In the waiting rooms of a Beirut hospital, exhausted families slumped on couches, waited anxiously for doctors’ updates and wept. Nearby rooms held their loved ones, injured when pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah suddenly exploded across Lebanon this week, blinding and maiming many of their owners.

“I have no hope,” said a woman whose son-in-law had lost an eye and fingers on both hands. He had been lying down when his pager beeped and he picked it up — only for it to blow up in his face.

She gave only her first name, Joumana, and would not say what her son-in-law did that required a pager. But she made a vow: “The only revenge that will get us justice is to get rid of Israel.”

Across Lebanon on Thursday, hospitals were packed and people were on edge after hand-held communications devices imported by Hezbollah, the militant group and political party, blew up in waves across the country on two successive days. Dozens of people were killed and thousands of others injured in attacks that spread a terror that simple objects carried in people’s bags and pockets could readily become bombs.

Lebanese, American and other government officials have said that Israel launched the attacks by remotely detonating devices that had been outfitted with explosives before they were sent to Hezbollah. Israeli officials have not confirmed or denied their country’s involvement.

For 11 months, Hezbollah has been attacking sites in northern Israel in support of its ally Hamas in Gaza. Israel has responded by bombing and assassinating Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon, and civilians have fled areas on both sides of the border.

Lebanon’s health ministry on Thursday raised the death toll from the attacks on Tuesday and Wednesday to 37, adding that nearly 3,000 people had been wounded.

Hezbollah did not release figures on how many of its members were killed or injured, but the devices were distributed solely to its people, and multiple interviews with officials and relatives suggested that most of the victims were connected to the group, although some were civilians or had noncombat roles in the organization.

Hezbollah publicly mourned many of the dead as its fighters, including one teenager, born in 2008, who was 15 or 16. At least two other children, a 9-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy, were among the dead, as was at least one woman.

The precise identities and affiliations of the wounded were less clear. Journalists were barred from entering some hospitals to interview victims, and the covert nature of Hezbollah’s military activities means that its members don’t readily share information with outsiders.

Hezbollah is a vast organization, which Israel, the United States, and other countries consider a terrorist group. It has a military force estimated to have tens of thousands of fighters, as well as offices that provide social services, administer schools and serve the group’s ministers and lawmakers in the Lebanese government.

The attacks appeared to cut through a broad swath of that apparatus, raising questions about whether such an assault violated the laws of war.

“It was an indiscriminate attack,” Firass Abiad, Lebanon’s health minister, told reporters on Thursday, after describing the burden the attacks had put on Lebanon’s health system. “It was a war crime.”

The laws of war prohibit booby traps in everyday items, said Lama Fakih, director for the Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch, including “something like a pager that a kid could easily pick up when it starts beeping.”

Combatants must also differentiate between fighters and civilians, something an attacking power cannot do with so many explosives moving freely around such a large area, Ms. Fakih said.

And detonating such explosives in urban communities risked harming nearby civilians and possibly exposing those with no ties to Hezbollah to future attacks. Ms. Fakih mentioned the case of a man who had lost an eye because he had been passing someone on the street whose pager exploded.

Appearing to be affiliated with Hezbollah meant “you could be targeted at any time,” she said.

After two days of explosions, many in Lebanon were anxious on Thursday about what might blow up next. Public institutions banned pagers, the Lebanese army collected and detonated suspicious devices, and the civil aviation authority forbade airline passengers from traveling with pagers and walkie-talkies.

At the American University of Beirut hospital, two floors held people who had been injured in the attacks.

One man wiped away tears, saying that his 30-year-old nephew had “almost lost his whole face.”

Dr. Mohammed Ghobris, a surgeon from southern Lebanon, said he had received dozens of patients wounded by the exploding pagers after the first blasts on Tuesday. Now, he was in Beirut, where his brother-in-law, Sajid Ghobris, awoke to find that he was missing an eye and that one of his hands had been amputated at the wrist.

