Hundreds of pagers carried by Hezbollah members exploded simultaneously across Lebanon on Tuesday, a day after Israeli officials said they were ready to step up attacks against the Iranian-backed militia.

The pagers exploded on sidewalks and in grocery stores, at homes and inside cars, killing at least 11 people and wounding at least 2,700 others, officials said. Witnesses reported smoke coming from pants pockets before loud bangs knocked people off their feet. Hezbollah said at least eight of its fighters had been killed.

Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, said that one of those killed was an 8-year-old girl and that many victims had maimed hands and injured eyes. The health ministry put hospitals on “maximum alert,” and asked citizens to throw out their pagers.

Hezbollah has used pagers for years to make it harder for messages to be intercepted. At 3:30 p.m., the pagers received a message that appeared as though it was coming from Hezbollah’s leadership, according to two officials familiar with the attack. The pagers beeped for several seconds before exploding.

The blasts appeared to be the latest salvo in a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah that escalated after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, and Hezbollah, its ally, began firing rockets into northern Israel in support. Both militant groups are backed by Iran.

Although Israeli officials neither claimed nor denied responsibility for the explosions, Israel has a long history of sophisticated sabotage and assassination operations against its adversaries.

According to American and other officials briefed on the attack, Israel hid explosive material in a shipment of Taiwanese-made pagers imported into Lebanon.

The explosive material, as little as one or two ounces, was inserted next to the battery in each pager, two of the officials said. The pagers, which Hezbollah had ordered from the Gold Apollo company in Taiwan, had been tampered with before they reached Lebanon, according to some of the officials. According to one official, Israel calculated that the risk of harming people not affiliated with Hezbollah was low, given the size of the explosive.

Over 3,000 pagers were ordered from Gold Apollo, the officials said. Hezbollah distributed the pagers to its members throughout Lebanon, with some reaching the group’s allies in Iran and Syria, the officials said.

In Syria, the exploding pagers injured at least 14 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitor.

Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, condemned what he characterized as “criminal Israeli aggression” and called it a “serious violation of Lebanese sovereignty.”

Hezbollah also blamed Israel and warned that there would be “punishment for this blatant aggression.”

The Israeli military declined to comment, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Among those wounded was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amini, whose pager exploded, injuring his hand and face, according to Iranian state media reports. Mr. Amini was taken to a hospital in Beirut for treatment, and he was expected to recover, Iranian state television reported.

The pagers exploded a day after a senior Biden administration official, Amos Hochstein, met in Tel Aviv with Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, in an effort to prevent Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah from escalating into an all-out war.

In a statement after the meeting, Mr. Gallant said he had told Mr. Hochstein that the window for reaching a diplomatic solution was closing because Hezbollah had decided to “tie itself” to Hamas.

“The only way left to return the residents of the north to their homes is via military action,” Mr. Gallant said.

Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman, said on Tuesday that the United States was “not involved” in the attack in Lebanon, and that it had not received any advance notice about it. “At this point, we are gathering information,” Mr. Miller said.

The blasts came as international efforts to negotiate a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip have stalled, and diplomats have been unable to lower tensions between Israel and Hezbollah.

Mr. Miller said the Biden administration’s message “to both Israel and to other parties” remained that they should seek a “diplomatic resolution.”

Lebanon’s foreign minister, Abdallah Bou Habib, said his country was bracing for Hezbollah’s response. “Hezbollah are definitely going to retaliate in a big way,” he said in a phone call with The New York Times. “How? Where? I don’t know.”

In Israel, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the chief of staff, held a security briefing with other senior generals Tuesday evening, the military said in a statement. The officers reviewed “preparation for defensive and offensive operations on all fronts,” according to the statement. While no new defensive guidelines have been issued for Israeli civilians, the military said Israelis should continue exercising “alertness.”

