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.

The funeral Mass for Eamonn Casey seemed to befit one of the best-known Catholic bishops in all of Ireland. The pageantry on that cool March day in 2017 included 11 bishops and five dozen priests, all in white, gliding as if airborne up the center aisle of the pew-packed cathedral in Galway.

Incense and awkwardness commingled. Bishop Casey, who was 89, had once been the charismatic and progressive leader of the Galway Diocese, in western Ireland. But the disclosure in 1992 that he had fathered a child with a distant American cousin, and then refused to have anything to do with the boy, had rocked the Catholic-dominant country and sent him into the wilderness.

At the funeral, a fellow bishop referred to Bishop Casey’s “profoundly upsetting” actions. Then pallbearers carried his wooden coffin down to the cathedral’s crypt, the apparent end to the story of a charismatic but duplicitous cleric whose transgressions at least had been with a consenting adult.

But the past is patient. In late July, seven years after Bishop Casey’s death, Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTÉ, aired a sobering television documentary asserting that an affair was the least of the man’s covered-up offenses. The disturbing allegations, including that he had begun sexually abusing a niece when she was 5, have now ignited demands that his remains be removed from the crypt — that he effectively be evicted from the sacred ground reserved for the former bishops of Galway.

Among those championing such a drastic move is the broadcaster Joe Duffy, whose popular call-in radio show, Liveline, often taps into the national psyche. Mr. Duffy said that the phone lines for his program “just went on fire” after the new allegations, with furious callers demanding the bishop’s disinterment.

“For the Church to remove him from the crypt would be a major act of atonement,” Mr. Duffy said. “But they don’t want to do it. They literally want it buried.”

To confront the clerical sins of the past, is it best to disinter the remains of a predatory bishop to reflect atonement by the church? Or, as some have argued, is it better to leave the remains where they are as an eternal reminder of pastoral betrayal?

Under usual circumstances, the Catholic hierarchy would not deign to engage in calls for exhumation. But with a remarkable July news release bearing an equally remarkable headline — “Statement from the Galway Diocese on the Interment of the Remains of Bishop Eamonn Casey” — church leaders signaled their recognition of a volatile subject that could not be prayed away.

Acknowledging that this was “a very sensitive issue that deeply affects people in different ways, and which has different facets,” the diocese said the matter would require “a period of careful consideration and consultation, which has already begun.”

“Time and space are required to adequately and appropriately bring this undertaking to completion,” the diocesan statement continued. “We will not be making any further public comment until we are in a position to provide an update.”

A Host to the Pope — and a Hypocrite

By the time Anne Sheridan, a veteran reporter, began investigating Bishop Casey’s past in 2016, the man was both the personification of clerical deceit and a remnant from another Irish time.

The ubiquitous clergyman rose to prominence in the 1960s as the outspoken chaplain for the down-and-out Irish emigrant community in London before eventually ascending in 1976 to the prestigious post of bishop of Galway. Widely seen as a refreshing change from the repressive Irish Catholicism of the time, he spoke out for social justice, bantered on late-night television shows and raced expensive sedans along narrow back roads. When Pope John Paul II visited Ireland in 1979, Bishop Casey was a de facto host — but also a hypocrite.

In the early 1970s, while serving as bishop of Kerry, he had an affair with his distant cousin Annie Murphy, then 25, who had come to Ireland from the United States to recover from a miscarriage and divorce. When she later gave birth to their son, Bishop Casey tried to pressure her into giving the infant up for adoption and then ignored the boy’s existence, all while publicly decrying the plight of unmarried mothers.

Ms. Murphy ended the relationship and returned with the boy, Peter, to the United States. Over the years, the bishop sent monthly support payments. But when he refused her demand to be more involved in their son’s life, Ms. Murphy filed a paternity suit in New York, after which Bishop Casey sent her $100,000 in diocesan funds for Peter’s education.

Ms. Murphy shared her story in 1992 with The Irish Times and was vilified in some quarters as a result. Bishop Casey resigned, left Ireland and before long was serving penance as a missionary in Ecuador.

After a spell in England, he returned in 2006 to a transformed Ireland, where seemingly endless scandal — including revelations of pedophile priests and cruel institutions for unwed mothers — had weakened the influence of the Catholic hierarchy on everyday Irish life.

Bishop Casey’s known offenses seemed venial by comparison; he had repeatedly apologized, and had reconnected with his son. When he retired to the rural Galway community of Shanaglish, the locals celebrated his arrival with fireworks.

The aged bishop was living with Alzheimer’s disease in a nursing home in 2016 when Ms. Sheridan, the reporter, received an anonymous letter concerning the man, someone she had heard about all her life. Like Bishop Casey, she had grown up in Kerry, where everyone knew about the larger-than-life cleric and his reckless driving, memorialized in a cheeky song by the folk singer Christy Moore.

