An Israeli airstrike on Wednesday killed at least 18 people, Palestinian officials said, at a school turned shelter in the Gaza Strip that Israel said Hamas used as a command post, and a United Nations agency said six of the dead were its employees.

The attack in Nuseirat, in central Gaza, came as the Israeli military resumed the offensive on another front, launching a new round of deadly raids in the occupied West Bank.

The chief U.N. relief agency for Palestinians, known as UNRWA, said the strike on the Jaouni School building in Nuseirat was the deadliest single incident for its staff over the 11 months of a war that has killed more than 200 of its workers.

The Gaza Civil Defense emergency services said that those killed included women and children and that, in addition to 18 confirmed dead, a similar number were wounded, some of them critically. It said the strike was the fifth time the school, which housed displaced people, had been hit during the war.

Gaza’s schools have not held classes since the fighting began in October, and many school buildings have become shelters for people forced to flee their homes. Israel has increasingly been targeting such schools, with analysts saying that its military has largely destroyed Hamas’s network of tunnels, forcing more fighters above ground.

Since invading Gaza after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Israeli forces have also sharply increased the frequency and intensity of raids in the West Bank, saying that it is rooting out armed militants there, as well.

The military mounted raids and at least one airstrike overnight and into Wednesday in the cities of Tulkarm and Tubas in the northern West Bank and in other locations nearby, killing several people it described as terrorists. The actions came after a lull of a few days, following lengthy and destructive incursions into the same region.

Israel’s military said that its forces were carrying out an operation against militants, and that early Wednesday its aircraft struck in Tubas “and eliminated a terrorist cell consisting of five terrorists armed with explosives who posed a threat” to Israeli forces. Palestinian officials also said that five people were killed, and Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, reported that the dead were young men near a mosque.

Wafa also said that three other people were killed in another airstrike, on a car in Tulkarm. The Israeli military did not confirm that strike but said that in Tulkarm it had killed at least one person and “located and dismantled an explosives laboratory.”

Since the start of the war, Israeli troops and settlers have killed more than 650 people in the West Bank, including civilians, according to the United Nations. In that time, Israel has carried out 55 airstrikes in the West Bank, which previously were quite rare, the United Nations said.

On Wednesday, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both issued their first extensive remarks on the killing last week of an American woman, Aysenur Eygi, 26, who was in the West Bank to protest Israeli settlements. The Israeli military has acknowledged that one of its troops most likely fired the fatal shot during a clash with demonstrators throwing rocks. Other protesters say that Ms. Eygi never took part in the violence, and that the shots were fired after the clash had ended.

Mr. Biden said he was “outraged and deeply saddened” by the killing of Ms. Eygi and demanded “full accountability” from Israel for her death. Ms. Harris said the shooting “raises legitimate questions” about the conduct of Israeli military forces in the West Bank.

The new raids in Tulkarm, on the border with Israel, and Tubas, about 20 miles to the east, followed a series of destructive and lengthy incursions, a particularly intense 10-day campaign that killed at least 39 people, according to the Palestinian authorities, who do not separate civilians from combatants in their casualty counts.

Many Palestinians, especially in Tulkarm and the northern city of Jenin, were trapped in their homes for days while bulldozers ripped up streets in what the Israeli military said was an effort to unearth improvised explosives planted by armed groups.

In Tubas on Wednesday, Harith al-Hasani, a 33-year-old resident, said that Israeli forces had stormed the city during the early morning hours before “clashes erupted and we started hearing explosions.” Israeli aircraft and drones buzzed in the city’s skies, and soldiers also were “walking around on foot,” Mr. al-Hasani said.

“Usually they move around in their vehicles,” he said.

Mr. al-Hasani said that Israeli forces had closed roads with earthen barriers and were interrogating young men in the streets and raiding people’s homes.

Wafa, the news agency, said that Israeli forces had closed all entrances to Tubas and were inspecting ambulances before allowing them to enter a local hospital.

The Israeli military said it could not immediately comment on the reports, but later said its troops had exchanged gunfire with militants in Tubas, arrested some of them and dismantled a car bomb.

