Israeli military forces appeared to withdraw on Friday from the city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank, according to Palestinian news media and residents, 10 days into a major raid that has killed dozens of people, including children, and caused widespread destruction.

Hours after the Israeli military pulled back from Jenin, Palestinian civil defense teams along with public works employees and volunteers fanned out to assess the damaged homes, businesses, roads and water lines, and began the effort to restore essential services, according to Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency.

Elsewhere in the West Bank, an American woman who was protesting against an Israeli settler outpost was fatally shot. A 13-year-old Palestinian girl who was watching a clash between Israelis and Palestinians was also killed in a separate incident. People who were present blamed both shootings on Israeli troops. The Israeli military said it was investigating.

It wasn’t immediately clear on Friday whether all Israeli soldiers had left Jenin, in the northern part of the West Bank, or whether they would return. As Israeli forces have conducted one of their most extensive and deadly raids in the West Bank in years, they have pulled back from Palestinian cities and towns several times before returning.

In a statement on Friday, the Israeli military did not comment on a withdrawal but said its forces “are continuing to act in order to achieve the objectives of the counterterrorism operation.” It has described the recent raids — a marked escalation after the near-nightly operations that had already become the norm — as an effort to crack down on Palestinian armed groups and combat rising attacks against Israelis.

The military said that its forces had killed 14 members of armed Palestinian groups in Jenin over the past week and a half and had detained more than 30 people suspected of being members of the groups planning the attacks. The military said it had also found weapons and explosives. Israel has carried out airstrikes as part of the raids, a type of attack that was rare in the West Bank before the Hamas-led assault on Israel last Oct. 7.

The raids have killed at least 39 people, 21 of them in Jenin, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between fighters and noncombatants. Seven children were among those killed, according to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, which said that the past week was the deadliest for Palestinian civilians in the West Bank since November.

Palestinian residents who had been trapped in their homes for days as Israeli troops roamed Jenin ventured into the streets Friday, and some who had fled the raid returned.

They found their neighborhoods unrecognizable.

“God, I just collapsed,” said Kareeman Abu Naise, 30, when she saw video of her home taken by her father-in-law, who had returned to the neighborhood known as Jenin camp.

As residents inspected the damage, fallout from the wider war reverberated across the region and beyond. In the Gaza Strip, an urgent polio vaccination program proceeded in the south during a daily pause in fighting agreed to by Israel and Hamas.

In other parts of Gaza, the relentless bombardment continued. The Israeli military reported Friday that it had struck 40 sites across Gaza over the past week and claimed to have killed more than 100 militants. The military also said it had conducted 50 airstrikes against the militant group Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon, over the same time period.

The release by Hamas of a video showing a slain Israeli American hostage, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, recorded before he was killed, galvanized the movement of Israelis calling for a cease-fire that would provide for the release of the remaining hostages.

The U.S. State Department said Friday it was “urgently gathering” more information about the shooting death of the American woman, near the town of Beita.

Fellow protesters said the woman, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, a citizen of both the United States and Turkey, was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier firing from a rooftop.

The Israeli raids of the past 10 days in the West Bank, which were focused in and around the cities of Jenin and Tulkarm, were among the deadliest in the territory in years.

Ms. Abu Naise, who fled Jenin after the raid began, heard from neighbors on Sunday that Israeli soldiers had fired a missile at her family’s home, which had already been damaged by an Israeli bulldozer. That night, she said, she couldn’t sleep and cried for hours.

Seeing the damage on video — including the destroyed ground-floor living room where her family had received guests — was even more difficult.

“Literally, everything we had was in that house. Our belongings, all our memories, the good and the bad,” said Ms. Abu Naise, a mother of two. Her husband, Muhammad, was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in 2022 as he walked home from work.

“Two of the most precious things to me were my husband and my house,” she said, “and now I’ve lost them both.”

Nearly three million Palestinians live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, with far fewer civil rights and economic prospects than their Israeli neighbors.

U.S., Israeli and Iranian officials have said that Tehran is trying to boost militant groups and foment unrest in the Israeli-occupied territory by flooding it with weapons through clandestine smuggling routes. And Jenin has long been a hotbed of resistance against the occupation.

