Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is reportedly contemplating dismissing his defense minister, a move that would help stabilize his fractious ruling coalition but potentially create instability at the top of Israel’s defense establishment at a time of mounting tensions with Hezbollah.

The Israeli press has widely reported that Mr. Netanyahu was weighing firing Mr. Gallant and replacing him with Gideon Saar, who leads the right-wing New Hope party. An official in Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition confirmed that there were such discussions, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive talks.

The talks to replace Israel’s top defense official at a time of war rattled the country as increased chatter about an escalation with Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese armed group, led many to fear a wider conflict following months of war in Gaza. Hezbollah has fired missiles and drones at Israel in solidarity with Hamas, its Palestinian ally, prompting Israeli strikes across the border into Lebanon.

Israel’s cabinet signed off overnight on a new official war goal at a meeting in an underground part of Israel’s military headquarters in Tel Aviv: returning the tens of thousands of Israelis displaced by Hezbollah rocket fire to their homes, a move that would require reducing the threat of cross-border attacks. Just a few hours earlier, Mr. Gallant had told Amos Hochstein, a U.S. official tasked with brokering a settlement between Israel and Hezbollah, that “the only way left” to achieve that goal was “military action.”

Adding to the sense of escalation, on Tuesday afternoon, the Israeli military accused Hezbollah of attempting to assassinate a retired senior member of the country’s security services with an explosive device that could be remotely detonated from Lebanon. The same operatives were behind a similar attempted attack in Tel Aviv last year, the military said. Hezbollah declined to comment.

A hawkish former general, Mr. Gallant, 65, is a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party. But the two have long butted heads: Mr. Netanyahu sought to fire Mr. Gallant last year for calling for a halt to his plan to weaken Israel’s judiciary, which prompted mass protests and a general strike.

In recent months, Mr. Gallant has repeatedly taken positions that put him at odds with Mr. Netanyahu over the conduct of Israel’s war against Hamas and its allies. He has appeared to criticize Mr. Netanyahu for not articulating a clear postwar vision for the Gaza Strip and voted against a cabinet decision to back one of the prime minister’s key cease-fire demands.

By bringing in Mr. Saar, the coalition official said, Mr. Netanyahu would stabilize his fragile governing coalition, which currently commands a thin parliamentary majority of 64 out of 120 seats and relies on hard-liners in the Israeli government. Mr. Saar’s party, while small, has enough seats to dilute the power of those hard-line parties, which have suggested they could pull out of Mr. Netanyahu’s government over policies they oppose, including a potential cease-fire with Hamas.

Neither Mr. Netanyahu nor Mr. Saar has explicitly denied that the two are negotiating his entry into the government. In a statement, Mr. Saar’s party said there was “nothing new” on the matter, while Mr. Netanyahu’s office said that the reports were incorrect. Neither statement mentioned Mr. Gallant.

But a growing number of Likud lawmakers have called for Mr. Gallant’s immediate dismissal in recent days, accusing him of being disloyal to Mr. Netanyahu and undermining the government.

“It’s insufferable, and the prime minister seems to understand that it’s insufferable, and that a new defense minister is needed,” Shlomo Karhi, a Likud minister, said in a televised interview on Tuesday. “Who will that be? What’s needed is someone the prime minister can trust.”

Mr. Gallant’s dismissal would remove perhaps the most significant Israeli leader who vigorously supports a cease-fire deal that would free the hostages held in Gaza. He has also been a key point of contact for the United States amid tensions between Mr. Netanyahu and the Biden administration.

It could also help Mr. Netanyahu smooth over a domestic political crisis with his ultra-Orthodox coalition allies. Mr. Netanyahu must pass a new law to regulate the long-running exemption for the ultra-Orthodox from military service or else a new Supreme Court ruling will force them to enlist — a red line for many in the community.

Mr. Netanyahu hopes that Mr. Saar will be more willing to compromise than Mr. Gallant, who had demanded that any new legislation enjoy broad support across the political spectrum, said Nadav Shtrauchler, an Israeli political consultant who has worked for the prime minister.

Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant have differences that precede the war with Hamas.

“It’s no secret that the two of them have clashed in most stages of the war, and it’s only gotten worse,” Mr. Shtrauchler said.

In May, Mr. Gallant warned that the lack of a postwar plan for governing Gaza could force Israel to impose direct military rule in the territory, costing it “blood and many victims, for no purpose.” His remarks were widely understood as an implicit criticism of Mr. Netanyahu.