“This is international terrorism,” Dr. Ghobris said. Three other relatives of his had also been injured.

In a televised speech on Thursday, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, acknowledged that the attacks had been “a severe and cruel blow” to the organization. He vowed that Hezbollah would continue to prevent Israelis who have been displaced from the border region from returning home.

“No military escalation, no killings, no assassinations and no all-out war can return residents to the border,” he said.

As he spoke, Israeli jet screamed though the sky over Beirut, setting off sonic booms, further terrifying residents.

Earlier in the day, crowds had gathered in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah holds sway, for a second day of funerals for those killed in the attacks.

A woman named Hanan said that it was the second funeral she had attended in two days and that four of her relatives were in the hospital as a result of the attacks. They included her sister-in-law, who she said had been injured when her husband’s pager blew up.

“There are fighters and nonfighters,” she said. “There are people who were civilian staff in hospitals.”

Nearby, Ali Bazzi watched pallbearers carry the coffin of his nephew, Abbas Bazzi.

“This enemy has no mercy, no pity,” he said.

When asked how his nephew had died, he said, “From the pager.”

The revelation convulsed all of Canada.

Ground-penetrating radar had found possible signs of 215 unmarked graves at a former residential school in British Columbia run by the Catholic Church that the government had once used to assimilate Indigenous children forcibly taken from their families.

It was the first of some 80 former schools where indications of possible unmarked graves were discovered, and it produced a wave of sorrow and shock in a country that has long struggled with the legacy of its treatment of Indigenous people. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered flags to fly at half-staff, as many Canadians wore orange T-shirts with the slogan “Every Child Matters.”

Three years later, though, no remains have been exhumed and identified.

Many communities are struggling with a difficult choice: Should the sites be left undisturbed and transformed into memorial grounds, or should exhumations be done to identify any victims and return their remains to their communities?

While there is a broad consensus in Canada that children were taken from their families and died in these schools, as the discussions and searches have dragged on, a small universe of conservative Catholic and right-wing activists have become increasingly vocal in questioning the existence of unmarked graves. They are also skeptical of the entire national reconsideration of how Canada treated Indigenous people.

Three years after the announcement about the former Kamloops residential school site, they ask, why has no proof of any remains been uncovered anywhere in the country?

“There’s, so far, no evidence of any remains of children buried around residential schools,” Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and an author of “Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools),” said in an interview.

“Nobody disputes,” he added, “that children died and that the conditions were sometimes chaotic. But that’s quite different from clandestine burials.”

The arguments by Mr. Flanagan and other skeptics have been roundly denounced by elected officials across the political spectrum who say evidence clearly suggests that there are many sites of unmarked burials.

Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation, who made the announcement about the Kamloops site, said, “The denialists, they’re hurtful. They are basically saying that didn’t happen.”

Security guards protecting the potential gravesites in her community have turned away people who have turned up late at night with shovels, she said.

Chief Casimir recalled holding the piece of paper in her hands about the potential gravesites that she read from to deliver the news and knew it would reverberate.

“I was thinking to myself, ‘This is horrible,’” she said.

Now her community is moving slowly and deliberately before deciding what to do next.

“We’ve had many conversations about whether to exhume or not to exhume,” Chief Casimir said. “It is very difficult and it is definitely very complex. We know that it’ll take time. And we also know that we have many steps yet to go.”

“We have to know for sure,” she added, “that we did everything that we can to determine: yes or no, anomaly or grave?”

The Canadian government and Pope Francis have apologized for the gruesome treatment of Indigenous people and the residential schools where children suffered so much abuse.

But the work to try to establish a precise number of potential graves will likely be difficult.

Murray Sinclair, a former judge who headed the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the residential schools system, estimates that at least 10,000 students never made it home from the schools, which were established by the government and operated from the 1880s to the 1990s.

During that period the Canadian government forcibly removed at least 150,000 Indigenous children from their communities and sent them to residential schools, most of which were run by the Roman Catholic Church. Indigenous languages and cultural practices were forbidden, sometimes using force.