The documentary that aired in July, “Bishop Casey’s Buried Secrets,” which relied in part on Ms. Sheridan’s reporting for the Limerick Leader and the Irish Mail on Sunday newspapers, revealed that five women had independently complained to the church authorities of having been sexually abused as children by Bishop Casey. The complaints, dating back decades, involved all three Irish dioceses in which he served.

Ms. Sheridan and two RTÉ producers, Roger Childs and Birthe Tonseth, reported that the Galway Diocese had insisted for years that it knew of only one allegation, which was filed with the police but did not result in prosecution. Finally, though, the diocese acknowledged having five child-abuse allegations in its files, in addition to two complaints from women who said that the bishop’s abuse of their trust had involved sexual acts.

Ms. Sheridan discovered that one child-abuse complaint, filed in 2001, had resulted in a confidential settlement, while another was settled by the Limerick Diocese with a payment of more than $100,000 after Bishop Casey’s death.

The documentary centered on Patricia Donovan, a niece of the bishop, who said that he had sexually abused her for at least a decade, beginning when she was 5, in the 1960s. She portrayed him as a fearless pedophile who “thought he could do what he liked, when he liked, how he liked.”

Ms. Donovan filed complaints with the police and church officials in England — where she lived — in late 2005, and then shortly afterward with authorities in Ireland. Her allegations, described as credible by a leading child-safeguarding consultant who appears in the documentary, did not result in criminal charges. Still, they prompted church officials in England to push for Bishop Casey to leave their country.

He returned to Ireland to retire, but by then the Vatican had quietly restricted his ministry, prohibiting him from conducting priestly duties in public. He did anyway.

In a written statement to Ms. Sheridan, a spokesman for the Galway Diocese said: “This prohibition was a source of upset to Bishop Casey and on a few publicly documented occasions, it is known he violated this prohibition.”

Pastoral Betrayal

The latest revelations have sparked rage. Catholic Church coverups of pedophile priests had become all too familiar in Ireland, but this case involved a notorious bishop who in later years had been treated almost like a lovable rogue.

“Betrayal is the word now used most frequently when Bishop Casey’s legacy is raised,” Ms. Sheridan said.

Compounding that sense of betrayal are memories of the send-off given to Bishop Casey by the church hierarchy: a packed cathedral that included Ireland’s president, Michael D. Higgins, scores of clerics and a solemn recessional leading to the exclusive crypt below.

Only those steeped in Catholic protocol would have detected the modifications to ritual designed to play down his elevated status as a bishop, or noticed the absence of any archbishop or Vatican representative. The service was both loud and quiet.

Now, people are revisiting that ceremony and demanding that Bishop Casey’s remains be removed from the cathedral’s resting place of honor. Even the country’s prime minister, Simon Harris, has chimed in. He welcomed plans by the national police to review its Casey case file, and urged the Galway Diocese “to ensure their further consideration and consultation is victim focused.”

The Limerick Diocese, meanwhile, has indicated that it is prepared to receive those remains, saying in a statement that, if necessary, it “would fully cooperate to facilitate such a move.”

Until the Catholic hierarchy decides what, if anything, to do, Eamonn Casey will stay put, beside the remains of six other bishops beneath a sacred edifice in the ancient city of Galway.

The cathedral, formerly known as the Cathedral of Our Lady Assumed into Heaven and St. Nicholas, is a favored stop for Brian Nolan, the owner of Galway Walks tours. He has led who-knows-how-many visitors down the narrow city streets and across the River Corrib to stand in its looming shadow.

He explains that its construction began in 1958 on the site of the old city jail. That it was built with locally quarried limestone. That its floors are Connemara marble.

Mr. Nolan does not refer to the notorious cleric interred in the crypt beneath that marble — though he has an opinion: Leave the man where he is.

“If I ever saw a metaphor for a place I didn’t want to be, it’s down there,” he said. “It’s cold, it’s unloved, it’s unvisited.”

Israel’s attack on pagers belonging to Hezbollah on Tuesday was a tactical success that had no clear strategic impact, analysts say.

While it embarrassed Hezbollah and appeared to incapacitate many of its members, the attack has not so far altered the military balance along the Israel-Lebanon border, where more than 100,000 civilians on either side have been displaced by a low-intensity battle. Hezbollah and the Israeli military remained locked in the same pattern, exchanging missiles and artillery fire on Wednesday at a tempo in keeping with the daily skirmishes fought between the sides since October.

