The drones soar over the vast deserts along the Sudanese border, guiding weapons convoys that smuggle illicit arms to fighters accused of widespread atrocities and ethnic cleansing.

They hover over a besieged city at the center of Sudan’s terrible famine, supporting a ruthless paramilitary force that has bombed hospitals, looted food shipments and torched thousands of homes, aid groups say.

Yet the drones are flying out of a base where the United Arab Emirates says it is running a humanitarian effort for the Sudanese people — part of what it calls its “urgent priority” to save innocent lives and stave off starvation in Africa’s largest war.

The Emirates is playing a deadly double game in Sudan, a country shredded by one of the world’s most catastrophic civil wars.

Eager to cement its role as a regional kingmaker, the wealthy Gulf petrostate is expanding its covert campaign to back a winner in Sudan, funneling money, weapons and, now, powerful drones to fighters rampaging across the country, according to officials, internal diplomatic memos and satellite images analyzed by The New York Times.

All the while, the Emirates is presenting itself as a champion of peace, diplomacy and international aid. It is even using one of the world’s most famous relief symbols — the Red Crescent, the counterpart of the Red Cross — as a cover for its secret operation to fly drones into Sudan and smuggle weapons to fighters, satellite images show and American officials say.

The war in Sudan, a sprawling gold-rich nation with nearly 500 miles of Red Sea coastline, has been fueled by a plethora of foreign nations, like Iran and Russia. They are supplying arms to the warring sides, hoping to tilt the scales for profit or their own strategic gain — while the people of Sudan are caught in the crossfire.

But the Emirates is playing the largest and most consequential role of all, officials say, publicly pledging to ease Sudan’s suffering even as it secretly inflames it.

Starvation haunts Sudan. Famine was officially declared last month after nearly 18 months of fighting, which has killed tens of thousands and scattered at least 10 million people in the world’s worst displacement crisis, the United Nations says. Aid groups call it a calamity of “historic proportions.”

The Emirates says it has made “absolutely clear” that it is not arming or supporting “any of the warring parties” in Sudan. To the contrary, it says, it is “alarmed by the rapidly accelerating humanitarian catastrophe” and pushing for an “immediate cease-fire.”

But for more than a year, the Emirates has been secretly bolstering the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., the paramilitary group fighting Sudan’s military for control of Africa’s third-largest country.

A Times investigation last year detailing the Emirati weapons smuggling operation was confirmed by U.N. investigators in January, when they cited “credible” evidence that the Emirates was breaking a two-decade U.N. arms embargo in Sudan.

Now, the Emiratis are amplifying their covert campaign. Powerful Chinese-made drones, by far the largest deployed in Sudan’s war, are being flown from an airport across the border in Chad that the Emirates has expanded into a well-equipped, military-style airfield.

Hangars have been built and a drone control station installed, satellite images show. Many of the cargo planes that have landed at the airport during the war previously transported weapons for the Emirates to other conflict zones, like Libya, where the Emiratis have also been accused of breaching an arms embargo, a Times analysis of flight tracking data found.

American officials say the Emiratis are now using the airport to fly advanced military drones to provide the R.S.F. with battlefield intelligence, and to escort weapons shipments to fighters in Sudan — to keep an eye out for ambushes.

Through an analysis of satellite images, The Times identified the type of drone being used: the Wing Loong 2, a Chinese model often compared to the MQ-9 Reaper of the U.S. Air Force.

The images show an apparent munitions bunker at the airport and a Wing Loong ground control station beside the runway — only about 750 yards from an Emirati-run hospital that has treated wounded R.S.F. fighters.

The Wing Loong can fly for 32 hours, has a range of 1,000 miles and can carry up to a dozen missiles or bombs. So far, the drones do not seem to be conducting airstrikes of their own in Sudan, officials say, but are providing surveillance and identifying targets on chaotic battlefields.

That makes them “a significant force multiplier,” said J. Michael Dahm, a senior fellow at the Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

After taking off from the base, the drones may in fact be piloted remotely from Emirati soil, experts and officials say. Recently, they have been detected patrolling the skies above the embattled Sudanese city of El Fasher, where people are starving and surrounded by the R.S.F. The city is home to nearly two million people, and fears are rising that the war is on the precipice of even more atrocities.

American officials have been pressuring all the war’s combatants to stop the carnage.

Vice President Kamala Harris confronted the leader of the Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, over his country’s support of the R.S.F. when the two met in December, according to officials briefed on the exchange. President Biden called this week for an end to the “senseless war,” warning that the R.S.F.’s brutal, monthslong siege on El Fasher “has become a full-on assault.”

The crisis is expected to come up again when he and Ms. Harris host the Emirati leader at the White House for the first time on Monday.

“It’s got to stop,” John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, said of the siege.

‘They Can’t Lie to Us Anymore’

Both sides in Sudan’s civil war have been accused of war crimes, including brutal assaults filmed by the fighters themselves.

The war erupted in 2023, when a power struggle between Sudan’s military and the R.S.F. — a fighting force it helped create — erupted into gunfire on the streets of the capital and quickly enveloped the nation.

Sudanese military planes have bombed civilians, while rights groups accuse the R.S.F. of ethnic cleansing and indiscriminate shelling that has destroyed hospitals, homes and aid warehouses.

In El Fasher, Doctors Without Borders has accused the military of bombing a children’s hospital, and R.S.F. troops of plundering food intended for a camp of 400,000 starving people.

Aid workers are hoping to airdrop food into the city, which Toby Harward, the top U.N. official for Darfur, likened to “hell on earth.”

The Emirates insists it is simply trying halt the war and help its victims. It has provided $230 million in aid and delivered 10,000 tons of relief supplies, and it played a prominent role in recent American-led peace talks in Switzerland.

