The pagers began beeping just after 3:30 in the afternoon in Lebanon on Tuesday, alerting Hezbollah operatives to a message from their leadership in a chorus of chimes, melodies, and buzzes.

But it wasn’t the militants’ leaders. The pages had been sent by Hezbollah’s archenemy, and within seconds the alerts were followed by the sounds of explosions and cries of pain and panic in streets, shops and homes across Lebanon.

Powered by just a few ounces of an explosive compound concealed within the devices, the blasts sent grown men flying off motorcycles and slamming into walls, according to witnesses and video footage. People out shopping fell to the ground, writhing in agony, smoke snaking from their pockets.

Mohammed Awada, 52, and his son were driving by one man whose pager exploded, he said. “My son went crazy and started to scream when he saw the man’s hand flying away from him,” he said.

By the end of the day, at least a dozen people were dead and more than 2,700 were wounded, many of them maimed. And the following day, 20 more people were killed and hundreds wounded when walkie-talkies in Lebanon also began mysteriously exploding. Some of the dead and wounded were Hezbollah members, but others were not; four of the dead were children.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied any role in the explosions, but 12 current and former defense and intelligence officials who were briefed on the attack say the Israelis were behind it, describing the operation as complex and long in the making. They spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity, given the sensitivity of the subject.

The booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies were the latest salvo in the decades-long conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which is based across the border in Lebanon. The tensions escalated after the war began in the Gaza Strip.

Iranian-backed groups like Hezbollah have long been vulnerable to Israeli attacks using sophisticated technologies. In 2020, for example, Israel assassinated Iran’s top nuclear scientist using an A.I.-assisted robot controlled remotely via satellite. Israel has also used hacking to stymie Iranian nuclear development.

In Lebanon, as Israel picked off senior Hezbollah commandos with targeted assassinations, their leader came to a conclusion: If Israel was going high-tech, Hezbollah would go low. It was clear, a distressed Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, said, that Israel was using cellphone networks to pinpoint the locations of his operatives.

“You ask me where is the agent,” Mr. Nasrallah told his followers in a publicly televised address in February. “I tell you that the phone in your hands, in your wife’s hands, and in your children’s hands is the agent.”

Then he issued a plea.

“Bury it,” Mr. Nasrallah said. “Put it in an iron box and lock it.”

He had been pushing for years for Hezbollah to invest instead in pagers, which for all their limited capabilities could receive data without giving away a user’s location or other compromising information, according to American intelligence assessments.

Israeli intelligence officials saw an opportunity.

Even before Mr. Nasrallah decided to expand pager usage, Israel had put into motion a plan to establish a shell company that would pose as an international pager producer.

By all appearances, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the operation. They said at least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.

B.A.C. did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Produced separately, they contained batteries laced with the explosive PETN, according to the three intelligence officers.

The pagers began shipping to Lebanon in the summer of 2022 in small numbers, but production was quickly ramped up after Mr. Nasrallah denounced cellphones.

Some of Mr. Nasrallah’s fears were spurred by reports from allies that Israel had acquired new means to hack into phones, activating microphones and cameras remotely to spy on their owners. According to three intelligence officials, Israel had invested millions in developing the technology, and word spread among Hezbollah and its allies that no cellphone communication — even encrypted messaging apps — was safe anymore.

Not only did Mr. Nasrallah ban cellphones from meetings of Hezbollah operatives, he ordered that the details of Hezbollah movements and plans never be communicated over cellphones, said three intelligence officials. Hezbollah officers, he ordered, had to carry pagers at all times, and in the event of war, pagers would be used to tell fighters where to go.

Over the summer, shipments of the pagers to Lebanon increased, with thousands arriving in the country and being distributed among Hezbollah officers and their allies, according to two American intelligence officials.

To Hezbollah, they were a defensive measure, but in Israel, intelligence officers referred to the pagers as “buttons” that could be pushed when the time seemed ripe.

That moment, it appears, came this week.