Mr. Bou Habib said that the Lebanese government was preparing to lodge a complaint at the U.N. Security Council. A United Nations spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, said the developments in Lebanon were “extremely concerning,” given the volatile situation in the region.

“We deplore the civilian casualties that we have seen,” Mr. Dujarric said. “We cannot underscore enough the risks of escalation in Lebanon and in the region.”

The Lebanese Red Cross said that dozens of ambulances had responded to “multiple bombings” in southern and eastern Lebanon, as well as in Beirut, the capital. Lebanese security officials asked people to clear the roads so that victims could be rushed to hospitals.

Residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs, where many of the explosions took place, described chaos.

Mohammed Awada, 52, said he and his son had been driving alongside a man whose pager exploded. “My son went crazy and started to scream when he saw the man’s hand flying away from him,” he said. “It was like a firework.”

Another witness, Ahmad Ayoud, said he was in his butcher shop in Beirut when he heard what sounded like a gunshot and saw a man in his 20s on a motorbike fall to the ground. “We all thought he got wounded from a random shooting,” Mr. Ahmad said.

Although Hezbollah members have used pagers for years, the practice became more widespread after the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, warned in a speech in February that Israeli operatives could be using members’ cellphones to spy on them. He encouraged Hezbollah members to break or bury their phones.

As a result, thousands of rank-and-file members of Hezbollah — and not just fighters — switched to a new system of wireless paging devices, said Amer Al Sabaileh, a regional security expert and university professor based in Amman, Jordan. He said his information was based on extensive contacts in Lebanese political and security circles.

Mr. Sabaileh said that the explosions were a psychological blow for Hezbollah because they showed Israel’s capacity to strike anyone connected with the group as they went about their daily business.

Israel has a long history of using technology to carry out covert operations against Iran and Iranian-backed groups.

In 2020, Israel assassinated Iran’s top nuclear scientist and deputy defense minister, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, using an A.I.-assisted robot controlled remotely via satellite. The following year, an Israeli hack of servers belonging to Iran’s oil ministry disrupted gasoline distribution nationwide. And in February, Israel blew up two major gas pipelines in Iran, disrupting service to several cities.

In 1996, an exploding cellphone killed a Palestinian bomb maker in the Gaza Strip, in an attack widely attributed to Shin Bet, Israel’s security service. In July, a bomb planted in a guesthouse in Tehran killed Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, hours after he attended the inauguration of the country’s new president.

Reporting was contributed by Farnaz Fassihi, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Anushka Patil, Hwaida Saad, Aaron Boxerman, Gabby Sobelman and Johnatan Reiss.

In the nine years since Donald J. Trump entered American politics, the global perception of the United States has been shaken by the image of a fractured, unpredictable nation. First one, then a second apparent attempt on the former president’s life have accentuated international concerns, raising fears of violent turmoil spiraling toward civil war.

Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, has said he is “very worried” and “deeply troubled” by what the F.B.I. said was an attempt to kill Mr. Trump at his Florida golf course, fewer than 50 days before the presidential election and two months after a bullet bloodied the ear of Mr. Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

“Violence has no part to play at all in any political process,” Mr. Starmer said.

Yet, violence has played a core part in this stormy, lurching American political campaign, and not only in the two apparent assassination attempts. There is now widespread concern across the globe that the November election will not end well and that American democracy, once a beacon to the world, has frayed to the breaking point.

In Mexico, where elections this year were the most violent in the country’s recent history, with 41 candidates and aspirants for public office assassinated, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said in a post on X, formerly Twitter: “Even though what happened is still unclear, we regret the violence against former President Donald Trump. The path is democracy and peace.”

At a time of wars in Europe and the Middle East and widespread global insecurity as China and Russia assert the superiority of their autocratic models, American precariousness weighs heavily.

Corentin Sellin, a French history professor, said the “brutalization of American politics” had left France “wondering whether the presidential campaign will finish peacefully.”