Three months later, he was the sole Israeli minister to vote against a cabinet decision that prevented Israel from withdrawing from Gaza’s border with Egypt as part of a cease-fire agreement, widely seen as a key obstacle to reaching a deal with Hamas. Mr. Netanyahu has insisted that Israel maintain a presence there during a proposed truce.

Mr. Saar, 57, is a longtime veteran of Israel’s political landscape who never quite managed to clinch one of the most senior ministerial posts. A former member of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party, Mr. Saar broke with him in 2020 in an attempt to challenge the prime minister.

At the time, Mr. Saar vowed he would not join Mr. Netanyahu. After the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, he entered an emergency unity government with Mr. Netanyahu alongside Benny Gantz, another opposition politician, before withdrawing in March.

His New Hope party now has low support in opinion polls, most of which show it would not receive enough votes to again enter Parliament at all. Mr. Saar likely hoped the prominence of the job would put him back on the political map, said Mr. Shtrauchler.

Gabby Sobelman and Euan Ward contributed reporting.

Israel says it has killed thousands of Hamas’s militants, dismantled the command structure of nearly all its battalions and pummeled its tunnel network. The bombing campaign in Gaza has been so devastating that the urban landscape in the territory has become unrecognizable.

But Israel’s military has said that eliminating Hamas isn’t possible — even if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for “total victory” over the militant group.

One of Hamas’s most senior officials, Khaled Meshal, maintains that the group is even winning the war and will play a decisive role in Gaza’s future.

“Hamas has the upper hand,” Mr. Meshal said in an interview with The New York Times in Doha, Qatar, where he is based. “It has remained steadfast” and brought the Israeli military into “a state of attrition,” he said.

Hamas’s reasoning is simple — winning simply means surviving and, at least for now, the group has managed to do that, even if it is severely weakened.

The comments by Mr. Meshal, 68, in the two-hour interview in the living room of his home in Doha, offered rare insights into the thinking of Hamas officials. He is one of the most senior figures in Hamas’s political office and is considered a key architect of the group’s strategy.

Mr. Meshal was the target in 1997 of a failed assassination attempt by Israel in Jordan, and he served as Hamas’s political chief for more than two decades. In early September, U.S. federal prosecutors unsealed charges against him and other Hamas leaders, accusing them of playing a central role in planning and carrying out the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.

In the interview, Mr. Meshal made clear that Hamas officials are not in a rush to conclude a cease-fire with Israel at any price, and will not give up on their main demands for an end to the war and an Israeli withdrawal.

Independent analysts have made similar assessments about Hamas’s priorities. “They completely feel time is on their side,” said Ghaith al-Omari, an expert on Palestinian affairs. “They think they’re the only game in town.”

It is a confidence continuously tested on the battlefield in Gaza. While Hamas remains a powerful force in the enclave, it has faced criticism from Gazans who blame the group for putting them in harm’s way. And Hamas’s definition of success may no longer be valid if the war drags on for years and Israel succeeds in taking out much of Hamas’s remaining firepower, according to Palestinian analysts.

At the war’s start, President Biden expressed a similar position to that of Mr. Netanyahu — that Hamas needed to be eliminated. But Mr. Biden no longer speaks of its eradication, and both the United States and Israel have taken part in indirect negotiations with Hamas.

Mr. Meshal said he took that to mean that the United States was acknowledging Hamas was not going anywhere.

“The Israeli-American vision wasn’t talking about the day after the war, but the day after Hamas,” he said, referring to the initial stance by Israel and the United States.

Now, he said, the United States is saying, “We’re waiting for Hamas’s response.”

“They’re practically recognizing Hamas,” he added, without mentioning that the group has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel.

Some current and former Israeli security officials also say they believe that Hamas is unlikely to be defeated in this war.

“Hamas is winning this war,” Maj. Gen. Gadi Shamni, a former commander of the Israeli military’s Gaza division, said. “Our soldiers are winning every tactical encounter with Hamas, but we’re losing the war, and in a big way.”

Thousands of Hamas fighters and government officials continue to wield control over large parts of Gaza. In cities where Israeli forces briefly took control, their eventual departure left a void that was swiftly filled by Hamas and other militant groups.

General Shamni said that while it was undeniable that Israel has devastated Hamas’s military capabilities, Hamas has retaken towns within “15 minutes” of Israeli withdrawals.

“There’s no one that can challenge Hamas there after Israeli forces leave,” he said.

The greatest failure, General Shamni said, is that Mr. Netanyahu has not tried to introduce a realistic alternative governing body in Gaza in the aftermath of Israeli retreats.

