

The other outstanding dispute hinges on whether, and how quickly, Israel would withdraw its troops from the Philadelphi corridor, a narrow strip of Gaza along the Egyptian border. Israel initially agreed to a phased withdrawal plan, officials say, only to see Mr. Netanyahu upend that deal last week.

All of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations over proposals that have yet to be finalized. Israeli officials and Hamas leaders have expressed pessimism about the prospects for an agreement, despite rising public fury in Israel over the failure to bring home the remaining hostages held in Gaza.

Even as negotiators have traded ideas to break the deadlock between Israel and Hamas, Mr. Netanyahu gave a fiery speech on Monday, defying critics who have blamed him for not doing enough to reach a deal. He was similarly adamant on Wednesday in a news conference for English-language news outlets.

Mr. Netanyahu repeated his longstanding demand that Israel must retain control of the Philadelphi Corridor, to prevent Hamas from rearming through cross-border smuggling. “People said, ‘If you stay, this will kill the deal.’ And I say, ‘Such a deal will kill us,’” he said on Wednesday.

Hamas has insisted on a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and Egypt has objected strenuously to an Israeli military presence in the corridor. “Without withdrawing from the Philadelphi Corridor, there will be no agreement,” Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’s lead negotiator, told the Pan-Arab broadcaster Al Jazeera this week.

Mr. Netanyahu has sent mixed messages over whether he has called for Israeli troops to remain on Gaza’s border with Egypt solely during the six-week first phase of a truce or as part of a permanent cease-fire.

He told reporters on Wednesday that the corridor must be controlled by an outside force, over the long haul, to prevent weapons smuggling. He said that could be someone other than the Israeli military — in theory, at least — but that in reality he doubted anyone else would do the job.

“Bring anyone who will actually show us — not on paper, not in words, not in a slide, but on the ground, day after day, week after week, month after month — that they can actually prevent the recurrence of what happened there before,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “We’re open to considering it. But I don’t see that happening right now. And until that happens, we’re there.”

Another Israeli official, and multiple American officials, painted a somewhat different picture of Israel’s stance, saying the government understood that it would have to withdraw in the event that the deal moved forward to its second and third phases.

Shock and fury engulfed Israel this week after soldiers found the bodies of six Israeli hostages, all of whom were recently shot dead by Hamas, according to Israeli officials. Hamas issued contradictory statements in response, but at least one by its military wing in Gaza strongly implied that the hostages were executed after their captors understood Israeli troops were nearby.

Many Israelis blamed Mr. Netanyahu for the failure to bring the hostages back alive, accusing him of prolonging the war to appease his far-right coalition allies, rather than striking a deal to free the captives. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets in mass protests demanding an agreement with Hamas or participated in an hourslong general strike.

But both actions ultimately fizzled, revealing a country deeply divided over the price it should pay for bringing home more than 60 hostages believed to be alive and the bodies of roughly 35 others still in Gaza.

Hamas has been releasing videos of the dead hostages, made when they were living captives — a practice that Israeli officials have labeled “psychological terrorism.” On Tuesday night, the group released footage of Ori Danino, 25.

On Wednesday, it released a video showing Carmel Gat, 40, and Alexander Lobanov, 32. Mr. Lobanov, like Mr. Danino, was abducted from the site of a music festival during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7. Ms. Gat was kidnapped in Be’eri, a kibbutz.

Rights groups and international law experts say that a hostage video is, by definition, made under duress, and that the statements in it are usually coerced. The footage appears to have been edited, and it is not clear when it was recorded.

For months, mediators from Egypt, Qatar and the United States have sought to broker a truce between Hamas and Israel. Two rounds of high-level negotiations last month in Cairo and in Doha ended without a breakthrough.

Both sides have signed off on the deal’s broader strokes but are still wrangling over many key details. It would begin with a six-week cease-fire during which Palestinian prisoners would be swapped for some of the hostages. During that first stage, Israel and Hamas would negotiate an end to the war, the withdrawal of Israeli forces and the release of the remaining hostages.

