When Orly Gavishi-Sotto saw images of Hamas-led forces attacking southern Israel on Oct. 7, she worried about her kibbutz, a mere 500 yards from Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.

Ms. Gavishi-Sotto, 46, has spent more than two decades in Hanita, a hilltop kibbutz with a view of the Mediterranean Sea. Seeing Hamas attack Israel in the south, she feared that Hezbollah, the militant group that dominates Lebanon, might be capable of doing the same in the north.

“The first thought on Oct. 7 was that could have been us,” she said. “It was absolutely terrifying.”

Ms. Gavishi-Sotto is now among the roughly 60,000 Israelis displaced from their homes in northern Israel, an evacuation prompted by Hezbollah attacks that began immediately after the Oct. 7 assault, and that have been followed by tit-for-tat exchanges of fire ever since. For most of the past year, she and her three daughters have lived outside Hanita, moving among a hotel, a rented apartment and another kibbutz.

In the last week, Israel has ratcheted up the pressure on Hezbollah by beginning a major bombing campaign, with the stated goal of allowing residents in the north to return to their homes.

Some displaced Israelis hope the military escalation will restore quiet to their hometowns. But others express skepticism about the prospect, saying they had lost faith in the Israeli government a long time ago. That group contends the government hasn’t provided sufficient support for the displaced and that, until the last week, it hadn’t taken strong enough action to push Hezbollah away from their communities.

Tens of thousands of people have spent months scattered across the country, straining the connections of tight-knit communities in the north. “I very much want to believe the government cares about our situation, but I’m simply not able to,” Ms. Gavishi-Sotto said. “They abandoned us for an entire year.”

Hezbollah started firing on northern Israel nearly a year ago in solidarity with Hamas, its ally. Since the start of the war in Gaza, its fighters and Israel’s military have exchanged strikes in the north, with both wreaking havoc on the opposite side of the border — killing combatants and civilians, destroying homes and setting farmland on fire.

Over the past week, Israel’s attacks increased exponentially. Last Tuesday and Wednesday, Israel blew up pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah before pivoting to the most significant and intense strikes against the group since the 2006 war in Lebanon. The bombing campaign has destroyed weapons stores and killed senior Hezbollah commanders who Israel said were developing plans to invade northern Israel.

The Israeli military said that on Monday alone, it struck approximately 1,600 targets affiliated with Hezbollah.

At the same time, Hezbollah has also fired deeper into Israel, setting off air sirens in Tel Aviv and Haifa, two of the largest cities in the country.

The Lebanese health ministry said that at least 558 people had been killed and more than 1,800 wounded on Monday, making it the deadliest day of attacks in the country in at least two decades. The figures released by the ministry do not distinguish between combatants and civilians, but it has said that many of the casualties were women and children.

In northern Israel, frustration among the displaced has grown as they have watched their military fight Hezbollah but fail to create conditions under which they would feel comfortable returning to their homes. Some are calling for a demilitarized zone along the border, a buffer that would keep Israel and Hezbollah forces further apart. Such a zone was drawn up in 2006 as part of a United Nations Security Council resolution passed the last time Israel and Hezbollah fought a war, though both sides have been accused of violating it.

Zami Ravid, a resident of Metula, the northernmost town in the Galilee, said his home had been seriously damaged by a rocket last week.

“A war is a disaster; no one wants a war,” said Mr. Ravid, 82, an owner of a museum of rare instruments who has been living in Tel Aviv since October. “But this buffer needs to be created for the good of Israel as a state.”

Hezbollah has said it will stop firing rockets and drones into Israel only if Israel and Hamas reach a cease-fire agreement in Gaza. Efforts to achieve such a deal have repeatedly failed, and hopes for one have faded as Israel and Hamas have staked out irreconcilable positions.

Seeing the military intensify its operations in Lebanon had raised hopes for some in the north that the strikes might force Hezbollah to back down, or set the stage for a mediated end to the fighting.

In Netua, a kibbutz less than a mile from the border, Seth Dekanu said the scaled-up assault on Hezbollah had enabled him to breathe “a sigh of relief” even as he acknowledged that war, and the rising civilian death toll, was “tragic.” As a member of the kibbutz’s security team, Mr. Dekanu has been able to leave the site once a week in the past year, to see his wife and two young sons, who were evacuated.

“Since the start of the war, we’ve been sitting here, waiting to be attacked,” said Mr. Dekanu, 27, one of a few residents remaining in Netua. “Now we’re finally on the offensive.”

Amir Adari, a resident of Yiftah, a kibbutz sandwiched between Lebanon and the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights in a sprawling section of northern Israel known as the Galilee, said he supported Israel’s military blitz against Hezbollah. But he emphasized that the government should leverage it to reach a diplomatic resolution with the group.

