One of President Biden’s most trusted advisers met with officials in Israel on Monday amid deepening concern that months of cross-border violence between Israel and Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militia, could escalate into a larger regional war.

Hezbollah and Israel’s military have been trading near-daily fire since last October, when the start of the war in Gaza prompted the Iran-backed militia to launch rocket attacks on northern Israel in solidarity with Hamas.

The cross-border clashes have intensified in recent months, and Israel’s reduced combat operations in Gaza have freed up more of its forces for a possible offensive in the north against Hezbollah.

The visit by the adviser, Amos Hochstein, is part of efforts by the Biden administration to prevent “an escalation and a widening of this conflict,” John Kirby, a White House spokesman, told reporters last week.

“Amos’s travels are very much a continuation of the diplomacy that he’s been conducting now for many months to try to prevent a second front from opening up in the north there,” he said.

Mr. Hochstein met with Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and also was expected to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday. He has already made at least five trips to Israel and Lebanon since Mr. Biden tasked him with trying to prevent the clashes from expanding into a war that could be even more devastating than the conflict in Gaza.

Statements by Israeli officials in recent days suggest that the window for negotiating a political settlement to the spiraling conflict in the north might be closing.

Mr. Gallant said on Monday that he had informed U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III in an overnight phone call that time was “running out” for a diplomatic solution.

“Hezbollah continues to ‘tie itself’ to Hamas,” Mr. Gallant said in a statement. “The trajectory is clear.”

And Mr. Netanyahu told a meeting of government officials on Sunday that the situation in Israel’s north “will not continue.”

The strikes have driven more than 150,000 people in Israel and Lebanon from their homes in the border region. Those who have fled their homes in Lebanon have received little assistance from the government, which is in the middle of a prolonged financial crisis. In Israel, the government has paid to feed and house evacuees in hundreds of hotels across the country.

In his remarks on Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu said “we will do whatever is necessary to return our residents securely to their homes.”

Mr. Hochstein’s mediation efforts have involved repeated rounds of shuttle diplomacy between Beirut and Jerusalem. Because the United States designates Hezbollah a terrorist group, Mr. Hochstein has communicated with it through Lebanese government officials who act as interlocutors.

France — which maintains direct lines of communication with Hezbollah — has been pursuing its own diplomatic solution at the same time. In recent months, Mr. Hochstein has sought to better coordinate efforts with French officials, who have also been vocal about the risk of military escalation.

On Monday, France’s ambassador to Israel, Frédéric Journès, also warned of a wider conflict.

“If a full-scale war starts in Lebanon, it could turn this whole thing into a regional conflict, and then you have a regional conflict in Ukraine and a second regional conflict in the Middle East,” he said at the Haaretz National Security Conference in Israel.

“Nobody wants this war,” he added. “Iran doesn’t want it, Hezbollah doesn’t want it and Israel doesn’t want it, and yet it is very possible that it happens.”

Despite the warnings, the tit-for-tat violence continued on Monday. Israel’s military said that it had struck Hezbollah “infrastructure” in southern Lebanon on Monday after “a number of projectiles” crossed from the country into Israeli territory.

That followed Israeli artillery fire and airstrikes on southern Lebanon over the weekend in response to Hezbollah rockets that had triggered air-raid sirens and sparked brush fires in northern Israel.

Fears of a broader conflagration have risen since an Israeli airstrike in late July killed a senior Hezbollah commander in the Beirut suburbs. Iran threatened to strike Israel over the killing of a Hamas leader on its soil shortly after that.

Israeli officials have taken pains to emphasize their readiness. On Monday, Israel’s defense ministry said it had equipped 97 “rapid response units” in towns along the northern border with Lebanon with “combat and rescue gear, medical supplies, uniforms and protective equipment.”

Here’s what else is happening in the Middle East:

• Polio in Gaza: Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the main U.N. agency that aids Palestinians in Gaza, said on Monday that the first round of a polio vaccination campaign in the Gaza Strip had been successfully completed, with hundreds of thousands of children vaccinated. The next stage of the campaign aims to administer a second vaccine dose to each child by the end of September, he added.

• West Bank Violence: Israeli settlers attacked a Palestinian school in the occupied West Bank and wounded seven people, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent and Palestinian new media. In a clip shared widely on X, three men armed with batons and speaking Hebrew are seen beating people in a school courtyard. The Times verified the location of the footage to a school northwest of Jericho in the occupied West Bank. The Israeli military said it had responded to the scene, where “a number of Palestinians were injured.” Since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel and the start of the war in Gaza, attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians across the West Bank have surged.

• Netanyahu’s rival goes to Washington: Yair Lapid, the leader of Israel’s parliamentary opposition, was in Washington on Monday. His office said he was scheduled to meet with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser. Mr. Lapid, a vocal critic and rival of Mr. Netanyahu, made a similar diplomatic trip to the U.S. capital in April.

Euan Ward contributed reporting.

Since the Oct. 7 attacks and the start of the war in Gaza, no part of life in the region has been left untouched — least of all, the three great religions whose histories are rooted there.

While Israeli Jews struggle to celebrate holidays or even find common ground with one another, Palestinian Muslims and Christians are struggling to reach their holy sites at all.