In late July, Mr. Netanyahu ordered his negotiating team to toughen Israel’s position on key points of contention, including the Philadelphi Corridor. An Arab official said that Mr. Netanyahu’s insistence on maintaining Israeli control of the corridor posed the main obstacle to an agreement.

On Monday, President Biden issued a one-word rebuke of Mr. Netanyahu’s unwillingness to yield on the conditions for a cease-fire. Questioned about whether the Israeli prime minister was doing enough to get back the hostages, Mr. Biden said simply, “No.”

Asked about Mr. Biden’s remarks, Mr. Netanyahu cited multiple occasions when Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken had praised Israel’s conduct in the talks. After meeting with Mr. Netanyahu in mid-August, Mr. Blinken sought to place the onus on Hamas for not moving ahead with the deal.

But several American officials said they believed Mr. Netanyahu was being disingenuous, seeking to run out the clock until the American election. If former President Donald J. Trump is elected, Mr. Netanyahu will be unlikely to come under much pressure from Washington to make concessions, they speculated.

Hamas officials have refused to take a direct part in the recent rounds of talks, arguing that neither Israel nor the United States was serious about reaching an accord acceptable to the militant group. But they have continued to communicate with Qatari and Egyptian mediators.

Osama Hamdan, a senior Hamas official, called any new American proposal an attempt to defuse public anger over the failure to reach an agreement.

“Further negotiations aren’t necessary,” Mr. Hamdan said in a televised interview with Al Jazeera on Tuesday night, saying that Mr. Netanyahu needed to be compelled to adhere to a previous cease-fire offer.

“That is the solution — not more negotiating without any horizon,” Mr. Hamdan added.

Israel and Egypt imposed a crushing blockade on the Gaza Strip when Hamas took full control of the territory in 2007 — dealing a heavy blow to the enclave’s economy — in the hopes of weakening the group. Israel levied tight restrictions on the movement of goods and people by land and barricaded Gaza by sea.

Egypt says it has cracked down on the cross-border tunnels and the smuggling of weapons from its side. But Hamas has still managed to bring in large quantities of arms from Egypt, according to Israeli officials.

As Israeli troops swept along the Philadelphi Corridor in May, they set about destroying Hamas’s tunnel network there. Israeli forces also captured the Rafah crossing to Egypt, which officials argued was similarly used to bring in munitions.

Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting.

Hamas on Wednesday released a video of two hostages, recorded before their deaths, whose bodies were among those recovered earlier this week by the Israeli military from a tunnel in the Gaza Strip.

The video released on Wednesday included footage of Carmel Gat, 40, and Alexander Lobanov, 32. Hamas had released videos of two other hostages, on Monday and another on Tuesday. The release Wednesday ensures that the fate of the captives remains in the public eye.

All four were among six slain hostages who, according to autopsy reports released by the Israeli Ministry of Health, were shot at close range sometime between Thursday and Friday morning.

More than 60 living hostages, and the bodies of about 35 others taken captive during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, are still in Gaza, according to the Israeli authorities. The publication of the video comes as international negotiators are trying to bring Israel and Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, to an agreement that would result in a cease-fire.

The status of the hostages and the government’s decision to press on with the war has rived Israeli society. Many people say Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pursued the war at the expense of the hostages; he says that pursuing the war is the way to free the hostages.

In the days since the six bodies were discovered, many Israelis have taken to the streets to protest the war. The protesters blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for failing to reach a cease-fire agreement that would return the hostages to Israel. The release of the videos by Hamas appears to be designed to inflame those tensions inside Israel.

Rights groups and international law experts say that such hostage videos are, by definition, made under duress, that the statements in them are usually coerced and that making them can constitute a war crime. Israeli officials have called the videos a form of “psychological warfare.”