“We should make a strong show of force before striking a deal,” said Mr. Adari, 49, who has been living with his family in Livnim, a village beside the Sea of Galilee.

Waging war, Mr. Adari said, was not something he desired, but he said he felt there was no alternative. “If we give up on the Galilee, soon we will be giving up on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem,” he said.

Other Israelis rejected the notion that military action would bring long-term calm, citing the failure of past wars in 1982 and 2006 to achieve that goal.

“Wars beget wars,” said Daniella Porat Penso, 57, a volunteer spokeswoman for the Yiftah kibbutz. “I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve seen one war after another and we’re still dealing with this situation.”

Wars, she said, “won’t solve our problems.”

After months of constant pressure and grinding, bloody advances, Russian forces are pressing up against multiple strongholds along more than 100 miles of the jagged front in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine. For Ukraine, losing any of those important defensive positions could significantly alter the contours of the fight for control of the region, long coveted by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Despite staggering casualties, Russian forces are mounting armored assaults and sending waves of infantry on foot, motorbikes and all-terrain vehicles to attack Ukrainian positions from Chasiv Yar in the north to the southern stronghold of Vuhledar, which is at risk of being encircled, according to Ukrainian soldiers and combat footage.

With attacks across cratered fields, the Russians are racing to seize territory before the fall strips the foliage they use for cover and the rains turn fertile farmland into bog.

Even with both armies exhausted, the battles across the east remain as deadly as at any point in the war, according to Ukrainian soldiers and Western officials.

On each of two days last week, the Ukrainian military reported more than 200 clashes between the two sides — the highest such numbers in many months, according to DeepState, a group of analysts that maps the battlefield.

At a location near the front where injured soldiers are treated, the steady influx of the wounded last weekend testified to the intensity of the fight. In just 24 hours, small crews of medics treated more than 70 soldiers.

Sergeant Valeria, a 23-year-old combat medic, ticked off a list of the traumatic injuries the wounded have sustained, including severe head injuries and burns covering more than 20 percent of their bodies.

As bleary-eyed fighters slumped against a wall listening to the screams of a soldier injured in fighting around Vuhledar, she said that in the grim calculus of her vocation, screams were a positive sign.

“The most important thing about someone who’s screaming is that they’re breathing,” she said.

Sergeant Valeria, like other soldiers interviewed on the front, asked only to be identified by a first name or call sign in accordance with military protocol. The New York Times was given access to medics and soldiers at the facility under the condition that its location not be disclosed.

As the battles rage at home, President Volodymyr Zelensky is in the United States this week on a diplomatic mission that he portrays as no less urgent.

He spoke at the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday and was scheduled to meet with President Biden on Thursday, where he was expected to plead, again, for the ability to strike deeper into Russian territory using Western-supplied missiles. Without that, he says, it will be harder to continue to bring the war home to Russia — the only way, he believes, that Moscow can be brought to the negotiating table.

Mr. Biden has been reluctant to approve such deep strikes, fearing confrontation with Russia. On Wednesday, Mr. Putin said that he planned to lower the threshold for his country’s use of nuclear weapons, an escalation in the Kremlin’s efforts to deter the United States from expanding its military aid to Ukraine.

Along the eastern front line, the Ukrainian soldiers interviewed this month spoke of exhaustion and of securing one area only to see another come under threat. The territory that they are protecting, the remaining unoccupied sections of Donetsk, is part of the Donbas region, what was once the industrial heartland of Ukraine.

The cities and towns under assault are of strategic importance for different reasons, including their use as hubs to move soldiers and supplies, and their elevated positions. It is unclear how robust Ukraine’s next line of defense is beyond those places.

The Russians have, however, failed to turn some past advances into rapid breakthroughs. They are also paying a steep price in troops and equipment for every mile they gain.

The Ukrainians have held the Russians at bay for months outside the ruined hilltop town of Chasiv Yar, but just 20 miles to the south, the Russians are advancing in bloody urban battles now raging inside Toretsk.

Just south of there, the Russian advance toward the city of Pokrovsk over the past seven months has created a bulge some 22 miles deep and 15 miles wide, altering the geometry of the front in complicated ways.

Pokrovsk, a critical rail and road hub, is the last major city before the wide-open plains leading to the Dnipro region, home to the third-largest city in Ukraine and vital to its economic health.

Ukrainian soldiers have halted the direct advance on Pokrovsk, for the moment, but the Russians are close, fortifying their positions about five miles to the east.

The city itself is under daily bombardment. All the highway overpasses have been destroyed, so the authorities are urging the 15,000 people who remain to use winding dirt roads to leave while they can.

“It’s very scary,” Kateryna Kandybko, a 34-year-old mother of two children, said in an interview on the outskirts. Her family is packed and ready to run, but is holding on for now. “We don’t really want to leave at all. But we definitely don’t want to live under the Russian flag.”