Israel this year introduced some of the toughest restrictions on Ramadan prayers at Al Aqsa Mosque, one of the holiest structures in the Islamic faith. Al Aqsa, which sits atop an ancient plateau in Jerusalem that is sacred to Jews and Muslims, has long been a point of contention.

For decades, Israel’s government prevented Jews from praying on the grounds to avoid stoking tensions, and officially, it still does so. But as Israel has exerted tighter control over the site, right-wing politicians and settler groups have repeatedly entered the area to pray, a move widely seen as provocative to Palestinian Muslims.

Palestinian Muslims, particularly those coming from the West Bank, have faced routine restrictions on access to Al Aqsa for years. The Israeli agency overseeing policy for the territory, responding to a question from The New York Times about the number of Palestinians granted entry since October, said that it had issued no permits to West Bank residents, even for access to the mosque, except for “specific laborers.”

Israel is also placing tighter restrictions on the roughly 50,000 Christians who live in the West Bank.

During Easter, Israel limited access to what is known as the celebration of the Holy Fire, when a flame is taken from what is believed to be Jesus’ tomb at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and used to light the candles of visitors. Israel cited safety reasons for the change, but Palestinians accused Israeli officials of curbing the centuries-old tradition as part of efforts to push them out of their ancestral lands.

In the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Christian celebrations have also been forced to break with tradition. In April, a procession of Easter worshipers that usually winds through the streets of central Bethlehem was canceled and held inside the Church of the Nativity instead.

The growing tensions between Israelis and Palestinians are mirrored within Israeli society, in particular in the divide between secular Jews and the ultra-Orthodox, a group that is now about 13 percent of Israel’s population.

In Bnei Brak, a city east of Tel Aviv that is considered Israel’s ultra-Orthodox capital, the photographs of Israeli hostages captured on Oct. 7 that are ubiquitous in more secular areas are notably absent. And some of the ultra-Orthodox celebrating Passover this year clashed with the police over another traditional ritual: the burning of all the bread in their homes before the holiday begins.

Instead of burning their bread in trash bins, as legally required, many defied the police and went to do so on nearby hillsides, aggravating the risk of forest fires that are already plaguing northern Israel amid the daily strikes exchanged between forces in the country’s north and militants across the border in Lebanon.

For Palestinians, there is no retreat from the post-Oct. 7 landscape. Many have lost jobs they once had in Israel, and those employed by the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank, have seen their salaries cut as Israel has halted or slowed transfers of the funds that finance the territory’s operations.

The changes to the cultural and religious practices of Bethlehem’s Christians have not just dampened the mood but also devastated the economy. Tourism, which accounts for a major part of the town’s income, particularly during the holiday season, has plummeted since the start of the war.

Pilgrims no longer crowd Bethlehem’s cobblestone streets. Squares that echoed with the voices of butchers shouting out prices for their slabs of meat, or bakers selling holiday pastries, now are more likely to be silent.

During Ramadan, Laylat al-Qadr, or the Night of Power, is one of the most important dates in the Islamic calendar. For Muslims, it marks the night when the Quran was sent down from heaven to the world.

In years past, families would shop for treats and clothes ahead of that night. This spring, many residents met at their local mosque empty-handed but eager to preserve the tradition of family gatherings of prayer, while children played late into the night.

On Eid al-Fitr, the celebration at the end of Ramadan, families in the West Bank city of Nablus filled graveyards to offer early-morning prayers for loved ones there. When local fighters went to one cemetery to try to shoot guns in honor of their own dead, the families quietly asked them to move away, to avoid a potential crackdown by the authorities.

In the absence of visitors from the West Bank, many of those who traveled to Jerusalem for April’s holy days were Christian pilgrims from abroad. Yet their numbers, too, were much depleted, since tourism to Israel has plummeted more than 70 percent since the start of the war in Gaza.

While the devout of all religions push on determinedly with the practice of their faith, any feeling of celebration has struggled to survive. Those who come to Jerusalem find the long, ancient shopping thoroughfares that stretch through the city’s ancient quarters eerily empty.

A prominent lawyer in Britain, accused of trying to advance Beijing’s interests in Parliament.

An aide to a far-right politician in Germany, suspected of passing information about the inner workings of the European Parliament to China.

A politician in Canada, accused of receiving help from the Chinese Consulate organizing busloads of international students from China to vote for him in party elections.

Even before Linda Sun, a former senior aide in the New York governor’s office, was charged this month with using her position to benefit the Chinese government, suspected cases of Chinese foreign meddling had been on the rise in Western democracies.

Allegations of Chinese political interference have also surfaced in Australia, New Zealand, France, Belgium and the Netherlands in recent years.

The clandestine activity usually follows a pattern, analysts said. China recruits members of Chinese diaspora communities to infiltrate halls of power, or to silence Chinese dissidents and other critics of Beijing.

Covert Chinese operations abroad have long centered on seizing industrial secrets and technology in sensitive sectors such as the military, aviation or telecommunications, with the aim of trying to erode the United States’ edge.

What Ms. Sun is accused of doing is part of a different side of Chinese intelligence work — one that is focused on influencing political discourse so that it leans more favorably toward China’s positions on contentious issues like the status of Taiwan, the self-governing island claimed by Beijing, or the repression of China’s ethnic Uyghur minority.