Although Tuesday’s attack was an eye-catching demonstration of Israel’s technological prowess, Israel has not initially sought to capitalize on the confusion it sowed by initiating a decisive blow against Hezbollah and invading Lebanon.

And if the attack impressed many Israelis, some of whom had criticized their government for failing to stop Hezbollah’s strikes, their core frustration remains: Hezbollah is still entrenched on Israel’s northern border, preventing tens of thousands of residents of northern Israel from returning home.

“This is an amazing tactical event,” said Miri Eisin, a fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, an Israel-based research organization.

“But not a single Hezbollah fighter is going to move because of this,” said Ms. Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer. “Having amazing capabilities does not make a strategy.”

Israelis are divided about whether the attack was born from short-term opportunism or long-term forethought. Some believe that Israeli commanders feared that their Hezbollah counterparts had recently discovered Israel’s ability to sabotage the pagers, prompting Israeli commanders to immediately blow them up or risk losing the capability forever.

Others say that Israel had a specific strategic intent. Israel may have hoped that the attack’s brazenness and sophistication would ultimately make Hezbollah more amenable to a cease-fire in the coming weeks, if not immediately.

“The goal of the operation, if Israel was behind it as Hezbollah claims, may have been to show Hezbollah that it will pay a very high price if it continues its attacks on Israel instead of reaching an agreement,” said Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israel’s military intelligence directorate.

Hezbollah began firing on Israel in early October in solidarity with Hamas, after its Palestinian ally raided southern Israel, prompting a large-scale Israeli counterattack on Gaza. Since then, Hezbollah has tied its fate to that of Hamas, vowing that it will not stop fighting until Israel withdraws from Gaza.

Given the connection, officials either side of the border have hoped for months that a truce in Gaza would lead to a parallel agreement in Lebanon. American and French mediators, led by Amos Hochstein, a U.S. envoy, have shuttled between Beirut and Jerusalem, preparing the ground for a truce between Israel and Hezbollah in the event of a deal in Gaza.

With negotiations over Gaza now at an impasse, the Israeli leadership may believe it has to take more ambitious action against Hezbollah to persuade the group to disentangle its fate from that of Hamas, analysts said. In recent days, the Israeli leadership has intensified its public focus on Hezbollah, with the country’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, warning this week that “military action” was “the only way” to end the conflict.

“The point is to disconnect the war Hezbollah declared on Israel from the war with Hamas,” Mr. Yadlin said.

The operation gives Mr. Hochstein “another tool to use when speaking with Hezbollah: ‘You better reach an agreement, or you’ll face more substantial and surprising attacks,’” Mr. Yadlin added.

Some are more skeptical, arguing that Hezbollah is unlikely to change course, even if it has been degraded and disoriented by the attack.

Hezbollah views itself as the most influential Iranian ally in the Middle East and would try to avoid creating the perception that it had abandoned Hamas, according to Sima Shine, a former senior officer in the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency.

“I don’t see it happening,” said Ms. Shine, an analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli research organization. “It is very important for them to be the head of all the proxies in the region, the one who gives direction to others, the one who trains others from time to time.”

More generally, the attack also highlighted the dissonance between the discipline of Israel’s intelligence agencies, which have the ability to plan operations months or even years ahead, and the messy short-term thinking of Israel’s political leadership.

The attack followed days of reports in the Israeli press about an intention by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to fire his defense minister, even as Mr. Gallant was overseeing the planned operation in Lebanon.

“This is a very strange situation,” Ms. Shine said. It shows “such a gap between the politicians and the security establishment.”

Gabby Sobelman and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.

As a teenager, Pavel Kushnir won a coveted spot in Russia’s most prestigious training program for pianists at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. His classmates remember him as a shy, quirky introvert with fluency in not just classical music, but in film, literature and painting.

He made a career playing for provincial orchestras, while on the side he wrote startling avant-garde novels, mostly unpublished.

Long a critic of President Vladimir V. Putin, Mr. Kushnir took up political activism with added zeal after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. He spread leaflets damning the war while pushing himself to endure ever longer, harsher hunger strikes. Four blurry, muffled antiwar screeds that he posted on his YouTube channel, which had just five subscribers, landed him in a dark, crumbling jail on Karl Marx Street in Birobidzhan, the remote Siberian provincial capital where he lived.

Now, at age 40, he is dead.

Mr. Kushnir is one among what human rights activists say is more than 1,000 Russians who have been caught in a harsh state apparatus designed to mute criticism of the war. Some politicians or well-known artists put on trial attract significant attention. But many prisoners linger in obscurity, with activists struggling to keep track of them.

Mr. Kushnir was one who fell between the cracks, and his lonely death in Russia’s remote Far East has prompted extended soul-searching among prominent Russian political activists and war critics. Why, they wonder, did a talented performer deeply committed to protesting have to die in order to become an antiwar icon?