France was stunned, he said, by the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters, and “there is this notion that the story that started with that insurrection has not yet ended,” and that the Nov. 5 election will determine how it does.

The threat of violence — at times, even the need for it — has been a core part of Mr. Trump’s message.

He has already cast doubt on the credibility of the coming November election results. He has persistently laced his language with calls to “fight” and used incendiary terms to insult immigrants. Just before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, he urged followers to “fight like hell” or they would not “have a country any more.” In general, he has shown an ironclad incapacity to accept many truths, including the result of the 2020 election.

Democrats have responded by depicting Mr. Trump as a direct menace to American democracy, a “weird” would-be autocrat of fascist tendencies and a “threat to our freedoms,” in the words of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. The left-leaning New Republic magazine portrayed Mr. Trump as Hitler on a recent cover, expressing the view that a second Trump term is likely to lead to some form of American tyranny.

Some Europeans see things in a very different light.

“They tried to do everything,” said Andrea Di Giuseppe, a lawmaker with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing Brothers of Italy party. “They tried to bring Trump down with trials, they tried to bring him down with insinuations, they tried to bring him down by scaring people that ‘if Trump arrives democracy ends.’ Then, since all these attempts did not work, they tried to kill him.”

The authorities have identified a suspect in the Florida episode, Ryan W. Routh, a 58-year-old building contractor with a criminal history and a passionate embrace of the Ukrainian cause. He was charged in federal court with two firearms counts. More charges may follow.

Responding to the apparent assassination attempt, Carsten Luther, an online editor for international affairs, gave voice to deep concerns about the survival of American democracy in the respected German weekly Die Zeit. “The warnings of a civil war can be heard and no longer sound completely unrealistic,” he wrote. “It seems almost banal, as if it was bound to happen at some point.”

Of course, other Western societies, including France and Germany, are also viscerally divided and have seen the rise of xenophobic, far-right parties with many of the same messages as Mr. Trump. In May, an assassination attempt on Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia left him critically injured.

But a far more restrictive European gun culture has curbed the extent of political violence while leaving Europeans alarmed and incredulous at the ease with which Americans are able to obtain weapons.

Félix Maradiaga, a former Nicaraguan presidential candidate and political prisoner who is now a fellow at the University of Virginia, said that polarization, intolerance and the widespread availability of high-caliber weapons in the United States had led to a “perfect storm.”

“The world is watching, and the stakes could not be higher,” he added. “Russia and China are undoubtedly taking satisfaction in this deterioration of democracy.”

Lebohang Pheko, a senior research fellow at South Africa’s Trade Collective, an economics research institute, said that she perceived “a militarization of everyday life in the United States, and this essentially seems to be spilling into these elections.”

Mr. Trump has often appeared to seek this very militarization of which he has narrowly escaped being a victim. The multimillionaire son of a real-estate developer from Queens, he has positioned himself as the defender of the gun-toting, God-fearing American frontier against what he portrays as the Democrats’ politically correct socialist takeover.

Alluding to his Democratic opponents, he has blamed “the things that they say about me” for the first assassination attempt and the second episode, not the easy access to guns that he defends.

The question now is how violent will this political confrontation in America prove. For many around the world, it seems to contain the seeds of rampant conflict.

“There is a sort of reciprocal delegitimization, where the political opponent is no longer a normal political competitor, but also an existential enemy,” said Mario Del Pero, a professor of United States and International History at Sciences Po University in Paris. He called this process “a degradation of political and public discourse.”

In the United States, this has been a degradation compounded by guns, as much of the world sees it.

“Style over substance. Image over issues. Lies over facts. Distractions over policy. Repeated violence,” said Tomasz Płudowski, the deputy dean of the School of Social Science, AEH, in Warsaw. “That seems to be the contemporary American reality.”

The core confrontation in Western societies is no longer over internal issues. It is global vs. national, the connected living in the “somewhere” of the knowledge economy vs. the forgotten living “nowhere” in industrial wastelands and rural areas.

