The Middle East is still in a state of volatile uncertainty after the latest exchange of missiles between Israel and Iran.

Last weekend, Israel destroyed much of Iran’s air-defense system, as well as a major Iranian missile plant. Yesterday, two top Iranian officials threatened to continue the cycle of retaliation.

“We have never left an aggression unanswered in 40 years,” said Gen. Ali Fadavi, the deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, according to Iranian media.

In my column several weeks ago, I looked at how the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas, the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and the widening war between Israel, Iran and Iranian-backed militant groups have destabilized the equilibrium of power in the Middle East. The new mix of uncertainty and aggression threatens to spiral into all-out war.

Even with dual-track peace talks underway to resolve conflicts between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the region is far from stable. Add in the uncertainty of the U.S. election next week, and the prospect of re-establishing an equilibrium seems even more remote.

I talked to experts on game theory and international relations about how they see the situation, and what they expect in the coming weeks and months.

An old equilibrium shattered

For years, Israel and Iran was in a state of stable but occasionally violent equilibrium.

The two countries were engaged in what amounted to a shadow war, but neither wanted all-out conflict. Each side had the ability to harm the other, and enough interest in avoiding that harm, to maintain a rough balance of mutual deterrence.

Israel had the more powerful army — and the support of an even stronger ally, the United States — while Iran cultivated a group of proxy militias that surrounded Israel. It made clear that any attack on Iran would be met with devastating retaliation.

That equilibrium began to crumble on Oct. 7, 2023, when militants from Hamas, an Iran-backed group, attacked Israel, massacring civilians and taking some 250 hostages. Hamas clearly hoped its attack would be the opening salvo of a broader war against Israel. Hezbollah fired rockets and missiles at Israel in support of Hamas, but both Iran and Hezbollah signaled that they did not want to escalate. Israel, for its part, engaged in heavy warfare against Hamas in Gaza, but initially avoided escalation with Iran or Hezbollah.

In recent months, the equilibrium began to disintegrate.

• In April, Israel and Iran traded direct strikes on each other’s territory following an Israeli airstrike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria.

• In mid-September, Israel sharply escalated its actions against Hezbollah with a heavy bombing campaign in Lebanon along with targeted attacks that have killed much of Hezbollah’s senior leadership, before launching a ground incursion on Oct. 1.

• In early October, Iran fired more than 180 ballistic missiles at Israeli soil, a significant escalation in direct hostilities.

• And on Saturday, Israel delivered its long-awaited response to Iran’s attack: a series of airstrikes that destroyed much of Iran’s air-defense system.

Achieving ‘strategic stability’

There is little doubt that Israel is in a better strategic position today than it was before the Oct. 7 attacks, though they left deep scars on the country’s psyche. The Iranian “axis of resistance” — including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the Houthi rebels in Yemen — has been dramatically weakened.

“Hamas is still out there, but it has been disabled in various ways. Hezbollah’s entire leadership has been decapitated, and the Israelis have done a lot of damage to Hezbollah,” said Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Israeli attack on Iran on Oct. 26 seems to have severely damaged Iranian air defenses, impeding Iran’s ability to defend itself against future strikes. The Israelis, Cook said, “now kind of rule the Iranian sky.”

However, it is not yet clear whether Israel’s new advantage will lead to a new equilibrium.

There are two primary ways of achieving “strategic stability,” according to Daniel Sobelman, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the author of a forthcoming book, “Axis of Resistance: Asymmetric Deterrence and Rules of the Game in Contemporary Middle East Conflicts.”

The first is hegemony, in which one party defeats the other so decisively that it can enforce its will. That’s how World War II ended, for instance, with the Allies’ defeat of the Axis powers. The other is equilibrium, in which there is a relatively symmetrical balance of power, so that all parties are deterred from escalation. That roughly describes the Middle East before the Oct. 7 attacks

Israel’s new advantage, while significant, falls far short of the kind of victory needed for a stable hegemony. Its strategic gains have been enough to destabilize the previous equilibrium — but a new one has not yet emerged. That is a combustible state of affairs, Sobelman said.

Drawing new red lines

A new equilibrium “will typically be achieved, sadly, through mutual exhaustion and through a stalemate,” Sobelman said. “Both parties have to be able to counterbalance each other, to be seen as a force to be reckoned with.”

They must also develop a “mutually intelligible language,” he said, that communicates what type of action will maintain the status quo, and what will be treated as a red line that, if crossed, would dramatically escalate hostilities.