“The U.A.E. remains committed to supporting the people of Sudan in restoring peace,” Lana Nusseibeh, an Emirati minister for foreign affairs, said afterward.

Senior American officials have privately tried to coax the Emirates to drop its covert operations, bluntly confronting it with American intelligence on what the Gulf state is doing inside Sudan, said five American officials with knowledge of the conversations.

After Vice President Harris raised American objections to the arms smuggling with Sheikh Mohammed in December, the Emirati leader offered what some officials considered a tacit acknowledgment.

While not admitting direct support to the R.S.F., Sheikh Mohammed said he owed the paramilitary group’s leader, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, for sending troops to fight alongside the Emirates in the war in Yemen, according to two American officials briefed on the exchange.

Sheikh Mohammed also said he viewed the R.S.F. as a bulwark against Islamist political movements in the region, which the Emirati royal family has long considered a threat to its authority, the officials said. (The Emirati government did not respond to questions about the conversation.)

“They can’t lie to us anymore, because they know that we know,” said one American official who, like others, was not authorized to speak publicly about the intelligence.

Relief organizations are particularly incensed with the Emirates, accusing it of running “a Potemkin aid operation” to disguise its support to the R.S.F., according to Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and a former Obama and Biden administration official.

“They want it both ways,” he said of the Emiratis. “They want to act like a rogue, supporting their militia client and turning a blind eye to whatever they do with their weapons. And they want to appear like a constructive, rules-abiding member of the international system.”

Sudan’s civil war has turned the country, perched strategically on the Red Sea, into a global free-for-all. Iran has supplied armed drones to the Sudanese military, which has fought alongside Ukrainian special forces in the capital, Khartoum. Egypt has also sided with the military.

Russia has played both sides. Wagner mercenaries initially supplied missiles to the R.S.F., United Nations inspectors found. More recently, officials say, the Kremlin has tilted to the military, offering it weapons in exchange for naval access to Sudan’s Red Sea coast.

The Houthis of Yemen sent shiploads of weapons to Sudan’s military, at Iran’s behest, and gas-rich Qatar sent six Chinese warplanes, American officials say. (Qatar and the Houthis denied sending military aid.)

The Emirates has sent an array of weapons as well, officials have concluded.

“The delivery of drones, howitzers, multiple rocket launchers and MANPADS to the R.S.F. by the U.A.E. has helped it neutralize the air superiority” of Sudan’s military, the European Union ambassador to Sudan, Aidan O’Hara, wrote in February in a confidential memo obtained by The Times. (A MANPAD, or Man-Portable Air Defense System, is a type of antiaircraft missile.)

The memo contained other startling assertions: that Saudi Arabia has given money to Sudan’s military, which used it to buy Iranian drones; that as many as 200,000 foreign mercenaries were fighting alongside the R.S.F.; and that Wagner mercenaries had trained the R.S.F. to use the antiaircraft missiles supplied by the Emirates.

The Emirati role appears to be part of a broader push into Africa. Last year, it announced $45 billion in investments across the continent, analysts say, nearly twice as much as China. Recently, it has expanded into a new business: war.

It turned the tide of Ethiopia’s civil war in 2021 by supplying armed drones to the prime minister at a crucial point in the fight, ultimately helping him emerge victorious. Now it appears to be trying to repeat the same feat in Sudan with the R.S.F.

The Arms Pipeline

Last year, when cargo planes began to land at the airport in Amdjarass, 600 miles east of the Chadian capital, Ndjamena, the Emirates said it had come to establish a field hospital for Sudanese refugees.

But within months, American officials discovered that the $20 million hospital quietly treated R.S.F. fighters, and that the cargo planes also carried weapons that were later smuggled to fighters inside Sudan.

The Times analysis of satellite images and flight records showed that the Emiratis set up the drone system at the same time they were promoting their humanitarian operation.

During a lengthy phone call in early May with his Emirati counterpart, President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, cited American intelligence that had been declassified so that it could be shared with a foreign official. The evidence documented Emirati military support to the R.S.F., two American officials briefed on the exchange said.

But the American candor appears to have had little impact. The Emirates has only doubled down on its support to the R.S.F. in recent months, American officials and witnesses in Chad say.

Fewer cargo flights now land at Amdjarass airport, where they can be easily detected, but a greater proportion of supplies arrives by truck, often along routes that bypass major cities and towns, officials say.

Traces of Emirati-supplied weapons are also being found on the battlefield. Human Rights Watch recently identified Serbian-made missiles, fired from an unidentified drone, that it said were originally sold to the Emirates.

“It’s very clear — the U.A.E. is sending money, the U.A.E. is sending weapons” said Succès Masra, a former prime minister of Chad.

After complaints from Western officials, he said, he told his nation’s president, Mahamat Idriss Déby, that allowing the Emirates to funnel weapons through Chad was a “huge mistake.”

Nothing changed. The Emirates promised Mr. Déby a $1.5 billion loan, nearly as big as Chad’s $1.8 billion national budget a year earlier.

The Emirates supports the R.S.F. in other ways, too. Earlier this year, an Emirati private jet carried the paramilitary force’s leader, General Hamdan, on a tour of six African countries, where he was treated like a head of state.

Dubai, one of the seven emirates that make up the nation, is the hub of the R.S.F.’s business empire, which is anchored in gold trading. The U.S. Treasury has sanctioned what it calls an R.S.F. “front company” and recently listed seven Emirati companies under investigation on suspicion of being linked to the paramilitary group.

General Hamdan’s 34-year-old brother, Algoney Hamdan, has lived in Dubai since 2014 and was singled out by American sanctions. Yet he is now an interlocutor for stuttering peace efforts. Speaking in Switzerland during last month’s talks, Mr. Hamdan brushed off the U.S. measures against him.