In the surrounding farmland, the burning of unharvested fields of sunflowers, set alight by shelling, illuminates the night sky.

“Take a look around,” said Serhii, a 45-year-old trucker, as he raced to haul thousands of pigs from a large farm under bombardment in the border area. “Despite this being a rural area, there are no birds, no animals — not even stray dogs or cats. Everyone’s stressed, people and animals alike.” He asked that his family name not be used for their safety.

Ginseng, the call-sign of a 44-year-old master sergeant in charge of an artillery unit with the 68th Jaeger Brigade protecting Pokrovsk’s southern flank, said that Ukrainian forces had stabilized the line but that the fight remained a “nightmare.”

He pointed to a shotgun near the entrance of his bunker, which he said was the best defense against small Russian attack drones when electronic jamming equipment fails.

“They fly in waves: One shows up, then 15-20 minutes later, another,” he said.

His small band of soldiers manning a Soviet-designed howitzer emerge from the bunker only when they have a target sent in by their own surveillance drone operators.

Even if they can hold their lines, Ginseng fears Pokrovsk is doomed.

“They’ll level it,” he said. “I’ve seen so many cities wiped out — it’s overwhelming.”

The area directly south of Pokrovsk is perhaps the most volatile part of the front at the moment. The front line there has become an increasingly jagged arc as the Russians push the Ukrainians back in pockets.

About halfway to Vuhledar, 60 miles to the south, the towering smokestacks of a battered power plant in Kurakhove stand idle over another smashed town that used to be home to some 20,000 people. But black smoke rising over nearby villages is clearly visible across the flat plains, marking the Russian advance.

The Ukrainian 46th Air Mobile Brigade, which is responsible for part of the defense of the area around Kurakhove, said in public statements that two recent attacks featured nearly 100 tanks, armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles.

The Russian attacks were met with a blizzard of Ukrainian drones and artillery fire and the soldiers of the 46th said they managed to repel both assaults. But they do not expect the Russians to let up.

And in Vuhledar — a former mining town strategically located at the intersection of the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions — the Russians are also gaining ground, advancing around the city from the northeast. They recently drove the Ukrainians from two mines that had served as key bases, soldiers said, raising the risk that a city that had been the site of some of Russia’s most devastating losses in this war could now fall.

“They still haven’t taken Vuhledar to this day,” said Dmytro, a 41-year-old senior lieutenant with the 72nd Mechanized Brigade, which has led the defense of the city for two years without a break. But he is worried.

“If they manage to get past the mines,” he said, “they’ll surround Vuhledar.” For now, he said, the soldiers in the city “are just hanging on.”

Liubov Sholudko and Olha Konovalova contributed reporting from eastern Ukraine.

For months, Ukrainian officials have carefully navigated the turbulent partisan politics in the United States leading up to November’s elections, saying that they could work with either a Democratic or Republican administration.

But on Wednesday night, Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House, called for Ukraine to fire its ambassador to Washington, accusing her of meddling in American election affairs.

In a public letter addressed to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Mr. Johnson demanded the dismissal of the Ukrainian ambassador, Oksana Markarova, citing her role in organizing a visit by Mr. Zelensky to an ammunition factory in Scranton, Pa. Mr. Zelensky toured the factory this week and thanked workers for manufacturing shells sent to his country’s embattled forces.

Mr. Johnson criticized the visit for taking place in a key battleground state in the company of Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who supports Vice President Kamala Harris in her presidential bid. The speaker noted that no Republicans were invited.

“The tour was clearly a partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats and is clearly election interference,” Mr. Johnson wrote in the letter on Wednesday.

The same day, James Comer, a Republican who chairs the House Oversight Committee, announced that he had launched an investigation into the visit, saying it was a partisan event paid for with taxpayer funds.

Ukraine had not responded to Mr. Johnson’s demands about its ambassador as of Thursday morning.

The complaints are likely to complicate Mr. Zelensky’s primary objective this week: to push Washington to increase its financial and military aid to Kyiv, as part of his “victory plan” to force Russia to the negotiating table.

The Ukrainian leader will meet with President Biden at the White House on Thursday, as well as holding several meetings in Congress.

Ahead of the meeting, Mr. Biden announced nearly $8 billion in military assistance to Ukraine. Roughly $5.5 billion is not new funding, but its disbursement is aimed at ensuring financial support for Kyiv, at least in the short term, even if former President Donald J. Trump wins the presidential election.

The money will go to the so-called presidential drawdown authority shipments that send weapons and matériel from the Pentagon’s stockpile.

Another $2.4 billion in aid will be channeled through a program that allows the administration to purchase weapons for Ukraine directly from manufacturers rather than depleting U.S. stocks.