Speaking to his security cabinet on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would do whatever was necessary to enable more than 70,000 Israelis driven away by the fighting with Hezbollah to return home, according to reports in Israeli news outlets. Those residents, he said, could not return without “a fundamental change in the security situation in the north,” according to a statement from the prime minister’s office.

On Tuesday, the order was given to activate the pagers.

To set off the explosions, according to three intelligence and defense officials, Israel triggered the pagers to beep and sent a message to them in Arabic that appeared as though it had come from Hezbollah’s senior leadership.

Seconds later, Lebanon was in chaos.

With so many people wounded, ambulances crawled through the streets, and hospitals were soon overwhelmed. Hezbollah said at least eight of its fighters were killed, but noncombatants were also drawn into the fray.

In southern Lebanon, in the village of Saraain, one young girl, Fatima Abdullah, had just come home from her first day of fourth grade when she heard her father’s pager begin to beep, her aunt said. She picked up the device to bring it to him and was holding it when it exploded, killing her. Fatima was 9.

On Wednesday, as thousands gathered in Beirut’s southern suburbs to attend an outdoor funeral for two people killed in the blasts, chaos erupted anew: There was another explosion.

Amid the acrid smoke, panicked mourners stampeded for the streets, seeking shelter in the lobbies of nearby buildings. Many were afraid that their phone, or the phone of a person standing next to them in the crowd, was about to explode.

“Turn off your phone!” some shouted. “Take out the battery!” Soon a voice on a loudspeaker at the funeral urged everyone to do this.

For the Lebanese, the second wave of explosions was confirmation of the lesson from the day before: They now live in a world in which the most common of communication devices can be transformed into instruments of death.

One woman, Um Ibrahim, stopped a reporter in the middle of the confusion and begged to use a cellphone to call her children. Her hands shaking, she dialed a number and then screamed a directive:

“Turn off your phones now!”

Liam Stack and Euan Ward contributed reporting.

In his continuing fight with the Brazilian authorities, score one for Elon Musk — at least briefly.

On Wednesday, his social network, X, suddenly went live again for many across Brazil after three weeks of being blocked under orders from Brazil’s Supreme Court.

The reason? X made a technical change to how it routes its internet traffic, enabling the site to evade the digital roadblocks set up in recent weeks by Brazilian internet providers.

But by Wednesday night, the president of Brazil’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, said his agency believed it would soon be able to restore the block.

The new twist showed how Mr. Musk appears far from backing down in Brazil, making the dispute a significant test of strength between national sovereignty and the borderless power of internet companies.

Brazil’s Supreme Court blocked X because the company defied orders to remove certain accounts and then closed its offices in the country to avoid consequences.

Days later, a separate company controlled by Mr. Musk, the satellite-internet provider Starlink, told Brazilian regulators it would continue to deliver X directly to Brazilians from satellites in space. Starlink later backed down after regulators made clear the company would lose its license in Brazil.

Now, those same regulators are working to quickly reverse Mr. Musk’s latest workaround.

Earlier on Wednesday, technical experts predicted doing so would be hard. X’s new approach relies on Cloudflare, a major internet-infrastructure provider based in San Francisco, to deliver its site in Brazil. Cloudflare helps route traffic for millions of websites, so blocking it in Brazil would have major consequences for internet users across the nation of 200 million.

Think of it as if X’s car was blocked in Brazil and so it just began using Uber to get around — and now regulators are weighing whether to block Uber for everyone in response.

“You can’t just block Cloudflare because you would block half of the internet,” said Basílio Perez, president of Abrint, the trade group for Brazilian internet providers. He said Cloudflare supported more than 24 million websites, including those of the Brazilian government and banks.

But hours later, Anatel’s president, Carlos Baigorri, said in an interview that Cloudflare had agreed to isolate internet traffic from X, enabling Brazilian internet providers to easily target and block that traffic.

“Cloudflare has been extremely cooperative,” he said. “It really shows the diverse reactions from two companies, Cloudflare and X.”