It was unclear where or exactly when the video released on Wednesday was filmed, and the footage appears to have been edited. The images of Ms. Gat, who turned 40 in captivity but gives her age as 39 in the video, and Mr. Lobanov were released on Hamas’s social media channels around 7 p.m. local time in Israel. The videos follow those of Eden Yerushalmi, 24, released on Monday, and of Ori Danino, 25, released on Tuesday.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which represents relatives of the captives, responded in a statement around midnight in Israel on Wednesday, calling the video of Ms. Gat and Mr. Lobanov “horrific” and “yet another testament to Hamas’s ruthless cruelty.” Recalling the other two recently released clips — of Ms. Yerushalmi and Mr. Danino — the forum said that more videos could come soon.

“Hamas has not only murdered and kidnapped innocent civilians but continues to inflict psychological terror on the families of hostages of the hostages through these calculated releases of distressing footage,” the group said.

The United Nations Security Council held a meeting Wednesday on the topic of the hostages in Gaza, its first such session on the subject. Israel requested the session after the killing of the six hostages this week, not to seek a specific action from the Council but to draw attention to the captives’ plight.

Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, called the session “overdue” and held up pictures of the hostages and shared stories about them. One was saving for a trip to India, he said, another was waiting for a baby and a third loved nature.

Mr. Danon said there was a disconnect between international calls for Israel to lay down its arms and end the war in Gaza and the events of Oct. 7 and the hostages held by Hamas. He spoke of those who remained captive, “their cries for mercy ignored by international indifference.”

Dr. Efrat Bron-Harlev, a physician at the Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel, addressed the Council virtually about the trauma of child hostages who have returned to Israel. Dr. Bron-Harlev said that in captivity, the children were not allowed to cry or laugh, hardly ate and were moved frequently. At the hospital, the children were scared to look out the window or get out of bed. Over 30 children were taken captive on Oct. 7, with two still in Gaza.

The meeting’s focus did not remain on just the hostages. Many diplomats and senior U.N. officials also criticized Israel for excessive force in Gaza, for the suffering of Palestinians and for recent Israeli military operations in the West Bank. They called for an immediate cease-fire deal and for Hamas to release the hostages.

Amar Bendjama, the U.N. ambassador of Algeria, the only Arab member of the Council, said the lack of a deal was costing the lives of Israeli hostages and Palestinians in Gaza. He blamed the Council for not being able to put in place its own cease-fire resolution adopted in June.

“For us, there can be no double standards in recognizing suffering or in grieving the loss of a loved one,” Mr. Bendjama said.

Also on Wednesday, the Israeli military said that the shaft leading to the tunnel in which the bodies of the six hostages were found was located inside a children’s playground. The shaft, the military said, “was located next to stuffed animals and wall art of cartoon characters.” Images released by the Israeli military showed partly destroyed walls surrounding what appears to be a concrete tunnel shaft.

The walls are painted with figures, including one of Mickey Mouse, and a large red heart with the word “LOVE” in English written over it. A stuffed brown bear lies amid the rubble. Hamas tunnels have previously been discovered near civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and schools. The Israeli military and some Palestinians accuse the group of embedding fighters and hiding weapons among the civilian population.

Israeli troops found the shaft leading to the tunnel in an area the military said was “surrounded by the enemy and extensively booby-trapped,” arguing that “this is a further example of how Hamas abuses civilian areas to hold hostages and carry out its terrorist activities.”

Ms. Gat lived in Tel Aviv but was staying at her parents’ house in Be’eri, a kibbutz near the Gaza border, when she was taken hostage on Oct. 7. Her mother, Kinneret Gat, was killed in the attacks.

“Carmel was an occupational therapist, full of compassion and love, always finding ways to support and help others,” the group that represents hostage families wrote in a post on social media on Sunday.

In a separate statement, the forum noted that hostages who were released in a temporary truce in November described Ms. Gat “as their guardian angel” who taught them meditation and yoga exercises “to survive captivity.”

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a profile of Ms. Gat in January, in which her closest friends said they had been holding regular yoga classes in her honor in an area of Tel Aviv that has become known as “Hostage Square.”