“We could not pool money to send him a lawyer — we just didn’t know,” Svetlana Kaverzina, a local opposition politician, wrote in a post on the Telegram app. “We didn’t write him letters of support — we didn’t know. We didn’t dissuade him from sacrificing himself — we didn’t know. He was alone. Let’s at least symbolically tell him after his death: ‘Forgive us and rest in peace.’”

Even the exposure of his death was almost accidental.

Olga Romanova, the head of Russia Behind Bars, a nongovernmental organization that defends prisoners’ rights, receives letters from convicts daily. So she did not consider it exceptional when a group of cellmates from the Jewish Autonomous Region — established under Stalin in 1934 as an agrarian homeland for Jewish people — mentioned in passing that a musician among them had died.

“We are in grief,” the prisoners wrote. On July 27, Mr. Kushnir, who had been charged with “justifying terrorism,” had succumbed to a hunger strike during pretrial detention, they said.

Then one of his pianist friends, Olga Shkrygunova, contacted Ms. Romanova and together they wrote a bleak description of his passing for an online publication. The article prompted some people to dig up letters from Mr. Kushnir, who had tried unsuccessfully to gain support from prominent Russians for his hunger strikes against the war. His death spurred a new recognition of his artistic talents.

Dmitry Volchek, a publisher of avant-garde literature who had ignored Mr. Kushnir’s request for translation work, praised “Russian Cut,” a novel that Mr. Kushnir had published privately in Germany. The author used the arrival of a giant, predatory, eyeless pig as a metaphor for Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Maria Alyokhina, a member of the punk band Pussy Riot who has also used hunger strikes as a political tool, said on Facebook that Mr. Kushnir had written her many letters, but that she read them only after he died.

In August, a group of more than 20 classical musicians — including Alexander Melnikov, Sir Simon Rattle and Daniel Barenboim — signed an open tribute to Mr. Kushnir published in a German newspaper.

Russian prison, judicial and law enforcement authorities did not respond to requests for comment about his death, nor did the Birobidzhan Regional Philharmonic, his last employer.

Mr. Kushnir grew up in Tambov, a provincial capital about 300 miles southeast of Moscow. His father, Michael, wrote a music textbook still used across Russia, while his mother taught musical theory. At age 17 he was among 25 student pianists accepted into the Moscow Conservatory.

“He was a funny, talented genius who excelled at the different art forms that interested him,” said Ms. Shkrygunova, who met him when they were both 6.

Grace Chatto, an English musician and singer for the band Clean Bandit who studied with him at the conservatory in 2004, said he introduced her to the films of Bergman, Antonioni and Tarkovsky. On most days, she stayed up long into the night to hear him play Rachmaninoff, Schubert and others. “So kind and so gentle and funny, and he played with such deep passion always,” she wrote on Instagram.

He once amazed his fellow students by writing an analysis of an obscure German pop artist for an online journal, said Maria Nemtsova, another classmate. As for his piano playing, she said, he “was very free and honest,” ignoring the school’s rigid prescriptions that the students emulate the interpretations of renowned musicians.

That attitude got him in trouble. When the panel evaluating him for graduate study asked him to play an excerpt from Schumann’s “Fantasy,” he said he would either play the whole piece or nothing, his friends recalled.

Similar clashes set him on an odyssey of playing for one provincial orchestra after another.

Along the way, he became increasingly politicized, returning to Moscow in 2011 to participate in anti-Putin protests.

In early 2023, he was hired by the Philharmonic in Birobidzhan, the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region, which had fewer than 1,000 Jews living there since most had emigrated to Israel.

He kept his handwritten novels in a drawer, he said in interviews, and expressed admiration for the daring performances of rock musicians like Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin. He organized a weekly radio program to explain Chopin’s folk compositions, greeting listeners with “No pasaran!” a political slogan drawn from anti-fascists in the Spanish Civil War that translates to “They shall not pass.”

“The truth is out there!” he would say.

He named his YouTube channel after Fox Mulder, the Federal Bureau of Investigation agent hero of “The X-Files,” and wore a hand-drawn F.B.I. badge pinned to his clothing in his videos. In one, he endorsed L.G.B.T.Q. rights, now largely banned in Russia. In another, he called for protests and revolution.

“Scatter leaflets, post fliers, write huge posters, put them up on benches, leave them somewhere, paste them on the walls of buildings,” he said. Last January, the Philharmonic fired him, Ms. Shkyrgunova said.

She had emigrated to Germany in 2012, but they exchanged emails every few months. His overflowed with emotional anguish about the war, she said, and he could not let go of events like the Russian massacre of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. “He was a man processing every death as his own personal loss,” she said.