Abrint, whose members deliver internet connections to more than half of Brazil, said that internet providers received a new order from Anatel, the nation’s telecommunications regulator, late Wednesday with technical instructions on how to block traffic from X. The order instructed the companies to comply starting Thursday, the trade group said.

X said in a statement that it moved traffic to Cloudflare because its recent tumult in Brazil had affected its internet infrastructure in Latin America.

“This change resulted in an inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users,” the company said in a statement. “While we expect the platform to be inaccessible again in Brazil soon, we continue efforts to work with the Brazilian government to return very soon for the people of Brazil.”

The relatively pacific comment was a notable departure from the months of harsh criticism that X’s owner, Mr. Musk, has leveled against Brazil’s Supreme Court. For weeks, it appeared that neither side was willing to budge in the dispute, suggesting that X could remain blocked in Brazil for the long term. In recent interviews, three Brazilian Supreme Court justices said that it was up to X to comply with court orders if it wanted to return to the country.

Brazil’s Supreme Court did not respond to requests for comment on X’s latest move on Wednesday.

Earlier on Wednesday, a person close to Cloudflare confirmed that X had recently switched to using the company’s services but said that it was not actively trying to help X evade the block in Brazil. The person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss business with a client, suggested that regulators would soon be able to figure out how to block X again.

It was unclear how many Brazilians could use X again on Wednesday, but thousands were flocking to the site to celebrate its return. Reports of X’s status were mixed, depending on the internet provider and device.

At The New York Times bureau in Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday, the X app was functioning, but the website was not.

Mr. Baigorri, Brazil’s telecom regulator, said that even after X is blocked again in Brazil, he expected Mr. Musk to seek new ways around the suspension. “This is going to be a cat-and-mouse game,” he said.

Kate Conger contributed reporting from San Francisco.

A second wave of deadly blasts rocked Lebanon on Wednesday, as hand-held radios that had been covertly turned into explosive devices and carried by Hezbollah members blew up across the country, killing at least 20 people, wounding more than 450 others and shocking the nation.

It was the second coordinated attack against Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed group backed by Iran, and the explosions came as the country was burying its dead from the day before, when pagers exploded, killing at least 12 people and injuring 2,700 more, officials said.

Hezbollah blamed Israel for the pager attack, and American and other officials said Israel had hidden tiny explosives in a shipment of Taiwanese-made pagers imported into Lebanon.

The Israeli military neither claimed nor denied responsibility for the pager explosions, and it did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest attack. But Israeli officials issued statements on Wednesday signaling their intent to take more aggressive action to push Hezbollah forces away from Israel’s northern border.

Hezbollah has been exchanging cross-border strikes with Israel for 11 months, even as Israel battles Hezbollah’s ally, Hamas, in the Gaza Strip. Hezbollah began firing missiles and drones at Israel in the wake of the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, prompting Israel to strike across Lebanon. For months, both sides have avoided all-out war.

But Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said that Israel was “at the outset of a new period in this war, and we must adapt.”

“The center of gravity is moving north, which means we are diverting forces, resources and energy toward the north,” Mr. Gallant said in a statement on Wednesday that did not explicitly refer to the explosions in Lebanon.

The pagers blew up in people’s hands and pockets on Tuesday. Two Lebanese security officials and a Hezbollah official said some of the devices that exploded on Wednesday were hand-held radios belonging to Hezbollah members.

The two-way radios that exploded were larger and heavier than the pagers and, in some cases, set off larger fires, according to a New York Times analysis of the available visual evidence.

The Times reviewed three photos and one video to identify the communication devices involved in Wednesday’s attacks as the IC-V82, a two-way radio bearing the brand of the Japanese company ICOM. It is unclear where Hezbollah purchased the radios.

The Lebanese Telecommunications Ministry also said ICOM walkie-talkies had exploded and condemned what it called “the criminal act committed today by Israel.” The ministry said it had not licensed the devices.