Some Jenin residents who had made dangerous escapes from their neighborhoods over the past 10 days returned Friday morning to survey the aftermath of the Israeli attacks. They were also able to check on loved ones whom they couldn’t reach because phone lines were down, residents said.

“Some are burying a martyr or visiting someone who has been wounded or checking on their home or shop,” said Nidal Naghnaghia, a resident who had fled Jenin with his family shortly after the raid began.

Many found homes so badly damaged that they were no longer habitable and streets so ravaged by bulldozers that cars were unable to pass, residents said.

Khulood Jabr, a 39-year-old mother of three, said it was as if people had been freed from their homes as they poured into the streets. What they saw was as if nothing had been spared, she said.

“There is so much destruction, you can’t describe it. They didn’t leave any shop undamaged,” she said.

“What crime did the owners of these shops commit?” she asked. “What do the electrical poles have to do with anything? What does the water have to do with anything?”

Ms. Jabr added that she was heartened to see people banding together to rebuild, even as they feared Israeli forces would soon return.

Some residents were less hopeful, worrying that any attempt to rebuild would again be crushed in the next Israeli offensive.

“All of this will repeat itself, sooner or later,” said Ismail Bani Gharra, 25, who returned to Jenin on Friday. Of the Israeli forces, he said: “They will come again. There will be more raids and more people killed.”

Reporting was contributed by Anushka Patil, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Aaron Boxerman, Ephrat Livni and Thomas Fuller.

Pope Francis will be welcomed by children bearing flowers, a 21-gun salute and a candlelight vigil after he lands in Papua New Guinea on Friday. It will be the first papal visit in three decades to the Pacific Islands, a deeply Christian region — but one that has played a little-known role in the clergy abuse scandal that has stained the Roman Catholic Church.

Over several decades, at least 10 priests and missionaries moved to Papua New Guinea after they had allegedly sexually abused children, or had been found to do so, in the West, according to court records, government inquiries, survivor testimonies, news media reports and comments by church officials.

These men were part of a larger pattern: At least 24 other priests and missionaries left New Zealand, Australia, Britain and the United States for Pacific Island countries like Fiji, Kiribati and Samoa under similar circumstances. In at least 13 cases, their superiors knew that these men had been accused or convicted of abuse before they transferred to the Pacific, according to church records and survivor accounts, shielding them from scrutiny.

It has been widely documented that the church has protected scores of priests from the authorities by shuffling them to other places, sometimes in other countries. But what sets these cases apart is the remoteness of the islands the men ended up in, making it harder for the authorities to pursue them. The relocations also gave the men access to vulnerable communities where priests were considered beyond reproach.

Notably, at least three of these men, according to government inquiries and news media reports, went on to abuse new victims in the Pacific.

Most moved to or served in 15 countries and territories in the region in the 1990s, but one still serves as an itinerant priest in Guam, an American territory, and another has returned to New Zealand, where he has been cleared by the church to return to ministry. Both deny the allegations of abuse.

Christopher Longhurst, a New Zealand-based spokesman for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, a support group, said the organization planned to press the pope on the movement of the priests to the Pacific while he is in Papua New Guinea.

The pope’s next stop is East Timor. In 2022, the Vatican punished Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, a hero of the nation’s independence movement, over allegations that he had raped and abused teenage boys decades ago in East Timor.

Francis has made a string of apologies for the church’s global sex abuse scandal. He has ordered clergy to report allegations of sexual abuse and cover-ups and issued a broad apology to all Catholics. But the remedies he has offered, survivors and critics say, fall well short of his words.

Michelle Mulvihill, a former nun and adviser to the Australian Catholic Church, has long accused Catholic organizations of using the Pacific Islands as a “dumping ground” for abusive priests.

“We’re moving pedophiles and pederasts into the poorest countries in the world,” Ms. Mulvihill said after being told of The Times’s findings. The church “used them to discard those people who they didn’t want to confront.”

Allegations or convictions have previously been documented for all the priests and missionaries in question, but, in more than a dozen cases, this is the first time their subsequent move to the Pacific has been reported. It is also the first time a widespread pattern of such movement to the Pacific Islands has been identified.

‘There’s No Vetting’

In Fiji, one of the first public accusations of abuse against a priest or missionary was made in 2022. That was the case of Felix Fremlin, who said he was abused as a child by New Zealand missionaries working in Fiji. His father did not believe his accusations and instead beat him.