And when the children died the government refused to pay to return their bodies to the communities where they came from.

In Ontario, a search of records by investigators working for the province’s chief coroner has so far identified 456 students who died while attending 12 residential schools. Some records show where remains may be buried, the coroner said, but there’s uncertainty about those findings.

At the Kamloops school site, where one of the largest number of potential gravesites was reported, Chief Casimir said her tribe was still analyzing the results of its ground and document searches before deciding whether to conduct exhumations.

Doing so, she added, would be “very intrusive.”

Kimberly Murray, a lawyer and a member of a Mohawk First Nation, was appointed by the federal government in 2021 to examine the issues surrounding potential Indigenous graves and make recommendations about protecting and commemorating the sites.

She says she reminds communities that the work they are doing is because “the government purposely disappeared” Indigenous children, “by not proper record keeping, by not telling the families, by refusing to send them home.”

Many communities, Ms. Murray said, have expanded their physical searches and have employed additional methods to find remains.

One involves placing probes into the ground to detect specific soil acidity that is created by buried human remains.

Another process involves using short pulses of laser light to scan the surfaces of areas where government and church records, as well as the memories of former students, suggest there were burials. The process, using a technology known as lidar, can reveal patterns consistent with burial sites.

Some Indigenous communities have also brought in dogs trained to find remains.

In some cases, Ms. Murray said there was evidence that schools resorted to burying students in mass graves because of disease sweeping through the institutions or to store bodies until the spring thaw made digging graves possible.

Still, Indigenous communities have faced obstacles finding graves, Ms. Murray said, as they struggle getting access to records about the children who died at the schools from the Canadian government and the Catholic Church, despite pledges of cooperation.

Even if exhumations uncover remains, identifying individual bodies or determining a cause of death will likely be impossible, said Dr. Rebekah Jacques, a forensic pathologist who has been working with Indigenous communities that have potential gravesites.

Dr. Jacques has met members of Indigenous communities while serving as a member of a national committee on potential graves at school sites, and she said the question of exhumations hangs heavy over many groups.

“I don’t always have consensus myself about what to do,” she said. “So for me to expect for our communities to have consensus — well, I can really relate to that.”

She also believes that nothing Indigenous communities do, including exhumations, will satisfy skeptics.

For Mr. Flanagan and others who share his viewpoint, their disbelief that there are many gravesites is part of a broader argument against the key conclusion of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission: that the residential schools were a system of brutality that led to “cultural genocide.’’

“The narrative that’s been constructed pulls out all the bad stories and retails those and minimizes the benefit of residential schools,” Mr. Flanagan said, adding that converting Indigenous people in nations colonized by Europeans to Christianity and eradicating their cultures was once common worldwide.

“The churches believed that it was their religious duty, and the politicians thought that it helped to civilize the Indians,” He said. “Would we do that today? No. But our understanding wasn’t available to these people of 150 years ago.”

Government officials and experts say such views are driven by bias and a lack of understanding and sensitivity over what Indigenous children endured for over a century, until 1996.

“There is simply no question about the horrific impact that the residential schools policy had on Indigenous peoples,” said David Lametti, who was Canada’s justice minister and attorney general when Chief Casimir announced the findings at the Kamloops school site.

Government officials, he added, have little doubt that many of the radar anomalies found on school grounds will prove to be gravesites.

“Will every one of those anomalies turn out to be an unmarked grave? Obviously not,” Mr. Lametti, a former law professor now practicing law in Montreal, said. “But there’s enough preponderant evidence already that is compelling.”

Many Indigenous people who favor exhumations want their communities to move more quickly to find remains.

On his ranch in the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation, Garry Gottfriedson, a poet, retired academic and rodeo rider, said that as a former residential school student he wants more openness and progress from leaders.

“It can drag on and on and on and in the meantime, it dies out,” Mr. Gottfriedson said of the discussion about what to do about the gravesites.