In late June, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, dismissed Mr. Netanyahu’s proposition that Hamas could be wiped out.

“Hamas is an idea,” he told Israel’s Channel 13. “Those who think we can make Hamas disappear are wrong,” he said. “The thought that it is possible to destroy Hamas, to make Hamas vanish — that is throwing sand in the eyes of the public.”

Last month, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described Mr. Netanyahu’s “total victory” slogan as “nonsense.” And some Israeli security officials have said the battle with Hamas will be left for their children.

The Israeli military has said it has killed more than 17,000 militants in Gaza. A military intelligence official said this summer that Israel had succeeded in undermining Hamas’s ability to fire long-range rockets at Israel, though they had other less sophisticated munitions.

The process of taking over and demolishing tunnels, the official said, was an extremely complex engineering project that could take years.

Some members of the military leadership have concluded that a cease-fire with Hamas was the best path forward, even if it leaves the group in power for the time being.

Despite Hamas’s immense losses, including many senior commanders killed by Israel, Mr. Meshal said he was confident that the group would play a dominant role in Gaza following the war. He dismissed alternative American and Israeli proposals for administering the territory without Hamas.

“All their illusions about filling the vacuum are behind us,” he said.

The United States has proposed bringing a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority to Gaza; Israel’s defense minister has suggested that Arab forces provide security in the territory; and Mr. Netanyahu has considered working with “local stakeholders with managerial experience.”

“Assuming Hamas won’t be in Gaza or influencing the situation is a mistaken assumption,” Mr. Meshal said, insisting that Palestinians alone would determine arrangements for the territory.

Hamas’s confidence about maintaining a dominant role in a postwar Gaza has also been seen in private meetings with Palestinian politicians.

When Samir al-Mashharawi, a Palestinian politician, met with Hamas leaders in Doha in November of 2023, Hamas appeared willing to share power broadly in Gaza, even on the sensitive issue of security, according to two Palestinians familiar with the gathering. Mr. al-Mashharawi is a close confidante of Mohammed Dahlan, an influential Palestinian exile who works for the president of the United Arab Emirates.

When Mr. Mashharawi met Hamas officials more than six months later, they shared a more uncompromising message: the group was ready to work together on civilian issues, but Hamas’s military wing and its internal intelligence forces were off limits, the two Palestinians said.

With the first anniversary of the war approaching, Akram Atallah, a columnist for Al-Ayyam, a Ramallah-based newspaper, listed Hamas’s accomplishments: It has stopped Israel from achieving a decisive victory; it has forced Israel to dispatch representatives to negotiate with it; and it has preserved a substantial number of fighters.

He also said that Hamas’s grip could be undone with time. “If the war ends now, it would be a victory for Hamas,” Mr. Atallah said. “But if it ends in two years, the results could change, and we don’t know where things will go.”

Whatever happens to Hamas, it is civilians who have paid the highest price in Gaza. Tens of thousands of people have been killed, and most of its population of around 2 million has been displaced.

Many Palestinians in Gaza have lashed out at Hamas for launching the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that left 1,200 people dead, accusing the group of giving Israel a pretext to wage a massive bombing campaign that has reduced cities to rubble.

Mr. Meshal dismissed criticism of Hamas’s decision. Palestinian critics of Hamas represented a minority, he said.

“As a Palestinian, my responsibility is to fight and resist until liberation,” he said.

He acknowledged that the assault had caused enormous destruction but said it was a “price” Palestinians must pay for freedom.

Asked how the Hamas-led attack had helped improve the situation given the devastation in Gaza, he insisted it was less about achieving a military victory over Israel than making it realize its policies weren’t sustainable.

“Before Oct. 7, Gaza was dying a slow death,” Mr. Meshal said. “We were in a big prison and we wanted to get rid of this situation.”

Testifying for the first time in a trial that has transfixed and horrified France, Dominique Pelicot said on Tuesday that he had “nothing but love” for his wife but a sex addiction controlled him, and he couldn’t stop himself from drugging her and raping her, and bringing other men into their home to rape her along with him while she was unconscious.

Mr. Pelicot, 71, added that his illness was created by traumatic episodes in his childhood, notably a sexual assault he said he suffered at age 9, when he was admitted to hospital with a head injury, and a nurse sexually assaulted him. His wife, he said, had saved him from that horror for a long time.

“She didn’t deserve this, I recognize that,” he said in tears sitting on the stand, his voice so weak that the court strained to hear him.

“I regret what I did and ask for forgiveness, even if it unforgivable,” he said later, addressing his ex-wife, Gisèle Pelicot, who stood in the middle of the court and looked directly at him as he testified.