“If you say something against the church, it’s like saying something against God,” said Mr. Fremlin, who is now estranged from many family members and suffers from depression. Correspondence between his lawyer and Catholic officials shows that Mr. Fremlin reached a monetary settlement with the church.

Peter Loy Chong, the archbishop of Suva, the capital of Fiji, said he had no records of abusive priests being moved to his archdiocese.

But such cases were possible, Ms. Mulvihill said, because of the way the church is organized. Many of the accused priests and brothers belonged to Catholic religious orders that are supposed to be supervised by their own superiors, and not by diocesan bishops and archbishops.

Others were priests who belonged to Catholic dioceses and therefore required individual approval from local bishops before moving. But often, Ms. Mulvihill said, bishops were “probably not asking questions” when colleagues requested transfers for such men. “There’s no vetting,” she said. “It’s become normalized.”

Each order and diocese ultimately reports to the Vatican. Matteo Bruni, the Vatican’s spokesman, said he had no knowledge of the cases and said it would be inappropriate to comment about them because he did not know the specifics of each. He emphasized Francis’ “commitment to ensure abuses are never tolerated” and referred The Times to the individual dioceses and orders.

The Times sought comment from the orders or dioceses of all 34 men. Many did not respond, and some declined to comment. Most that did answer said they had no records whatsoever of the men or that they received reports of abuse only after the men returned from overseas.

Twenty-two of these priests and missionaries were convicted of abuse, admitted to allegations or were considered credibly accused by their religious orders or dioceses. Four others died before the claims against them were made public.

Three of the men, who denied allegations of abuse, were investigated by the police but did not go to trial because of health or mental fitness issues. Prosecutors charged three others who also denied accusations of abuse, but the first man died before trial, the second man’s case was stayed by a judge for procedural reasons, and the third man’s case was stayed by a judge for reasons that are not clear. The latter’s diocese did not respond to questions. The remaining two priests, the ones now in Guam and New Zealand, deny the claims of abuse and have not faced charges from prosecutors.

Brother Gerard Brady, the Oceania head of one order, the Christian Brothers, apologized and said, “We acknowledge that some past responses fell well short of the processes and standards which are in place today to protect children.”

A Stint at the Vatican

In Papua New Guinea and East Timor, Francis is visiting two overwhelmingly Christian countries. Catholicism is the biggest denomination in Papua New Guinea and accounts for more than a quarter of the population. The faith is followed by 98 percent of the people in East Timor.

Christianity spread in the Pacific Islands during the 18th and 19th centuries through a strong partnership between missionaries and local leaders. Today, many countries in the region have intensely religious cultures where more than 95 percent of people identify as Christian.

The Rev. Julian Fox taught in Catholic schools around Melbourne, in his native Australia, for decades after he was ordained. He rose to be the Australian head of his order, the Salesians of Don Bosco. But in 1999, according to documents released by an independent inquiry established by the Australian government, he moved to the small Pacific Island nation of Fiji. Around the same time, according to news media reports, a former student accused the priest of rape.

Subsequent reports in the news media and from the Salesians diverge on whether Father Fox left Australia before the allegation was made or because of it. But both show that church leaders did not require him to return to Australia, even as other accusations of abuse by Father Fox were reported to them. He was within his legal rights to stay in Fiji, and that kept him out of the reach of the Australian authorities. After spending several years in Fiji, he took an assignment at the Vatican.

Father Fox returned home a decade after the initial accusation, according to media reports, which the church settled privately through a broad settlement program called Towards Healing. He then faced allegations in court and was convicted in 2015 for abusing five children, some of whom he beat and violated with a pool cue, according to Australian media reports.

The Salesians of Don Bosco in Melbourne did not respond to repeated requests for comment, and Father Fox could not be located for comment. The Dallas Morning News first reported on his case in 2004, alongside two other abusive Salesian priests who moved to the Pacific.

An Admission of Abuse

Frequently, church officials knew priests and missionaries had committed abuse before sending them to the Pacific.

In 1986, a couple went to a priest in Baltimore to talk about Brother William Morgan, an American missionary who had briefly returned from Papua New Guinea, according to a report issued by the Maryland Attorney General’s Office years later.