“If it brings peace to Sudan, they can sanction as many companies as they want,” he said.

Mr. Hamdan conceded that some R.S.F. troops had committed abuses, but insisted the Emirates was not backing the R.S.F.

“There is no proof of anything,” he said. “It’s just false propaganda.”

A Cherished Symbol of Aid

The Emirati operation in Chad has deeply worried the Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, one of the world’s oldest and most venerable aid movements.

It learned only from news reports that the Emirates Red Crescent had established a hospital in Amdjarass, said Tommaso Della Longa, a Red Cross spokesman. The Emirates Red Crescent, which is funded by the Emirati government, did not inform the international federation, as it should have, he added.

The Emiratis eagerly touted their largess. The government’s publicity showed workers unloading cargo pallets and treating patients under the Red Crescent logo — an emblem dating back to the 1870s that is legally protected under the Geneva Conventions. Misuse of that symbol is a potential war crime.

Worried that its reputation for neutrality was at risk, the Red Cross sent fact-finding missions to Chad in 2023 and 2024, “to better understand” what the Emiratis were doing under the Red Crescent banner in Amdjarass, Mr. Della Longa said.

They found few answers.

When the officials arrived, they were turned away from the Emirati field hospital for unspecified “security reasons,” Mr. Della Longa said. The officials eventually left Chad without setting foot in the hospital.

The Emirates Red Crescent did not respond to questions.

Mr. Konyndyk, the Refugees International official, said it was “unheard-of” for an aid organization to bar its own officials from visiting a hospital that supposedly treats refugees.

“The Emirates seems to be instrumentalizing the Red Crescent as cover for well-documented arms shipments to a militia that is actively committing atrocities in Darfur.”

In June, Emirati officials said they had treated nearly 30,000 patients, and were looking to expand the hospital, but people in Amdjarass say the hospital opens for just four hours a day.

The Emirates opened a second field hospital in Chad, in the city of Abéché in April. When The Times visited the 80-bed facility in July, doctors readily offered a tour of its well-equipped wards, which the hospital’s director, Dr. Khalid Mohammed, said received as many as 250 patients every day.

A private Emirati company ran the hospital, and it had no connection with the Red Cross or Crescent, he said. But the hospital closed at 4 p.m. each day, limiting the medical services it could provide.

The Red Cross says it is still trying to figure out what the Emiratis are up to.

“The process is not finished,” Mr. Della Longa, the Red Cross spokesman, said of the inquiry into the Amdjarass hospital. “We want to get the bottom of it.”

Counterbalancing Iran

As Sudan plunges deeper into what many experts called the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis, American officials say they are more sharply focused on the conflict than ever.

Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state, organized last month’s peace talks in Switzerland despite their low chance of halting the fighting.

And Mr. Sullivan, the national security adviser, intervened directly with officials from Saudi Arabia when they appeared to be obstructing talks, said three people with knowledge of the interactions.

But the Biden administration is divided on a fundamental question: How hard should it push the Emirates?

When the U.S. envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, suggested on a podcast on Sept. 4 that he supported a boycott of the Emirates by the rapper Macklemore, who recently canceled a Dubai show over the Emirates’ role in Sudan, it provoked a furious private reaction from Emirati officials, several officials said.

“I sure didn’t have Macklemore as hero for Sudan on my bingo card,” Mr. Perriello said on the podcast.

Some senior White House and State Department officials felt Mr. Perriello had gone too far, while others cringed at the idea of cowing to the Emiratis for the sake of good relations.

The dispute reflected the limits of challenging the Emirates, a country the United States relies on for many global priorities. The Emirates is a staunch American ally against Iran, a signatory of the Abraham Accords to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, a potential player in postwar Gaza, and it has even facilitated prisoner swaps between Ukraine and Russia.

The Gulf state has shrugged off international censure before, notably over its role in Yemen, but it appears to be sensitive to growing criticism over Sudan.

When European diplomats considered last February whether the nation “would have any qualms about the slaughter and devastation” caused by its actions in Sudan, the confidential E.U. memo said, the diplomats concluded that the Emiratis “would be more concerned about any damage to their reputation rather than any sense of moral culpability.”

But whether the Emiratis would be willing to cede Sudan to one of the many rival powers piling into the war, especially Iran, is another matter entirely.

The prospect of Iran gaining a foothold on the Western shores of the Red Sea has clearly unnerved the Emirates and several other Arab countries involved in Sudan, officials say.

That sense of alarm is driving a proxy war and prompting rival powers to pour ever more weapons into Sudan, pushing the tottering state toward complete collapse.

The Emiratis say Sudanese refugees are grateful for the Emirati help. But the anger among others is growing.

Last week, when Ms. Nusseibeh, the Emirati minister who took part in peace talks in Switzerland, visited one of the hospitals in Chad to showcase her country’s good works, she was confronted by an infuriated Sudanese refugee.

“You know very well that you ignited this war!” yelled a man during a public meeting, in an exchange that quickly spread on social media. “We don’t want anything from you, except that you stop it.”

Speaking by phone, the man, who asked to be identified as Suliman out of fear of reprisals, said he hadn’t been able to contain himself.

R.S.F. brutality had forced him to flee Sudan a year earlier, joining 800,000 refugees now in Chad, he said. So when the Emirati minister sat before him, he said, he saw “the reason my house was destroyed.”

“I lost everything,” he said. “I had to get up and say what was in my heart.”

Julian Barnes and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Shuaib Almosawa from Bangalore, India. Videos and graphics by Alexander Cardia and Josh Holder.

The Muslim cleric preparing to lead what, if everything goes as planned, will become the world’s smallest state, has laid-back plans for the tiny new country.