Mr. Kushnir began to encourage people to go on hunger strikes to demand Mr. Putin’s resignation and an end to the war. A slight figure, he had undertaken them periodically himself after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but had continued drinking liquids until the last one.

Prison protocol mandates medical monitoring in such cases, Ms. Romanova, the head of the prisoner rights’s group, said, but there was no indication that any monitoring took place in his case. She suspects Mr. Kushnir succumbed to the effects of the hunger strike, but his 79-year-old mother, Irina Levina, refused an independent autopsy.

Ms. Levina told a Russian reporter that the Russian Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., had informed her that her son had been on a medical drip at the end. Neither his mother nor his brother attended his cremation; his criticism of Mr. Putin had estranged his family, his friends said. Mr. Kushnir’s father died four years ago.

“I certainly wanted him to conduct himself in a quieter way and to stay out of politics altogether,” Ms. Levina told Okno, an independent news organization. “I am very sorry that he gave up his life, apparently for nothing.”

A local reporter who attended Mr. Kushnir’s funeral said only two musicians came. The 11 people at the funeral were mostly admirers, and no one delivered a eulogy, said the reporter, who declined to use her name for security reasons.

Mr. Kushnir did not seek recognition for himself, said Ms. Nemtsova, the classmate. Instead, she said, he concentrated on feeling the pain of others. Even close friends did not know that he was protesting by starving himself to death in jail.

“Pavel definitely sacrificed his life for us, it is almost a biblical story,” she said. “He was trying to scream, but it was so muted.”

Men from the most effective military force in Lebanon bleeding on the street and sprawled out in hospital beds, wounded not on the battlefield, but by devices carried in their pockets and worn on their belts.

This carnage, the result of what Lebanese, American and other officials have called an Israeli operation to remotely detonate hundreds of pagers carried by Hezbollah fighters, damaged and humiliated the group, puncturing its aura as one of the Middle East’s most sophisticated anti-Israel forces.

“This operation is basically Hezbollah’s Oct. 7,” said Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, comparing the group’s security failures to those that allowed its ally, Hamas, to strike Israel last year, starting the war in Gaza. “It is a huge slap.”

The attack, carried out in hundreds of small, simultaneous explosions on Tuesday afternoon, blew off fingers, bloodied faces and damaged eyes, spreading fear across Lebanon and flooding emergency rooms with thousands of wounded patients.

While the victims included civilians — two of the 12 dead were children and one was a medical worker, Lebanon’s health minister said — the attack clearly targeted Hezbollah, disrupting its operations and potentially reshaping its fight against Israel.

Israel has not confirmed or denied involvement in the attack, which the Lebanese authorities say injured more than 2,700 people. For Hezbollah itself, experts said, the blow was both physical and psychological.

“It is a serious attack,” Mr. Hage Ali said, adding that during 11 months of aerial attacks across the Lebanon-Israel border, Hezbollah had lost many leaders and cadres, some in targeted assassinations.

“And now this blow cuts through the rank and file of the organization,” he said. “It is a kind of sword stabbed deep into the organization’s body, and it will take it time to heal from that.”

Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate, but its members appeared to be in shock on Wednesday and its leaders have given no indication of how this attack could change its approach to its broader conflict with Israel. The group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is expected to speak on Thursday.

Hezbollah was formed in the 1980s, with Iranian help, to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000. In the years since, it has grown into Lebanon’s most effective political party and fighting force, and expanded its operations into Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East.

In Lebanon, it has deep roots in parts of society, as well an extensive apparatus to support its mission that includes offices dedicated to social services, communications and internal security.

The group has not said how many of its members and fighters were affected, but the wounded were overwhelmingly in areas where the group holds sway: the south, near the border with Israel; the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon; and the capital Beirut and its southern suburbs, Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, told reporters on Wednesday.

Dr. Abiad said the attack had come with no warning and that thousands of patients had suddenly arrived in Lebanon’s emergency rooms. Nearly 10 percent of the cases were critical, and many patients remain in intensive care. Medics performed 460 operations, mostly on hands, faces and eyes.

Not all of the wounded were men of fighting age, he said.

“We saw that there were children, there were elderly people,” he said. “That shows that there were a lot of the pagers that were in houses. Maybe there was one whose children were playing with it.”

Hezbollah did not announce that any senior figures were among the dead, who included the son of a Hezbollah lawmaker. The Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, a key liaison between Hezbollah and its key sponsor, was wounded. Blasts were reported in shops, open markets and buildings where Hezbollah functionaries work.

Hezbollah goes to great lengths to keep the identities of its fighters secret, so much so that they often become known to their neighbors only when their deaths are announced. A secondary effect of the attack could be to blow that cover, leaving operatives with visible wounds that indicate their links to the group.

Speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to journalists, three Lebanese with knowledge of the matter said the pagers had arrived in Lebanon recently and were distributed because they were presumed to offer more secure communications than cellphones.

The group abandoned the devices right after the attack, likely disrupting its members’ ability to communicate. It was unclear whether any backup system was in place.

The attack will likely incapacitate some members, but Hezbollah has a long history of adaptability. It lost many fighters in its last major war with Israel, in 2006, but emerged stronger in the following years, building a vast arsenal that is believed to include more than 100,000 rockets and sophisticated weapons like precision-guided missiles that can hit sensitive sites inside Israel.

There is nothing in Hezbollah’s history or ideology that suggests that Tuesday’s attack will cause it to seek an accommodation with Israel. But experts on the group said it is stuck between feeling the need to respond and wanting to avoid an all-out war with Israel that could be catastrophic for both sides.

Complicating its decision is that Hezbollah has linked its cross-border strikes on Israel to the war in Gaza, leading officials in Washington and elsewhere to hope that a cease-fire there between Israel and Hamas would bring quiet to the Lebanese border as well. Tuesday’s attack could change that calculation.

“Hezbollah is in a trap of its own making,” said Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “Having tied their confrontation with Israel to the ongoing war on Gaza limits their options to de-escalate. This attack makes it even harder for them to do so.”

Hezbollah could decide that the new attack necessitates its own retaliation, regardless of what happens in Gaza. The group could choose to deploy new weapons to strike military bases or civilian infrastructure inside Israel or seek to surprise Israel by targeting its interests elsewhere in the world.

Inside Lebanon, Hezbollah relies on a deeply loyal community to support its operations and provide it with fighters. It remains unclear how Tuesday’s blasts will affect this community, Ms. Slim said.

“This will also add to fatigue and weariness already developing inside Hezbollah’s constituency,” she said. “On the other hand, it might increase demands inside the constituency for Hezbollah to strike back hard.”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut.

At least 12 people were killed and thousands were wounded in Lebanon on Tuesday when hundreds of pagers exploded simultaneously across the country in a mass attack that appeared to target members of Hezbollah. Another wave of explosions was reported on Wednesday afternoon.

The blasts — which came after Israeli officials said they were ready to step up attacks against the Iranian-backed militia — have heightened concerns that Israel’s long-simmering conflict with the group might escalate into a broader war. Hezbollah and Iran quickly blamed Tuesday’s operation on Israel, an assessment confirmed by U.S. and other officials. Israel has not confirmed or denied responsibility.

With hospitals in Lebanon struggling to cope with the number of wounded, Israel and Lebanon were tensely awaiting a promised retaliation from Hezbollah and its allies.

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The Tao cafe in Srinagar, capital of the disputed Kashmir region in India, is a bustling place. At outdoor tables shaded by majestic trees, Himalayan trout is served with loaves of fresh bread to the young, affluent Kashmiris who frequent it.

But when conversation turns to politics, a hush falls, even though it’s an election season. People describe a loss of direction, a drift into an unsettled future.

They are not sure what place mostly Muslim Kashmir has in an increasingly Hindu-nationalist India. They see themselves as caught between India and Pakistan, the two powers still bitterly at odds over the region. They feel trapped in cycles of oppression by India’s government and violent resistance to that authority.

On Wednesday, people began voting in the first election for Kashmir’s regional legislature in a decade. The vote will restore a degree of self-rule five years after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government stripped Kashmir of its semiautonomous status and brought it more tightly under Indian control.

But many young Kashmiris say the return of democracy is partial at best. They say the ballot will not fully restore their voices, taken away by what they call India’s criminalization of dissent and freedom of expression in Kashmir.

“Should we accept our fate or just wait for the situation to change? I am confused,” Idrees Ahmad, 33, told friends at the cafe. It was a markedly resigned statement for a young man who, 14 years earlier, had joined a bloody civilian uprising after a Srinagar teenager was struck and killed by a tear-gas canister.

During the decades when India was trying to crush a Pakistan-backed militancy and fully assimilate Kashmir, many young Kashmiris found solace in two things. One was street protests and other forms of public expression; the other, participation in local democratic politics.

Even as tens of thousands died in fighting between separatist insurgents and Indian security forces, a culture of free speech — graffiti, gatherings in public parks, discussions in cafes like Tao — provided many with a sense of nonviolent release for their rage and confusion.

No matter how dynastic and self-serving the political parties were, participating in the process gave Kashmiris some semblance of ownership, even if it all played out in the shadow of an Indian military presence.