Since Oct. 7, raids have been a near-daily reality for the nearly three million Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank. Israeli officials have described the raids as necessary to combat rising Palestinian militancy, particularly a spate of attempted bombings, over the past few weeks. Israeli officials have said that more than 150 attacks against Israelis have emanated from the Jenin and Tulkarm areas in the past year.

Liam Stack and Thomas Fuller contributed reporting.

Mexico’s Senate on Wednesday narrowly passed a sweeping proposal to revamp the judiciary system, effectively clearing the last major obstacle to a measure that the country’s president had vowed to push through before stepping down at the end of this month.

The result reflects the exceptional sway of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico and his party after his allies won large legislative majorities in June, enabling them to pass some of the Mexican leader’s most contentious and far-reaching proposals in his final weeks in office.

The measure would shift the judiciary from an appointment-based system largely grounded in training and qualifications to one where voters elect judges and there are few requirements to run — and it would remove 7,000 judges from their jobs, from the chief justice of the Supreme Court down to those at local courts.

The bill already passed in the lower house of Congress last week, during a marathon session. It will now go to the state legislatures, where it will need a majority to be enacted into law. Mr. López Obrador’s governing Morena party and its allies control 25 of 32 state legislatures, so it is expected to be approved with ease.

When that happens, voters could start electing thousands of federal, state and local judges as soon as next year.

The debate, which started on Tuesday, was temporarily suspended after a group of protesters, megaphones and Mexican flags in hand, barged into the Senate building calling on senators to block the overhaul. Protesters followed the lawmakers to another venue, where an opposition senator was assaulted when someone threw gasoline on his face. Police officers later dispersed demonstrations using fire extinguishers.

After a heated session in which legislators accused each other of being “traitors” and “liars,” 86 senators approved the bill and 41 voted against it.

The government says the overhaul is needed to modernize the judiciary and to instill trust in a system plagued by graft, influence-peddling and nepotism. Mr. López Obrador’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, takes office on Oct. 1 and has fully backed the plan.

However, the proposal has met fierce resistance from judicial workers, law experts, investors, judges, students, opposition legislators and other critics. Mr. López Obrador’s determination to push it through has kept financial markets on edge and caused a diplomatic spat with the U.S. and Canada’s ambassadors. Even leaders in the Catholic church have said the election of judges would not guarantee a better delivery of justice for Mexico’s victims of criminal violence.

“Where does that leave my 27 years of service? I started from the bottom,” said Sandra Herrera Benítez, a court clerk and spokeswoman for judicial workers in the northern city of Monterrey, who went on strike last month with thousands of other federal court workers across Mexico. “Now, to be a judge or magistrate you have to be friends with the president or some politician.”

Experiences in countries such as the United States or Bolivia, where voters can elect some judges, have shown that doing so carries the risk of making judicial seats more politicized.

“Judges respond to the incentives that elections create,” said Amrit Singh, a law professor at Stanford University and an expert on rule of law. “The judiciary will be politicized beyond recognition.”

Mr. López Obrador first presented his idea of overhauling the judiciary last year. Angered at the Supreme Court for blocking some of his administration’s plans, such as weakening Mexico’s electoral watchdog agency or putting the National Guard under the military’s control, he vowed to have judges and justices elected by popular vote — a move seen as retaliation by some analysts.

“The judiciary is hopeless, it is rotten,” he told reporters back then, calling on his supporters to give his political movement large majorities in Congress at the polls in order to pass the overhaul and change the constitution.

On Election Day, voters cemented Morena’s dominance in the lower house but left the Senate a few seats short of a supermajority. On Wednesday, however, Morena and its allies secured the two-thirds majority required for passage when three opposition senators voted in favor of the overhaul. Another opposition senator, Daniel Barreda, was absent from the vote because his father had been detained by the authorities in southern Mexico, he told reporters.

Days before the vote, opposition legislators said they had been threatened, blackmailed and offered bribes to get them to approve the overhaul.

In recent weeks, protests and strikes erupted across the country over the proposed changes. Judicial workers and their supporters have organized sit-ins to block access to the lower house of Congress and the Senate.