The couple said that Brother Morgan had touched their 4-year-old granddaughter with his penis and in the past abused other children, according to notes taken by the Baltimore priest that were quoted in the Maryland report. A letter by the priest showed that Brother Morgan later admitted that he had “fondled and touched” children several times while he was in Papua New Guinea. Despite his admission, Brother Morgan’s superiors at the Society of the Divine Word, his religious order, sent him back to the island nation for five years.

The Maryland Attorney General’s Office, which obtained the notes and correspondence, found no record of a report to law enforcement.

The Rev. Adam Oleszczuk, the leader of the Chicago province of the Society of the Divine Word, which includes Baltimore, said he had no records concerning Brother Morgan.

In multiple cases, moving to the Pacific seemed to offer Catholic figures an escape.

In 1971, Brother Rodger Moloney was appointed by the Hospitaller Brothers of St. John of God, a Catholic order, as the leader of Marylands School in Christchurch, New Zealand. His job was to care for disabled children. Six years later, one person anonymously reported to the brother’s superior in Australia that Brother Moloney had sexually abused a child, according to a New Zealand government inquiry.

Months later, he was transferred to serve in a pharmacy at the Vatican. He then moved to Papua New Guinea, the inquiry found, where he worked in the 1980s and 1990s, and eventually to Australia.

Brother Moloney was extradited to New Zealand in 2006, convicted of abusing five boys and sentenced to nearly three years in prison, according to court records. He died in 2019. His order did not respond to questions.

In Fiji, Mr. Fremlin now coordinates a support network for survivors of clerical abuse, most of whom keep their experiences secret. All “have marriage problems, job problems,” he said. “Some are violent towards women, some have problems with drugs.”

He added: “Overseas, you’ve got specialists. Here in Fiji, we’ve got nobody. The only counseling we get is when we sit and talk with each other.”

Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome.

Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the Peter M. Acland Foundation, a New Zealand media charity.

Caroline Darian and her two brothers were frantically moving their mother out of the family house that had effectively become a crime scene when she was interrupted by a call from the police saying they had something to tell her in person. It could not wait.

She was already shattered by the news that the father she always believed was loving and supportive had been arrested on suspicion that he drugged and raped her mother, and that he allegedly brought other men to join him in violating her for almost 10 years.

What, she wondered that day in November 2020, could there be left to learn?

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On the day Ukraine launched its daring incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, the Federal Security Service, the Russian agency most responsible for protecting the border, played down the seriousness of the operation. Calling it “an armed provocation,” the agency said its forces were working to push the Ukrainians back.

That was nearly a month ago. Since then, Ukrainian forces have occupied a small but significant patch of Russian territory and killed or captured hundreds of Russian troops, according to officials, analysts and satellite imagery.

President Vladimir V. Putin has said an assessment of the failures in Kursk would be made only after the situation in Russia’s border region had stabilized, but intelligence experts say that a large measure of the responsibility rests with the Federal Security Service. Despite its sprawling networks of agents and vast budget, the agency, known as the F.S.B., first failed to anticipate the Ukrainian incursion and is now struggling along with the Russian Army to dislodge a sizable Ukrainian fighting force.

There were clear signs that something was brewing. Days before the incursion, Russian bloggers, citing local residents on the Ukrainian side, reported a massive buildup of Ukrainian armor. But if it noticed anything amiss, the F.S.B. failed to prepare sufficiently. When Ukrainian troops charged across the border on Aug. 6 and pushed dozens of miles into Russian territory, they encountered almost no resistance.

“We are talking about many, many units which should have seen something and they failed,” said Andrei Soldatov, an author who has spent his career researching Russia’s security services.

The F.S.B. is a muscular, authoritarian version of the American F.B.I., with a broad national-security mandate that includes defending against threats from within Russia and in former Soviet republics.

But the agency is hindered by infighting, rivalries with other security agencies and an aversion to delivering bad news to Mr. Putin. Particularly since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the F.S.B. has also been distracted by a large-scale crackdown on internal dissent.

As a result, the agency has suffered a series of damaging intelligence failures since the start of the war, Western officials and experts say. Kursk was just the most recent.

