The contrast between the dexterity of Israel’s latest attacks on Hezbollah and the uncertainty over its long-term strategy in Lebanon is the latest example of a fragility at the heart of Israeli statecraft, according to Israeli public figures and analysts.

To friend and foe alike, Israel appears technologically strong, but strategically lost. It is capable of extraordinary acts of espionage, as well as powerful expressions of military might, but is struggling to tie such efforts to long-term diplomatic and geopolitical goals.

“You see the sophistication of the technological minds of Israel and the total failure of the political leadership to carry out any moves of consequence,” said Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli prime minister.

“They are too preoccupied and obsessed by their fears to do anything on a broader strategic basis,” Mr. Olmert said.

Israel’s security services have infiltrated and sabotaged Hezbollah’s communications networks by blowing up pagers and other wireless devices this week, but Israel’s leadership appears uncertain about how to contain the group in the long term. Israel has conducted several clandestine missions and assassinations inside Iran, most recently of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh by infiltrating a guesthouse protected by the Iranian security establishment. At the same time, it has avoided making the political concessions necessary to forge formal alliances with most of Iran’s opponents in the region.

Its commandos have freed several hostages from captivity through complex special operations, even as its politicians have failed to secure a wider deal to rescue more than 100 others still held in Gaza. And while Israel’s world-leading Air Force has pounded Gaza, destroying much of the territory’s urban fabric and killing top Hamas commanders like Muhammad Deif, the Israeli government has not issued a detailed and viable plan for Gaza’s postwar future.

The result is a slow and repetitive military campaign in Gaza in which Israeli soldiers are repeatedly capturing and then withdrawing from the same pockets of land, with no mandate to either hold ground or initiate a transfer of power to a different Palestinian leadership.

Israel’s campaigns have come at considerable cost. By killing tens of thousands of Gazan civilians as well as several hundred Lebanese in its strikes on enemy combatants, Israel has prompted international outcry, drawn accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice and tarnished its global standing without conclusively destroying Hamas, let alone Hezbollah.

For now at least, Israel’s choices have also undermined its chance to forge diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia, the most influential Arab country and one that could provide Israel with an extra diplomatic and even military buffer against Iran and Hezbollah. Talks to normalize relations with Riyadh have stumbled amid Israel’s refusal to allow Palestinian sovereignty in Gaza and the West Bank after the war.

For some, the scrambled thinking is partly derived from the shock of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. The attack was the bloodiest day in Israel’s history and may have left Israel’s leaders seeking short-term wins to atone for their lapses that day, at the expense of long-term planning for Israel’s future. With many Israelis traumatized by the attack, their leaders risk losing popularity and further tarnishing their legacy by promoting contentious compromises to bring Israel’s various wars to a close.

“Tactical successes can be obtained by professionals, but large-scale achievements have to be achieved by leaders,” said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington. “They must be able to bite their tongue, go against the grain, take unpopular decisions and political risks.”

For Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, Israel’s security must be prioritized at all costs, and Hamas and Hezbollah must be fully defanged — in part to restore the sense of deterrence and invincibility that Israel lost on Oct. 7 — before diplomatic compromises can be reached.

But to Mr. Netanyahu’s critics, true security cannot be achieved without a diplomatic vision that Israel’s allies and potential allies can accept; they argue that Israel’s successful operations against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran will only have limited effect in the long term if they remain divorced from a coherent national strategy. According to his opponents, Mr. Netanyahu has allowed political considerations — principally his need to prevent the collapse of his fragile coalition government — to supersede strategic decisions that are opposed by his coalition allies.

Mr. Netanyahu’s grip on power is dependent on a group of far-right lawmakers who are opposed to the kinds of compromises necessary to reach an endgame in Gaza and Lebanon.

Those lawmakers have threatened to collapse Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition if he agrees to a truce in Gaza that leaves Hamas in power. They also oppose plans to hand power to Hamas’s main Palestinian rival, Fatah.

In turn, the standoff in Gaza has led to the extension of the war along the Israel-Lebanon border, where Hezbollah says it will continue fighting until a truce is reached between Israel and Hamas.

Mr. Netanyahu’s allies say the attacks this week in Lebanon, coupled with the deployment of more troops to the Lebanon border, show a clear strategic effort to use increased military action to force Hezbollah to compromise.