Still, people have also taken to the streets to defend the overhaul. More than half of the country’s business leaders support the proposal, according to Mexico’s association of chambers of commerce. Polls commissioned by Morena indicate around 80 percent of the participants think revamping the judicial system is necessary — though other polls find that more than 50 percent of those surveyed don’t know what the overhaul entails.

The tension has even divided the Supreme Court. Justice Loretta Ortiz, who was appointed by Mr. López Obrador and has called herself a “founder of Morena,” said on social media that the overhaul “will decisively contribute to guaranteeing the access to justice that Mexicans deserve.”

Some experts say it will take years for the impact of the legislation to be fully understood.

“The president’s proposal is an experiment,” said Vanessa Romero Rocha, a lawyer and political analyst, adding that the overhaul’s effect will need to be evaluated in a few years time as there is no precedent for it. “The president’s main objective, so I see it, is to remove all the judges who have been around for a long time and who are deeply corrupt.”

Yet others say that the current plan would exacerbate the problems of corruption that the government is trying to eliminate.

“The dismantling of the judiciary is not the way forward,” Norma Piña, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who opposes the measures, said in a televised message on Sunday. She also presented a counterproposal to redesign the system.

That plan includes steps such as making the selection of judges more transparent so as to prevent nepotism and privilege merit, creating independent disciplinary mechanisms, strengthening local judiciaries — where corruption is more prevalent — and improving state prosecutors’ offices.

But the judiciary’s counterproposal, analysts say, came a little too late.

“This reform is and will be historic. It will change the way the judiciary is seen and conceived,” said Morena senator Ernestina Godoy Ramos during Tuesday’s debate. “Justice is everyone’s business.”

Miriam Castillo contributed research from Mexico City.

An Islamist party that made opposition to the Israeli invasion of Gaza the centerpiece of its campaign scored a significant success in elections in Jordan, results released in the kingdom on Wednesday showed, giving the Muslim Brotherhood a bigger foothold in Jordan’s Parliament.

The Islamic Action Front, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been banned in several countries in the Arab world, will now control a sizable bloc in Parliament, according to results announced by the electoral commission. It won 31 of the 138 seats.

But the government will likely retain a substantial majority, given that two parties allied to it secured around 70 seats combined. Independent deputies and those representing smaller parties, as well as deputies selected under a quota system, are also likely to back government policies.

So while Islamists may now have a greater voice in Jordan, the kingdom’s reputation as one of the more stable and electorally open countries in the region will probably not be shaken, analysts said.

“It’s a result that the government will be broadly happy with,” said Neil Quilliam, an expert in Jordanian and regional politics at Chatham House think tank in London.

Mr. Quilliam described the vote as a safety valve of sorts for public anger over the Israeli assault against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, where tens of thousands of people have been killed.

“The system is flexible enough to allow the elections and to allow the Islamists to have a voice,” he said.

The election was the first following a series of reforms introduced by King Abdullah II aimed at promoting greater democratization, including changes to the electoral law that shifted the focus from individual candidates to political parties.

Even before the war in Gaza, which began after Hamas led an attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, discontent over the government’s ties to Israel ran high in Jordan, where many citizens are of Palestinian origin. The assault on Gaza and the Israeli governments crackdown in the occupied West Bank have fueled public anger, leading to a series of mass demonstrations. Hundreds of protesters have been arrested.

King Abdullah has described suffering in Gaza as unbearable, called for a cease-fire and spoken in favor of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The government has also denounced Israel’s conduct of the conflict and said that any transfer of Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan would amount to a declaration of war.

At the same time, Jordan is a regional ally of Washington. Its military joined Israel, the United States and other countries in shooting down a barrage of missiles and drones fired by Iran toward Israel in April.

The election results suggest that the government’s balancing act has had only limited success, said Mohammad Abu Rumman, a political analyst and columnist based in the Jordanian capital, Amman. “Voting for the Brotherhood reflects the deepening trust deficit between government and the public, a chasm that has widened over the years and has been largely ignored by officialdom,” he said.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt as a Pan-Islamic organization, but during the campaign, the Islamic Action also criticized the Jordanian government’s domestic policies, seeking to capitalize on discontent over unemployment, corruption, poverty and other issues .