The worst of the violence has subsided in recent years. But a chill has fallen over the region. Bringing Kashmir under New Delhi’s direct rule in 2019 ushered in what local leaders called an occupation administered mostly by outsiders.

Even Kashmiri politicians who had fought against the separatists were put under house arrest in large numbers. Rights groups, journalists and civil society have been cowed, with any questioning of the legitimacy of New Delhi’s rule essentially outlawed. Many Kashmiri dissidents still languish in jails in faraway Indian cities.

At a corner table at the Tao, most of a group of eight young Kashmiris said their identity and their dignity were under threat. They spoke of feeling suffocated and uncertain about the future.

Siddiq Wahid, a professor of international relations at Shiv Nadar University near New Delhi, said the Indian government was not solely to blame for that sense of alienation.

The Kashmiri leaders who spearheaded the long struggle for self-rule lacked a clear strategy, he said. While most Kashmiris wanted an independent homeland, separatists were divided over whether to seek independence, integration into Pakistan or more autonomy within India.

“You can fight a state, you can resist a state, but you can’t play a zero-sum game, because you don’t stand a chance,” Mr. Wahid said.

New Delhi’s top administrator in Kashmir, Manoj Sinha, and the region’s police chief did not respond to requests for interviews.

The election — a multistage process whose results will be announced on Oct. 8 — is being held against the backdrop of a slowly changing political landscape.

Mr. Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., has been working for years to secure a foothold in Kashmir. In villages and towns, many young Muslim men have joined its ranks, believing that as India’s governing party it can bring more development. But they often wear masks while campaigning for the B.J.P., fearing retribution.

During a speech this week in Jammu, the Hindu-majority part of the state once called Jammu and Kashmir, Mr. Modi said his policies had indeed led to more investment and infrastructure development.

“In the last 10 years, the change witnessed in Jammu and Kashmir is nothing short of a dream come true,” he said. “The stone which used to be thrown at police and the army is now being utilized for building a new Jammu and Kashmir.”

Even as the B.J.P. hopes to gain greater acceptance, high turnout in an election for the national Parliament last spring showed that people would use whatever instrument they were left with to keep Mr. Modi’s party at bay.

On a recent afternoon, about 30 miles south of Srinagar, Abrar Rashid, 26, was being carried on the shoulders of young supporters. In June, his father, widely known as Engineer Rashid, won a seat in India’s Parliament despite being imprisoned. His son led his campaign.

“We are Kashmiris first, and we have to fight to preserve our identity,” said Mr. Rashid, whose father was jailed years ago on charges of funding terrorism.

Just a few years ago, some of these same supporters were using stones and their own bodies to try to stop soldiers from killing militants. Now, they were celebrating the elevation of a Kashmiri leader in the national legislature of India, a country whose elections many people in Kashmir boycotted for decades.

Shahid Reyaz Thoker, a political activist, shouted slogans and danced on a pickup truck as he campaigned for a candidate from the People’s Democratic Party, a regional organization that once governed the state.

When he was a teenager, Mr. Thoker was detained by the police and sent to a juvenile home. Officers told his father he had participated in protests over the killings of militants and was preparing to join the insurgency.

“What does a 20-year-old want?” Mr. Thoker asked, as a loudspeaker blared slogans of self-rule. “A mobile phone, a few friends, a good number of Instagram followers and some pocket money.”

“But I want nothing of that sort,” he added, “just peace, and peace with dignity.”

At the Tao cafe, a group of teenage girls, some wearing Kashmiri-embroidered silk salwar kameez, giggled as they took selfies in front of flower beds. An irritated waiter served them fried vegetable pakora.

One girl said she hoped to become a physician, another a fashion designer. They were holding tight to those aspirations, despite what they described as the childhood trauma of the Indian military presence.

“These children have dreams; they need a stable environment to achieve them,” said Ruhani Syed, an artist at another table.

A police officer arrived at the cafe, apparently to meet some friends. Suddenly, everyone went silent, and the mood grew somber.

Ahmad Parvez, a singer, said he sometimes felt that the world around him was collapsing. Ugly high-rises were replacing old bazaars. India, hoping to present a picture of normalcy, has encouraged tourism in Kashmir, and money has poured into the ecologically fragile region.

As a child, Mr. Parvez said, he performed with a school troupe inside military garrisons. That changed after he took a picture of a camp near his home, which had once been a watch factory. Soldiers beat him.

As he got older, he began reading books, and questions about his identity and nationality seemed to resolve themselves. One day, he borrowed a guitar from a friend and started singing. Within a few months, he was an internet sensation.

Then India revoked the semi-autonomy of Kashmir, and everything seemed tenuous again.

