For decades, members of Britain’s Jewish population have marked life’s milestones by taking out notices in The Jewish Chronicle, a weekly publication founded in 1841 that bills itself as the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper.

Births, weddings and deaths — or, as some like to call them, “hatches, matches and dispatches” — all are recorded faithfully each Friday in a community publication that Jonathan Freedland, who until recently wrote a column for The Chronicle, once described as the “beating heart of British Jewry.”

So when Mr. Freedland and several other well-known journalists announced this month that they would stop contributing to The Chronicle, it seemed less a business breakup than a family rupture. The trigger was a series of sensational articles about the war in Gaza that ran in the paper but were later debunked as fabricated.

The Chronicle’s editor, Jake Wallis Simons, apologized for the articles, removed them from the paper’s website and severed ties with the freelance journalist who wrote them, Elon Perry. “Obviously it’s every newspaper editor’s worst nightmare to be deceived by a journalist,” he said in a social media post.

“I take full responsibility for the mistakes that have been made,” Mr. Wallis Simons wrote, “and I will take equal responsibility for the task of making sure nothing like this can happen again.” He did not reply to requests for additional comment.

To Mr. Freedland and his fellow contributors, the episode was not an aberration but the troubling culmination of a period in which, they say, The Chronicle has evolved from a beloved community paper — albeit one that did not hesitate to weigh in with a conservative slant on the thorny geopolitical issues of the day — into a mouthpiece for right-wing Israeli politicians.

Mr. Freedland, who is also a columnist for The Guardian, said in an interview that he had made the decision to end his relationship with The Chronicle “with a heavy heart,” noting that he himself had been “hatched and matched” in the paper. He had written for it since 1998; his late father, the author Michael Freedland, since 1951.

“In more recent years, the paper has become more stridently right of center,” he said. “The thrust of the paper, in its current incarnation, does not reflect the breadth of the Jewish community in Britain.”

But it was not simply extreme politics that drove out Mr. Freedland, as well as the columnists Hadley Freeman and David Aaronovitch, the academic Colin Shindler and the humorist David Baddiel, all of whom joined Mr. Freedland in declaring that they would no longer contribute to the paper.

Since The Jewish Chronicle survived a brush with insolvency in 2020 and was rescued by a group of investors, the paper’s ownership has been shrouded in mystery, deepening the anxiety over its editorial direction.

“I just can’t think of a precedent for a newspaper being in anonymous ownership,” said Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of The Guardian, who has written about the upheaval at The Chronicle for his current publication, Prospect magazine.

The lack of transparency had long troubled Mr. Freedland and others, who said their questions were deflected when they asked Mr. Wallis Simons for answers. But it was after the Gaza articles were published that a full-blown crisis erupted.

Mr. Perry, a freelancer with a thin portfolio of published work, made an extraordinary claim: that he had obtained Israeli intelligence showing that the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, was preparing to flee Gaza, via the Philadelphi corridor, to Iran, and would take with him Israeli hostages captured in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

The report echoed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who had cited fears about Mr. Sinwar and the hostages as a reason that Israel would not agree in cease-fire talks for its soldiers to leave the corridor. One of Mr. Netanyahu’s sons, Yair, reposted the story on his social media account, and the prime minister’s wife, Sara, referred to the reports in a meeting with family members of the hostages.

But questions about The Chronicle’s article, parts of which were also reported by the German tabloid Bild, quickly surfaced. The chief spokesman for the Israeli military, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, told reporters he was unaware of any intelligence indicating that Mr. Sinwar planned to flee Gaza with hostages. Other officials called the reports “wild fabrications.”

There were also questions about Mr. Perry: On his website, he claimed to have covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a journalist for 28 years. But he has published very few articles, apart from those in The Chronicle. He claimed to have served as a commando in the Israeli army; while The Chronicle said it believed he had served in the military, “we were not satisfied with some of his claims.”

Mr. Perry’s website also included a blurb for one of his books from a Harvard humanities professor, Stephen Greenblatt. “I have not read and did not endorse Elon Perry’s book, nor, to the best of my knowledge, have I ever met or corresponded with him,” Professor Greenblatt said in an email, adding, “I am appalled.”

Mr. Perry did not reply to a request for comment. His wife, Gillian, said in an email last week that her husband had suffered a “severe heart attack” in recent days and had been hospitalized. She questioned the continued media interest in “someone who neither holds public office, nor is running for politics.”