The party described the election gains on Wednesday as a victory for the country as a whole.

“The advance results we have achieved will strengthen the power, resilience and stability of our state,” a spokesman, Moath al-Khawaideh, said in a post on Facebook. The vote, he said, affirmed the party’s stance on Palestinian resistance.

Voting turnout stood at around 32 percent, slightly up from the previous election, but a clear signal of a disillusioned electorate, despite the government’s democratization drive. Participation was highest in rural areas, where tribal leaders who are often aligned with the government have traditionally overseen bloc voting, and lower in urban centers like Amman.

The low turnout may also reflect the fact that Parliament has no direct role in shaping foreign policy, which under the Constitution is overseen by the monarch. Experts said this might have blunted the Brotherhood’s effort to make the war a central issue.

Many Jordanians appear not to view Parliament as capable of addressing their concerns, said Amer Al Sabaileh, a regional security expert and university professor based in Amman.

“It’s a failure on the level of voter participation,” he said. “Nobody bought the story of change.”

In a rare joint visit abroad, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and his British counterpart, David Lammy, met with the top leaders of Ukraine in Kyiv on Wednesday to discuss bolstering the Ukrainian military and whether to allow it to use imported long-range missiles to strike deep into Russia.

Mr. Blinken and Mr. Lammy said they had heard views from President Volodymyr Zelensky on Ukraine’s desire to fire missiles provided by the United States and Britain at Russian targets well beyond the border between the two warring nations.

They told reporters at a news conference that they would convey what they had heard to President Biden and Keir Starmer, the prime minister of Britain, and that those two leaders would discuss it when they meet in Washington on Friday.

The talks on Wednesday were focused on “the situation on the battlefield, Ukraine’s objectives and what it needs to succeed going forward,” Mr. Blinken said, adding that long-range fire was among the topics. “I’m going to take that discussion back to Washington to brief the president on what I heard,” he said.

“From day one, as you’ve heard me say, we have adjusted and adapted as needs have changed, as the battlefield has changed,” he said.

Mr. Lammy confirmed that the officials had talked about Ukraine using American and British long-range missiles to hit Russia. “We’ve had detailed conversations today with President Zelensky,” he said. “We recognize that Ukraine is on the frontline of the fight for freedom.”

The visit came as the Biden administration struggles to curtail aid to Russia from Iran, North Korea and China, and as the U.S. presidential elections loom over the conflict.

Mr. Blinken alluded to anxieties over the election at the news conference and to the state of aid for Ukraine if Donald J. Trump, the Republican candidate, were to win in November.

“The bottom line is this: We want Ukraine to win, and we’re fully committed to keep marshaling the support that it needs,” he said. “Support for Ukraine will endure because it doesn’t depend on any one country, any one party, any one election.”

But the United States has been by far the largest provider of military aid to Ukraine. And Mr. Blinken announced additional humanitarian and energy infrastructure aid on Wednesday.

Two air-raid sirens sounded in the evening, once as Mr. Blinken and Mr. Lammy met with Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, and once at the end of their news conference in the foreign ministry. A third siren sounded late at night, soon after Mr. Blinken and Mr. Lammy boarded a train for the return trip to Poland.

After stepping off a private overnight train from Poland in the morning, the top American and British diplomats met throughout the day with military and civilian officials, including Ukraine’s new foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, who was appointed last Thursday by Mr. Zelensky as part of an overhaul of the government’s top ranks.

After 5 p.m., Mr. Zelensky, Mr. Sybiha and four other Ukrainian officials met with Mr. Blinken, Mr. Lammy and their aides at the Mariyinsky Palace, the presidential residence.

Mr. Lammy said it had been well over a decade since the top diplomats from the United States and Britain had traveled together. He added that the governments were determined to address the threat posed to Ukraine by Iran’s shipments of short-range ballistic missiles to Russia, an accusation Mr. Blinken and Mr. Lammy made publicly in London on Tuesday.

At 6:15 local time, the first air raid siren of Mr. Blinken’s trip sounded, with Ukraine’s air force saying it had picked up a missile threat from the north.