His hoped-for Muslim state in Tirana, Albania’s capital, will be a Vatican-style sovereign enclave controlling territory about the size of five New York City blocks, and it will allow alcohol, let women wear what they want and impose no lifestyle rules.

“God does not forbid anything; that is why he gave us minds,” said the cleric, Edmond Brahimaj, known to followers as Baba Mondi, explaining how he intends to rule over a 27-acre patch of land that Albania wants to turn into a sovereign state with its own administration, passports and borders. The Albanian prime minister, Edi Rama, says he will announce plans for the entity, to be called the Sovereign State of the Bektashi Order, in the near future.

“All decisions will be made with love and kindness,” said Baba Mondi, 65, a former Albanian Army officer who is revered by millions around the world by his official title, His Holiness Haji Dede Baba. He is the paramount leader of the Bektashi, a Shiite Sufi order founded in the 13th century in Turkey but now based in Albania.

In an interview, Mr. Rama, the prime minister, said the aim of the new state was to promote a tolerant version of Islam on which Albania prides itself. “We should take care of this treasure, which is religious tolerance and which we should never take for granted,” he said.

An avowedly moderate Islamic microstate, the prime minister said, would send a message: “Do not let the stigma of Muslims define who Muslims are.”

The territory of the proposed new Islamic state is a compound in a low-rent residential district of eastern Tirana. It is just a quarter of the size of Vatican City, currently the world’s smallest country, governed by the pope, an absolute monarch.

Baba Mondi said that “size doesn’t matter,” adding, “I don’t need to be a dictator,” though he conceded that the only significant constraint on his authority will be God. After toasting visitors with raki, a fiery drink distilled from grapes, he noted that he made no claim to infallibility.

“Only God,” he said, “doesn’t make mistakes.”

The Bektashi domain features a domed meeting and prayer hall, a museum showcasing the order’s history, a clinic, an archive and the administrative offices of Baba Mondi, a cheery man with a white beard and waspish disdain for rigid dogma. Muslim extremists who set off bombs and use violence to spread their version of the faith, he said, “are just cowboys.”

Combining a loose interpretation of the Quran with mysticism, elements of Turkey’s pre-Islamic faiths and devotion to their deceased wise men, known as dervishes, the Bektashis moved their headquarters to Tirana from Turkey nearly a century ago after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of the Turkish Republic, shut down their operations.

Viewed as heretics by many conservative Shiites and Sunnis, and subjected to centuries of persecution in Muslim lands, the Bektashis have been a force in Albania and neighboring countries such as Kosovo and Macedonia since the Ottoman Empire’s conquest of the Balkans in the 14th and 15th centuries.

Members of the sect played a prominent role in Albania’s nationalist awakening against Turkish rule, promoting a relaxed version of Islam that helped rally the country’s large Muslim and Christian communities behind the secular cause of independence.

Though one of Europe’s poorest countries, Albania has a long history of helping people in need, sheltering Jews during World War II and Afghans fleeing the Taliban in 2021. Its international airport is named after Mother Teresa, the ethnic Albanian nun who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for her charity work in India.

A team of legal experts, including international lawyers, is drafting legislation defining the new state’s sovereign status inside Albania. That will need to be endorsed by Parliament, controlled by Mr. Rama’s governing Socialist Party. It is unclear which, if any, countries will agree to recognize the Bektashis’ sovereignty.

So far, Mr. Rama, a nonpracticing Roman Catholic, said, only a few of his closest aides know about the plan and NATO allies like the United States have not been consulted.

One country that is highly unlikely to recognize it is Iran, which has many mostly underground followers of Sufi Islam, including some Bektashis, but views itself as the guardian of Shiite Islam against heterodox readings of the faith.

“The Iranians are frankly my last thought,” Mr. Rama said, noting that Albania broke off diplomatic relations with Iran in 2022 after linking it to a cyberattack on Albanian government and banking networks.

Baba Mondi has long campaigned against extremism. After Islamist militants killed 12 people in a 2015 attack on the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, the Bektashi leader traveled to Paris along with Mr. Rama, the prime minister, to join a march against terrorism.

He said the new Bektashi state might need a small intelligence service “because we have enemies too” but won’t have an army, border guards or courts. Details such as who will be eligible for passports still have to be worked out, he added, but the passport color has been decided: green, an important color in Islam. Albania allows dual nationality.

Committed to soothing rather than stoking tensions, the new state has already sworn off the curse of many nations — that of territorial ambition. Baba Mondi vowed not to make any attempt to expand his territory by grabbing back land his order once held in the Albanian capital.

The Tirana compound, which originally covered nearly 90 acres, has shrunk by two-thirds since Albania’s former communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, outlawed all religion in 1967 and his government began building warehouses on Bektashi territory in the capital. After the collapse of communism in 1991, the Bektashis lost yet more land when private developers built homes on the edge of the compound without permission.

Mr. Rama said the borders of the proposed Bektashi state would be defined by what the sect has: “What was seized is not part of that,” he said. Squabbles over property ownership, he said, would only undermine the state’s purpose as a “model of coexistence.”

“This is not a property issue but a spiritual issue,” he said.

Baba Mondi, for his part, declared the statehood plan “a miracle” and expressed hope that the United States and other Western powers would recognize his state’s sovereignty if Parliament endorses the prime minister’s plan.

“We deserve a state,” he said, “We are the only ones in the world who tell the truth about Islam” and “don’t mix it up with politics.”

How many Bektashi believers there are in the world is unclear, and even their number in Albania is subject to wildly different estimates, ranging from just a few percent of the country’s population of less than three million to many times that.

Baba Mondi said that around half the total population was Bektashi, the rest being Sunnis, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and evangelical Christians. That is almost certainly an exaggeration, but it reflected a widespread view of the sect, even among some Christians, as Albania’s national religion.