In March, the agency ignored specific warnings from the United States and failed to prevent a terrorist attack on a Moscow concert hall that killed more than 140 people.

Ten months earlier, the agency was caught off guard when Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, launched a rebellion aimed at toppling Russia’s military leadership. And it was the F.S.B. that famously informed Russia’s military that its troops would be greeted with flowers when they launched their invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In each instance, though, there were few visible repercussions from Mr. Putin, and there is no indication that there will be after the debacle in Kursk.

A week after Ukrainian troops crossed the border, the agency’s longtime director, Aleksandr Bortnikov, made a public appearance in which he seemed to place blame for the incursion on local municipalities in the border region, even as he made assurances that everything was under control.

“At the moment all necessary measures are being taken to protect our citizens,” he said.

Mr. Putin on Thursday sought to downplay the incursion. Speaking at an international conference in Vladivostok, he said that Ukraine had made a mistake in deploying “fairly large and well-trained units” to the Kursk offensive and that Moscow’s “first-priority goal” was its military’s offensive in eastern Ukraine.

But Ukraine’s continued presence has dealt an embarrassing blow to Mr. Putin, whose power in large part rests on the projection of strength and stability.

The F.S.B., as the primary domestic successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B., is perhaps the most important pillar of Mr. Putin’s power, responsible for suppressing dissent within the Russian population and keeping other government entities, including the military, in line. Despite the failures, Mr. Putin simply cannot do without the F.S.B., Mr. Soldatov said.

“It’s the lesson he learned from Stalin,” Mr. Soldatov said. “During war you cannot punish your agencies because it might be more dangerous for you.”

Other agencies besides the F.S.B., including the military intelligence service and the National Guard, as well as the army, have intelligence-gathering resources that could have detected the Ukrainian buildup. Part of the problem, experts say, is a lack of coordination within the military and intelligence operations that is likely to have impeded any Russian response.

It is a problem that has bedeviled the Russian war effort from the first days of the invasion, but one that Mr. Putin appears reluctant to address.

This is in part by design, said Douglas London, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer. Mr. Putin seems to be as wary of his own military and intelligence services as he is of the Ukrainians, Mr. London said, and has created a system of competition between them so that no single entity can become too powerful.

Instead of collaborating, part of the F.S.B.’s job is to spy on other government agencies, particularly the military, which Mr. Putin, as a former K.G.B. officer, was trained to distrust, he said.

“If agencies are collaborating they could also collaborate against him,” Mr. London said.

The F.S.B. was not the only intelligence service to be surprised by the Ukrainian incursion. Planning was carried out under such strict secrecy that even Ukraine’s allies did not know about it, officials in Ukraine and Washington said.

Senior members of Ukraine’s own intelligence services were kept in the dark, and even the soldiers involved in the operation did not know until the last instant that they would cross the border, said Gen. Valeriy Kondratiuk, a former head of Ukraine’s military and foreign intelligence service, who still maintains contacts among senior officials.

“We needed to seize the initiative and achieve something at the front,” he said.

Even so, with hundreds of troops and heavy armor on the move, it was impossible to remain completely hidden.

On Aug 1., five days before the incursion, a Telegram channel that provides news for the Russian border town of Sudzha reported a huge deployment of Ukrainian armor spotted on the other side of the border.

If F.S.B. officers or others picked up on anything unusual, they may have dismissed the movements as normal Ukrainian operations to fortify the border, experts and officials said. In any case, local residents along the border inside Russia said they saw no evidence of increased security in the days before the incursion.

Alesya Torba, a 41-year-old resident of Sudzha, which is now under Ukrainian occupation, said that she saw news of Ukrainian military movements on Telegram but that she received no information from the authorities. There was no sign of the Russia military, she said, even after the Ukrainians had launched their attack.

“There was nothing, no aviation, nothing, not even notifications asking people to evacuate,” she said in an interview in the Russian city of Kursk, where she had fled.

The lack of resistance took the Ukrainians by surprise, and exposed a lapse in Russian oversight, a senior Ukrainian official said.

“They overestimated their own intelligence,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

One major mistake the Russians made, the official said, was interpreting previous cross-border raids by the Ukrainian forces as isolated episodes. In March, Ukraine launched a series of raids along a portion of the border, crossing onto Russian territory, but quickly falling back into Ukraine.