“I’m saying: something needs to happen, let it happen,” he added. “But right now, it seems like nothing’s happening.”

Vjosa Isai contributed research.

Facing an aggressive Russia, a long war in Ukraine and an uncertain American commitment to Europe, Ursula von der Leyen, as president of the European Commission, has created a new post of defense commissioner.

The task before any new commissioner is formidable. The war in Ukraine has pointed up huge shortcomings in Europe’s capacity to defend itself. Its armies are small and sometimes poorly equipped. It has been slow to increase military spending and prioritize the production of artillery shells, ammunition and air defense. It remains deeply dependent on the United States for key military equipment and funds.

But even before the commissioner, a former prime minister of Lithuania, Andrius Kubilius, can begin, analysts and others have raised alarms that the portfolio is ill-defined and vastly underfunded. The appointment, they say, appears more of a semaphore than a substantive position, calling into question whether Europe is fundamentally serious about taking responsibility for its own defense.

Europe has no army. Defense is legally in the competence of the 27 member states, 23 of which are also members of the NATO alliance. In reality, Mr. Kubilius will be a commissioner for the European arms industry, not defense itself.

His difficult job will be trying to push the arms industries of various European nations toward more standardized production and cooperative purchasing power and coordination.

Before he resigned suddenly on Monday, Thierry Breton, who was responsible for industry as commissioner for internal markets and security, estimated that 100 billion euros a year — about $111 billion — would be needed for European defense.

But even €20 billion or €30 billion, the size of the military budgets of larger European countries, “could make the European Union a sizable investor on the continent and start shaping business decisions,” said Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary general for defense investment now at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

For now, the European Union is not even close. It can spend just €1.5 billion for 2025 to 2027 under its budgeted strategy, far less than required, said Christian Mölling, a defense expert and director for Europe for the Bertelsmann Foundation.

“So to change the E.U. structure you’re really looking more for a wizard than a commissioner,” Mr. Mölling said. “It’s a king without a kingdom.”

A senior European diplomat also expressed skepticism, saying that the commission had no extra money for the job, so Mr. Kubilius wouldn’t be able to get much done. In any case, the diplomat said, individual countries would do better at coordinating military capabilities than Brussels could.

A defense commissioner “could prove the catalyst for further reform and better coordination, but good intentions in this area have all too often failed to deliver the desired outcomes,” argued Ester Sabatino of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a centrist research institute that focuses on defense and security.

Then there is the question of overlapping responsibilities within the commission, the European Union’s 27-member executive arm. Ms. von der Leyen will have to “carve out something from already existing portfolios, so how is that going to work?” asked Mr. Grand.

The European Union already has a vice president in charge of European foreign affairs and security policy, soon to be Kaja Kallas of Estonia.

Ms. von der Leyen, who is starting her second term, has named a former French foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné, to succeed Mr. Breton and he will keep much the same responsibilities for industrial strategy, but with a higher rank, as a vice president. There is also another vice president, Henna Virkkunen of Finland, responsible for tech sovereignty, security and democracy.

So what is the job of defense commissioner and is it really needed? asked Mr. Mölling.

In a recent comprehensive report on how to revive European growth and competitiveness, Mario Draghi, the former Italian prime minister and governor of the European Central Bank, supported the new commissioner’s job.

Europe buys more than 60 percent of its equipment from the United States, plus another 15 percent from other non-E.U. countries. So making European weapons more competitive would be good for European companies and taxpayers, Mr. Draghi argued, echoing many others.

“Europe is wasting its common resources,” he wrote. “We have large collective spending power, but we dilute it across multiple different national and E.U. instruments.” He added: “We are still not joining forces in the defense industry to help our countries to integrate and reach scale.”

He proposed creating E.U. bonds for military-related projects and other key investments. But that idea was quickly shot down by key member states, like Germany and the Netherlands, that have rejected collective European debt except for dealing with the “one-time” crisis of the coronavirus.