In the weeks leading up to Israel’s counter-strike, U.S. diplomats lobbied Israel not to hit Iran’s nuclear or oil facilities. And Iranian diplomats held high-profile talks with Gulf States like the United Arab Emirates, making the implicit point that Gulf oil facilities were vulnerable to an attack by Iran if Israel hit Iran’s own oil sites.

“What we saw over the past several weeks was that Israel, Iran, and the U.S. were kind of bargaining over what would count as acceptable, what would count as an egregious violation of an Iranian red line,” Sobelman said.

“We’ve moved to a higher level of exchange between the Israelis and the Iranians,” added Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan research institute that studies peace and security.

However, it’s not yet clear whether the tit-for-tat exchange between them has ended, as Iran’s recent comments made clear.

Another major factor in that uncertainty is Israel’s relationship with the United States, and how the results of next week’s election might affect the complex dynamics of the Middle East.

“At this point, I suspect the equilibrium in the Middle East is actually somewhere in Pennsylvania — or at least another swing state,” Ashford said, half-jokingly. “It’s just a bit too early to call this, I’m afraid.”

Five Russian soldiers, armed with rifles and grenades, crawled from their trenches into a low-lying ravine, ready to assault the Ukrainian position. At least one of them heard a hornet-like hum and looked up, into the lens of a drone looming above them, and realized that they had been detected.

Little happens in this war without the other side watching.

From an outcrop of jagged trees shedding their leaves before the onset of winter, a group of Ukrainian infantrymen swiftly retaliated with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. At the same time, armed drones, operated miles away from the trenches, dropped grenades. The sound of incoming and outgoing fire merged, making a chorus of battle between trench lines just 150 meters, or nearly 500 feet, apart.

At first glance, the fighting resembled many of the thousands of battlegrounds dotting Ukraine, each with their own array of trenches and bunkers. But the Ukrainian soldiers said that a Russian breakthrough here, outside the city of Toretsk in eastern Ukraine, could have catastrophic consequences for their country’s defense against the Kremlin’s invasion.

“If I lose these positions now, all the units in Toretsk will be cut off from resupply and logistics because all the roads are behind me,” said the battalion commander of the 28th Mechanized Brigade, going by his call sign, Nesquik, according to military protocol.

The Ukrainians fight from fortified, dug-in bunkers. There is rarely a chance to move in the open, where Russian drones, some equipped with thermal night vision, can quickly kill them. Mines are hidden across land where soldiers might inch forward, if they could. At the same time, Russian jets, artillery and mortars wreak havoc from above.

Russian soldiers storm the Ukrainian position about twice a week, in a style of warfare that Russian forces have themselves compared with being put into a meat grinder. The soldiers often appear to be poorly trained convicts who, seeking freedom, money or redemption, now fight for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. About once a month, they are joined by much better trained troops from Russia’s airborne units, and in more significant numbers.

The Ukrainian troops captured their position from Russian fighters from the Wagner paramilitary group more than a year ago and have held the line since.

A defeat could cascade into strategic losses in eastern Ukraine’s industrial heartland. It would start with neighboring Toretsk, where urban street fighting already rages, and later bleed into more significant and strategically valuable cities. Advancing here would allow Moscow to block a supply line that connects Ukrainian forces in much of the east, cutting them off from critical medicine and ammunition.

A city just to the northwest of the brigade’s position, Kostiantynivka, is especially important, Ukrainian forces said, because it could provide highway routes to reach other major cities, like Kramatorsk and Slavyansk, bypassing obstacles like forests and rivers. A Russian takeover there could spell the end of Ukrainian control of the industrial Donbas region — one of Mr. Putin’s stated objectives when the invasion began.

“Any school kid understands now that Kostiantynivka is the key town,” said Yevgen, a press officer with the brigade who asked that only his first name be used.

Russian commanders appear to know this, too, and their forces have gained slow, costly ground against Ukrainian troops in swaths of the east.

But sophisticated, armed drones have changed the combat, at least to a degree. Before the flying machines became prevalent, both the Ukrainians and Russians could advance in phases, building trenches and fortifications along the way.

Now, digging under an open sky exposes soldiers to sudden, explosive danger, so troops cannot pause as they move ahead. They have to make assaults in one-shot sprints, immediately occupying trenches and bunkers where sometimes the tea made by men they killed moments before is still warm.

With the drones so often watching, infantrymen do not get to use the element of surprise on the battlefield as they once could. Bombings from artillery, mortars and jets can come without warning, but human movement rarely does.