Including Mr. Pelicot, some 51 men are on trial together, mostly on charges of the aggravated rape of Ms. Pelicot. One has pleaded guilty for similarly drugging his own wife to rape her and inviting Mr. Pelicot to their home to rape her while she was drugged.

Mr. Pelicot’s appearance on Tuesday came as a surprise. Just one week into the trial, he fell so ill that he missed four days of court, until the head judge finally postponed the hearing. Mr. Pelicot was diagnosed with kidney stones, a kidney infection and prostate problems.

After dispatching medical experts to assess him on Monday, the Avignon court’s head judge, Roger Arata, ruled Mr. Pelicot was well enough to attend, seated in a comfortable chair and given regular breaks to rest.

The accused men fill the benches of the court. Eighteen of them sit in two glass boxes, one built especially for the trial. The rest arrive daily, hiding their faces behind medical masks and baseball hats pulled low over their heads, walking past a growing line of journalists and spectators.

They are a cross-section of working- and middle-class rural France, ranging in age from 26 to 74; they include truck drivers, members of the military, a nurse, an IT specialist and a journalist. Most are accused of going to the retired couple’s house in the town of Mazan and raping Ms. Pelicot once. A handful are accused of returning and raping her repeatedly.

More than a dozen have admitted their guilt, including Mr. Pelicot. But lawyers for many others have argued that their clients did not intend to rape Ms. Pelicot. The lawyers for several have said that they were tricked into believing they were joining a sexual threesome among consenting adults and that she was only pretending to sleep.

Over the past two weeks, many of the more than 40 lawyers in the courtroom have painted Mr. Pelicot as a master manipulator — overseeing the bedroom scene like a film director, coaxing the men, lying to them and urging them on.

“Without the intention to commit it, there is no rape,” Guillaume De Palma, a lawyer representing six of the accused, said in an interview. His clients, he said, had all gone to the Pelicots’ house just once, believing Ms. Pelicot was consenting. None of them knew she had been drugged, he said.

“They were being filmed. So there was no reason to think it was a rape,” he said, adding that the idea of agreeing to being filmed while committing a rape was “surreal.”

In a voice that grew stronger as the morning proceeded, Mr. Pelicot addressed his fellow accused.

“Today I maintain that I am a rapist, like those in this room,” he said, dressed in gray jacket zipped all the way up. “They all knew her condition before they came, they knew everything. They cannot say otherwise.”

Later, his words caused a gasp in the courtroom among lawyers and defendants: “They came looking for me. I was asked, I said yes. They accepted, they came. I did not handcuff anybody to make them come to my place.”

Until the shock of Mr. Pelicot’s arrest, the family considered themselves very close, often visiting and vacationing together. By their descriptions, no one suspected anything. Mr. Pelicot agreed that it was “an ideal family,” and added “It was just me that wasn’t.”

He flatly refuted allegations made earlier, by his daughter and the former wife of his youngest son, that he had ever improperly touched — or attempted to touch — his daughter or grandchildren.

“When you suffered as a child what I suffered, you are not at all tempted by that kind of thing,” he said. “I have never touched a child. I would never touch one.”

As a teenager, he also was forced to witness a gang rape while working as an apprentice electrician on a construction site, he said. “I’m not looking for excuses, but these are the facts,” he said.

Prosecutors pieced the case together after Mr. Pelicot was arrested in September 2020 for filming up the skirts of women shopping in a grocery store. The police seized his electronic devices and a laptop from his home, discovering a first batch of videos and photos, which led to his arrest that November for the broader crimes.

Eventually the police discovered more than 20,000 videos and photos on Mr. Pelicot’s computers and hard drives, many of them dated and labeled, in a folder titled “abuse.” Some of the videos are expected to be shown during the trial as evidence.

Explaining why he had taken the videos, edited them in a giant digital library and titled them all, Mr. Pelicot said: “Part pleasure but also, part insurance. Because of that, we could find all those who participated.”

Ms. Pelicot, who has divorced Mr. Pelicot and renounced her former surname but is using it in court during the trial, was entitled under French law to remain anonymous and have the case tried privately. Instead, she made the relatively rare decision to ask that it be public.

She wanted to shift the shame to the accused, her lawyers said, and she stated that she hoped her story would help other victims of drugging and abuse.

During her own harrowing testimony, Ms. Pelicot described her former husband as the love of her life. They met at 19 and soon built a life together, having three children and then seven grandchildren, who often visited. She said she had no idea that she had been drugged or abused.