But without added money behind the E.U. ambition, the new commissioner is unlikely to be able to achieve what is needed. That includes helping the bloc make its support for Ukraine more timely, efficient and coordinated, while also replenishing the stocks of military equipment and ammunition depleted in European countries that have sent them to Ukraine.

Europe also needs to provide seed money, Mr. Grand emphasized. That is the only way to advance research and development of next-generation weapons and so-called strategic enablers, like integrated air and missile defense, sophisticated drones and intelligence satellites, among other things, that are now almost exclusively provided and sold by the United States.

Making the European Union itself a player in procurement could slim down extensive overlap. To satisfy competing domestic industries, Europe produces 12 battle tanks and 17 infantry fighting vehicles, and it provided Ukraine 10 kinds of howitzers, not all of which use the same shells.

To improve consolidation and make spending efficient, European rules on competition would have to be softened for defense, Mr. Grand said.

Still, he said, “I’m not sure having a single product line is a good idea,” and Brussels should not get into the business of trying to define military requirements for each country. “NATO knows much better, and the commission should not try to do that.”

But given the war in Ukraine and a U.S. concentration on the threat of a rising China, the question of European military dependency on Washington is no longer just a theoretical question, said Ian Lesser, director of the Brussels office of the German Marshall Fund.

It’s a natural inclination for Europeans to buy off-the-shelf from larger American arms producers, he said. “But Europe is in the process of shifting from seeing its own defense companies as national champions to thinking of them also as essential building blocks for stronger European defense,” Mr. Lesser said.

He, too, emphasized the issue of money, with major European economies like Germany, France and Italy already scouring their budgets for cuts.

As some E.U. countries are becoming skeptical of further large support for Ukraine, the motivation to come up with the money may only wane, said Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank centered on security.

He said he was skeptical that the defense commissioner would have the scope to make an impact on Europe’s military strategy. As ever, he said, a lot will depend on political will, and not just the funding.

“There’s a disconnect between the stated ambition you get initially and the hard reality of when you actually have to get member states’ approval,” he said.

A week ago, he was the keynote speaker at a glitzy Chicago dinner for the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank with a history of denying climate science, where the top tables went for $50,000.

On Friday, it was back to the day job for Nigel Farage, the veteran political disrupter, ally of Donald J. Trump and hard right, anti-immigrant lawmaker whose ascent has alarmed both of Britain’s main political parties.

In a cavernous exhibition center in Birmingham, in England’s West Midlands, Mr. Farage addressed supporters of his upstart party, Reform U.K., at its first annual conference since its success in Britain’s July general election.

Declaring that this was the moment the party “comes of age,” he called on his enthusiastic audience to campaign and build networks of support across the country, telling them that the “sky is the limit.”

There had, he added, never been a time of “greater disenchantment” with Labour, which won the election, or with the Conservatives, who lost it and whose brand was “broken.” Later, Mr. Farage told reporters that Labour-controlled regions were now his main target.

His ambitions for the party were clear. But the jet-setting lifestyle of Mr. Farage, 60, whose visit to Chicago was his third recent trip to the United States, underscores the question hanging over Reform U.K.: Does its leader have the ability and appetite to build the fledgling party into a credible political force?

Mr. Farage, a polarizing, pugnacious figure, is one of Britain’s most effective communicators and had an outsized impact on its politics for two decades before finally being elected to Britain’s Parliament in July. A ferocious critic of the European Union, he championed Brexit and helped pressure Prime Minister David Cameron to hold the 2016 referendum.

“A fairly strong case can be made that Nigel Farage has been the most important political figure in all the elections of the last decade,” said Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester.

Having divided the Conservatives in the 2010s with his campaigning on Brexit, Mr. Farage dealt a huge blow to the party in July by splitting the vote on the right, allowing Labour to win. “Nigel Farage is the reason that the Conservatives had their worst-ever election result in July. Not even a reason. The reason,” Professor Ford said.