Federal prosecutors said Ms. Sun, who served as a liaison to the Asian community, blocked Taiwanese officials from having access to the governor’s office and removed references to Taiwan and Uyghurs from state communications. In return, prosecutors say, she and her husband, Chris Hu, received millions of dollars in benefits.

“These are classic tactics that we are seeing,” said Anne-Marie Brady, a political scientist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, who specializes in Chinese influence efforts, referring to the allegations against Ms. Sun. “China is very proactive at trying to make use of overseas Chinese communities and ethnic Chinese politicians and officials to get information and shape policy.”

Fanned by Geopolitical Tensions

China’s attempts to interfere with Western democracies are likely to grow more acute as relations between Beijing and the West fray, Ms. Brady said. Not since the Cold War have two powers like the United States and China competed so fiercely for global influence.

Finding it harder to sway national governments in such an environment, the Chinese government has instead directed its attention to local, county and state governments, which are not as savvy at detecting such efforts, experts say.

Chinese leaders and intelligence officials may feel emboldened if their interference efforts exact little cost to Beijing, analysts say.

No Chinese diplomats at the New York consulate, for example, have been expelled from the United States despite four officials being implicated as co-conspirators in the indictment against Ms. Sun and her husband. In contrast, as recently as 2019, two Chinese officials suspected of espionage were secretly expelled from the United States for driving onto a sensitive military base in Virginia.

“The point we should be making about this case is not that a Chinese American allegedly committed this crime, but that the P.R.C. Government, and its senior officials, intentionally sought to place an American citizen into this position,” said Matt Turpin, former director for China at the National Security Council and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, referring to the People’s Republic of China. Mr. Turpin said the Biden administration should have declared the four diplomats included in Ms. Sun’s indictment as persona non grata.

“Now they just look weak,” Mr. Turpin said.

China has said virtually nothing about Ms. Sun’s arrest, and has heavily censored discussions about it online. A spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry, Mao Ning, declined to comment on the case other than to say, “We oppose malicious associations and slander against China.”

Many other countries, including Australia, Canada and New Zealand, remain divided about how to deter Chinese interference. Some want law enforcement to be more aggressive. Others fear doing so will sow racism and result in racial profiling of Chinese diaspora communities.

Those debates play into what Ms. Brady said were growing divisions in free societies, fueled by partisanship and populism, that China views as irrefutable signs of the West’s decline. Beijing aims to exploit those fissures, much as Russia has been doing, to weaken its geopolitical rivals.

“China thinks its moment is now,” Ms. Brady said. “So instead of withdrawing, they’re going harder.”

Xi’s ‘Magic Weapon’

China’s assertive tactics reflect the leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Under his rule, upholding national security has required a “whole of society” mobilization. Ordinary Chinese citizens are encouraged to spy on one another and to be suspicious of foreigners and virtually everything else. Senior leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is stacked with officials with security backgrounds. China’s spy agency, the Ministry of State Security, has also raised its ambitions and public profile, going so far as to create a social media account to publicize its investigations.

“It’s a bit like the Venetian Republic at its apogee, where everyone was potentially engaged in some form of covert activity to further the interests of the state,” said Nigel Inkster, the former director of operations and intelligence for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.

“And of course, the Chinese Communist Party was forged in a crucible of clandestinity that is still very much part of its political culture,” Mr. Inkster added, referring to the party’s emergence more than a century ago as an underground revolutionary organization.

China has tried to apply the same furtive strategy to its relations with the outside world. It supplements its normal diplomacy with a covert network of party members, organizations and overseas Chinese groups that work to promote China’s policies abroad. Those efforts, which Mr. Xi has called one of China’s “magic weapons,” often come under the guidance of a party organ known as the United Front Work Department.

The group, which had an estimated budget of $2.6 billion as recently as 2019, serves as the party’s intelligence agency. It often works in conjunction with China’s other spy agencies, which fall under the control of the military and the central government.

In 2017, when Ms. Sun was in her early 30s, she traveled to Beijing to attend an event where she was celebrated as a Chinese youth living overseas. On that same trip, Ms. Sun made a side visit to the eastern city of Nanjing in Jiangsu province, where she was born, to meet with Wang Hua, the top official for the province’s United Front Work Department.

During the meeting, Mr. Wang told Ms. Sun she should “be an ambassador of Sino-American friendship” and “actively promote solidarity” among Chinese migrants in New York, Chinese state media reported at the time.

The United Front Work Department plays prominently in other suspected cases too. In 2022, Britain’s domestic security agency, MI5, issued an alert about a British Chinese lawyer named Christine Ching Kui Lee. The notice accused Ms. Lee of acting covertly through the United Front Work Department to “cultivate relationships with influential figures in order to ensure the U.K. political landscape is favorable” to the Chinese Communist Party’s agenda. Ms. Lee has reportedly denied the allegations and has filed a lawsuit against MI5.

The United Front Work Department is also linked to an Australian Chinese community leader, Di Sanh “Sunny” Duong, the target of Australia’s first prosecution under a new foreign interference law; and bands of pro-Beijing supporters accused of attacking protesters last November in San Francisco when Mr. Xi attended the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, according to an investigation by The Washington Post.