To Israeli national security journalists, the reports bore the hallmarks of a disinformation campaign by sources in the Israeli government. Such stories, one said, are often placed in friendly publications outside Israel because their reporters and editors are less likely to subject them to intense vetting.

Even after the Israeli military denied the report, Mr. Rusbridger noted that it stayed on The Chronicle’s website. Only after Mr. Freedland and other columnists cut off their ties did Mr. Wallis Simons retract the stories.

The Jewish Chronicle was owned for decades by the Kessler Foundation, a family trust, before the paper fell into financial distress during the coronavirus pandemic. The owners proposed in 2020 to merge it with London’s other Jewish paper, The Jewish News, but that deal fell apart when a consortium of investors led by Robbie Gibb, a former BBC executive, offered a rival bid.

In its statement announcing the acquisition, the consortium said it had lined up financing for the paper from donors, adding, “These donors that have made philanthropic contributions to secure the future of this treasured institution are entitled to their privacy.”

Until recently, Mr. Gibb, who was once communications director for a Conservative prime minister, Theresa May, and now sits on the BBC’s governing board, was listed in public records as the sole shareholder of Jewish Chronicle Media Limited. Mr. Rusbridger said that posed a conflict with Mr. Gibb’s role at the BBC, which includes sitting on the broadcaster’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, and therefore reviewing its coverage of the Gaza war.

Mr. Gibb declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the BBC said that the board had not yet initiated a review of Gaza coverage, and that if it did, the review would be conducted by an independent committee.

Last month, Mr. Gibb resigned as a director of The Chronicle and divested his shares into what the paper said would be a new charitable ownership structure. A spokeswoman for Britain’s Charities Commission said there was no record yet of The Chronicle’s registering for status as a charity.

Mr. Gibb was replaced by two new directors. One is Ian Austin, a former Labour member of Parliament now in the House of Lords, where he has stoutly defended Israel’s conduct in Gaza. The other is Jonathan Kandel, a tax lawyer who is active in Jewish causes. Mr. Rusbridger said none of the directors appeared to have the financial resources necessary to bankroll the paper, which as recently as 2022 had debts of 3.5 million pounds ($4.6 million) on its books.

That has fueled unsubstantiated rumors of other investors, with the most frequent name floated being that of Paul E. Singer, an American billionaire hedge fund investor who backs pro-Israel groups. He is a board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition, a lobbying group for Jewish G.O.P. candidates. A spokesman for Mr. Singer’s firm, Elliott Management, said he had no involvement with the paper.

Mr. Freedland said he had regularly raised the question of ownership with Mr. Wallis Simons, who came to The Chronicle in 2021 after working for The Daily Mail, a right-leaning tabloid, but never got a satisfactory response. “You can’t have accountability if you don’t know, ultimately, who owns the institution,” he said.

The opacity of The Chronicle’s ownership has reinforced suspicions that it was being used to promote a political agenda. And yet, because of its long history and revered place in the British Jewish community, it remains influential.

“It sells itself as the voice of British Jewry,” Mr. Rusbridger said, “and it has a disproportionate influence because people think it reflects the Jewish community in this country, which I don’t think it does anymore.”

“Effectively,” he said, “it’s become a mouthpiece for Likudnik propaganda,” referring to Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party.

For the paper’s longest-serving contributors, the upheaval has been a source of sorrow as much as anger.

“The Jewish Chronicle had this hallowed place, not only within the British Jewish community, but more broadly in the Jewish world,” said Mr. Shindler, an emeritus professor of Israel studies at SOAS University of London, who contributed essays and book reviews for 50 years. “The beauty of The Jewish Chronicle is that it had to be all things to all people.”

The fact that the paper no longer plays that unifying role, he said, was a loss for a community that is already suffering the trauma of the Hamas attacks and the polarizing effect of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

“There’s no forum — there’s no place to discuss these issues,” Professor Shindler said.

Ronen Bergman contributed reporting.

President Volodymyr Zelensky returned to Ukraine this weekend from a high-stakes diplomatic trip to the United States with limited new aid for his armed forces and mounting challenges on the battlefield.

While the Ukrainian leader was busy trying to rally support from the Biden administration and meeting with former President Donald J. Trump, Russian forces were pressing their grinding advance in Ukraine’s east, capturing more villages and closing in on a key Ukrainian stronghold.

They also continued their assault on Ukrainian cities, killing 10 in Sumy, in the northeast, in a strike on Saturday, while maintaining their attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure and energy facilities. Ukraine, for its part, struck several Russian ammunition depots in an attempt to disrupt Moscow’s military logistics.