The announcement, however, did not mention any authorization for Ukraine to fire Western-made long-range missiles into Russia, which Kyiv has long lobbied for. Mr. Zelensky recently said that the White House was afraid that such an authorization would escalate the war.

In what appeared an effort to play on those fears, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said on Wednesday that Russia would be prepared to use a nuclear weapon in response to an attack carried out with conventional weapons by a nonnuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear one. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said Mr. Putin’s decision was meant as a message to Ukraine’s Western backers.

The Ukrainian authorities have long tried to remain neutral in the American presidential campaign, although they have tried to build bridges in both camps to advance their interests.

Earlier this year, they lobbied Mr. Johnson to help pass a multibillion-dollar aid package for Ukraine. Republicans have long been skeptical about providing support to Ukraine, and Mr. Trump’s vice-presidential choice, JD Vance, has been deeply critical of previous United States aid packages for Kyiv.

In recent weeks, relations with the Republican camp have deteriorated as the U.S. election campaign picked up pace, with Mr. Trump increasingly denouncing American aid to Ukraine while touting a plan, for which he has offered no details, to quickly broker a peace deal.

In an interview published on Sunday with The New Yorker, Mr. Zelensky questioned that plan, which many in Kyiv fear would leave Russia in control of vast swathes of Ukrainian territory. He also described Mr. Vance as “too radical.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump accused Mr. Zelensky of refusing to negotiate a peace deal with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“The president of Ukraine is in our country. He is making little nasty aspersions toward your favorite president, me,” Mr. Trump said during a campaign event in North Carolina. “We continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal: Zelensky.”

Volodymyr Ariev, an opposition lawmaker in Ukraine, said the absence of Republican representatives during Mr. Zelensky’s visit to the ammunition factory had been a critical misstep.

“Trump’s team doesn’t have a very friendly attitude to Zelensky, and any excuse for blaming him will be used,” Mr. Ariev said. “So prudence was supposed to be at the maximum level to not give them a single reason.”

“No matter who wins, the main question for Ukraine is to maintain U.S. support,” he said.

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kyiv.

An 88-year-old man believed to be the world’s longest-serving death row inmate was exonerated by a district court in Japan on Thursday, 44 years after he was first sentenced to death.

The man, Iwao Hakamada, was originally convicted of a quadruple murder in 1966 on the basis of what his defense lawyers say was a forced confession and fabricated evidence. Japan’s Supreme Court sentenced him to death in 1980. He was released a decade ago and granted a retrial that began last fall.

Over the years, Mr. Hakamada, a former featherweight boxer, had consistently testified that he pleaded guilty only after the police intensively interrogated him for 20 days, beating him with sticks and depriving him of sleep. He retracted his confession soon after making it.

“I feel relieved as he was ruled innocent,” said Hiroaki Murayama, a lawyer who as a judge in 2014 released Mr. Hakamada and ordered a retrial. “Why did it take so long?”

Speaking in front of the court on Thursday, Hideyo Ogawa, a lawyer for Mr. Hakamada, said that the ruling was a “landmark decision” and that the court had clearly said Mr. Hakamada’s original conviction was based on fabricated evidence.

His acquittal was the fifth time a defendant sentenced to death row has been exonerated in Japan in the postwar period.

Mr. Hakamada’s lawyers had won a retrial and his release 10 years ago after testing showed that blood on clothing that the police used as evidence didn’t contain his DNA.

After the Shizuoka District Court granted Mr. Hakamada a retrial in 2014, the Tokyo High Court reversed that decision, refusing to reopen the case. In 2020, the Supreme Court sided with the district court and ordered a new trial.

According to The Mainichi Shimbun, one of Japan’s main daily newspapers, Mr. Hakamada’s sister appeared at court hearings and testified that his mental condition was deteriorating.

Prosecutors now have to decide whether to appeal the Shizuoka court’s ruling.

Mr. Hakamada’s case has attracted the attention of international human rights activists.

“After enduring almost half a century of wrongful imprisonment and a further 10 years waiting for his retrial, this verdict is an important recognition of the profound injustice he endured for most of his life,” Boram Jang, Amnesty International’s East Asia researcher, said in a statement on Thursday.

The entrance to the district police headquarters in southern Pakistan was carpeted with rose petals, a grand gesture of respect. A crowd filled the air with chants of Islamic slogans. Many carried garlands and flower bouquets to laud the officers for their actions.

The throngs were ecstatic because the police had killed a man. His supposed crime: “blasphemous content” on social media.

The man, a 36-year-old government doctor, had been shot “unintentionally” as he resisted arrest, the authorities claimed. But human rights groups called it an extrajudicial killing, the second such one in a week. On Sept. 12, a 52-year-old man in custody on suspicion of blasphemy was shot dead inside a police station in southwestern Pakistan.