Diaspora on the Firing Line

Mr. Xi and the party have long considered overseas Chinese populations both an asset and a risk. An estimated 60 million people of Chinese origin live outside of China, including 5.4 million in the United States, and they have been called on by Mr. Xi to help with “telling China’s story well.” They have been encouraged to “actively participate in and support” the “peaceful reunification of China,” a reference to Taiwan coming under Beijing’s control.

At the same time, Mr. Xi’s supporters overseas have worked to silence and intimidate Beijing’s critics living abroad. That has grown more urgent with the expansion of Uyghur and Hong Kong Chinese diasporas escaping crackdowns on freedoms at home. Overseas Chinese student associations, for example, have played a central role in pushing back against open criticism of Beijing and its policies on college campuses around the world.

China’s embrace of overseas Chinese has left many members of that community feeling like there is a target on their backs. In the United States, Chinese Americans have been obliged to defend their loyalties — with a chilling effect on scientists of Chinese descent. In 2022, the Justice Department scrapped a Trump-era initiative aimed at Chinese theft of American intellectual property. The program came under fire from civil rights groups and was criticized for failing to win many prosecutions.

Researchers say the emergence of Ms. Sun’s case risks trapping the diaspora between a suspicious American public and Beijing’s desire to drive a wedge between ethnic Chinese and their adopted homes.

“The freedoms of Chinese diaspora communities and the health of multicultural democracies are at stake,” said Audrye Wong, an expert on Chinese foreign influence at the University of Southern California. “Beijing likes to claim to speak on behalf of all ethnic Chinese overseas, intentionally blurring the lines between Chinese nationals and those of ethnic Chinese descent who are citizens of other countries.”

Alexandra Stevenson and Zixu Wang contributed reporting.

The Ukrainian authorities on Monday said that they had repelled a “massive” Russian attack on Kyiv in the early morning hours. They said it was the eighth attack on the Ukrainian capital in just over two weeks, in what appears to be an escalation by Russia of its long-running air campaign against the city.

Serhii Popko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, said that Ukrainian forces had shot down nearly two dozen Russian drones around Kyiv, and the Ukrainian air force said it had intercepted 53 of 56 Russian drones overnight.

Mr. Popko said that in contrast to recent attacks, “this one was massive,” and that an air-raid alert was announced about 2 a.m. in the capital and remained in effect for about three and a half hours.

The Ukrainian military’s claims could not be independently verified, and there was no comment from the Russian authorities.

One woman was injured by debris from a downed drone, the authorities said, but they reported no significant damage in the capital. The Ukrainian government did acknowledge, however, that shelling of energy infrastructure in five other regions had caused temporary power cuts over the past day.

Russia has been intensifying its assaults on the Ukrainian capital and other big cities since the beginning of the month, starting with an assault on Sept. 2, on the first day of the school year, when Russia fired a volley of missiles at Kyiv and other cities.

Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second biggest city, in the east not far from the Russian border, has also been battered by strikes in recent weeks, including an attack on Sunday that hit an apartment building, killing one and injuring more than 40 people.

Kyiv’s and Moscow’s troops are also engaged in fierce fighting in the Kursk region in western Russia, after Ukraine invaded last month in a surprise cross-border attack, capturing several villages and a small town.

The state of the fighting in the area is fluid, with both sides launching counterattacks. Russia has managed to reclaim several villages in the past few days, but Ukrainian forces breached the border in a new location around the same time, although it was unclear whether they had managed to hold onto territory there.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, on Monday said that he had asked the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit Ukrainian-controlled territories in the Kursk region and “join humanitarian efforts” in the area.

Ukraine, he added, “is ready to facilitate their work and prove its adherence to international humanitarian law.”

Whether the United Nations and the Red Cross will be able to gain access to the area in the face of heavy fighting remains to be seen.

In a statement last month, a spokesman for the Red Cross in Ukraine said the organization was ready to provide support “should we receive the necessary security guarantees for our humanitarian access from both parties to the conflict.”

Russia has not asked the United Nations and the Red Cross to visit Ukrainian-controlled areas in the Kursk region. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, called Mr. Sybiha’s invitation “provocative.” Mirjana Spoljaric, the head of the Red Cross, was visiting Moscow on Monday.

The latest attacks on Kyiv involved mostly drones, in a departure from Russia’s usual approach of launching waves of different weapons — ballistic and cruise missiles, along with drones — at Ukrainian cities to complicate the work of air defense systems.

In the past, Russia has often used drones to probe Ukrainian defenses and exhaust Ukrainian air defense ammunition, in anticipation of future and larger attacks.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Monday said that more than 640 Russian attack drones had been launched against Ukraine since the beginning of the month. The Ukrainian Army said it used antiaircraft missiles, electronic warfare units and mobile groups firing heavy gun machine mounted on trucks to repel the attack on Monday.

In addition to the assaults on Ukrainian cities, Russia is using drones on the battlefield. Ukraine’s 59th Brigade reported that nearly 160 Russian drones had attacked their positions in the past 24 hours near Pokrovsk, a strategic city in eastern Ukraine that the Russians have been closing in on in recent weeks.

For months, politics in the Caucasus nation of Georgia has been roiled by a tussle between those advocating closer relations with the West and those who lean more toward Russia.

Now, as the country prepares for critical elections in October, the leader of the governing party has ignited a political firestorm by saying that Georgia should apologize for a 2008 war with Russia for which many Georgians blame Moscow.