Mr. Blinken’s visit came as part of a busy day in the capital for Mr. Zelensky. He also welcomed leaders of Latvia, Lithuania and Croatia, who came to attend the annual Crimea Platform summit, which is dedicated to reversing the illegal annexation of the peninsula by Russia in 2014.

Mr. Zelensky unveiled a memorial commemorating the tragedy that befell the Crimean Tatar people, an ethnic minority repressed by Stalin, who — in a foreshadowing of the Kremlin’s justification for its current war — accused them of being Nazi collaborators and deported them en masse. Thousands died.

“Memory compels us to act,” Mr. Zelensky said, noting that the return of Crimea to Ukraine is a key part of ensuring a lasting peace.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, speaking by video at the summit, said, “The return of Crimea to Ukraine is a requirement of international law.”

The first debate between Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris took place in the middle of the night during Mr. Blinken and Mr. Lammy’s Kyiv-bound train ride. A few passengers on Mr. Blinken’s train stayed up to watch at least the start of the debate, but most scrambled online in the morning to read assessments of the event.

Officials in Ukraine were tracking the debate as well: Mr. Trump, who has expressed admiration for Mr. Putin, has rallied a significant number of Republican politicians to oppose U.S. military aid to Ukraine, while Ms. Harris has vowed to continue supporting the besieged country. Asked during the debate specifically if he wanted Ukraine to win, Mr. Trump delivered a 400-word reply but did not say “yes.”

In recent weeks, the Ukrainian military has made a surprising incursion into the Russian region of Kursk, lifting morale in Ukraine. But that offensive has failed to divert Russian units from their onslaught in eastern Ukraine, where they continue to make small but steady gains.

At the news conference, American and British reporters pressed Mr. Blinken and Mr. Lammy on entreaties from Ukrainian officials for permission for the Ukrainian military to use missiles provided by those nations for strikes deep into Russian territory.

In May, the Biden administration gave Ukraine permission to use U.S. weapons for shorter cross-border attacks against Russian sites that were being used in an offensive against the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Since then, U.S. officials have allowed the Ukrainian military to make that kind of shorter strike at other places along the border.

On Tuesday, Mr. Lammy called Iran’s ballistic missile shipments to Russia a “significant escalation,” and in Kyiv on Wednesday he said that Britain was joining the United States in imposing sanctions on Iran and Russia. Iranian officials have denied they made any such shipment, and in Moscow on Wednesday, the Kremlin denied it was receiving weaponry from other nations.

Until now, Iran has mainly supplied Russia with drones, while North Korea has provided artillery shells and ballistic missiles. The Biden administration says Chinese companies are selling factory machine tools and microelectronics to Russia to help it rebuild its arms-production industry.

“We’re seeing this new axis: Russia, Iran, North Korea,” Mr. Lammy said. “We’re urging China not to throw their lot in with this group of renegades.”

Also on Wednesday, Mr. Zelensky attended an international conference on justice, where he said Ukrainian investigators had gathered evidence of 137,000 war crimes committed by Russian forces since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in 2022. And he chided Mongolia’s decision to host Mr. Putin recently — the Russian leader’s first trip to a member nation of the International Criminal Court since it issued a warrant for his arrest last year — and Brazil’s plans to invite Mr. Putin to a meeting of the Group of 20 later this year.

Those invitations were signs of the degradation of the international system of law, Mr. Zelensky said, and “the demolition of the remaining norm must not be allowed.”

Marc Santora contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine, and Ivan Nechepurenko contributed from Tbilisi, Georgia.

Donald J. Trump’s refusal to say that he hopes Ukraine will win its war against Russia has cast a spotlight on what promises to be an abrupt U.S. policy shift toward the conflict — and Washington’s relations with Moscow — if Mr. Trump returns to the White House.

Twice Mr. Trump was asked directly at the debate on Tuesday night whether he hoped for Ukraine’s victory, and both times he insisted that his main goal was for the war to end quickly. “I think it’s in the U.S.’s best interest to get this war finished and just get it done, negotiate a deal, because we have to stop all of these human lives from being destroyed,” he said.