On Tuesday, she sat in court and listened, often putting on her sunglasses to hide her emotion. When asked if she wanted to respond to her ex-husband’s testimony, she again took the stand and told the court that she found it all difficult to hear. They had been together for 50 years, she said, and “could never have imagined for a single second he could commit these acts of rape.”

“I had total trust in this man,” she added.

She had, however, suffered disturbing symptoms for many years that led her to fear she had a brain tumor or was developing Alzheimer’s: hair and weight loss, and large gaps in her memory, with whole days and nights blacked out.

As a result of her decision to testify publicly, she has become a feminist icon and hero of sexual assault survivors in France. Thousands of women rallied in her support over the weekend at events across France. Posters and street paintings celebrating her have gone up not only in Avignon, but elsewhere in the country.

Each day, so many people arrive at the courthouse to watch that there is regularly a lineup outside the door of a second overflow room, where the proceedings are shown on a large television screen. On Tuesday, they lined the path between the courtroom and the exit at lunch to applaud and cheer Ms. Pelicot as she walked by.

Earlier this week, Ms. Pelicot stopped briefly to acknowledge the support.

“Thanks to all of you, I have the strength to fight this battle to the end,” she told a battery of cameras and outstretched microphones. She offered a message to victims of sexual violence around the world.

“Look around you,” she said. “You are not alone.”

A Greek oil tanker that was stuck in the Red Sea since it was attacked by the Houthi militia group last month has been towed to safety without incident, the European Union’s naval mission said.

The three-day effort to rescue the MV Delta Sounion, which was still burning following the Aug. 21 attack, about 90 miles off the coast of Yemen, ended on Monday, the E.U. mission said. There were no leaks from the vessel, which was carrying 150,000 metric tons of crude oil, the equivalent of about one million barrels, it said.

The Houthis, based in Yemen, have sought to disrupt crucial shipping lanes through the Red Sea in a show of solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

No crew members were injured in the attack, but the tanker’s cargo had posed a serious environmental risk and made the rescue effort more complex. Adding to the precarity, the ship was a sitting duck for potential repeat attacks, though the Houthi militia had said it would allow the Sounion’s retrieval.

The group’s spokesman, Mohammed Abdulsalam, told Iranian media last month that it made the decision out of “humanitarian and environmental concerns.”

The U.S. State Department had warned that a spill from the tanker would be four times the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska.

The rescue operation began on Saturday, with three warships from the E.U. Red Sea mission guarding the tugboats that would tow the 900-foot long tanker. Fires continued to burn on the deck as the tugboats hitched ropes to the Sounion, according to images posted by the naval mission. It was eventually pulled to an undisclosed location without incident, the mission said.

The E.U. mission was established last year in response to increasing Houthi attacks and mounting insecurity in the Red Sea, a key route for commercial shipping through the Suez Canal.

Known to target vessels sailing through the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, the Houthis have stepped up attacks since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.

After gaining control of large swathes of territory in northern Yemen, the Houthis, also known as the Ansarrullah Movement, have become the de facto government of the Gulf country. The Shiite militants have waged an armed insurgency in Yemen for more than two decades, with the backing of Iran.

After six years of investigations, delays and behind-the-scenes battles, a hearing finally began this week into allegations that Manchester City used a yearslong cheating scheme to transform itself into a global soccer powerhouse and a serial Premier League champion.

The hearing is among the most consequential in British sports history, the culmination of a case that has been the talk of English soccer since the Premier League charged Manchester City with more than 100 violations of its financial regulations last year.

The charges — that City corrupted the world’s richest soccer competition for a decade or more — threaten to rewrite years of Premier League history. And the repercussions might go well beyond the soccer field. In accusing City’s owner, the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, of presiding over years of rule-breaking, the case could veer into the highest levels of international diplomacy.

And then there are the fans. With the suggestions that cheating helped to deliver trophies to City while wealthy rivals were left empty-handed, the hearing has incited the passions of tens of millions of soccer followers around the world.

Whatever is decided will shape the Premier League for years to come: Either Manchester City will have been found to have corrupted the world’s richest soccer competition, or the league will have been unable to enforce its rules against one of its most powerful members.

What is the Manchester City case about?

It is now 19 months since the Premier League announced a set of charges against Manchester City so wide in scope that the reputational damage to the team’s decade of success will most likely be stained even if it prevails. The charges date back to 2009, a year after City’s purchase by the brother of the ruler of Abu Dhabi. That acquisition began a turbocharged era of spending — and success — for a club that had not won a championship since 1968.