One of the explosions happened at an outdoor funeral in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where thousands had gathered to mourn two Hezbollah fighters, a paramedic and a 12-year-old boy killed in the pager blasts. It sent people running for cover and scrambling to turn off their phones and other devices.

The Lebanese Red Cross said that 30 ambulance teams were responding to “multiple explosions” in different areas of the country, including in the south and east.

“I saw stuff today that you can only see in movies,” said Hussein Awada, 54, recounting how he watched as a man attempting to clear the road for ambulances in Beirut was gravely injured when his hand-held radio exploded.

“It took seconds — the thing just blew up in his hands,” Mr. Awada said. “Maybe tomorrow lighters will explode, too. If you want to light a cigarette, it will just explode in your hand.”

Fires engulfed at least 60 homes and shops, and dozens of cars and motorcycles, including in the Bekaa Valley and the southern suburbs of Beirut, said the Lebanese Civil Defense, an emergency rescue organization. Both areas are known as Hezbollah strongholds. Ambulances clogged the roads, and some hospitals in southern Lebanon were swamped with dozens of wounded patients, according to Lebanon’s state-run news agency.

“There are buildings burning right now in front of me,” Mortada Smaoui, 30, a resident of Beirut’s southern suburbs, said after a series of simultaneous explosions hit his neighborhood on Wednesday. He said that firefighters and soldiers were rushing to the scene.

Hezbollah said that eight of its members were killed by the exploding pagers on Tuesday. Lebanese officials said two other people and two children were also killed, including a 9-year-old girl, Fatima Abdullah, from central Lebanon.

She had just come home from school when a pager on the kitchen table began to beep, her aunt said. She had picked up the device to take it to her father when it exploded, mangling her face and leaving the room covered in blood, her aunt said.

At her funeral on Wednesday in the village of Saraain, mourners chanted: “The enemy killed us using this small device. They killed our child Fatima.”

The Taiwanese company some officials have named as the supplier of the pagers, Gold Apollo, on Wednesday sought to distance itself from the devices, saying that another manufacturer with a Hungarian address had made the model of pager as part of a licensing deal.

The pager explosions fanned fears of a wider Middle East war. “Israel is pushing the entire region toward the abyss of regional war,” Ayman Safadi, the Jordanian foreign minister, told reporters. “Such a war would have drastic ramifications not only for the region, but for the world.”

The U.S. secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, said the United States did not know about the pager attack in advance and was not involved.

“We are still gathering the information and gathering the facts,” he said at a news conference in Cairo, Egypt’s capital, with his Egyptian counterpart, Badr Abdelatty. Mr. Blinken said the United States had been “very clear about the importance of all parties avoiding any steps that could further escalate the conflict that we’re trying to resolve in Gaza.”

The United Nations Security Council planned to convene an emergency meeting on Friday to discuss the wave of attacks in Lebanon, according to Slovenia, which holds the Council’s rotating presidency this month. Algeria, the only Arab country on the Council, had requested the meeting.

Hezbollah has said it will not stop fighting until Israel ends its campaign against Hamas, an Iran-backed ally, in Gaza. More than 160,000 people in Lebanon and Israel have been displaced by the cross-border strikes between Israeli troops and Hezbollah forces.

Israeli leaders have faced growing frustration from the tens of thousands of displaced Israelis unable to return home. In a short video statement on Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “I already said that we would return the residents of the north securely to their homes, and that is exactly what we will do.”

Reporting was contributed by Anushka Patil, Ronen Bergman, Sheera Frenkel, Farnaz Fassihi, Christiaan Triebert and Aric Toler.

A 10-year-old student was fatally stabbed near a Japanese school in southern China on Wednesday, according to the Japanese and Chinese foreign ministries, in what appeared to be the latest in a spate of knife attacks on foreigners in the country.

A 44-year-old man, surnamed Zhong, was in custody, according to a statement from the police in Shenzhen, the city where the attack occurred. The student was taken to a hospital, but died early Thursday of injuries sustained in the attack, the Japanese Embassy in China said.