“Even though these are tactical moves, it’s part of a bigger plan,” said Nadav Shtrauchler, a political strategist and former adviser to Mr. Netanyahu. After months of contained conflict along the Israel-Lebanon border, Mr. Shtrauchler said, “We’re going to go strong at Hezbollah.”

To others, the moves still feel inconclusive, stopping short of a decisive end to the deadlock through either force or diplomacy. On the one hand, Mr. Netanyahu has avoided ordering a ground invasion of Lebanon. On the other, he has rejected a truce in Gaza that could end the Lebanon war through mediation.

“Where is he going? How does he end the war?” asked Mr. Rabinovich, the former ambassador. “All these fundamental questions have not been answered, and in some cases not even asked in the public discourse.”

To Mr. Olmert, the former prime minister, Israel’s lack of strategy extends far beyond Mr. Netanyahu.

The problem is rooted, Mr. Olmert said, in a reluctance across Israeli society and its establishment to address or sometimes even acknowledge a conundrum within Israel — the question of Palestinian sovereignty.

“There is no endgame on any issue without the Palestinians,” Mr. Olmert said.

Many Israelis now reject the idea of a Palestinian state because they feel a sovereign Palestine, shorn of Israeli supervision, would be more able to mount the kind of attack that Hamas initiated on Oct. 7.

Even centrist and left-leaning leaders mostly see the resumption of peace talks as a non-starter, given that one of the two leading Palestinian factions, Hamas, killed more than one thousand Israeli civilians less than a year ago and the other, Fatah, is weak and discredited among much of the Palestinian population.

Without agreeing to a pathway to a Palestinian state, it will be difficult for Israel to solve most of its other strategic binds, Mr. Olmert said.

For example, it will be harder to plan for a postwar Gaza without showing more flexibility on Palestinian sovereignty, Mr. Olmert said: The only feasible Palestinian alternative to Hamas is the Palestinian Authority, the Fatah-dominated institution that administers parts of the West Bank.

By allowing the Palestinian Authority to govern in both Gaza and the West Bank, Israel would in effect reestablish political contiguity between the two territories, making it easier to form a Palestinian state that spans both places.

Without at least some progress toward Palestinian statehood, it will also be harder for Israel to forge formal ties with Saudi Arabia, since the Saudi leadership has made clear that concessions to the Palestinians are a prerequisite for normalization. And by forging such an alliance, Israel could firm up its standing in the region and make Iran and its Hezbollah proxy warier of antagonizing Israel, since Saudi Arabia also shares Israel’s wariness of Tehran, Mr. Olmert said.

“Hezbollah and Iran won’t suddenly become Zionists, but it will change the balance,” said Mr. Olmert. “It will make life for Israel much easier to deal with such challenges.”

Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.

The military junta ruling the West African nation of Mali suffered one of its deadliest attacks in years this week, as extremists affiliated with Al Qaeda killed at least 50 members of its armed forces in an assault on the capital, Bamako.

But even as a private ceremony for the dead was being arranged for Thursday, the junta had yet to acknowledge the true toll of the assault, which struck two symbolically important military sites and brought an Islamist insurrection that has ravaged much of Mali to its doorstep. Tuesday’s attack sent a direct message to the country’s leader, Col. Assimi Goïta, as assailants stormed his former military base and set fire to his plane.

The Islamist group Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, or JNIM, which has declared allegiance to Al Qaeda and is one of the deadliest extremist organizations in West Africa, claimed responsibility for the attack, the first in Mali’s capital since 2016.

The death toll of 50 or more is a preliminary, conservative figure based on interviews with members of Mali’s security forces, a surgeon at a Bamako hospital and a Western intelligence official with extensive knowledge of West Africa.

All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the attack publicly. The junta has not said how many people were killed.

The assault began at a school for military police in Faladié, a neighborhood halfway between downtown Bamako and the airport. Hundreds of trainees were still asleep when insurgents stormed the school compound around 5:30 a.m. The camp that hosts the school is also home to an elite special forces unit to which Colonel Goïta belongs.

About 50 of the trainees were killed, according to a police officer who was trapped at the camp during the attack, a Malian intelligence official based in Bamako and a surgeon at one of the capital’s main hospitals, who treated victims on Tuesday and visited the morgue on Wednesday.