The cases have reverberated across the nation, highlighting the volatile nature of Pakistan’s religious landscape. Blasphemy, a legal offense that can carry the death penalty, has long been a sensitive issue in a country that is more than 96 percent Muslim. Even a mere accusation can be deadly; mobs sometimes lynch people before their cases can go to trial.

Rights activists have expressed concerns over the government’s tolerance of hard-line Islamist groups and over surging violence among their supporters after blasphemy allegations. The killings of the two men this month have ignited fears that the police, pressured by the mob actions, may now be taking matters into their own hands, too.

“The Pakistani police force is a deeply conservative institution, mirroring the broader societal challenges in the country,” said Zoha Waseem, a policing expert at the University of Warwick in Britain. The killings, she said, raise “serious concerns about the ability to fairly address hate crimes and curb lynch mobs in blasphemy-related cases in the future.”

The doctor who was killed, Shah Nawaz, was accused of “desecrating” the Prophet Muhammad with a post on Facebook. He went into hiding, fearing for his life. Mr. Nawaz was dismissed from his job and faced blasphemy charges after a cleric filed a police complaint.

Islamist political parties organized violent protests demanding his immediate arrest, despite Mr. Nawaz’s insistence that he had not written the post on his account, which had long been dormant. One cleric even publicly announced an $18,000 bounty on his head, declaring that punishment for blasphemy was beheading.

Mr. Nawaz’s family said he voluntarily surrendered to the police in Sindh Province, hoping to avoid the fate of others lynched by mobs. A minister in the provincial government from Mr. Nawaz’s hometown confirmed that Mr. Nawaz was in police custody.

However, on the night of Sept. 18, the police claimed that Mr. Nawaz had been killed as they tried to arrest him.

Mr. Nawaz’s family vehemently denied the police’s account, asserting that he had been murdered in what is known in South Asia as an “encounter,” in which officers kill a person and invent a story about having acted in self-defense during a shootout.

“Police breached our trust and killed Nawaz while he was in their custody, instead of bringing him before a court of law,” said his brother, Babar Kumbhar.

The aftermath of Mr. Nawaz’s death was marked by further violence. When his family tried to bury his body on their private land under the cover of darkness, after being denied burial at a graveyard, a mob armed with weapons and Molotov cocktails chased them, seized the body and set it on fire.

The mob’s actions set off public outrage, as did videos of the rose-petal celebrations at the police station. The provincial government suspended officers who had been involved in Mr. Nawaz’s case and started an investigation.

Islamist groups threatened protests against the government’s actions, hailing the police officers as heroes for “defending Islam.”

A week before Mr. Nawaz’s death, a police officer in Balochistan Province, in Pakistan’s southwest, killed Abdul Ali, a shopkeeper, while he was in custody. Mr. Ali had been accused of using objectionable words against the Prophet Muhammad. He had been transferred to a more secure facility because of growing demands that he be handed over to a mob so they could kill him.

A police officer posing as a relative of Mr. Ali’s gained access to the station and shot him. Since then, the family of the officer, who has been arrested, has been receiving visitors offering praise for the killing of Mr. Ali.

Pakistan inherited 19th-century British laws outlining punishments for blasphemy-related offenses. In the 1980s, the government revamped those laws to add harsh penalties for those who insult Islam.

Last year, the nation passed a law to increase the punishment for derogatory remarks against revered personalities — including the Prophet Muhammad’s family, wives and companions, and the first four caliphs — to at least 10 years of imprisonment, up from three.

The Center for Social Justice, a Lahore-based minority rights group, reported that at least 330 people, mostly Muslims, were charged in 180 blasphemy cases last year.

Although Pakistan has never executed anyone for blasphemy, mob killings and other violence are another matter.

In recent years, police stations have been burned after officers refused to hand over blasphemy suspects to mobs, and groups have stormed stations to try to lynch accused individuals.

In June, a mob broke into a police station in the Swat Valley, in northwestern Pakistan, and snatched a man who had been detained there after being accused of desecrating the Quran. The attackers lynched the man and burned down the station.

In May, the police rescued a Christian man from a mob in Sarghoda, a district in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, after allegations that he had deliberately burned pages of the Quran. A week later, he died from injuries suffered in the attack.

In February, a female police officer in Lahore rescued a woman from an attack by a mob that had mistaken the Arabic script on her dress for Quranic verses.

Last year, eight people accused of blasphemy were killed extrajudicially, primarily by mobs with insufficient intervention from the police and other authorities, the Center for Social Justice reported. This year, the number of such deaths has risen to eight with the two killings this month.

With fear rising after the recent killings, many in Pakistan are posting disclaimers on social media stating that any offensive content on their accounts was not posted by them.

Experts and rights activists attribute the surge in blasphemy-related violence to the rise of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, or T.L.P., a radical Islamist party. The organization was initially formed to demand the release of Mumtaz Qadri, a police officer who assassinated Punjab’s governor, Salman Taseer, in 2011 over proposed changes to the blasphemy law.