Neither the Chinese nor the Japanese authorities specified the nationality of the victim, whose surname is Shen, according to the Shenzhen police. (The Chinese character Shen can also be used for surnames in Japan.)

But students at the Shenzhen Japanese School, near where the stabbing occurred, must be Japanese nationals, according to its website. And at a regularly scheduled news conference on Wednesday, Lin Jian, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, said the government would continue to take “effective measures” to protect “the safety of all foreigners in China.”

A string of recent attacks has fueled fears that xenophobia and nationalism in China — which have been on the rise for years, often fanned by the government — are spilling over into violence. In June, four American teachers were stabbed in Jilin, a northern city; later that month, a Japanese woman and her child were attacked with a knife in Suzhou, a city in the east.

The Chinese government described each of those attacks as an isolated incident and said the assailants had not targeted citizens of any particular country. It insisted that the attacks could have happened anywhere in the world.

But soon after the Suzhou episode, several major social media platforms pledged to crack down on hate speech that targeted Japanese or incited “extreme nationalism.”

Japan’s consul general in Guangzhou, Yoshiko Kijima, who oversees a region that includes Shenzhen, told reporters on Thursday that she had met with a Chinese official and requested that the “truth of the incident be revealed and explained,” referring to the assailant’s motive.

China’s ruling Communist Party has often encouraged nationalist emotions as a way of rallying support for its rule.

That is especially true when it comes to Japan. Imperial Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s, which continued through the end of the Second World War, has shadowed the countries’ relationship ever since. And the stabbing Wednesday occurred on an especially sensitive date: The Communist Party regards Sept. 18, 1931, as the beginning of the invasion.

On that date, Japanese soldiers caused an explosion on a Japanese-owned railway in China, which Japan blamed on Chinese nationalists and used as a pretense for the invasion. Schoolchildren are taught to observe moments of silence on Sept. 18 every year. Trending social-media hashtags on Wednesday included “Every Chinese must never forget Sept. 18.”

Japan’s foreign minister, Yoko Kamikawa, told reporters on Thursday that the Japanese government had several days earlier requested that the Chinese authorities take “all possible measures” to protect Japanese schools on the anniversary.

“It is very unfortunate that this incident occurred in such a situation,” she said.

Even on other days, anti-Japanese rhetoric is common on Chinese social media, despite the platforms’ promise to crack down. Self-described patriots post videos of Japanese schools, asking why Japanese people are allowed to run educational facilities in China, or suggesting that the students inside are being trained as spies. Some videos have featured the Shenzhen Japanese School.

After the June attack, and again after the one on Wednesday, some commenters praised the assailant or suggested that Japan had staged the attack to win sympathy.

Other Japanese schools across China warned their students to be cautious. The Guangzhou Japanese School canceled club activities and asked parents to accompany their children to and from school for the rest of the week. It also advised parents to avoid speaking Japanese loudly in public.

In a first, the Japanese foreign ministry this year requested about $2.5 million in the government’s budget for the forthcoming year to hire security guards for school buses in China.

The Shenzhen Japanese School had 273 students as of April, according to its website. It is in a neighborhood where many Japanese people live. Shenzhen has about 3,600 Japanese residents, giving it the fifth-largest Japanese population in mainland China, according to Japan’s foreign ministry.

The stabbing in June in Suzhou was also near a Japanese school. A Chinese man attacked a Japanese woman and her child at a bus stop outside the school. A Chinese woman, Hu Youping, who was working as a bus attendant, tried to shield the victims and was wounded herself. She later died of her injuries.

Two weeks before that, four instructors from an Iowa college who were teaching in Jilin in northern China were attacked by a Chinese man with a knife while walking in a park. The instructors have since returned to the United States. A Chinese bystander tried to intervene, according to an official Chinese official statement, which did not provide details.

Siyi Zhao contributed research from Beijing.