Mr. Lobanov lived in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, according to the forum, and was working as a bar manager at the Nova music festival when the attack began. Witnesses said Mr. Lobanov helped evacuate people, the forum said. He was a married father of two; his second child was born while he was in captivity.

In a post on social media on Wednesday, the forum recalled the six slain hostages as “young, beautiful and happy.” It added, “Six that will never dance again, nor will they ever hug, travel or love. Six who will forever live in our memory and may their memory be a blessing.”

Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting.

Twenty-one migrants were missing at sea on Wednesday, according to survivors rescued from a sinking boat about 10 miles from the Italian island of Lampedusa, Italy’s Coast Guard said.

Seven men, identified as Syrian, were rescued by a Coast Guard vessel on Wednesday morning. A video showed the migrants crouching in a small white motorboat, partly submerged, before being carried in pairs by a rubber raft to a waiting Coast Guard vessel.

The migrants told their rescuers that they had left Libya on Sunday on the boat packed with 28 people, including three minors. They said that 21 people had fallen off during the crossing because of “adverse weather conditions,” the Coast Guard said in a statement.

The seven survivors were taken to Lampedusa, one of the principal destinations for migrants crossing the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe on one of the world’s deadliest migration routes.

Last year, more than 212,000 migrants and refugees tried to cross the central Mediterranean Sea from North Africa, according to a report by the United Nations refugee agency and the International Organization for Migration, or I.O.M.

At least 3,105 lost their lives or disappeared at sea while trying to cross to Europe by various Mediterranean routes, according to the report. But it noted that “the real number of dead and missing along these routes is believed to be higher as many incidents go unreported or undetected.”

Since taking power nearly two years ago, Italy’s right-wing government has cracked down on illegal immigration, striking deals with Tunisia, renewing agreements with Libya and toughening laws against traffickers.

The government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has introduced rules against rescue ships operated by nongovernmental organizations, which Italy has accused of working with human traffickers, forcing them to take migrants to far-off northern ports.

And, stoking controversy, the government is building a center in Albania where migrants will be processed and returned to their home countries if they do not qualify for asylum.

The government strategies have had an impact, government officials believe. There has been a 62 percent decrease in arrivals to Italy in 2024 — some 40,000 through August, compared with more than 113,000 for the same period in 2023 — according to the I.O.M.

Deaths at sea, however, have not comparably declined. As of Wednesday, nearly 1,100 migrants had gone missing in the central Mediterranean in 2024, according to the I.O.M., just 25 percent fewer than the same period last year, said Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesman for the organization in Italy.

The I.O.M. statistic did not include the more than 600 people who drowned off the coast of Greece last year, which Mr. Di Giacomo described as “one of the greatest tragedies in the Mediterranean.”

Mr. Di Giacomo said that another boat had sunk on Wednesday off the eastern coast of Libya, near Tobruk. Of the 32 people on board, 22 were missing and one person had drowned, he said.

Chiara Cardoletti, the top official in Italy for the United Nations refugee agency, or UNHCR, posted on X that the survivors of Wednesday’s rescue near Italy had been taken in by a local agency team “and were in critical condition.”

The survivors said that the boat had flipped over because the sea was rough. Many of the survivors said that they had lost relatives on the boat, Filippo Ungaro, a refugee agency spokesman in Italy, said in an interview. “The survivors told us that the boat overturned more than once,” he said.

“Another tragic shipwreck off the coast of Lampedusa,” wrote Nicola Dell’Arciprete, the UNICEF country coordinator for Italy, on X.

The Coast Guard said it had deployed ships and an airplane to search for any possible survivors.

Venezuelan security forces and armed groups aligned with the government committed widespread violence against protesters and killed some of them following the country’s disputed presidential election, according to a report on Wednesday by Human Rights Watch.

Venezuelan organizations and media outlets reported 24 killings during the demonstrations, but the report marks the first effort by an international organization to verify some of them.