There lies the frustration, even fury, on which a Trump or a Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right French National Rally, or Ms. Meloni in Italy have been able build.

The perceived vulnerability of American democracy has already provoked many reactions around the world, from Russian gloating and interference to European anxiety about its security. Few countries in the developing world want American lessons in how to run their societies these days.

Yet, a fascination with the United States endures, and the checks and balances of its institutions have proved resilient, including through the first Trump term.

Mr. Trump often cites the template of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary: neutralizing an independent judiciary, subjugating much of the media, demonizing migrants and creating loyal new elites through crony capitalism. But it would not be easy to impose in America.

Still, the world is anxious. The 48 days to the election feel like a long time.

“In the end, the only real final word is for the American people,” said Mr. Di Giuseppe, the Italian lawmaker. “And if you want to defeat a person whom you think is not fit to govern the United States of America, you have to defeat him in a democratic system with elections, not with justice or Kalashnikovs.”

Reporting was contributed by Natalie Kitroeff, Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, Aurelien Breeden, Stephen Castle, Christopher F. Schuetze, John Eligon, Elisabetta Povoledo, Frances Robles, Emma Bubola, Jenny Gross, Vjosa Isai, Jorge Valencia and Tolek Magdziarz.

A month and a half into its offensive into Russia’s western Kursk region, the Ukrainian Army faces difficult decisions over where best to commit its limited forces.

Moscow’s troops have begun counterattacking in the area, reclaiming a few villages and threatening Ukraine’s ability to hold onto the territory it has seized. At the same time, Russian soldiers in Ukraine have continued advancing on other parts of the front there, which Kyiv had hoped to stabilize by prompting a diversion of Russian units back home to defend Kursk.

Ukraine and Russia are also engaged in air assaults, targeting each other’s military bases and energy infrastructure as each side tries to degrade the other’s capacity to sustain the war effort. In addition, Russia continues to regularly hit civilian areas in devastating attacks that cause frequent casualties.

The order to evacuate on Monday afternoon ripped through Nysa, a small Polish city, drenched after days of heavy rains. Some people helped older neighbors into cars as they headed for higher ground. Others raced to the roadside embankment to try to prevent the surging river from overflowing.

Together, thousands worked through the rainy night, passing sandbag after sandbag along a lengthy human chain — including the city’s professional men’s volleyball team. By morning, the danger seemed to have passed and disaster had been averted, thanks in no small part to the heroic efforts of its inhabitants.

“Everything indicates that Nysa is saved,” Kordian Kolbiarz, the mayor, wrote in a euphoric Facebook post on Tuesday. “Yesterday’s ‘chain’ on the top of the embankment did its job!”

Nysa, near the Czech border, is just one community in Central Europe that has stared down the devastation of Storm Boris, which has been blamed for at least 20 deaths in recent days. Towns have flooded, bridges have been destroyed and dams have been breached. Thousands of people have been forced from their homes.

The rains have abated in parts of Poland, where at least seven people died during the storm, the Polish Press Agency reported on Tuesday. But parts of Italy were bracing for heavy rains. Some public services and transit options remained interrupted in Budapest, the Hungarian capital on the Danube, which is swollen with rainwater.

In Nysa, the 42,000 residents had been preparing for days, despite reassurances from the authorities. Many remembered the 1997 floods that killed more than 100 people in the region and displaced thousands of others.

Residents on Saturday had started filling sandbags and stacking them around vulnerable buildings, like the basilica. A hospital evacuated dozens of its most vulnerable patients on Sunday. On Monday, hours after Poland declared a natural disaster, Mr. Kolbiarz finally announced the evacuation.

“We were getting ready for what people were calling ‘the Armageddon,’” said Robert Prygiel, the president of the men’s volleyball team. “We were waiting for the wave to come.”