First, hundreds of pagers blew up, killing and injuring members of Lebanon’s most effective military organization and filling the country’s hospitals with wounded patients.

Next, during mass funerals on Wednesday for people killed in the previous day’s blasts, more wireless devices exploded, adding to the human toll and spreading terror that any portable gadget in people’s hands or pockets could suddenly become a weapon.

Lebanese and American officials said Israel had remotely detonated devices carried by Hezbollah members. The attacks marked one of the largest security failures in Hezbollah’s history and sowed chaos inside 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 attacks, carried out in two waves of simultaneous explosions, blew off fingers, bloodied faces and damaged eyes. The target was clearly Hezbollah, although many of the victims were civilians, including a medic killed in the hospital where he worked and a girl who picked up her father’s beeping pager to take it to him.

The Lebanese health authorities said that the first wave of explosions, on Tuesday, killed 12 people, including two children, and wounded more than 2,700. The second wave of blasts on Wednesday killed 20 and injured more than 450 others, the authorities said.

Israel has not confirmed or denied involvement in the attacks.

For Hezbollah, experts said, the blows were 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, especially after the second wave of explosions, which appeared to focus on hand-held radios. The group’s leaders have given no indication of how this attack could change 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 in the first wave 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 before the second wave of explosions.

Dr. Abiad said Tuesday’s blasts had come with no warning and that thousands of patients had suddenly arrived in 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 many devices after the first attack, likely disrupting its members’ ability to communicate. The second took out the hand-held radios that some had resorted to as a backup.

The attacks likely incapacitates 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 the attacks 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. The attacks 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 attacks necessitate 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 the 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.

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, formally 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 and other wireless devices belonging to Hezbollah was a tactical success that had no clear strategic effect, analysts say.

While it embarrassed Hezbollah and appeared to incapacitate many of its members, the attack has so far not altered the military balance along the Israeli-Lebanese 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 the attack on Tuesday was an eye-catching demonstration of Israel’s technological prowess, Israel has not so far sought to capitalize on the confusion it sowed by initiating a decisive blow against Hezbollah and invading Lebanon. A second wave of blasts was heard across Lebanon on Wednesday, reportedly caused by exploding walkie-talkies and other devices, but the Israeli military did not appear to be preparing for an imminent ground invasion.

And if the pager attack impressed many Israelis, some of whom had criticized their government for failing to stop Hezbollah’s strikes, their core frustration remained: 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.”

The intricacy of the attack has restored some of the prestige and aura that Israel’s intelligence agencies lost on Oct. 7, when Hamas led a surprise attack on Israel that the Israeli military failed to predict or prepare for. Among Israelis, the devastation caused by Hamas’s attack dented their trust in the military leadership, and it has since prompted the resignation of the military intelligence chief, as well as the head of its main signal intelligence agency.

Still, Israelis are divided over whether the attack was born of 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. It 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 on 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.

The expectation was that the Hezbollah war would end without the need for a bigger Israeli attack on Lebanon, as long as a solution could be found in Gaza.

With negotiations over Gaza now at an impasse, the Israeli leadership faces rising domestic pressure to find another way of coercing Hezbollah to stand down.

As a result, the Israeli leadership has recently 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 pager attack appeared to make good on that warning. Analysts said it had been an attempt to persuade Hezbollah to disentangle its fate from that of Hamas and, in doing so, end the northern war without waiting for a resolution in the south.

“The point is to disconnect the war Hezbollah declared on Israel from the war with Hamas,” General 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,’” General 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.

Avi Issacharoff, an Israeli columnist, wrote in a commentary on Wednesday that the assault “will not prompt Hezbollah to stop its attacks on Israel’s northern civilian communities, but to escalate them.” Mr. Issacharoff added, “We appear to be in for days and possibly even weeks of escalating hostilities that might ultimately force the army to launch a ground operation, even as the army is still operating on the ground in Gaza and is still taking losses.”

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 news media 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.