Two graphic videos posted online, said to have been filmed at the camp, show rows of burned beds and at least five charred bodies. The New York Times was unable to confirm that the videos were authentic.

The surgeon and another military official said more than 100 people had been wounded in the assault on the school compound, 60 of whom were gravely injured.

Minutes after that attack began, assailants stormed the airport, where they set fire to the presidential plane used by Colonel Goïta, according to photos shared by the extremist group, as well as videos posted to social media whose authenticity was verified by The Times.

The images show that the militants infiltrated both the presidential or V.I.P. area of the airport, where they set fire to the presidential plane’s engine; and the civilian area, where there were at least five other aircraft. Those included two jets operated by the United Nations’ World Food Program and a commercial Sky Mali plane. The insurgents set fire to equipment inside another hangar.

A spokesman for the World Food Program said it was aware of footage showing an armed man shooting at one of its planes, but was unable to assess the damage because of restricted access to the tarmac.

The Islamist group said in a statement on Wednesday that it had destroyed six military aircraft, including a drone. The Times was not able to confirm that, but the police officer who had been at the camp during the attack said he had visited the airport on Wednesday, and that six aircraft had been damaged.

Satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies, provided to The Times, shows apparent fire damage to the airport’s V.I.P. hangar. The images, captured on Wednesday, also show damage to the rear of one U.N. plane, but no destroyed aircraft are visible.

The Malian intelligence official based in Bamako said that six insurgents had struck the military camp, with a second group of seven militants carrying out the airport assault.

Since Colonel Goïta and other officers seized power in 2020, they have maintained that only military leadership can restore order to Mali and win back territories lost to Islamist insurgents and other rebels over more than a decade. Turning their back on traditional allies like France and the United States, they have instead bought drones from Turkey and contracted with Russia’s Wagner group to send mercenaries to fight the rebels.

But so far, the military has struggled to contain the Islamists’ expansion, analysts say. In its statement on Wednesday, the extremist group said that it had killed “hundreds” of Malian soldiers and Wagner mercenaries, which The Times could not confirm.

The Islamist insurgency, which began in 2012, has been concentrated in northern and central Mali. But militants have been moving south toward the capital since 2022, carrying out dozens of attacks in neighboring regions.

“This attack significantly scratches the image that the Malian authorities had been painting since their takeover: one of a regime that has managed to restore security in the country,” said Ibrahim Maiga, a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit focused on conflict prevention and resolution.

A video posted on social media after the Bamako assault shows Malian soldiers inspecting two bodies, accompanied by fair-skinned men speaking Russian. Wagner has a base at the airport that does not appear to have been targeted by the militants.

Early on Tuesday afternoon, Maj. Gen. Oumar Diarra, the military’s chief of general staff, visited Bamako’s airport and said on public television that all the attackers had been killed or arrested. But militants were still at large at the airport until 5 p.m., though the ones at the school compound had all been killed by late morning, the members of the Malian security forces said.

Malian state-run television aired footage showing more than a dozen blindfolded detainees, who the army identified as suspects in the recent attack. On the street outside the police camp, social media footage shows, a mob of youths set a man on fire. Witnesses told Reuters that the victim was a cigarette seller who was wearing a bullet belt, which may have lead the mob to believe he was an attacker.

Civilian deaths in Mali have skyrocketed as the insurgency has spread. A third of the country’s 23 million people are in need of aid, according to the United Nations’ humanitarian agency. Many have been displaced by Islamist violence or live under the rule of insurgents.

Mali has also been dealing with its worst floods since the 1960s, with at least 55 people killed and roughly 350,000 displaced or otherwise affected in recent weeks.

As of Thursday, the junta had not released a death toll from the insurgent assault, though the military’s general staff acknowledged on Tuesday that “some human lives were lost.” Two representatives for the military did not respond to requests for comment.

An official with the presidential office, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to publicly comment on the events, said Colonel Goïta had ordered that no death toll be made public. A private ceremony to honor the victims was scheduled for Thursday afternoon at a military police camp in Bamako, according to a telegram shared by military police officers and seen by The Times.

The assault, and the junta’s silence about it, has led to renewed calls from its opponents to restore civilian rule. A presidential election had been scheduled for March, but the junta declared a postponement and has not set a new date.