Mr. Prygiel had brought his players to his fourth-floor apartment to wait it out. But soon, they started seeing posts on social media that their neighbors were going to the river embankment to build a sandbag wall.

So the team, PSG Stal Nysa, decided around 7:30 p.m. to go, too.

“We are young, fit men — well, at least the players in my team are young, fit men,” said Mr. Prygiel, 48. “So we just got to work. We really wanted to fight for our Nysa.”

Alongside thousands of other residents, the team loaded sandbags into private cars, which then ferried them toward the growing embankment. But soon, it got too wet for cars to drive safely. So the players joined a human chain, which he said was easily 500 meters long (or about 1,600 feet).

Their arms ached. Their backs ached. They were exhausted. “We just kept going,” Mr. Prygiel said. “We did what had to be done.”

Several residents spoke with thick emotion about the ways the community came together.

They didn’t wait to get ready, said Piotr Fitowski, who lives in the Nysa area.

“We were taking turns sleeping,” said Mr. Fitowski, 34, who owns businesses in Nysa and is from the area. “The work never stopped.”

On Sunday, he waded through a torrent to rescue his dog, a German shepherd named Molly. Then, he picked up an older couple and their 13-year-old bulldog. The wife struggled to walk. So did the dog. As he was driving them, he heard that the bridges had been closed.

“I couldn’t help this lady,” Mr. Fitowski said, fighting to speak through tears. “I couldn’t help this dog. I had this deep feeling of helplessness.” (As it turned out, he got them to another bridge, where they were driven by others to safety.)

Medical staff were worried, too. As the residents were stacking sandbags on Sunday, a hospital evacuated about 30 patients, including pregnant women and people on ventilators, said Jacek Rydzek, the operations director of a neighboring heart clinic, the American Heart of Poland Group.

Mr. Rydzek also moved eight patients from his heart clinic to the upper floors of the hospital.

On Monday, he said, the hospital evacuated everyone. “We did all that we could to secure our patients,” he said.

Residents — many of whom have barely slept — are just starting to realize how close they may have come to disaster. Many are also realizing how heroic their collective actions were.

“We were fighting for everything,” Mr. Prygiel, the volleyball president, said, adding, “We were fighting for our friends, for our close ones, for our acquaintances. For Nysa.”

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 Yoav 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.

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 “perversion” 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’s 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, many hiding their faces behind medical masks, hoods and baseball hats pulled 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, speaking into a hand-held microphone.

“Today I maintain that I am a rapist, like those in this room,” said Mr. Pelicot, dressed in a zipped-up gray jacket that he removed over the course of the day as the room heated up. “They all knew her condition before they came; they knew everything. They cannot say otherwise.”

Later, his words caused a gasp among lawyers and defendants in the courtroom: “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 in late 2020, his 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, time and time again, allegations made earlier in court that he had ever improperly touched — or attempted to touch — his daughter, Caroline Darian, or his 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.

Asked about traces of photos of his daughter sleeping discovered by police in his electronics, Mr. Pelicot said he had not taken them, and didn’t think they were of her. Ms. Darian, who is convinced that her father also drugged her, grew red-faced on the other side of the courtroom, and shouted: “You are lying.”

“I don’t know how to tell you, I never touched my daughter,” said Mr. Pelicot.

Prosecutors pieced the case together after Mr. Pelicot was first 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, sometimes 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.

The crowd of spectators — mostly women — arriving at the courthouse to watch the proceedings in a separate overflow room has grown bigger and bigger each day since the trial commenced on Sept. 2.

“I’m here to support Gisèle Pelicot and the collateral victims,” said Eva Chova, 24, a law student, standing in the middle of the line after two hours of waiting. “I think we are seeing a historic process. There will surely be a before and an after this trial, and I hope this changes things.”

At lunch, many spectators formed a line between the courtroom and the building’s exit to boo the accused and 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.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.

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 swaths 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.

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.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.”

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 happen 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.”