In Kruje, a town north of the capital that is the site of a castle used in the 15th century by Skanderbeg, Albania’s national hero, Ismet Kaciu, a retired Bektashi teacher, said that he had not heard of Mr. Rama’s plans to give his sect Vatican-style sovereignty over the Tirana site.

But, he said during a visit to a Bektashi shrine near Skanderbeg’s castle, he would be overjoyed if that happened. It would, he said, help to keep younger Albanians, including his own four children, who work in Italy, from drifting away from their faith and their country.

Nuri Ceni, a 79-year-old Bektashi historian, hailed the offer of statehood as “a hugely important gift” that would not only strengthen tolerant Islam inside Albania but also help spread “our message of peaceful coexistence regardless of religion or race.”

“We are against all the forms of extremism that are today so dangerous,” he added

Mr. Rama acknowledged that creating a sovereign Islamic state in Tirana would take time. “Maybe everyone will say: ‘This guy is crazy,’” he said. But, he added: “They have said that many times before. I don’t care. The important thing, crazy or not, is to fight for good.”

Elon Musk suddenly appears to be giving up.

After defying court orders in Brazil for three weeks, Mr. Musk’s social network, X, has capitulated. In a court filing on Friday night, the company’s lawyers said that X had complied with orders from Brazil’s Supreme Court in the hopes that the court would lift a block on its site.

The decision was a surprise move by Mr. Musk, who owns and controls X, after he said he had refused to obey what he called illegal orders to censor voices on his social network. Mr. Musk had dismissed local employees and refused to pay fines. The court responded by blocking X across Brazil last month.

Now, X’s lawyers said the company had done exactly what Mr. Musk vowed not to: take down accounts that a Brazilian justice ordered removed because the judge said they threatened Brazil’s democracy. X also complied with the justice’s other demands, including paying fines and naming a new formal representative in the country, the lawyers said.

Brazil’s Supreme Court confirmed X’s moves in a filing on Saturday, but said the company had not filed the proper paperwork. It gave X five days to send further documentation.

The abrupt about-face from Mr. Musk in Brazil appeared to be a defeat for the outspoken businessman and his self-designed image as a warrior for free speech. Mr. Musk and his company had loudly and harshly criticized Brazil’s Supreme Court for months, even publicly releasing some of its sealed orders, but neither had publicly mentioned their reversal by Saturday morning.

The moment showed how, in the yearslong power struggle between tech giants and nation-states, governments have been able to keep the upper hand.

Mr. Musk has had to come to terms with that reality in other countries, including India and Turkey, where his social network complied with orders to censor certain posts. But in Brazil and Australia, he complained about government orders he disagreed with and accused local officials of censorship. His company’s responses to governments have often been in line with his personal politics.

Brazil is one of X’s most important international markets, with analysts estimating that it had more than 20 million users there. Since X has been blocked, Brazilians have flocked to the social network’s rivals: Bluesky and Threads, which is owned by Meta.

The longer X remain blocked, the more Mr. Musk risked losing market share and revenue — problematic for a company that has alienated many American advertisers by allowing users to say just about anything on the site.

Another Musk-controlled company, the satellite-internet service Starlink, was also caught in the crossfire. Brazil’s Supreme Court took $2 million from Starlink in Brazil to cover fines it had issued against X.

Many of the accounts X had been ordered to take down in Brazil belonged to prominent right-wing Brazilian commentators who had once intensely praised Mr. Musk for resisting the court’s orders. Some were now conflicted about his backpedaling.

Mr. Musk “has bowed down,” Paulo Figueiredo, a right-wing pundit who had his X account blocked in Brazil, wrote in a post on Thursday, when X first hired new lawyers in Brazil, signaling a shift in stance. “It’s a very sad day for freedom of expression.”

A day later, Mr. Figueiredo said he understood Mr. Musk’s stance “and appreciates his efforts.”

The turn of events was a major victory for Brazil’s Supreme Court and the powerful justice who has led the push to regulate online speech, Alexandre de Moraes.

Justice Moraes has become one of Brazil’s most polarizing figures since the nation’s Supreme Court granted him broad authority to order tech companies to take down content that he deems a threat to Brazil’s institutions.

Since 2019, he has ordered social networks to take down at least 300 accounts, according to a New York Times analysis of a portion of his court orders, which had been leaked or released publicly. For more than half of those accounts, Justice Moraes did not provide details in the orders for why they should be taken down. He has generally issued such orders under seal, but The Times analyzed orders published by X and U.S. congressional Republicans. There are likely many more orders that remain secret.

Justice Moraes has said that he takes down accounts that attack Brazil’s democratic institutions. When ordering X to be blocked last month, he said it was because Mr. Musk intended to “allow the massive spread of disinformation, hate speech and attacks on the democratic rule of law.”

Mr. Musk had made confronting Justice Moraes one of his pet issues this year, at times posting repeatedly about the judge, insulting him, calling for his jailing and vowing to defy his orders. The issue came to a head when X stopped complying with the judge’s orders and then closed the company’s offices in Brazil to avoid consequences.

The first signs of the reversal came on Thursday, when Justice Moraes said in a court filing that X had hired new lawyers in Brazil.

One of those lawyers, Sérgio Rosenthal, said in a text message on Thursday that X planned to comply with all of the judge’s orders to take down accounts. “The goal is to regularize the company’s situation in Brazil,” he said.

On Saturday morning, a different lawyer, André Zonaro Giacchetta, said the conditions to return to Brazil “have already been met, but it depends on the assessment of” Brazil’s Supreme Court.

As recently as Wednesday, X seemed to still be defying the court. The company appeared to use a technical maneuver to evade efforts by internet providers to block its site in Brazil, allowing it to go live for many users in the country.