The former president went on to suggest that he would leverage his friendly relationship with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, underscoring clear signs that he intends to reverse President Biden’s confrontational relationship with Russia.

Mr. Trump’s answers “should tell people all they need to know — which is that if Trump gets elected and gets involved, Ukraine’s going to be the loser and Russia’s going to be the winner,” said John R. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser. Mr. Bolton has become a vocal critic of the former president, who fired him after repeated policy disagreements.

Mr. Trump offered little detail on how he would negotiate a rapid end to the Ukraine war, saying only that he would speak to both Mr. Putin and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to strike a deal even before he was inaugurated in January.

That is a seemingly impossible goal. Mr. Zelensky has ruled out any settlement with Russia that does not restore his country’s original borders, while Mr. Putin seems determined to conquer even more of Ukraine than the roughly one-fifth of its territory that his army now occupies.

Given the realities on the ground and Ukraine’s lack of leverage over Russia, analysts said that calling for a swift end to the war was tantamount to arguing that Ukraine should surrender much of its territory to Mr. Putin. It could also rattle other U.S. allies who might question their assumptions about American commitments.

Richard N. Haass, a former diplomat and the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, called the idea that Mr. Trump could broker a near-immediate end to the war “preposterous.” Mr. Haass said the claim was most likely “an empty but impossible-to-disprove boast that associates Trump with peace and his opponent with war.”

Speaking at a news conference in Kyiv on Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken left no doubt about where the Biden administration stood. “We want Ukraine to win,” he said.

During her nomination speech at the Democratic National Convention last month, Vice President Kamala Harris declared that “as president, I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.”

Mr. Trump did not criticize or threaten to halt U.S. military and economic aid to Ukraine, but he has previously implied that he considers that spending wasteful. During remarks in June, Mr. Trump referred to Mr. Zelensky as “the greatest salesman of all time” and complained that the Ukrainian’s plea for more aid “never ends.”

Mr. Trump’s call for a swift peace deal amounts to proposing one of the most sudden and drastic shifts in modern American foreign policy. Even his unilateral withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, painstakingly negotiated by President Barack Obama, did not happen until his second year in office. And unlike U.S. aid to Ukraine, that agreement never enjoyed bipartisan support.

Mr. Biden has overseen the delivery of more than $107 billion in military and economic aid to Kyiv, and tens of billions more to NATO allies deemed at risk of further Russian aggression. European nations could make up for some of that support were Mr. Trump to halt or reduce it, but the result would still be a calamity for Ukraine as it struggles simply to defend existing battle lines.

Mr. Trump’s comments also drew renewed attention to his past courtship of Mr. Putin, an authoritarian widely reviled among Western democratic leaders. Even many of Mr. Trump’s former top advisers have said they were mystified by his praise of Mr. Putin.

Insisting that he could strike a fast deal because both Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Putin “respect” him, Mr. Trump complained that Mr. Biden had not pressured the warring leaders into peace talks. “He hasn’t even made a phone call in two years to Putin,” Mr. Trump said. (That is roughly accurate: Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin last spoke in February 2022. Oddly, Mr. Trump falsely asserted that Ms. Harris met with Mr. Putin shortly before the Russian invasion later that month.)

Andrew Weiss, a former U.S. national security official and Russia expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has chronicled Mr. Trump’s statements about Mr. Putin and Russia for months on the social media site X. Mr. Weiss notes that Mr. Trump has repeatedly indicated that he would seek to normalize relations with Moscow and resume direct dialogue with Mr. Putin.

Mr. Trump was particularly enthusiastic during his interview with the X owner and Tesla mogul Elon Musk in August, telling him that, as president, “I loved Russia. I was a friend of Putin and I loved Russia.”

Mr. Trump continues to dismiss concerns about his admiration for Mr. Putin as part of a grand “Russia hoax” meant to discredit him. At the debate, he claimed that Mr. Putin had “endorsed” Ms. Harris, referring to ostensibly positive comments the Russian leader recently made about her.