Here’s a closer look at the current situation on the battlefield.

Russia presses ahead in the east

For the past few months, Russia has concentrated its attacks on the area around Pokrovsk, a road and rail hub in eastern Ukraine, and Moscow’s forces are within about five miles of the city. The capture of Pokrovsk would seriously disrupt the Ukrainian Army’s logistical lines in the surrounding Donetsk region.

After making quick progress toward Pokrovsk, Russia’s direct advance has slowed in recent weeks. Its troops have run up against a line of Ukrainian fortifications, strengthened by reinforcements sent by Kyiv, defending the city’s outskirts.

Ukrainian soldiers and military experts say they now expect a more protracted battle for Pokrovsk that could lead to the city’s being seized after a sustained bombing campaign, similar to Russia’s earlier assaults on cities such as Bakhmut and Avdiivka.

“We are going to see a siege of Pokrovsk as we have seen play out for a number of other cities, and I think it’s more than likely that Pokrovsk will end up being destroyed in that siege,” Michael Kofman, a military analyst, told the podcast War on the Rocks on Sunday.

For now, the Russian Army has redirected some of its offensive efforts to the area south of Pokrovsk. Moscow’s troops have been trying to encircle the towns of Kurakhove and Vuhledar.

Vuhledar, which has been a Ukrainian stronghold, is now caught in a pincer movement, with only 1.5 miles separating the western and eastern flanks of the Russian attack around the town. “Vuhledar is likely to fall very soon,” Mr. Kofman said.

Mykola Bielieskov, a military analyst at the government-run Institute for Strategic Studies in Ukraine, said that Russian troops had improved their encirclement tactics, pushing through weak points in Ukrainian lines with small squads. “It has increased the tempo of their advances,” he said in a text message, adding that Russia currently does not have the capacity to launch large-scale offensives.

The Russian Army may be trying a similar pincer movement around Kupiansk, a town in the northeast that Ukrainian forces recaptured in the fall of 2022. Its troops have recently seized a narrow spit of land to the south of Kupiansk, pushing toward the Oskil River.

A drone battalion from Ukraine’s 92nd brigade said last week that it had repelled a large-scale Russian assault toward the river which involved around 50 armored vehicles. The claim could not be independently verified.

Counterattacks near the northern border

Since launching its offensive into the Kursk region of western Russia in August, Ukraine has captured about 400 square miles there. But this month, Moscow’s troops began counterattacking, reclaiming several villages.

Vincent Tourret, an analyst at the French Foundation for Strategic Research, said that the Ukrainian cross-border offensive had lifted morale and shown Western partners that Kyiv could still take the initiative. But he added that it had failed to divert Russian troops from hot spots on the eastern front and had come at an important cost in military equipment.

An open-source intelligence researcher who uses the online handle Naalsio and who analyzes combat footage reported that, a month into Ukraine’s offensive, which began on Aug. 6, Kyiv had lost at least 121 pieces of equipment in the Kursk region — comparable to Russian losses near Pokrovsk over the same period. Russian equipment losses near Kursk, however, were three times greater than Ukraine’s losses near Pokrovsk, Naalsio reported, an assessment that could not be independently confirmed.

To respond to the Ukrainian offensive, Russia has pulled some troops from the area it captured this spring in the Kharkiv region, according to analysts, helping Ukrainian forces to go back on the attack in that area.

Last week, the Ukrainian Army said it had recaptured a large plant, now mostly in ruins, in Volchansk, a town northeast of the city of Kharkiv that Russia had tried to seize during its spring offensive. Geolocated footage analyzed by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, indicated that the Ukrainians had “likely seized” the plant.

Punishing air assaults

In recent days, Russia has hit several Ukrainian cities that are relatively distant from the front lines, sometimes using powerful bombs carrying hundreds of pounds of explosives, according to the Ukrainian authorities. Those attacks, which have resulted in civilian casualties, have heightened the sense among Ukrainians that no city is safe.

Ukrainian officials said that 10 people were killed in an attack on a hospital in Sumy on Saturday. The United Nations human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine said that two drones had hit the hospital 45 minutes apart, with most of the fatalities occurring during the second attack, “which hit as first responders arrived at the site and patients attempted to evacuate.”

Ukraine has also conducted strikes into Russia, focusing on depots that contain thousands of tons of ammunition in northwestern and southwestern Russia, according to Western officials. The British Defense Ministry said that those strikes would almost certainly disrupt Russian military operations to some degree.