But taking the party a step further could be a challenge, he added, because it “presumes a level of strategic thinking that generally isn’t Farage’s strong point: He likes big, bold plans, lots of excitement, lots of razzmatazz.”

In an interview with The New York Times in June, Mr. Farage said his party could challenge both mainstream parties in the next general election, which must take place by mid-2029. “Five years will give us a lot of time to build us a mass movement,” he said, adding, “Very quickly into a Labour government, the desire for real change will get bigger.”

When it was put to him that Reform had few of the organizational structures of a modern political party, he replied: “Absolutely.”

Reform was founded in 2018 as a private company — initially called The Brexit Party — with Mr. Farage owning a majority stake. In a video released on Thursday, he pledged to give up his shares, saying: “I am giving up control, I am giving it to the members.” One of the tasks on the conference agenda in Birmingham is to adopt a formal constitution.

Having largely relied on volunteers until now, rewarding loyalty over expertise, Reform has begun recruiting for a number of jobs, including a regional director for England, a management accountant, a membership manager, a graphic designer and a video editor.

The party has five lawmakers in Parliament, including Mr. Farage and the blunt-spoken Lee Anderson, a former coal miner whose inflammatory, Islamophobic language saw him suspended by the Conservative Party early this year. He then defected to Reform.

Much of the work in professionalizing Reform will likely fall to its chairman, Zia Yusuf, 37. Born in Scotland to parents who emigrated from Sri Lanka, he studied at the London School of Economics and worked for Goldman Sachs before making a fortune by founding and selling a luxury concierge service.

On Friday Mr. Farage called on his party to copy the strategy of the centrist Liberal Democrats, who won a smaller share of the vote than Mr. Farage’s party in July but secured 72 seats in Parliament. That was achieved by ruthlessly targeting areas where they had a realistic chance of winning.

Reform came second in 98 constituencies in July. Of those, 89 were won by Labour, often in the deindustrialized north and middle of England. The party will try to campaign aggressively in those areas, hoping to win over disenchanted voters amid rising disillusionment with the mainstream political parties.

Mr. Farage also sees an opportunity in elections to the Welsh Parliament, the Senedd, and the Scottish Parliament, both scheduled for 2026. Those contests take place under different voting systems, which award seats in proportion to the number of votes cast.

But the party’s many challenges include vetting candidates to exclude extremists and cranks. Mr. Cameron, the former prime minister, once described members of one of Mr. Farage’s earlier parties, the U.K. Independence Party, as “fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists, mostly.”

During this year’s election campaign, embarrassing revelations emerged about one Reform candidate who said that Britain should have “taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality” in the Second World War, and another who used antisemitic tropes.

On Friday Mr. Farage said that amateurism had let down Reform in the past, adding: “We don’t want extremists, we don’t want bigots.” It was left to other speakers to rail against an array of targets, including illegal immigrants, climate protesters, trans activists, the BBC, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations.

But perhaps the biggest question surrounds Mr. Farage himself. He wavered before deciding to run for Parliament this year, confessing doubts as to whether he wanted to spend time in Clacton, the seaside area he now represents. He appears regularly as a presenter on GB News, a right-leaning TV channel, and recently declared earnings of almost £98,000 a month (about $131,000) from those appearances.

Gawain Towler, a spokesman for Reform U.K., said Mr. Farage’s recent trips to the United States were arranged months ago, when the general election was expected to be held later in the year. He said Mr. Farage was now committed to building up his party and campaigning against immigration and against government plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.

Yet while he is the party’s undisputed star, Mr. Farage is a divisive politician. In one pre-election interview, he said the expansion of the European Union and NATO had provoked the war in Ukraine, prompting widespread criticism. During riots in August that were fueled by far-right conspiracies about the murder of three young girls, he was accused of stoking the violence by questioning whether “the truth” had been withheld by the authorities.

“Having him as your frontman ensures that you get media attention whenever you want it,” Professor Ford said. But, he added: “There are an awful lot of people — including quite a lot of Tory voters — who just don’t like the guy at all.”