In April 2021, the T.L.P. organized violent countrywide protests demanding the expulsion of the French ambassador after President Emmanuel Macron of France eulogized a French teacher murdered for showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a classroom.

Rabia Mehmood, a Lahore-based researcher who studies blasphemy-related violence, said the Pakistani government’s tolerance of the T.L.P.’s supporters and groups defending the country’s blasphemy laws had fostered a climate conducive to extrajudicial violence.

“This sends a message that no one is safe from the wrath of blasphemy vigilantes, far-right lawyers or law enforcement personnel on the hunt for victims of fabricated blasphemy cases,” she said.

Lumi and Pyry, two pandas who have spent the past six years living in a zoo in central Finland, are heading back to China this year, more than eight years earlier than planned.

But both Finland and China insist that it isn’t a breakdown in “panda diplomacy.”

It simply turns out that pandas are pricey guests.

Hopes had been high when Lumi and Pyry, a female and male pair whose names mean Snow and Blizzard in Finnish, and who are known as Jin Baobao and Hua Bao in China, arrived in Finland in early 2018 on a 15-year loan.

Thousands of people came out to watch their convoy arrive, according to the Finnish news media. And about 280,000 people visited the Ahtari Zoo that year, Arja Valiaho, the zoo’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview on Thursday— more than double its visitor traffic in 2017.

The zoo, riding an initial wave of enthusiasm, spent about $9.5 million to build them a Panda House, Ms. Valiaho said. Then, it spent about $1.7 million a year on their upkeep, she said, including energy and maintenance costs and staff salaries, and about $223,000 in bamboo, shipped from the Netherlands. (Pandas eat 26 to 84 pounds of it every day.) Zoos also commonly pay an annual fee to China to host its pandas, although Ms. Valiaho declined to comment on whether it was part of the Ahtari Zoo’s arrangement.

But the zoo, which is at least a two-hour drive from any major Finnish city, has struggled to keep up its foot traffic and thus revenue from ticket sales, as Finland endured the coronavirus pandemic, steep inflation spurred in part by Russia’s war in Ukraine and a dip in domestic tourism.

And the panda pair just didn’t breed.

“We would have presumed that a panda cub here would have attracted people,” Ms. Valiaho said. “This year we didn’t even try for cubs.”

The zoo attracted only about 150,000 visitors last year, she said.

So after years of negotiation and requests for more state funding, the zoo decided that it had little choice but to return the pandas.

“Every time I leave work to go home, I go check on the pandas,” Ms. Valiaho said. “I’ll miss them dearly.”

When the zoo announced the pair’s return on Monday, Finland and China both emphasized that their diplomatic ties remained strong.

“This matter concerns the Ahtari Zoo,” Finland’s Foreign Ministry said in an emailed statement. It added: “Finland upholds well-functioning relations with China.”

“After friendly consultations, China and Finland have jointly made the decision to bring back the two giant pandas to China ahead of schedule,” China’s embassy in Finland said in a statement.

China has been moving in recent years to shore up its panda diplomacy after several departures from the United States raised questions about whether there was a bigger geopolitical significance. This year, it was announced that pandas were being sent from China to San Diego, San Francisco and Washington.

The Ahtari Zoo is certainly mourning the looming departure of two of its most famous residents.

It is also preparing Lumi and Pyry for their long journey, likely later this year. The zoo will host several parties in their honor next month, including one in which a choral group of Chinese singers living in Finland is scheduled to sing and bid them farewell. (The pandas may be pleased by that: Ms. Valiaho said the animals perk up when they hear Chinese.)

Then, the bears will enter a monthlong quarantine before their flight to China.

And the zoo’s pricey Panda House?

“It’s suitable for bears,” Ms. Valiaho said. “And there are other species of bears in the world.”

Israel launched more than 1,000 airstrikes against Lebanon this week in an attempt to weaken Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that has been exchanging missile barrages with Israel for nearly a year.

But fighting Hezbollah is not a straightforward task. The group is also a Shiite Muslim political party, backed by Iran, with an influential role in Lebanon’s faction-ridden political system. It provides social services to a large base of supporters. And its fighters and missiles are hidden among Lebanon’s civilian population.

“Israel’s war is not with you,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Lebanese people this week. “It’s with Hezbollah.”

But it’s not always clear where Hezbollah ends and Lebanon begins. The group, which the United States and many other countries consider a terrorist organization, is a dominant political and military power in the country.

The name Hezbollah (pronounced hez-bo-llah) is Arabic for “Party of God.” The group was founded, with help from Iran, to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon that began in 1982 during the country’s civil war. The United States believes that an early incarnation of the group also played a role in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut.