President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela has faced widespread domestic and international condemnation over his claim that he won a July 28 presidential vote, and the ensuing violent crackdown on demonstrations protesting that claim.

The government has yet to release any vote tallies to show that Mr. Maduro won. Tallies from electoral observers released by the opposition show that he lost decisively.

The report by Human Rights Watch, a research and advocacy nonprofit headquartered in New York, details the cases of six people who died during protests at the hands of state security forces or what appeared to be armed militia groups called colectivos.

The report said it also independently verified 11 of the 24 reported deaths by reviewing photos, videos and death certificates. The organization also interviewed 20 sources, including family members, witnesses, journalists and other human rights groups.

The group said that it had received “credible reports” of all 24 killings, but that many relatives and witnesses declined to be interviewed for fear of government reprisal.

The group verified 39 videos and two photographs by analyzing the upload stamp to determine the time of day and cross-referencing that with shadows and weather conditions. They also consulted with weapons experts and forensic pathologists to evaluate the reported injuries and weapons.

Venezuelan security forces, including the police and national guard, were implicated in some of the killings according to “credible evidence” gathered by Human Rights Watch.

State and colectivo forces seemed to coordinate to crack down on the protesters, the report stated.

Security forces put up barricades, threw tear gas and arrested demonstrators to contain or disperse protests. If the demonstration continued, colectivos arrived in some cases and used firearms against the protesters.

One video verified by Human Rights Watch was uploaded to TikTok on July 29 and showed at least three men dressed in civilian clothing shooting handguns in the air for more than one minute while standing behind a line of state security officials in uniform as nearby protesters fled.

The officials did not attempt to stop or arrest the armed men.

One protester killed was Aníbal Romero, 24, a construction worker who joined a protest on July 29 in a poor neighborhood in Caracas, the capital. Human Rights Watch reviewed a video in which police officers appear to fire weapons at the demonstrators.

Mr. Romero was hit by a bullet in the forehead around 7 p.m., according to two videos, a photograph and an audio message sent by a witness that Human Rights Watch reviewed.

The witness said that police officers did not initially allow protesters to take Mr. Romero away from the scene to a hospital. A video filmed after dark showed him lying wounded in the back of an unmoving truck. Demonstrators were eventually able to take him to the hospital, where he died, according to the audio message.

Two days later, Mr. Maduro called Mr. Romero’s death “fake news.” As evidence, he showed a video of a man confessing to simulating his own death.

Human Rights Watch called this claim by Mr. Maduro “demonstrably false” and said the man in the video used a name and a location that did not match Mr. Romero, and said that a local organization that helped Mr. Romero’s family also confirmed that the person in the video was not Mr. Romero.

Another death verified by Human Rights Watch was that of Olinger Montaño, 23, a barber who died from an injury caused by a firearm, according to his death certificate. In three videos filmed near the spot where he was protesting and verified by Human Rights Watch, national guard members are seen throwing tear gas or smoke canisters and shooting rubber bullets into a crowd of demonstrators.

Mr. Montaño’s mother sobbed over his coffin at his funeral, which The New York Times attended.

The Venezuelan government has said that more than 2,400 people have been arrested since July 29. A local human rights group has stated that the government has arrested nearly 1,600 people during that same period. (U.S. officials said Wednesday that a U.S. service member had been detained in Venezuela, but did not provide further details).

Government officials have stated that those who were detained were responsible for terrorism or other violent crimes. But Human Rights Watch said it found a pattern of arrests simply for criticizing the government or taking part in peaceful demonstrations.

It also identified a pattern of people who have been detained and denied contact with their families or lawyers for weeks at a time and representation by a lawyer of their choice, even when they or their families explicitly requested one.

The report also said detainees have often been presented in groups at virtual trials, making it difficult to properly administer justice for each individual person.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada may be forced into an election earlier than expected after a left-leaning political party that had been propping up his government in Parliament announced on Wednesday that it was abandoning the arrangement.