But Mr. Putin appeared to be speaking mischievously or even sarcastically, as when he said he admired Ms. Harris’s “infectious” laugh, which has been the subject of frequent mockery by Trump allies. Ms. Harris for her part told Mr. Trump that Mr. Putin “would eat you for lunch.”

Many former top officials in Mr. Trump’s administration continue to say they remain confounded by his seeming admiration for the Russian autocrat.

In a new book, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser H.R. McMaster described his bafflement at his boss’s eagerness to please Mr. Putin.

Mr. McMaster recounted how, in 2018, Mr. Trump reveled over a newspaper article about comments Mr. Putin made both deriding America’s political system and praising Mr. Trump. The story appeared just days after a former Russian spy was poisoned with nerve agent in Britain in a brazen plot quickly attributed to Russia.

Using his Sharpie, Mr. Trump wrote a friendly note to Mr. Putin on the newspaper page and instructed Mr. McMaster to have it delivered to the Kremlin.

“After over a year in this job, I cannot understand Putin’s hold on Trump,” Mr. McMaster remembered telling his wife at home that night. (He never delivered the note.)

For now, Mr. Haass said, the key question is what kind of deal Mr. Trump would actually pursue as president.

Mr. Haass, who has advocated more U.S. efforts to begin peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, suggested that Mr. Trump might in fact “continue aid and try to persuade both sides that further fighting would not yield benefits.”

That approach could eventually lead to “an interim cease-fire with modest territorial adjustments and which required neither side giving up its long term aims,” he said.

“But the danger given Trump’s admiration for Putin and antipathy toward Zelensky is he might opt for an imposed peace that would surely be rejected in Kyiv but would cause real harm to Ukraine and to the U.S. standing with allies everywhere,” he added.

England’s National Health Service, one of the country’s most revered institutions, is in “critical” condition, according to a government-commissioned report that cited long waits for treatment, crumbling hospitals, mental health patients in “vermin-infested cells” and far fewer M.R.I. scanners than in comparable countries.

The hard-hitting review, published late on Wednesday, was commissioned by Britain’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer, after he won the general election. The dire state of the N.H.S. was a key reason many people voted for his Labour Party in July, according to polls.

But the report underscores the scale of the challenge the government faces to revive a health care system that is in a spiral of decline after years of underinvestment and administrative meddling and is still suffering the aftershocks of the pandemic.

Mr. Starmer said in comments his office released on Wednesday that he was working on a 10-year plan that could amount to the “biggest reimagining of our N.H.S.” since its creation in 1948.

The report, written by Ara Darzi, a surgeon and member of the House of Lords, said that during the 2010s, when a Conservative-led government embarked on a stringent austerity program, the N.H.S. was “starved of capital,” leading it to fall behind other countries in terms of investing in diagnostic equipment, technology and buildings.

His findings will not surprise Britons, whose satisfaction in the health service is “at its lowest ever,” the report said, having peaked in 2009. Still, even Professor Darzi, who has spent three decades in the N.H.S., said that he was “shocked” by what he discovered and laid the blame for the problems on successive Conservative governments that held power for 14 years.

Mr. Starmer described the findings as “unforgivable” in comments released before a speech on Thursday, in which he plans to argue that the health service must “reform or die.”

“People have every right to be angry,” he said. “It’s not just because the N.H.S. is so personal to all of us — it’s because some of these failings are life and death.”

Paid for through general taxation and payroll deductions, medical treatment in Britain is delivered to patients without money changing hands, with a few exceptions such as dentistry and prescription medication.

The N.H.S. was created after World War II by a Labour government that aimed to make health care available to everyone, regardless of income or wealth. It grew so popular that Nigel Lawson, a former chancellor of the Exchequer, described it as “the closest thing the English have to a religion.”

But in his speech on Thursday, Mr. Starmer is expected to prepare Britons for a long wait before their health care system is restored. That echoes a warning he made last month that, because of the scale of the challenge he inherited in restoring the economy and public services, circumstances “will get worse before they get better.”

Mr. Starmer said his government would focus on digitizing the N.H.S., moving care from overburdened hospitals to other settings in the community and investing in preventive health care.