The Premier League has accused City of 115 specific rule breaches. The bulk are related to violations of its financial regulations, including failing to provide accurate financial information; submitting inflated figures for sponsorship deals involving Emirati companies, such as the airline Etihad and the telecoms company Etisalat; and hiding off-the-books payments that supplemented the salaries of managers and players. Other charges accuse City of not cooperating during the investigation, which took almost four years and millions of dollars to complete.

The case has done little to slow City on the field: The club has won the past four Premier League championships as well as, in 2023, its first Champions League trophy.

How long will the hearing take?

The hearing, which some news outlets have described as the “trial of the century,” will take place out of view, inside a building in London’s financial district that is home to the International Dispute Resolution Centre — a privately owned facility for businesses to untangle conflicts away from prying eyes.

Manchester City, which has long leaned on lawyers to defend itself or to delay any reckoning, has assembled a cast of some of Britain’s most expensive legal minds. Its defense is being led by David Pannick, a lawyer whose hourly rate puts him in the same wage bracket as Erling Haaland, the Norwegian striker whose goals have carried City to its most recent titles.

Tuesday was the second day of a hearing that is expected to last 10 weeks, and a verdict is not expected until early next year. That means the case will shadow more than half of the current Premier League season, in which Manchester City is already atop the standings as it pursues a record-extending fifth successive domestic title.

What is City saying?

Manchester City has consistently denied all of the charges, even before they were enumerated by the Premier League last year, and has said that its case is supported by a “comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence.”

It has never provided that evidence publicly, however, saying the claims are based on “illegal hacking and out-of-context publication of City emails.”

Wait: illegal hacking?

The City case has roots in the publication of a trove of documents called Football Leaks. They were released by a Portuguese computer hacker, Rui Pinto, after he gained access to the internal files of some of the biggest teams in global soccer. His supporters called him a whistle-blower; the clubs labeled him a thief.

The thousands of documents, messages and emails he uncovered, though, pointed at an ugly underbelly to the multibillion dollar soccer industry, and led to embarrassment and, in a few cases, legal fallout for some of the biggest personalities and institutions in soccer. But it is the City case that has always seemed to have the most ramifications given the size of the Premier League and the owner of Manchester City, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who, apart from his political clout in the United Arab Emirates, is one of the richest men in the world.

Mr. Pinto has been imprisoned in Portugal and faces other charges related to his activities targeting the soccer industry. The City case, he said in a statement released by his lawyer, “clearly demonstrates once again the importance of the Football Leaks revelations, its public interest and its generalized value that outweighs other interests.”

What could happed to City if it loses?

There is no precedent for a punishment on the array of charges City faces. Everton, a team that was found guilty of only one charge of breaching the Premier League’s financial rules, was initially hit with a 10-point deduction in the standings last year, the biggest penalty in the league’s history. (The punishment was later reduced to six points on appeal.)

The range of potential punishments Manchester City faces includes huge fines, a significant points deduction or even the ultimate sanction: expulsion from the Premier League. Any penalty could lead rival clubs to press claims for honors they feel were denied them. And a significant sporting punishment — such as banishment from the Champions League — could lead to the breakup of the dominant, star-studded roster assembled by City’s Spanish manager, Pep Guardiola.

The hearing even has high stakes for international relations. The British government appeared to confirm discussions between the Foreign Office and the United Arab Emirates when it declined Freedom-of-Information requests about talks regarding the case, arguing that “detailing our relationship with the U.A.E. government could potentially damage the bilateral relationship between the U.K. and the U.A.E.”

Since the very beginning, the trial in the southern city of Avignon has riveted, and stunned, France. Dozens of men stand accused of raping a drugged woman. The man accused of masterminding the alleged abuse was her own husband, Dominique Pelicot. He is accused of drugging her, raping her and inviting the other men to join him.

Prosecutors say that, for almost a decade, Mr. Pelicot drugged his wife, Gisèle, 71, to rape her and filmed the abuse. Mr. Pelicot has pleaded guilty to all of the charges against him, including aggravated rape and drugging.

On Tuesday, Mr. Pelicot testified for the first time during the trial.

“She didn’t deserve this, I recognize that,” he said in tears from the stand. He later addressed his wife, who looked directly at him. “I regret what I did and ask for forgiveness, even if it unforgivable.”

Ms. Pelicot has said that she has no memory of the abuse but that, over the years, she began to experience frightening, unexplained symptoms.