On Saturday, Bidzina Ivanishvili, the founder of the governing Georgian Dream party, who built his fortune in banking, metals and real estate in Russia, said that the people of South Ossetia, which broke away from Georgia in the 1990s and expanded with Russian support in 2008, should receive an apology for the war that eventually broke out.

His comments at a rally in Gori, a town that was briefly occupied by Russian forces in 2008, were quickly condemned by pro-Western activists and the opposition.

On Sunday, hundreds of people came to the Parliament building in Tbilisi, the capital, to protest against Mr. Ivanishvili’s statements, shouting, “No to the Kremlin’s diktat!”

In a statement, Mikheil Saakashvili, who was Georgia’s president at the time of the 2008 war, called Mr. Ivanishvili’s statement “an unprecedented betrayal” and “an insult to the memory of the heroes who sacrificed for our country.”

“He asked Georgians to apologize for the invader,” said Mr. Saakashvili, who is serving a six-year sentence in Georgia on charges related to abuse of power that he says were politically motivated. “We won’t be able to wash away this shame for a while.”

The 2008 war with Russia lasted five days, but it left deep wounds in Georgia. It was initially fought over the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia, but quickly spread to other parts of the country.

Russia blocked the main east-west highway, and briefly occupied the strategic Black Sea port of Poti and other towns. Its troops stopped about 25 miles from Tbilisi as a cease-fire was reached with the help of international mediators.

In 2009, an independent fact-finding mission set up by the European Union found that the war was initiated by “a sustained Georgian artillery attack” that was not “justifiable under international law” but that “much of the Russian military action went far beyond the reasonable limits of defense.” The report also accused all sides, including separatist formations, of violating international humanitarian law.

But many Georgians blame Russia for the war, which is why Mr. Ivanishvili’s comments blaming the country’s opposition set off such an uproar.

Mr. Ivanishvili, who entered Georgian politics in the early 2010s, promised a “Nuremberg trial” against members of the United National Movement, a pro-Western party that was in power during the 2008 war, after parliamentary elections next month.

After the elections, he said, “all the perpetrators of the destruction of the Georgian-Ossetian brotherhood and coexistence will receive the strictest legal response.” He called the opposition “criminals” and “traitors” who “in 2008 burned our Ossetian sisters and brothers in flames.”

“We will definitely find strength in ourselves to apologize,” said Mr. Ivanishvili, who is officially an honorary chairman of the governing party, but who is widely believed to be its shadow leader.

Mr. Ivanishvili’s remarks were part of an increasingly polarized electoral campaign in Georgia. The elections are scheduled for Oct. 26.

At the end of 1991, Georgia was among the most pro-Western states to emerge from the ashes of the Soviet Union. But in recent years, the government of the Georgian Dream party, which has been in power since 2012, has grown increasingly critical of Western policies, and unwilling to criticize Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

In May, defying large-scale protests, the Georgian government passed a law that aims to limit the influence of pro-Western nongovernmental groups and media outlets in the country.

The government is also now considering a package of bills that would ban “alternative” forms of marriage, the public promotion of same-sex relationships and gender-affirming surgery, among other measures.

Mariam Kiasashvili contributed reporting.

There is no sign on the door of the new Hamas political office in Baghdad, and the address is closely guarded. The same goes for the new Houthi office, a short drive away.

Iraqi government officials quietly allowed both Iranian-backed armed groups to establish a more permanent presence in Baghdad early this summer, after years of their representatives visiting. The shift, which Iraqi officials deny publicly even as photos of the groups in Iraq circulate on social media, comes as Iran has appeared to encourage its proxies from different countries to share military skills and even coordinate on targets.

The new offices reflect Iraq’s growing role in the shadow war between Iran, Israel and the United States.

For more than 20 years, since the U.S. invasion to oust the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, Iraq has struggled to maintain an uneasy balance between Iran, with which it shares a 1,000-mile border, and the United States, which still maintains about 2,500 troops in the country.

The balance has gradually shifted in favor of Iran. Iraq’s neighbor has worked steadily to amplify its geopolitical sway by expanding recruitment and funding of sympathetic forces inside Iraq. It is part of a larger effort by Tehran to build a regional bloc of Shiite power that extends to Lebanon with Hezbollah and to Yemen with the Houthis.

Iran in recent years pushed the Iraqi government to legitimize the country’s Shiite militias, some with loyalties to Tehran, as well as affiliated Sunni, Christian and Yazidi armed groups, by making them part of Iraq’s security apparatus. The Shiite forces have also created successful political parties, a coalition of which won enough seats in the 2021 election to choose the prime minister.

Against that backdrop of Iran’s rising influence, Iraq’s leadership acquiesced when the Houthis and Hamas wanted to open offices. Some Iraqi government officials, according to two of the people who spoke to The New York Times, say privately they are not thrilled about their new guests but did not have the power to block them, given the sway of the Iraqi political parties with ties to Iran.

The offices, mainly focused on developing links in Iraq, were established in June, according to the Iraqi and Western officials, as well as a member of an Iraqi armed group. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive topics.

Iraq and Iran’s shifting relationship

The two new offices, one for Hamas, a Sunni group, and the other for the Houthis, a Shiite one, reflect how much Iraq’s politics have changed since the time of Mr. Hussein.