Jagmeet Singh, the leader of the New Democratic Party, said in a video that he was “tearing up” a formal agreement to support the Liberal Party. Without that support, Mr. Trudeau’s party lacks a majority of votes needed to pass legislation in the House of Commons.

It’s the latest setback for Mr. Trudeau, a political star on the global stage who has been losing the confidence of his voters at home after nine years in power. Polls show that Mr. Trudeau’s party badly lags behind the Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre.

Mr. Singh’s move does not automatically force an immediate election, but it does remove the stability that came from an agreement that effectively allowed Mr. Trudeau to act as if he controlled a majority in the House of Commons.

Under the country’s Constitution, a general election must take place by October 2025, but, in theory, Mr. Trudeau’s government could fall at any point following the return of Parliament from its summer break on Sept. 16.

One potential flashpoint could be the passage of the next budget sometime next spring or early summer. If Mr. Trudeau failed to get the critical bill through Parliament, experts said, that could lead to an early election.

For some time, the agreement between the Liberals and the New Democrats worked for both parties: Mr. Trudeau got the votes he needed, and Mr. Singh helped pass some policies that were important to his voters.

The two men had agreed to the pact, which was scheduled to expire in June 2025, more than two years ago in exchange for Mr. Trudeau’s prioritizing various issues, including laying the groundwork for a national pharamacare program, a publicly funded system for prescription drugs.

Tensions rose recently between the Liberals and the New Democrats over Mr. Trudeau’s decision to force the end of a lockout of railway workers and to require binding arbitration to settle it.

“Justin Trudeau has proven again and again he will always cave to corporate greed,” Mr. Singh said on Wednesday. “The Liberals have let people down. They don’t deserve another chance from Canadians.”

Policy-specific disagreements aside, though, Mr. Singh and Mr. Trudeau’s arrangement was always destined to end before elections, said Laura Stephenson, a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario and a director of the Consortium of Electoral Democracy.

For the N.D.P., she said, eventually differentiating itself from the Liberals was vital to its own electoral strategy and Mr. Trudeau’s unpopularity only precipitated the breakup.

For months, Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals have lagged by double digits behind Mr. Poilievre’s Conservatives in all public opinion polls, while the New Democrats remained in third place. The agreement was not a formal coalition that brought New Democratic members of Parliament into Mr. Trudeau’ s cabinet or otherwise involved them directly in governing.

But Mr. Poilievre has consistently, if inaccurately, described it as such. And as Mr. Trudeau’s poll standing has sunk, the Conservative leader has repeatedly linked Mr. Singh politically to the prime minister. In a social media post on Wednesday, he referred to the leader of the New Democrats as “Sellout Singh.”

“The way the Conservatives are publicly lumping together the Liberals and the N.D.P., you can understand from Singh’s point of view that he didn’t want to be tied to a sinking ship,” Ms. Stephenson said, referring to Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals, “especially if you want to be appearing as an alternative to this sinking ship.”

Last week, Mr. Poilievre called on Mr. Singh to end his agreement with the government and join the Conservatives to force an election this fall. Having had his wish granted in Mr. Singh’s move to tear up his deal with Mr. Trudeau on Wednesday, Mr. Poilievre doubled down and criticized Mr. Singh for not committing to a vote to bring down the government and hold elections.

“My message to Sellout Singh is this: If you’re serious about ending your costly carbon-tax coalition with Trudeau, then commit today to voting for a carbon-tax election at the earliest confidence vote in the House of Parliament,” Mr. Poilievre told reporters Wednesday afternoon, referring to a key Trudeau government policy that he opposes.

On Wednesday, Mr. Singh was as negative about Mr. Poilievre as he was about Mr. Trudeau, saying that he was ending the agreement to focus on campaigning against the Conservatives.

Speaking in Newfoundland, Mr. Trudeau told reporters that he would continue to push his government’s agenda in Parliament.

“I really hope the N.D.P. really stays focused on how we can deliver for Canadians,” Mr. Trudeau said. “I’m focused on Canadians. I’ll let the other parties focus on politics.”