The company said in a statement that its return in Brazil on Wednesday was “inadvertent.” Mr. Musk himself seemed to suggest that the return of his network was a supernatural phenomenon rather than an intentional move to sidestep the authorities.

“Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology,” he posted on X.

But Brazil’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, said in a statement that it believed the change was “a deliberate intention to disregard the Federal Supreme Court’s order.”

​​Justice Moraes seemed to agree, issuing a fine of $1 million per day and blocking the social network again. X remained inaccessible across Brazil on Saturday.

Kate Conger contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Lis Moriconi from Rio de Janeiro. Flávia Milhorance and Paulo Motoryn contributed research.

For the second time in less than two months, Israel located and killed Hezbollah’s most senior and secretive military figures as they held covert meetings near Beirut. And in between those strikes, Israel incapacitated hundreds, if not thousands, of the group’s rank-and-file members by remotely blowing up their pagers and walkie-talkies.

Hezbollah’s response so far: calls for vengeance and routine rocket fire into northern Israel.

The assassination of the senior military leader, Ibrahim Aqeel, and other ranking Hezbollah militants on Friday capped a week that threw Lebanon’s most sophisticated political and military force into deep disarray and appeared to hail a stark shift in the calculations that had long governed the decades-old conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

Since the two forces effectively fought each other to a standstill in a hugely destructive war in 2006, Israel and Hezbollah have been arming up and preparing for the next major confrontation, feeding a situation of mutual deterrence that kept intermittent clashes along the Lebanon-Israel border from spiraling into another big war.

Israelis feared that a new conflict could include Hezbollah’s targeting of sensitive infrastructure inside Israel and well-trained Hezbollah commandos rampaging though Israeli communities. Hezbollah knew that Israel’s air force could swiftly cause extensive destruction in Lebanon, especially in the communities from which the group draws its support.

This past week, however, Israel’s leaders decided to push past that equation and crossed what had been unofficially considered red lines. So far, it appears to have worked.

“Eighteen years of mutual deterrence has now given way to a new phase of one-sided superiority on the part of Israel,” said Lina Khatib, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a London-based research organization. “The facade that Hezbollah had been presenting to the world of it being an impenetrable organization is shattered, and Israel has displayed with flair how much of an upper hand it has in this equation vis-à-vis Hezbollah.”

Both Israel and Hezbollah confirmed that Mr. Aqeel, whom Israel described as leading Hezbollah’s Radwan force, an elite combat unit, had been killed in the airstrike on Friday, and Hezbollah on Saturday announced the deaths of about a dozen other fighters, including Ahmed Wahbi, another ranking commander. The Israeli military said that at least 16 Hezbollah fighters had been killed in the strike on Mr. Aqeel, but did not identify them.

The attack, in a densely populated area south of Beirut known as the Dahiya, brought down two eight-story buildings and terrified people across the Lebanese capital.

On Saturday, Lebanon’s health ministry said the toll from the strike had risen to 37 dead, including three children, and 68 wounded. In the aftermath, Lebanese families circulated images of missing relatives on social media, including children. Overall, 70 people have been killed in Lebanon since Tuesday, and about 3,000 injured.

Friday’s strike followed 11 months of tit-for-tat strikes between Hezbollah and Israel across the Lebanon-Israel border that killed people on both sides and forced about 150,000 residents to flee their homes. Hezbollah began striking northern Israel after the start of the war in Gaza last October, saying that it was seeking to bog down Israeli forces in support of Hamas, its ally in Gaza.

The Hamas assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7 that started the war killed about 1,200 people and saw 250 dragged back to Gaza, damaging Israel’s sense of security and changing how its leaders thought about the threats on their borders.

Israel launched a war on Hamas in Gaza that aimed to destroy the group. Months of cease-fire negotiations have failed to stop the violence, and the Gaza health authorities say that more than 41,000 people have been killed.

Israel’s tolerance for Hezbollah’s military presence on its northern border has also declined, and even before this past week Israeli officials regularly called for stepped-up attacks on the group.

“It has been very clear since the first months of the war that Israel is saying, ‘This threat that we lived with for 18 years, we are not able to live with it any more,’” said Paul Salem, the vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “‘We can’t have this massive force on our northern border.’”

Underpinning the status quo before the Gaza war was an Israeli resistance to risking losses and sustaining damage compared with the professed willingness of Hezbollah fighters to die for their cause, Mr. Salem said. That dynamic, too, has changed.

“The simple threat of Hezbollah causing damage no longer has the same effect on Israel that it had before Oct. 7,” he said.

This past week, Israel dramatically upended how it fights Hezbollah by infiltrating the group’s supply chain to booby-trap thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies, severely disrupting its communications, in addition to conventional airstrikes like the one that killed Mr. Aqeel and other commanders. That combination has constricted Hezbollah’s ability to respond.

“Hezbollah has been backed into a corner by Israel,” said Ms. Khatib of Chatham House. “Even if its military arsenal remains intact, its ability to deploy it has been curtailed.”

On Friday, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, said that Israel would continue its “series of actions in the new stage” of its conflict with Hezbollah until tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from the border area can return home. Some experts view that language as suggesting that Israel’s plans could include a ground invasion.

In a speech on Thursday, Hezbollah’s leaders said they welcomed such a step. Hezbollah was formed in the 1980s to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000, and fighting on their own turf could give its guerrilla fighters an advantage.

Despite Israel’s superior firepower, it has not managed to defeat Hamas in 11 months of brutal combat in Gaza, whose borders are closed. Hezbollah is widely regarded as a more sophisticated force and could take advantage of Lebanon’s open borders to rearm in a way that Hamas cannot.

Ukraine said on Saturday that it had struck two large ammunition depots deep inside Russia overnight. It was the second such attack in less than a week as Kyiv seeks to escalate hits on Russian military bases and warehouses to try to disrupt Moscow’s military logistics and slow its troops’ advance on the battlefield.