Although he was a Sunni Muslim, his regime suppressed Sunni Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood with which Hamas was affiliated. He saw them as a potential threat to the hegemony of his Ba’ath Party. Many Iraqis remained leery of such groups long after Mr. Hussein’s fall, not least of all because of the rise of Sunni militants, including Al Qaeda in Iraq and, later, the Islamic State.

As for Shiite Muslim movements, they were violently suppressed under Mr. Hussein, who feared they would conspire to depose him. Members of such groups were either forced to flee or were imprisoned and executed.

Politics in Iraq today are dominated by Shiite parties, with a strong affinity to Iran. The shift has allowed foreign groups with ties to Iran to make inroads, bolstering what is known as Iran’s Axis of Resistance, its armed network across the Middle East that is dedicated to countering American and Israeli influence in the region.

Thomas Juneau, a professor of international relations at the University of Ottawa, said he and other academics had noticed a trend by Iran of encouraging armed groups from different countries to work together. They point to efforts by Iraqi and Lebanese groups on behalf of the government of Bashar al-Assad during the Syrian civil war.

There is “a growing institutionalization of relations between Iran’s partners in the Axis of Resistance,” he said. With that end in mind, he said, Tehran has created joint operation rooms and held regular meetings that bring their leaders together, efforts that have “intensified” since Hamas and its allies attacked Israel and the war in Gaza began.

One worry is that the presence of so many Iran-backed groups in Iraq could prompt Israel’s military to strike inside Iraq, further destabilizing the region.

Similarly, there are concerns that the Iraqi armed factions will team up more frequently with the Iranian backed proxies and time their attacks against Israel together. The Iraqi groups, along with the Houthis, claimed to jointly attack Israel eight times in June and three times in July, according to a strike calendar maintained by the Washington Institute, a D.C.-based think tank.

Cultivating local ties

Hamas opened its Baghdad office in Arosat, a middle-class neighborhood with a mix of two-story homes built in the 1970s and more recent construction, traversed by streets featuring a smattering of pizza cafes and furniture stores as well as new buildings, some still under construction. Parts of the area are controlled by Kata’ib Hezbollah, the most prominent and secretive of the Iraqi Shiite armed groups loyal to Iran.

The Hamas representative in Baghdad is Mohammed al-Hafi, a member of the Hamas bureau for Arab and Islamic Relations. Reached by phone last month in Baghdad, Mr. al-Hafi declined a request to speak with The Times, saying, “I do not have permission to speak with the media.”

Mr. al-Hafi, whose security detail in Iraq is provided by Kata’ib Hezbollah, has met with a number of Iraqi groups and individuals, both Shiite organizations associated with the Axis of Resistance and Sunni groups that share Hamas’s Muslim Brotherhood philosophy.

Hossam al Rubaie, a spokesman for Khadamat, an Iraqi Shiite political party affiliated with an armed group close to Iran, said he met with Mr. al-Hafi on several occasions. He said the office provides a way for Iraqis to have a direct link with Hamas.

Mr. al-Hafi is “a political figure, not a military figure, and having an office allows him to convey messages to Iraqi politicians directly, not through an intermediary,” said Mr. al Rubaie.

The opening of the Hamas office has also been a boon for the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni party that shares its Muslim Brotherhood philosophy but has had little public presence in recent years. The Brotherhood, an international Sunni organization, has been condemned as terrorist by some Arab countries, but embraced by others.

Rashid al-Azzawi, the Iraqi Islamic Party’s chairman, said that the war in Gaza, which has been devastating for civilians, has brought sympathy from Iraqis of all religions and made them more open to Hamas’s having a presence. The group, he said, is seen as fighting for “a humanitarian cause.”

The reception to the Houthis has been especially warm among Shiites.

Since early July, the Houthi representative in Iraq, Abu Idris al-Sharafi, has met with Baghdad heavy hitters, including Qais al-Khazali, the leader of the Iranian-linked armed group Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq and the founder of its influential political wing. The Houthi representative also visited tribal leaders in rural southern Iraq, posting a video on the Houthis’ Iraq channel of a speech there in which he was wearing a ceremonial dagger and gesticulating vigorously as he urged them to wage jihad against Israel.

“The presence of a representative of the Houthis in Iraq is welcomed by all political parties in Iraq,” said Saad Al-Saadi, a member of the political leadership of Sadiqoon, the leading Shiite political party in Parliament. “Especially because they represent the Yemeni government and also represent an important part of the Axis of Resistance.”

Falih Hassan contributed reporting.

The driver braked hard and came to a screeching stop. Fans gasped, awed at the precision. Referees conferred, making sure all was aboveboard.

“We’re ready to rumble,” said Markus Chencinsky, 50, a driver from Vienna.

Despite the adrenaline, the speed and the thousands of eyes, this was not a demolition derby or a stunt-driving expo.

Instead, the competitors facing off on Saturday in a central square of Frankfurt were the captains of Europe’s tram systems. They had come to Germany’s financial hub to vie for the trophy at the 11th European Tramdriver Championship.

The annual public transit jamboree might best be described as tram dressage. The drivers coaxed their commuter chariots through an obstacle course meant to test their whimsy, mettle and precision.

“We try to mirror the entire range of skills a driver should have,” said Wieland Stumpf, the president of the championship.