“No half-mast flag, no national days of mourning,” Ismaël Sacko, an opposition leader living in exile in France, said in a telephone interview. “This government is in denial.”

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 Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, 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 four 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.

Multiple women have accused Mohamed al-Fayed, the billionaire former owner of Harrods, the luxury British department store, of rape and sexual assault, according to an investigation by the BBC.

Five women said Mr. Al Fayed, who died in 2023 at age 94, had raped them, while others detailed alarming accounts of sexual assault and harassment while they were working at Harrods.

Mr. al-Fayed, a tycoon with numerous properties and ships around the world, owned Harrods from 1985 to 2010. Later in his life, he became best known for the romance between his son, Dodi, and Diana, Princess of Wales, who both died in a 1997 car crash in Paris.

In a BBC documentary released on Thursday called “Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods,” more than 20 female ex-employees presented harrowing accounts of abuse. The allegations span years and continents, with accusations in London, Paris, St. Tropez and Abu Dhabi.

While the BBC investigation is not the first to accuse Mr. Al Fayed of unwanted sexual advances or harassment, it offers the clearest picture yet of abusive patterns of behavior and raise questions about how women’s accounts were dismissed for so long.

In a 1995 investigation in Vanity Fair by Maureen Orth, an employee said that Mr. al-Fayed “regularly walked the store on the lookout for young, attractive women to work in his office” and detailed other problematic behavior. Mr. al-Fayed sued for libel but eventually dropped the case.

In 2017 and 2018, Channel 4, a British broadcaster, spoke to several people who said Mr. al-Fayed had sexually harassed and groomed female employees. Some of the women interviewed spoke again in the BBC documentary.

Many of the women interviewed by the BBC were granted anonymity, used pseudonyms, or used only their first names when describing the abuse. One, who worked as a personal assistant to Mr. al-Fayed in the 1990s, described being raped by him at his apartment in London when she was 19.

Others described how Mr. al-Fayed would scour the department-store floor and pick women to work in his office. They were given intrusive gynecological health checks and tested for sexually transmitted diseases, the results of which were sent directly to him.

Former staff from the department store also said that Mr. al-Fayed’s behavior toward women was apparent.

“It was well known — everybody knew about it,” Tony Leeming, who worked as a department manager in Harrods from 1994 to 2004, told the BBC.

Harrods issued an apology on Thursday, saying that the organization was “utterly appalled by the allegations of abuse perpetrated by Mohamed al-Fayed.”

Mr. al-Fayed sold Harrods to Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in 2010 for 1.5 billion pounds, about $2 billion at today’s exchange rate.

“These were the actions of an individual who was intent on abusing his power wherever he operated and we condemn them in the strongest terms,” the company said. “We also acknowledge that during this time his victims were failed and for this we sincerely apologize. We are doing everything we can to fix this.”

The company said it was now “a very different organization” from the one Mr. al-Fayed had owned and controlled, and added that since 2023, when new information had come to light about allegations of sexual abuse, “it has been our priority to settle claims in the quickest way possible, avoiding lengthy legal proceedings for the women involved.” That process is still available for any current or former Harrods employees, the company added.

Harrods also posted instructions for former employees who believe they were victims of sexual misconduct by Mr. al-Fayed, to complete a form to report the allegations to the company. It said that complaints would be considered individually and that if victims wanted to claim compensation, it had an established process.

Mr. al-Fayed, an Egyptian-born entrepreneur, moved to Britain in 1974, and bought the Ritz Hotel in Paris, alongside his brothers, in 1979. He controlled oil, shipping, banking and real estate around the world, and Forbes had estimated his net worth last year at $2 billion. As his wealth grew, he courted celebrities and grew close to the royal family for a time.

But it was the death of his son that came to be most associated with him.

In the years that followed, Mr. al-Fayed became a vocal critic of the royal family, whom he blamed for his son’s death and that of Diana. Mr. al-Fayed was depicted, often framed in a positive light, in the final season of “The Crown,” the Emmy-winning Netflix series that offered a fictionalized version of the lives of Queen Elizabeth and her family.

Reflecting on the series, one of the women who reported being sexually assaulted by Mr. al-Fayed told the BBC: “I don’t want him to be seen as some kind of hero.”