The raids appeared timed to disrupt Mr. Putin’s re-election campaign, but the senior official said they also served an important reconnaissance function that aided the planning of the August offensive.

Now, a month after the incursion, the F.S.B. has released no information that might shed light on how the Ukrainians were able to cross the border successfully, and has given no sense of when Russian forces might be in a position to push them out.

The only information provided by the F.S.B.’s press service has been about criminal cases opened against Western and Ukrainian journalists, who followed the troops onto Russian territory without following Russian customs procedures and getting passport checks.

Nanna Heitmann contributed reporting from Kursk, Russia.

After a young Turkish American woman was fatally shot on Friday in the occupied West Bank while protesting an Israeli settler outpost, friends of hers in the United States said she would have wanted the world to recognize that such shootings are not uncommon.

The woman, Aysenur Eyzi Eygi, 26, was in Beita, a village in the West Bank, when she was shot in the head. It was not immediately clear who was responsible, but witnesses and Palestinian officials said Israeli soldiers had fired the shots that killed her.

Ms. Egyi’s death added to the rising toll in the West Bank since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel ignited a war in Gaza. According to the United Nations, Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 600 people in the West Bank since the war began.

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After Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in late July, Hamas officials told Qatari mediators that they had new demands for the already deadlocked cease-fire talks, according to one Arab and one American official.

The suggestion worried the Qatari prime minister, who had spent months urging Hamas to compromise. With the support of his staff, he pushed back in meetings and calls with the Palestinian militant group, the officials said.

Hamas ultimately dropped the idea.

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Nell McCafferty, a pugnacious Irish journalist whose outsize reputation and outspoken views on women’s rights, gay rights and Irish nationalism helped her country move on from an era of cosseted social conservatism to become one of the most progressive countries in Europe, died on Aug. 21 in Fahan, a rural area of northwest Ireland. She was 80.

Her death, in a nursing home, was announced in a statement from her family, who said she had been in declining health for several years after having a stroke.

Few nonfiction writers captured the Irish public as tightly or for as long as Ms. McCafferty. Like the singer Sinead O’Connor and a handful of other public figures, she was known, loved and sometimes despised by her first name — everyone in Ireland seemed to have an opinion about Nell.

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Wins over the Netherlands’ women’s wheelchair basketball team are so rare that its Paralympic opponents have been settling for moral victories.

Spain, an upstart among the European powerhouses, held the team, known as the Dutch Angels, to a 3-point lead at halftime in Wednesday’s quarterfinal, but never recovered from a third-quarter blasting in a 61-43 loss. “We competed for 32 minutes and we were close,” said Franck Belen, Spain’s coach. “It was something special for us because they are the big team and we were the little team.”

“They’re bigger than us, faster than us, but we can hang with them for sure,” Ixhelt González of the United States said after her team lost, 69-56, in pool play on Saturday.

Germany, one of the most physical teams in the competition, mauled the leading Dutch scorer, Mariska Beijer, during a bludgeoning battle and took solace in its losing effort. “We fought,” said Mareike Miller, a German who won gold at the 2012 London Games. “I think we did OK, and now we want to move forward and beat some of the other teams.”

The Dutch, who face Canada in a Paralympic semifinal on Friday, arrived in Paris as something of a para sports dynasty, having won seven consecutive international tournaments since 2017. Their streak stretches across four European titles and two world championships, with Paralympic gold at the Tokyo Games in 2021 in the mix.

Through the team’s first four Paralympics games this year, the Netherlands averaged a 24-point margin of victory, but that figure was skewed by a 53-point win over Japan in which a Japanese guard was toppled out of her chair by a hard screen and carted off on a stretcher.

Beijer, whose long reach and speed make her one of the world’s most potent players, confirmed the Dutch’s goal before the start of play: “To win every single game. I mean, we are defending Paralympic champions.” She added that so much winning had placed a target on the team. “But we know we can beat everyone, but we have to play our best basketball to be able to do that, because there are really good teams here.”