Some events focused on safety: Drivers had to emergency brake at a precise spot, just as if a cyclist had swerved in front of them. Another tested their ability to multitask: Could they remember a series of symbols that appeared on mock traffic signs?

A few challenges evaluated the smoothness of their touch: Drivers had to come to a stop so gently that water did not slosh out of a bowl that was filled to the brim. (A front-mounted camera showed every lost droplet: the less spilled, the more points.)

One test was downright counterintuitive: Tram billiards, in which a driver steers the vehicle to gently knock a pool cue attached to a stand into a billiard ball on a table. (The highest possible score for the billiards portion was 500 points, awarded if the ball rolled to a stop right in the middle of the table.)

“It’s not often you’re trying to hit something with your tram,” joked Victoria Young, 39, of Edinburgh. “You’ve just got this feeling inside you that says, ‘I should be stopping now.’”

Tram driving is surprisingly gentle — even for all its mandated collisions. It stands out from other niche sports involving heavy machinery.

Take lawn mower racing, which is half motocross, half go-karting. Or snowmobile watercross, in which competitors drive their vehicles onto water, almost as if they were Jet Skis.

Tram driving’s closest cousin may be the backhoe rodeo, in which operators perform delicate tasks like placing helmets onto cones using their machines’ hulking yellow claws.

But while backhoe contests typically attract construction workers, the tram competitions draw public transit fanatics with strong opinions.

“Buses are the worst,” said Nosa Tasslimi, 27.

How about the metro? “I like subways more than trams, but there are no subway competitions.”

Mr. Tasslimi even designed a soccer fan-style scarf in support of the team from Oradea, a Romanian city to which he had no obvious connection. He and his friends — who were also not Romanian — wore the scarves with pride.

Earlier this year, transit systems held internal tournaments to select their 2024 teams. With the exception of Kyiv, Ukraine, every competing city had a male and female representative, said Mr. Stumpf, the championship’s president. (Most Ukrainian men have been barred from traveling internationally during the country’s war with Russia.)

Many of the 26 competing teams thought that Frankfurt, as the home team, would have an advantage. But Mr. Stumpf thought those concerns were unfounded, adding that trams are mostly alike in terms of design and control boards. Only one host city — Brussels, in 2019 — has ever won first place.

The teams spent part of Friday racing back and forth on unused tracks near a depot, getting a feel for their vehicles. For some drivers, it was a little bit like the first few minutes spent adjusting the mirrors and the seat in a rental car.

“We have been practicing,” said Virendra Mohan, 47, of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. “But the other teams have also been practicing, too.”

Mr. Mohan had been testing his precision stops. But the drivers representing Edinburgh, which was competing for the first time, had trained two hours a week for about six weeks. Dougie White, the team’s coach, rigged up a pool table in the depot. In Frankfurt, they had to get a feel for different pedals, one of which was where the horn would normally be on their trams.

“That’ll be the biggest challenge for them,” Mr. White said: “Driving a different tram.”

Vienna, next year’s host, is already brainstorming ideas for the competition. The pressure is on: It could host teams from Asia, the Americas and beyond for the first truly world championship. So far, it’s keeping the details of the next championship largely under wraps.

Christian Ludwig, an event manager with Vienna’s public transit operator, said he came to scope out ideas. “We are a tram bowling city,” Mr. Ludwig hinted, alluding to a beloved event that was not included in this year’s rotation. “That I can say already.”

The tournaments are partly meant to laud the almighty tram, which has the feel of a bus but travels along set tracks with the precision of a subway. They have been embraced by many cities looking to limit cars.

Mostly, though, the competition is a celebration of the drivers. It’s also an attempt to market the profession.

Cities across Europe are struggling to recruit drivers, Mr. Stumpf said, and the job can be thankless. Commuters rarely acknowledge the drivers’ efforts to ensure the trams are safe, reliable and jostle-free.

Still, many drivers take immense pride in their work. At the competition, some wore socks bearing their transit company’s logo. A few wore large tram pins. Elinor Svensson, 23, painted her nails yellow and blue, the colors of the Swedish flag.

“I want my passengers to be impressed,” she said.

As she loops around Stockholm, she said, she tries to drive so smoothly that her riders take notice. But as a passenger, “you don’t really notice it when it’s good,” she admitted. “You notice it when it’s bad.”

Ms. Svensson often imagines her riders at work or in classrooms, or perhaps talking to their doctors or friends.

“If I wasn’t here,” she said, “they wouldn’t get to where they needed to be.”

That’s part of what made the weekend so joyful. For two days, the drivers were celebrities — of public transit, that is.

In the end, Budapest came out on top. It was faster, smoother — maybe luckier.

“We were training hard,” said Ákos Bodnár, 25, a member of Budapest’s team who also won the runner-up award for best driver. “We can’t believe it.”

Aishatu Bunu, an elementary schoolteacher in Maiduguri, a city in Nigeria’s northeast, woke up at 5 a.m. to the sound of her neighbors shouting.

When she opened her front door, she was greeted by the sight of rising waters outside. “We saw — water is coming,” Ms. Bunu said.

In a panic, she and her three young children grabbed some clothes and her educational certificates and fled their home into waters that quickly became chest high, eventually finding temporary shelter at a gas station.