Mr. Darzi’s report pointed out that the failure to invest in the N.H.S. had coincided with rising demand because of Britain’s aging population and surging levels of long-term sickness.

Among the consequences: Long waits for treatment in emergency rooms are estimated to have caused an additional 14,000 deaths each year. And outcomes for cancer patients lag behind those of comparable countries, with “appreciably higher” mortality rates in Britain than in many European nations, the report said.

Mr. Darzi was particularly damning of the major restructuring of the N.H.S. in 2012 by the Conservative health secretary Andrew Lansley, which the report described as “a calamity without international precedent.”

The health service’s capacity was “degraded by disastrous management reforms,” he wrote, while “the trust and good will of many frontline staff has been lost.”

The changes were intended to encourage more competition in health provision but were criticized for creating a fragmented and complex structure.

Jennifer Dixon, chief executive of the Health Foundation, a charity, said in a statement that the report pointed to some “obvious priorities” for change and argued, “The N.H.S. is weakened but not broken — and staff can recover services if they are given the resources to make it happen.”

Mr. Darzi, who was once a Labour Party member but left because of its handling of antisemitism allegations under the former leader Jeremy Corbyn, pointed to the inadequacy of government spending increases for the N.H.S. that, for most of the 2010s, were limited to 1 percent compared with a decades-long average of 3.4 percent.

Chronic problems that had built up in the health service over years became acute when Covid-19 hit, and the N.H.S. entered the pandemic with fewer available beds and fewer staff than most other high-income health systems, the report said.

Hospitals delayed, canceled or postponed more routine care during that period than any comparable health system did.

The result was longer waits for treatment. Lines at emergency rooms more than doubled, from an average of just under 40 people on a typical evening in April 2009 to over 100 in April this year.

Four climbers were found dead on Tuesday on Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps, the French authorities in the region said. The climbers, who were from Italy and South Korea, had been missing since Saturday.

Boris Duffau, a public prosecutor in Bonneville, France, said in an email that police officers discovered the bodies of two South Korean climbers, ages 45 and 53, after rescue officers traveled to the mountain by helicopter on Tuesday afternoon. The two Italians, ages 40 and 53, were found about an hour later, he said.

The security and rescue service that responds to emergencies on Mont Blanc, the Chamonix P.G.H.M., had received an alert around 5 p.m. on Saturday about people in need of help on the Three Mounts route of Mont Blanc, which is on the French side of the Alps that borders Italy, but a rescue helicopter could not immediately land there because of the bad weather, Mr. Duffau said.

The next day, two officers onboard a helicopter were able to rescue two stranded Korean climbers, Mr. Duffau said, but search-and-rescue teams could not continue their work because of worsening weather, which also prevented any rescues from taking place on Monday.

The prefecture of Haute-Savoie said that the climbers had “died of exhaustion,” and that they had done the climb without guides, Agence France-Presse reported.

La Repubblica, a newspaper in Rome, and other news organizations in Italy identified the Italian climbers who died as Andrea Galimberti and Sara Stefanelli. Mr. Galimberti was an experienced mountaineer who had climbed the Alps many times, and Ms. Stefanelli had recently completed a mountaineering course, Corriere della Sera, a newspaper in Milan, reported.

The two Korean climbers had traveled to the Alps with a mountaineering club and were found about 100 meters from the mountain’s summit, Yonhap News Agency reported in Seoul.

Mont Blanc, like other renowned mountains, has in recent years dealt with overcrowding and climate change, leading to more unpredictable and possibly perilous conditions for climbers. This year, there have been at least five other deaths on Mont Blanc, most of them from falls.

Human-caused climate change has reshaped the Alps and created hazards for climbers. It has affected snow patterns across the Northern Hemisphere, with warmer temperatures causing snow to melt faster in some areas, bringing a decline in snowpack. In the Alps, the warmer temperatures have melted permafrost, the frozen ground that can act as a glue in the mountains. The decrease in permafrost can create instability in the terrain and cause rockfalls.

After the four deaths were announced on Tuesday, the mayor of Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, Eric Fournier, told France Info, a public radio station, that climate change “absolutely” plays a role in creating conditions that can lead to accidents on Mont Blanc.