She said she lost hair and weight, at times spoke incoherently and suffered memory blackouts. She feared she was developing Alzeimer’s or a brain tumor.

In 2020, the police investigated Mr. Pelicot after three women said he had tried to film up their skirts in a supermarket. The police then seized electronic devices from his house and found thousands of videos or pictures of rapes and other sexual abuse. Using the photographs and videos, the police spent the next two years identifying and charging other suspects.

Here’s some background on the case.

Why is this case so different?

Much about the scope of the case is unusual. How long prosecutors say the abuse went on. The number of defendants. The variety of their ages, professions and backgrounds.

The case has widened perceptions of who might commit sexual crimes. “Sexual offenders are often imagined as being dysfunctional misfits, when, in reality, they are Mr. Everyman,” said Audrey Darsonville, a professor of criminal law at the University of Nanterre and an expert on rape. “That’s what this trial reminds us.”

In addition, under French rules, Ms. Pelicot could have kept the trial and its sordid accusations private. Instead, she chose to make it public in the hope that it would shed light on drug-facilitated assault.

Who is charged with what?

Of the 51 defendants, who are between 26 and 74 years old, 48 of them, including Mr. Pelicot, are charged with the aggravated rape of Ms. Pelicot. One is charged with sexually assaulting her, a lesser offense, and another with attempted rape.

Mr. Pelicot is additionally charged with drugging and accused of “taking, recording or transmitting” sexual images of his daughter, daughter-in-law and former daughter-in-law.

Only one of the men is not charged with abusing Ms. Pelicot. Instead, that man is accused of following the same model and drugging his own wife to rape her. Mr. Pelicot is charged with raping the man’s wife while she was drugged.

More than a dozen of the men have pleaded not guilty. Many who dispute the facts say they were tricked into having sex with Ms. Pelicot, lured by her husband for a playful three-way encounter and told she was pretending to sleep because she was shy.

Who will judge the trial, and what could the punishments be?

The trial is taking place before five professional judges. There is no jury, following a 2019 law that entrusts to regional criminal courts the trials of crimes punishable by 15 or 20 years, such as rape or robbery. To speed up the proceedings, these courts use only magistrates, not juries.

The accused all face up to 20 years in prison, which is the maximum sentence for rape in France unless the victim is tortured or killed.

What has happened at the trial so far?

The first day was devoted to addressing whether the trial would be open to the public, which was important to Ms. Pelicot. The judges ruled in favor of an open trial.

The following two days were spent reading the statement of facts and explaining how the yearslong investigation was conducted.

On the fourth day, Ms. Pelicot testified. She told the court that over the 50 years of their relationship, she had trusted him implicitly and had what she considered a normal sex life. “I thought we were a strong couple,” Ms. Pelicot said. “We had everything to be happy.”

She then recounted the point at which her life fell apart, one afternoon in 2020 when the police showed her pictures of what they said was her husband abusing her. She said she contemplated suicide. “I don’t know how I survived,” she told the courtroom.

The next day in court, Mr. Pelicot’s daughter, who goes by the pen name Caroline Darian, testified, saying that after being shown photos of herself asleep that she does not remember being taken, she suspects her father drugged her, and possibly abused her, too. His lawyer says he denies that accusation.

“What can you do for a person like me to heal?” his daughter asked the court, adding, “How do you rebuild from the ashes?”

Later in the trial, a group of lawyers said it would press charges over threats that some defendants and their families received after pictures showing some of their faces and a list of their names circulated on social media.

Can photographs be taken in the courtroom?

The court forbids any photographs of victims or accused people without their written consent. Through their lawyers, Ms. Pelicot and her children have given their consent, which is why they appear in photographs from court. The defendants have not.

What can we expect moving forward?

The court is expected to hear testimony about each of the defendants over time, trying to work through the cases against five to eight of them each week, according to a provisional timeline set by the court.

The trial is expected to last into December, although the schedule is subject to change.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has lost a Parliament seat it had held for decades in a special election in Montreal, a devastating defeat that is likely to increase pressure on Canada’s deeply unpopular leader to resign.

The Bloc Québécois, a national party that supports independence for Quebec, narrowly won the race that was held on Monday, according to final results released early on Tuesday morning. It was the Liberals’ second stunning election loss in three months.

The result underscored how support for the Liberals has evaporated, even in their last few strongholds, ahead of the next general election, which must be held by the fall of 2025 but is likely to take place in the spring.

Mr. Trudeau has pledged to lead his party in that election, saying over the weekend that he would not quit even if the Liberals lost on Monday.

Mr. Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa on Tuesday morning that “there’s all sorts of reflections to take’’ on the election outcome.