The strikes announced on Saturday targeted ammunition depots near the towns of Toropets, in northwestern Russia, and Tikhoretsk, in the country’s southwest. The facilities are both more than 200 miles from Ukrainian-controlled territory, and one has been identified as a major storage facility for munitions Russia has acquired from North Korea.

Ukraine said its armed forces had struck the depot near Toropets with drones, but it stopped short of specifying the types of weapons used in the attack on Tikhoretsk, saying only that the arsenals had been “hit by fire,” raising the possibility that it had used a new kind of weapon.

The attack came as Kyiv has been pressing its allies for weeks to let it use powerful, Western-delivered missiles to strike targets deep inside Russia. That authorization has yet to be granted, according to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and in the meantime his country has sought to modify missiles and drones already in its arsenal for long-range use.

Moscow has not directly acknowledged the strikes on the depots, but regional authorities said that a drone attack on Tikhoretsk had “caused a fire that spread to explosive objects” and triggered detonations. Some 1,200 residents were evacuated from the area. The Russian state news agency Tass reported that a drone attack near Toropets had forced the evacuation of a train station and the suspension of traffic on a highway.

NASA satellites detected multiple fires at the two depots on Saturday. The attack came four days after another ammunition depot near Toropets was hit by Ukrainian drones, causing a huge explosion, with videos showing large fireballs lighting up the night sky.

Strikes on weapons arsenals are crucial for Ukraine to weaken Russia’s overwhelming fire superiority on the battlefield, military experts have said. Every week, Moscow bombards Ukrainian frontline positions and cities with missiles, guided bombs and artillery shells. Ukrainian soldiers have long been outgunned at the front, with Mr. Zelensky saying in April that Russia fires 10 shells for every Ukrainian one.

Serhii Kuzan, chairman of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, a nongovernmental research group, said, “The only way to defeat the Russian Army is to defeat its logistics,” most specifically by destroying its ammunition depots.

“This is the destruction of the most key component of warfare,” he added. “Tanks and guns without ammunition will not fire and will simply be ineffective.”

The earlier attack on an ammunition depot this week took place on Wednesday, just outside Toropets, and appears to have caused serious damage. NASA satellites continued to detect fires at that depot on Saturday, and satellite imagery released by the British Defense Ministry showed destroyed storage bunkers and 280-foot-wide craters.

The British ministry said that the depot “almost certainly housed munitions of varying calibers for frontline use, as well as missiles and glide bombs used by nearby airfields.”

Col. Ants Kiviselg, head of Estonia’s military intelligence center, told journalists on Friday that “30,000 tons of explosive ordnance were detonated” in the attack, the equivalent of about 750,000 shells.

“That’s two to three months’ supply of ammunition” for Russian forces in Ukraine, he noted. “As a result of this attack, Russia has suffered losses in ammunition and we will see the impact of these losses on the front in the coming weeks.”

His assessment could not be immediately confirmed.

It is unclear whether Saturday’s attacks had a similar impact. But one of the two depots that was targeted, the one near Tikhoretsk, has been used as a storage site for North Korean munitions shipped to Russia, as documented by several think tanks and confirmed by the White House last fall.

Since late 2022, Russia has turned to buying shells and missiles from North Korea, which has a vast supply of Soviet-era weaponry, U.S. officials and independent analysts have said.

Many of those weapons arrived at the Tikhoretsk depot, whose storage capacity has recently been increased, according to reports by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies and the London-based Royal United Services Institute.

Imagery from late September 2023 “shows trains arriving at the facility, delivering dozens of containers of the same size and colors as those being loaded in North Korea,” the institute’s report said.

The Ukrainian Army said that 2,000 tons of ammunition, including some from North Korea, had been delivered to the depot shortly before Saturday’s strike. The claim could not be independently verified.

Ukrainian officials have said that the injection of North Korean weapons into the battlefield, particularly artillery shells, has helped Russian forces maintain an edge.

“Of all Russia’s allies, our biggest problem is North Korea,” Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, said at a security conference last week in Kyiv. “Because with the volume of military products that they supply, they actually affect the intensity of the fighting.”

Analysts say that the Tikhoretsk depot has also been an important nexus in supplying Russian forces. It is roughly equidistant from the combat zone in southeastern Ukraine and from Crimea, the Russian-occupied peninsula that has been an important logistics hub for funneling ammunition to the rest of the southern front.

The full array of weapons Ukraine used to attack the depots is unclear.

Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow for air power and technology at the Royal United Services Institute, said it was “entirely possible to set off ammunition stored in the open even with relatively small warheads” carried by attack drones “if they hit the right place.”

But Mr. Kuzan said that the ammunition depots were often protected with earth berms and underground concrete shelters that made them difficult to attack with drones.

“To do this you need not just a missile, it must be a heavy missile,” he said, pointing to long-range weapons supplied to Ukraine by Western allies, such as the British-French Storm Shadow missiles.

But Ukraine has so far been barred by its allies from using those weapons inside Russia. Mr. Zelensky told journalists on Friday that the White House was afraid that such an authorization would escalate the war. He said he would use a trip to the United States next week to try to persuade President Biden to lift the ban.

To circumvent it for now, at least partially, Ukraine has begun developing its own weapons, such as anti-ship missiles modified for land attacks, which it says it has already used to target Russia’s oil infrastructure. Kyiv also says it has developed long-range rocket drones that carry large warheads and can strike targets hundreds of miles away.

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.”

Sri Lanka is holding a presidential election on Saturday for the first time since its strongman president fled the country two years ago in the face of protests over an economic collapse.