“I used to hate taking pictures,” he said. “Today, I don’t leave anything without capturing. I feel all this will vanish very soon, and there will be nothing left.”

Ukraine said on Wednesday that it had hit a big Russian ammunition depot with drones overnight, with videos showing fireballs lighting up the night sky. The attack came just hours after the Russian military claimed to have captured the town of Ukrainsk as Moscow continues a slow but steady advance in eastern Ukraine.

Control of Ukrainsk, confirmed by geolocated battlefield footage analyzed by independent groups, brings Russia one step closer to its long-held goal of seizing all of the eastern Donetsk region, which it already partly controls. Ukrainsk, once home to 10,000 residents, lies on the path to the city of Kurakhove, a defensive stronghold.

The capture of Ukrainsk and the Ukrainian drone strikes, which hit in the northwestern Russian town of Toropets, highlighted one of the main dynamics of the war in recent months: Russian forces are gaining ground in Ukraine, and Kyiv is trying to disrupt that progress by hitting military bases and warehouses that are key to Russia’s operations.

Igor Rudenya, governor of the western Russian region of Tver, which includes Toropets, said in a statement that the town had been targeted by a “massive drone attack” but did not mention the ammunition depot. He said that wreckage from a destroyed Ukrainian drone had sparked a fire. He did not say what was burning, but the damage was significant enough that he ordered a partial evacuation of Toropets’s residents.

An official from the Ukrainian Security Services said that drones had hit a “large warehouse” in Toropets containing weapons such as Iskander missiles and guided bombs known as KABs. The claim could not be independently verified.

NASA satellites detected multiple fires in the area, which independent analysts monitoring open-source imagery said corresponded to the location of a big ammunition storage site. Toropets is nearly 300 miles north of Ukraine and the distance of the strike would be a testament to Kyiv’s improved long-range drone capabilities. Satellite images showed that a large fire in the area was still raging early Wednesday afternoon.

Videos posted on social media and verified by The New York Times and other independent analysts showed huge balls of flame and plumes of smoke rising from several positions across a body of water. The smoke trails were so large that they were even picked up by weather satellites. Earthquake monitoring stations also recorded a tremor in the area.

Pasi Paroinen, an analyst for the Finland-based Black Bird Group, which analyzes satellite images and footage from the battlefield, said, “The depot did indeed blow up.” He added that it was “pretty certain at this point” that it was the result of a Ukrainian strike.

Yuri Podolyaka, a pro-Kremlin military blogger, wrote on social media on Wednesday that Ukraine had “struck an ammunition depot near the city of Toropets at night.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry said that the country was attacked by dozens of Ukrainian drones overnight, adding that it had shot down 54 of them over different regions. The ministry did not mention the Tver region or the fires in Toropets in its report.

If confirmed, the Ukrainian attack would be the latest in a series of strikes on airfields, military factories and oil refineries in recent months, and would be a further attempt by Kyiv to undermine Russian military operations and disrupt Moscow’s progress on the battlefield.

Since the early months of this year, Russian forces have made steady advances in eastern Ukraine, seizing cities, towns, and villages in often bloody battles. After Russia’s push toward Pokrovsk, a strategic railway and road hub, stalled in recent days, the Russian military has shifted its focus to the south of that area, toward Kurakhove.

Vincent Tourret, an analyst at the French Foundation for Strategic Research, said that Russia, by pressing assaults toward Kurakhove, was trying to secure control over larger swaths of Ukrainian land. By doing so, Russian forces can position more artillery beyond the reach of Ukrainian defenses, potentially setting the stage for a renewed offensive against Pokrovsk, Mr. Tourret added.

The Ukrainian General Staff reported on Wednesday 49 Russian assaults around Kurakhove over the past day. The 46th Airmobile Brigade of Ukraine said on Thursday that Russia had launched four waves of attacks toward the city, involving a total of 46 military vehicles, including tanks. The brigade said that the attacks had been repelled, a claim that could not be independently verified.

The recent capture of Ukrainsk, which Ukraine did not comment on, could facilitate Russia’s approach to Kurakhove from the north. Russian troops have also been advancing from the east in a pincer movement, tightening pressure on the city. In the spring, Ukrainian forces built a network of trenches and anti-tank ditches around Kurakhove, anticipating future assaults after losing nearby towns.

Mr. Tourret said that Kurakhove was a critical stronghold that, with the town of Vuhledar to the south, held the key to the defense of the southern part of the Donetsk region.

Roman Kostenko, the secretary of the defense and intelligence committee in the Ukrainian Parliament, told a national television channel on Wednesday that some of his country’s troops were at risk of being encircled by the pincer movement, describing the situation as “really quite complicated.”

Maria Varenikova and Christoph Koettl contributed reporting.