“Obviously, it would have been nicer to be able to win,’’ Mr. Trudeau said. “But there’s more work to do and we’re going to stay focused on doing it.”

The defeat could set up an endgame for Mr. Trudeau’s third term in office. The main opposition Conservative Party is likely to redouble its efforts to quickly bring down his government, as polls predict the Conservatives cruising to a landslide in the next election. For the past year, Mr. Trudeau’s approval ratings have stagnated just above 20 percent and trailed those of Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, by double digits.

To survive, Mr. Trudeau could increasingly call on the Bloc Québécois and another small opposition party, the New Democrats. Both might prefer dealing with the Liberals to eke out victories for themselves, rather than face a potential Conservative majority that could easily pass legislation on its own.

The election in Montreal, held to fill a single vacant seat in Parliament’s House of Commons, assumed outsize significance because it was seen as a referendum on Mr. Trudeau.

After his party unexpectedly lost a special election in June — in Toronto, another Liberal redoubt — the prime minister faced calls from within his own party to step aside. Mr. Trudeau rejected the criticism, instead using his powers as party leader to quash internal dissent.

The Conservatives now enjoy an overwhelming lead in the polls across Canada — except in the French-speaking province of Quebec, which amplified the importance of Monday’s special election.

Mr. Trudeau’s popularity has plummeted as his government has seemed increasingly out of touch with the concerns of ordinary Canadians. On issue after issue — the high cost of living, a housing shortage, problems stemming from the record number of temporary workers or foreign students — his government has reacted with policy changes only after being pummeled by the opposition.

The government has also been accused of minimizing the threat of foreign interference in Canadian politics. It long opposed a public inquiry into the issue, which is now underway and has uncovered attempts by China and India to meddle in Canadian elections.

In the weeks leading up to Monday’s vote, the Liberal candidate had been locked in a tight three-way race against Louis-Philippe Sauvé of the Bloc Québécois and Craig Sauvé of the left-leaning New Democratic Party, who came in third on Monday. (The two are not related.)

The district, called LaSalle — Émard — Verdun, had been considered a reliable Liberal seat: in the party’s grip almost continuously for more than half a century, and the base for a former Liberal prime minister and a former Liberal justice minister.

In the last election, in 2021, Mr. Trudeau’s party won the district — made up of working-class and gentrifying neighborhoods, with linguistically and culturally diverse residents — by more than 20 percentage points.

This time, things went very differently.

After the seat suddenly became vacant early this year, three competitors launched campaigns to become the Liberal candidate. They said senior party officials had assured them that it would be an open nomination, and they were angered when Mr. Trudeau abruptly handpicked a city councilor named Laura Palestini to run.

With many voters expressing fatigue over Mr. Trudeau’s leadership, the prime minister was conspicuously absent from the local campaign, even though his own electoral district lies a short drive away.

Mr. Trudeau’s face was nowhere to be seen on Liberal Party campaign posters, though other parties featured their leaders. The prime minister made only two low-key campaign stops, including one over the weekend to a senior home. That appearance was closed to the news media.

Ms. Palestini refused nearly all interview requests, and her staff declined to let journalists accompany her on the campaign trail.

In one rare interview, she tried to distance herself from Mr. Trudeau. “It’s about me. It’s not about the P.M.,” she told the Canadian Press, referring to the election and to the prime minister.

By contrast, the candidates for the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Québécois ran energetic campaigns. Leaders for both parties showed up frequently in the district, at the southern point of the island of Montreal, to back their candidates.

For Catherine Auclair, meeting the New Democratic leader, Jagmeet Singh, in person was the clincher. Ms. Auclair, 27, had been hesitating between the New Democrats and the Bloc Québécois, but said she was won over after hearing Mr. Singh speak on the housing crisis and other issues.

“I found Jagmeet Singh close to the people, and seeing him more than once here made me feel that he cared about our issues,’’ Ms. Auclair said after voting on Monday.

At age 23, Jackson Hofer had now voted three times in his life — “once for Trudeau and now two times for Jagmeet Singh,” as he put it.

Mr. Hofer, who was studying to be a pilot, said he felt that Mr. Trudeau has been a good leader, citing his policies on the environment and L.G.B.T.Q. rights.

“He’s done a good job for the nine years he’s been in power,” Mr. Hofer said. “But nine years, maybe it’s time to go.”

On Monday, a second special election to fill a vacancy was held in Winnipeg. But the Liberals were not contenders in that district, which remained in the hands of the New Democratic Party.