During the 2022 crisis, Sri Lanka defaulted on its foreign debt and suffered shortages of imported fuel and food as its foreign exchange reserves ran dry. The interim government has introduced austerity measures to stabilize the economy, a condition for receiving a $3 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund.

The central issue in the election is how Sri Lanka should correct the imbalances in an economy long warped by too little taxation, too many subsidies and excessive borrowing. Opponents are trying to paint the incumbent, Ranil Wickremesinghe, as placing an unfair burden on the poor through increased taxation. They also say he is letting off the hook the elites whose corruption and mismanagement wrecked the economy.

The race is seen as tight. Here are the main contenders.

The Incumbent

Mr. Wickremesinghe, 75, a six-time former prime minister, is a political survivor. After the overthrow of Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2022, Mr. Wickremesinghe’s elevation to the presidency plucked him out of irrelevance and demonstrated his formidable bargaining powers.

He became interim president with the help of the powerful Rajapaksa clan, in what many saw as a deal in which he would not take action against the Rajapaksas for running the economy into the ground.

Over the past two years, Mr. Wickremesinghe has pitched himself as a senior statesman who has helped stabilize the country. He has argued that the economy is on the road to recovery, pointing to declining inflation and the country’s current account surplus, a broad measure of the trade balance. He has also promised to reduce taxes on essential goods, a nod to how his measures have pinched the poor.

The Marxist

Anura Kumara Dissanayake, 55, is the most closely watched candidate in the election. He has tapped into popular disenchantment with the political parties that have led the country in recent decades.

The party that Mr. Dissanayake leads was once behind deadly Marxist insurrections against the Sri Lankan state. But over the past 10 years, he has tried to move the party more to the center, distancing it from the staunch Communism and revolutionary principles of its past.

Mr. Dissanayake positioned his party, which is part of a much larger leftist coalition, as a supporter of the 2022 protest movement and presented himself as someone who would carry out its demands for a less centralized state. He has said he would renegotiate the deal with the I.M.F. and end corruption in higher offices.

The Opposition Leader

Sajith Premadasa, 57, the son of a former president, has promised a “social market economy” with a mix of market-led and social justice policies. Mr. Premadasa’s platform promises to strengthen fiscal discipline under the I.M.F. agreement while making changes to give relief to the poor.

He has the backing of the main political party of the country’s minority Tamils. Mr. Premadasa has vowed to fully implement a constitutional amendment intended to devolve powers to the country’s provinces to better accommodate Sri Lanka’s diversity.

The Heir

Namal Rajapaksa is the 38-year-old scion of a family that dominated the country’s politics for two decades but has struggled to bounce back after the upheaval of 2022.

His father, Mahinda, was one of Sri Lanka’s most popular leaders after he ended the country’s long civil war in 2009 with a brutal crackdown on the Tamil insurgency. But as the family’s star has fallen, Namal Rajapaksa has campaigned as the candidate of youth and change. He has also drawn on the postwar development projects that his father oversaw to say he will expand the economy.

Mujib Mashal contributed reporting.

Israel has long seen Hezbollah, with thousands of trained fighters and a deep arsenal of rockets and other weapons, as the most formidable foe on its borders. And Israeli officials say Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force, in particular, poses a major threat.

Israel claimed that it killed the force’s de facto commander, Ibrahim Aqeel, in a strike on a building in the Dahiya area of southern Beirut on Friday.

Hezbollah began firing missiles and drones at Israel on Oct. 8 in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza, and Israel has struck across Lebanon in response, prompting months of conflict that have displaced over 150,000 people in both countries. The strike on Friday deepened fears that the cross-border conflict could broaden into a larger regional conflict alongside the war in Gaza.

Why does Israel call the Radwan unit a threat?

Radwan has taken the lead in Hezbollah’s long-running conflict with Israel, and in the cross-border attacks that have escalated since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel set off the war in Gaza. Israeli military analysts say that Radwan has adopted the mission of conquering the northern Israeli region of Galilee.

Hezbollah and Hamas share a patron in Iran. If Iran and its proxies were to make a serious effort to broaden the war, the Israel-Lebanon border would be the likeliest place to do it.

“The Radwan force is dedicated to duplicating what happened on Oct. 7 in the south of Israel in the north,” Tamir Hayman, a retired general who led Israeli military intelligence until 2021, said in an interview in January, after a strike in southern Lebanon killed a commander that Lebanese officials tied to the Radwan force. “For that exact reason, it’s unacceptable for Israel to allow its fighters to remain in the border area.”

In the spring of 2023, the Radwan force took part in a rare example of public military exercises by Hezbollah, displaying an expansive military arsenal and simulating an infiltration into Israeli territory. Slick propaganda videos produced by Hezbollah have showcased the group’s small unit tactics and live-fire drills, interspersed with threats to Israel.

Why are we hearing more about the Radwan unit now?

The Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas also led to intensified strikes and retaliations between Hezbollah and Israel, forcing tens of thousands of people on each side of the border to evacuate.

In northern Israel, officials and residents have piled pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to protect them from Hezbollah and make it safe to return home.

What Israel has treated as a manageable threat, it now describes as something more serious. Israeli leaders have repeatedly cited the Radwan unit by name, and, as far back as last December, Tzachi Hanegbi, Israel’s national security adviser, told Israeli media that the country can no longer accept Radwan “sitting on the border.”

Where did the Radwan force come from?

The origins and makeup of the unit are murky.

The group took its name from the nom de guerre of its former leader, Imad Mughniyeh, who was assassinated in Syria in 2008. Under his command, the unit played a pivotal role in the abduction of Israeli soldiers in 2006 that led to the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War.

The unit, along with other elements of Hezbollah and other Iran-backed groups, later took part in the battle against the Islamic State in Syria. But the fighting in the last three months has marked the Radwan force’s most active period against Israel since 2006.

Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.

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.”