As the Lebanese civil war drew to a close in 1990, the group was allowed to keep its weapons as part of the peace deal, even as Lebanon’s other religious sects were forced to disarm. Hezbollah argued that its weapons were necessary to protect Lebanon and the group continued to launch guerrilla attacks on Israeli forces in southern Lebanon until they withdrew in 2000.

In addition to its military activities, Hezbollah increased its participation in Lebanon’s political system, winning seats in Parliament and holding cabinet positions.

Its standing increased further after a 2006 war with Israel that was triggered when Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers during a cross border raid. The war ended after 34 days of intense combat with both sides declaring victory. In Lebanon and across the Arab world, Hezbollah were lauded as heroes for taking on Israel.

With support from Iran and Syria, Hezbollah rebuilt areas that had been damaged during the war. It established schools, set up its own covert communications network and launched a TV station. Former fighters even opened a museum celebrating the militia’s reputation as a wily force of resistance against Israel’s powerful military.

It continued building its military forces, which are estimated to include tens of thousands of soldiers and more than 100,000 missiles. Hezbollah has perhaps the largest arsenal of any nonstate armed group in the world, according to experts.

Hezbollah and its coalition allies gained a majority in the 2018 parliamentary elections, but lost it again in 2022. Hezbollah currently holds 13 seats in the 128-member Lebanese Parliament. That may not sound like much, but in Lebanon’s consensus-driven political system, which requires coalition building between religious and political factions, it is enough to wield significant power.

“They do not control parliament, but they have a lot of influence,” said Paul Salem, the Beirut-based vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

Although Hezbollah’s coalition lost its majority two years ago, it has effectively maintained the power to block many major decisions. The effect has been gridlock: Lebanon’s Parliament has been unable to name a president for the past two years, and the country is run by a caretaker prime minister with limited powers.

A United Nations Security Council resolution called for Hezbollah to disarm and barred militants from the border area. But that resolution was never fully enforced, leading to long-simmering tensions and violence.

Now, with the Lebanese government crippled by deadlock and economic crises, there is no force in Lebanon that can limit Hezbollah’s power. Najib Mikati, the country’s caretaker prime minister, castigated Israel after this week’s bombings without mentioning Hezbollah.

“The continuing Israeli aggression on Lebanon is a war of extermination in every sense of the word and a destructive plan that aims to destroy Lebanese villages and towns,” he said at a cabinet meeting on Monday.

Despite its dominance in Lebanon, Hezbollah is not as popular in the country as it may seem, said David Wood, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group. Many resent the group’s outsize influence and accuse Hezbollah of dragging the whole country into an unnecessary war.

“It’s undeniable that these operations have weakened Hezbollah militarily,” Mr. Wood said. “What it has done to Hezbollah’s political standing is less clear.”

Each morning, when Gisèle Pelicot arrives at the courthouse, dozens of supporters, mainly women, are already there, waiting for her. When she leaves each night, they line her path to applaud and cheer.

Many call her “Gisèle,” as if they know her, though few do personally. In her chic image, they see themselves, their mothers, their grandmothers. They come to the court in the southern French city of Avignon and wait for hours to support her.

“I don’t know how she does it — her dignity,” said Catherine Armand, 62, who arrived an hour and a half before proceedings one recent morning to be first in line for a coveted place in a room in the courthouse where the trial was being broadcast.

“I admire this woman,” she added. “She is exceptional.”

In the three weeks since the rape trial against her former husband and 50 other defendants began, Ms. Pelicot has become a feminist hero in France. Her face, framed by her red Anna Wintour bob and tan sunglasses, appears on nightly TV newscasts, the front pages of newspapers, graffitied walls and signs held up by protesters around the country.

Feminist activists and writers have penned open letters to her that have been published in newspapers and read on the radio.

They laud her courage, her strength, her dignity in confronting her horrifying story. They also praise her rare decision to fling open the doors onto her intimate hell and to insist that the trial be made public, when it could have stayed behind closed doors. Many victims feel she speaks for them.

As Hélène Devynck, a journalist and author, wrote in the newspaper Le Monde: “It is not just you, Gisèle, that they treated like a thing. They tell us all, we are insignificant. Your strength gives us back ours. Thank you for this immense gift.”

Ms. Pelicot is at the center of the most significant rape trial France has seen in decades. Her husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot, has pleaded guilty to putting drugs in her food and drinks for almost a decade. Then he invited men into their bedroom to join him in raping her while she was drugged.

Mr. Pelicot and most of the other men on trial are charged with the aggravated rape of Ms. Pelicot.

More than a dozen of the men have pleaded guilty. Most of the rest do not dispute that they had sex with Ms. Pelicot, but they say that they did not think it was rape. Instead, they say they were tricked into it, lured by her husband for playful three-way encounters, and told that she was pretending to be asleep or some variation of that.