Ms. Bunu was speaking on Friday from the bed of a truck that she managed to board with her children after several days of sheltering at various sites across the flood-stricken city. The floodwaters inundated Maiduguri early last week after heavy rainfall caused a nearby dam to overflow.

Flooding caused by the rain has devastated cities and towns across west and central Africa in recent days, leaving more than 1,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed. Up to four million people have been affected by the floods and nearly one million forced to flee their homes, according to humanitarian agencies.

The exact number of deaths has been difficult to tally given the scale of the disaster, and the officially reported figures are not up-to-date. In Nigeria, the authorities said that at least 200 people had died, but that was before the floods hit Maiduguri, which has added at least 30 people to that toll. In Niger, more than 265 have been reported dead. In Chad, 487 people had lost their lives as of last week. In Mali, which is facing its worst floods since the 1960s, 55 died.

The first night after they fled their home, Ms. Bunu said she and her children, Zara, Ahmed and Fatima, slept in a gas station. The next morning, they sought shelter in the grounds of a research institute, where they stayed for two days, sleeping in the open, surrounded by water.

Apart from a few peanuts, they had no food. Ms. Bunu said she did not think she would survive.

Scenes of devastation could be seen across Maiduguri on Friday. Dead people and animals floated past. People were trapped in schools and on rooftops. Some slept on the highway.

Over the weekend, many people were rescued across the city after being trapped by the floodwaters for days. The ground floor of the main hospital was submerged, destroying vital equipment, samples and the polio laboratory.

Rising waters swept crocodiles and deadly snakes out of the zoo and into communities, while 80 percent of the zoo’s animals drowned, according to a statement from Ali Don Best, the general manager of the Borno State Museum Park, where the zoo is.

In Nigeria and in most of the region, the floods are hitting communities already racked by conflict, displacement and poverty. Even worse flooding is forecast for later in the year.

Although Africa produces only a fraction of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, Africans bear an exceptionally heavy burden from climate change, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

And adapting to it will cost sub-Saharan Africa $30 billion to $50 billion annually over the next decade, or 2 to 3 percent of the region’s gross domestic product, it said.

“The impact of climate change is what we’re witnessing right now,” said Olasunkanmi Okunola, a scientist whose study focuses on flood risk management and climate adaptation. “There’s no way we can prevent major disasters from happening, but there are steps we can take to lessen the effect.”

He pointed to early warning systems and improving countries’ infrastructure, like drainage systems and roads.

In the Sahel, the arid strip just south of the Sahara, the problem is not usually an abundance of water, but lack of it. Decades of desertification and multiple failed rainy seasons have frequently led to drought.

That is the case in Zinder, a city in southern Niger, where last week a treasured historic mosque caved in as a result of heavy rains, captured in a resident’s video.

“The collapse is a tragedy for all Muslims in Niger and around the world,” said Macky Rabiou, an imam at the mosque, which was built in 1810.

Everybody in Zinder was grief-stricken, said Hakimin Fada, a worshiper at the mosque whose parents and grandparents had also prayed there.

“No one slept without feeling the pain,” he said. “Although we acknowledge it as Allah’s destiny, and we have to accept destiny, we can’t help but feel profound sadness.”

In neighboring Mali, Mariam Diallo, a housekeeper, said her family had spent nights trying to empty their house of water. They protected the grain they had for food, but “the water took all our shoes,” she said.

Baba Faradji N’Diaye, an environmental expert based in Mali’s capital, Bamako, said people had built everywhere, including in the river beds.

“Of course, it’s a natural disaster, but it’s also happened because of anarchic practices,” he said. And the problem will only increase as the city’s population does, he said.

“Everyone wants to move to Bamako,” he said.

In Nigeria and across the region, there is a severe lack of funding to deal with the immense humanitarian crisis. In Nigeria, for instance, the United Nations has less than half of the $927 million it says it needs to save lives by providing food and clean water, and preventing disease.

As the floods lingered in Maiduguri, the only two bridges that link the city’s eastern and western halves began to make strange noises. Cracks appeared.

Then, on Thursday one bridge collapsed, followed by the other on Friday, splitting the city in half with no access from one side to the other.

Half of Maiduguri is now underwater.

Friends and family members are trying to rescue one another, using canoes or trucks to access cutoff areas.

Ms. Bunu, the teacher, and her children were on one of those trucks on Friday, along with dozens of other women and children. They were all famished, having eaten barely anything since the floods hit.

As the truck made its way out of the waterlogged area in the pouring rain, a member of Nigeria’s House of Representatives threw two loaves of bread to the people in the truck.

The women split the loaves among the children, giving each child a few mouthfuls.

From her spot on the bed of the truck, Ms. Bunu’s head was bowed in thought. Occasionally, she looked up at the sky. She had no idea how her daughters from a previous marriage, who were staying with her sister, had fared. She tried calling but couldn’t get through.

And the flood had swallowed the family’s means of survival — their sheep, goats and chickens — as well as every household item they possessed.

“I don’t have anything now,” she said.

When they finally reached a camp, a nongovernmental organization gave them some water and food: half a can of sardines and half a loaf of bread per person.

It wasn’t clear what would happen next.

Mamadou Tapily contributed reporting from Bamako, Mali; Amma Mossa from Zinder, Niger; and Elian Peltier from Dakar, Senegal.