The Netherlands’ style isn’t just soul-crushing power. When Gertjan van der Linden, a former player on the Dutch men’s wheelchair team, took over as coach of the women’s national team in 2005, he hoped to remake it in his image. He had built his game on the no-look passes and flashy fast breaks of his idol, Magic Johnson, becoming a five-time Paralympian (he won gold in 1992) and the world’s top wheelchair basketball player in 1991.

“On my team, I was the best point guard in the world,” he said. A double amputee, van der Linden usually roams the sidelines on his stumps and mixes coaching aphorisms about trusting the process with dry wit. These Games are his last tournament as head coach before he takes over the Italian men’s national team in January.

As a player, he said, he wanted to speed up play in wheelchair games, which he found gratingly slow, and close the gap between the effectiveness of the least impaired players (classified as 4 or 4.5) and their more restricted teammates (1s and 1.5s).

In its current iteration, the Netherlands team is built around Beijer and a few other tall high-point players who can create mismatches around the court while the low-point players set screens and picks. The tactic is particularly effective in wheelchair basketball, where a good screen makes it nearly impossible for a defender to change direction and contest a shot.

When the Netherlands went on an 8-0 run against Spain in the third quarter of the quarterfinal, Beijer had entire seconds to set up her shots over the outstretched arms of defenders whose chairs were out of position.

“It’s quicker decision making in able-bodied basketball,” Irene Sloof, a Dutch assistant coach, said. “When you do it right here, you have a lot of time to make your decisions.”

Sloof joined van der Linden’s staff in 2011, the year the team’s mission got supercharged. That was when the Dutch national training facility opened in Arnhem, with male and female Paralympic athletes receiving monthly salaries, training full-time with their teams and participating in mixed-gender league play. The changes helped the Netherlands quickly close the competitive gap with bigger, richer countries like the United States and Germany.

Sloof, who had returned to the Netherlands after playing point guard at Liberty University in Virginia, enjoyed coaching kids’ camps, but was frustrated by the limits some coaches placed on players’ development.

“There was a very conservative culture within training wheelchair basketball,” she said. She remembered suggesting one-on-one or four-on-three drills to encourage quicker decision-making against the defense. “They said, ‘Oh we can’t.’ I’m like, ‘Yes, you can.’ It was normal drills that I was used to in able-body basketball,” she said.

Van der Linden brought her onboard as a shooting coach but soon realized that, as an assistant, Sloof could help blur the tactical distinctions between the wheelchair and able-bodied games. She later took over the development program for youth-level players.

“That was the vision,” van der Linden said. “To mix able-bodied basketball from the U.S. with wheelchair basketball.”

The team took bronze at the London Games, but was dejected when the program’s tactical and professional growth yielded the same result in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.

“We were so, so focused on being physically strong,” said Jitske Visser, the Dutch captain. “I still believe that in Rio, we really had a squad to win the gold. Physically, we were really able to. But we’re not as much of a team as we are right now. Like connecting on a mental level.”

By the next year’s European Championship, Visser said, players knew that they needed to build chemistry in addition to muscle. “We’re just going to have fun, that was the main focus,” she said. “We’re just going to have fun and see. We’re going to do our best, you know. And then we won gold.”

She added, “The first tournament with this group and it was mostly, I think, because everyone was so excited. It was like a new page we turned.”

Players said the difference was talking: They vocalized critiques and praise of one another loudly, in real time, and didn’t let mistakes fester. Bo Kramer is a 4.5 whose shooting and gambling defense are nearly as essential to the Netherlands as her mouth.

“You always need one or two girls that shout the hardest on-court. If you do that, it makes it easier,” she said, adding that pointing out errors and good shots can keep teammates on the same page about what’s working during games. Off the court at the Paralympics, they kept in sync by screening episodes of “Emily in Paris” together.

Julia van der Sprong, a towering shot blocker, began playing for the team in 2017 for that first European title. She was 18, and only a year removed from the onset of a spinal cord injury that necessitated her use of a wheelchair. As the competition in women’s wheelchair basketball has gotten stronger and opponents have carried their grudges from old tournaments into this one, the Dutch team is aware of its distinction, she said.

“Most of the girls on other teams know how to lose tournaments. I don’t know how that is,” she said. “It’s really special to be on a team like this. But, yeah, I know it’s going to be hard when we’re going to lose. It will happen one day. Everybody knows that, I think. But hopefully not now and not within a few years.”