Before her husband’s arrest, Ms. Pelicot, 71, led a quiet life: a retired manager at a big company, a mother of three and a grandmother of seven who had moved with her husband of 50 years to a small town in Provence to enjoy hiking in the hills and swimming in the backyard pool.

Now, she arrives at court each day, dressed impeccably for battle, embodying the phrase her lawyers coined at the beginning of the trial that has become a mantra among her supporters — that shame must change sides, from the victim to the accused.

Her head held high, she sweeps past the defendants who fill the room’s many benches. They range in age from 26 to 74. They are thin, fat, bearded, smooth-faced. Many are married and have children. They work as truck drivers, construction workers, tradesmen, salesmen. There is a journalist, a nurse, a prison guard and a tech specialist among them.

By opening the doors to the public, Ms. Pelicot has opened up the view not only onto her own collapsing life and the legal process around rape but also onto the regular, mundane, normal profiles of the accused men. And many women credit her with skewering the myth of the monster rapist.

“Friend of the family, stranger at a bar or the street, brother or cousin, friend, colleague, professor, neighbor: All women can sadly find a face that brings them back to a traumatic memory among the multitudes of accused,” said an open letter published in the French daily Libération that was signed by more than 260 artists, writers, politicians, activists and historians — mostly women.

More than 40 defense lawyers fill the room in their black capes. Last week, many began to cross-examine Ms. Pelicot and to reveal their strategies. Some tried to raise doubt about Ms. Pelicot’s position that she had been completely unconscious and oblivious. They tried to poke holes in her credibility and in her self-portrayal as someone who enjoyed sex with her husband but was never interested in experimenting with other partners.

At their request, two series of pictures — 27 in total, selected from among the 20,000 photographs and videos that the police found on her husband’s electronic devices — were displayed on screens in court while the audience uncomfortably held its breath.

Most showed a woman’s intimate body parts, at times with a protruding sex toy. Some showed Ms. Pelicot’s face, her eyes open.

Ms. Pelicot remained defiant. “If this is an attempt to trap me, it’s difficult to bear,” she said. “What is it that you’re looking for here in this room, to make me look guilty?”

One lawyer asked her — causing an uproar in the courtroom — “Would you not have a secret inclination for exhibitionism?” Another suggested: “These photos are very explicit. Not all women would accept this type of photo, even with a loving husband.”

Men receiving pictures of this kind could have easily been fooled into thinking she wanted to have sex with them, they implied.

Whether or not she looked welcoming in these photos, Ms. Pelicot replied, “if a man came to have intercourse with me, he still should have asked for my consent.”

For the first time in the trial, Ms. Pelicot’s calm composure cracked. She raised her voice.

“I find it insulting,” she said. “And I understand why rape victims don’t press charges.”

The defense strategies are typical for rape trials, experts say. But now they are being aired before journalists posting updates on social media to an increasingly shocked public.

Many women say Ms. Pelicot has provided a public — and brave — demonstration about the treatment of rape victims.

“It’s a victim’s obstacle course,” said Audrey Darsonville, a professor of criminal law at the University of Nanterre. “Their whole life is scrutinized, starting with police officers asking how they were dressed, what is their sexuality, et cetera. All these questions that have nothing to do with the violence that is rape.”

“With everything she represents — a family woman, a grandmother — even she ends up being extremely mistreated by defense lawyers,” Professor Darsonville added, referring to Ms. Pelicot. “Can you imagine if she were a young woman who had consumed alcohol?”

The same lawyers who showed the photographs of Ms. Pelicot later argued against showing the footage Mr. Pelicot took of the men’s sexual interactions with his drugged wife. That, one said, would impugn the dignity of the men involved. The prosecutors argued that the edited clips were essential evidence — preciously rare in sexual assault cases. The head judge ruled that the clips would not be viewed publicly given their “indecent and shocking” nature.

Christelle Taraud, a feminist historian in Paris who edited the book “Femicides: A World History,” said that revealed a double standard.

“It’s only the reputation of men that counts,” Ms. Taraud said. “The reversal of responsibility, transforming the victims into guilty and the guilty into victims is a constant in rape trials.”

The trial has inspired soul-searching in France about the relationship between men and women. Some men have begun to speak about “rape culture” and “toxic masculinity.”

Ms. Taraud said that showed a shift. “We are seeing a difficult, paradoxical, ambiguous awareness — but an awareness nonetheless in part of the French male population,” she noted.

The accused are scheduled to appear at the hearings in groups of six or seven every week. As they do, Ms. Pelicot will be forced to continue walking into the courthouse and sitting among them.

Océane Guichardon, 20, a student, was waiting to applaud Ms. Pelicot at the court recently. “We came to support her — it’s feminine solidarity, really,” she said. “Gisèle is brave. Every time we see her leave the courthouse, her head is high.”