Still, beneath the invisible net of high-tech surveillance, much of the battlefield resembles wars past. “If you think of it in general terms, it’s the maneuverable defense of the Second World War. Nothing has changed,” Nesquik said, referring to a strategy that stressed mobility and opportunism. “Don’t forget about minefields. It is not as simple as it seems. All new is well-forgotten old.”

So, too, are the familiar routines once the gunfire tapers off and a ghostly calm returns to the forest. Soldiers return to their regular duties: a shift on watch, meal preparation or chatting with wives on their phones over a satellite connection, holding the line until the next attack. Not far away, Russian troops are doing much the same, tea brewing in both camps.

They did not sing “Happy Birthday.” At least, not at first.

Instead, they celebrated Giuseppe Verdi’s birthday last month with a rendition of “Va Pensiero,” a chorus from his opera “Nabucco.” The song is so beloved that there have been proposals to make it Italy’s national anthem.

The choir consisted of men from all walks of life — bankers, a surgeon, a lawyer, a neuroscientist, a vegetable vendor — and with one burning passion in common: adoration for the 19th-century composer.

They are all members of Club dei 27, an exclusive club based in Parma, not far from Verdi’s birthplace, whose members take the name of a Verdi opera when they join.

How exclusive is Club dei 27? Men (yes, only men) can join, and only when a member dies or retires.

Naturally, there is a waiting list. “When we get a new request, we touch wood,” as a way to ward off any premature deaths, said Enzo Petrolini, the president of the club, half joking.

Club dei 27 is not to be confused with the 27 Club, which refers to a number of famous musicians — Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and others — who died at age 27. For these Italian opera lovers, longevity is key.

“For the 211th time, happy birthday to Maestro Verdi,” Mr. Petrolini said on Oct. 10 by way of a toast at this year’s birthday celebration. His words were greeted with cheers of “Viva Verdi.”

Though Verdi was one the most famous composers of the 19th century, he spent most of his life in this agricultural area of Italy, once famously saying, “I have been, I am and always will be a villager from Roncole.” He wrote at least 26 operas, including “La Traviata” and “Aida,” as well as the famed “Requiem Mass.”

To celebrate his life, and his music, the members of Club dei 27 gather every Oct. 10 and drink spumante from ceramic mugs they use on that day only, each one individually labeled with their Verdi-opera aliases. Mr. Petrolini’s is “Un Giorno di Regno,” or “King for a Day,” an early opera that was an ego-deflating fiasco when it debuted in 1840. (“It’s no ‘Rigoletto,’” Mr. Petrolini, 75, said diplomatically.)

They have a dress code for special occasions: a navy blazer, gray trousers and matching ties with the club’s logo.

From its roots in 1958, when a bunch of Verdi groupies met in a modest panino shop, the club has grown into an established fraternity that hobnobs with A-list conductors and opera singers. The group also hands out its own knighthoods and runs fund-raisers and educational programs for schoolchildren. About Verdi, of course.

The exclusivity of the fraternity has created an aura of mystery around Club dei 27, feeding theories about membership prerequisites, like the ability to sing all of Verdi’s operas by heart, or at least the opera for whom a member is named. One rumor said that members had to know obscure bits of trivia, like how much the opera diva Maria Callas weighed at birth.

“All urban legends,” Mr. Petrolini said, adding that the only requirement was “a passion for Verdi.”

And patience.

Demetrio Ravasio, 58, a.k.a. “Don Carlo,” said he joined two years ago after the previous “Don Carlo” died at 91 after setting a record as the club’s longest-running member. Mr. Ravasio’s desire to join began about 30 years ago. He was so excited when he was finally inducted that he got a tattoo with his opera’s name. “I’m not attached to Verdi, it’s much more,” he said. “It’s visceral.”

If you ask, the members can tell you about the first opera they ever saw.

For Fernando Zaccarini, a.k.a. “Giovanna D’Arco,” 83, it was “Rigoletto.” For Paolo Zoppi, 75, it was “La Forza del Destino,” which he saw in 1968.

Now, 1,218 operas later (seen in theaters around the world), Mr. Zoppi said he was experiencing a bit of “an overdose.” Even so, each year on behalf of the 27, he organizes a benefit gala at the Teatro Regio, the city’s opera house, that is part of the Verdi fall festival season.

They know “how important and right it is for people who live here to know who Verdi is,” said Paolo Maier, the Regio’s spokesman.

A 2017 film — part fiction, part documentary — chronicles the story of a young boy from Parma, Giacomo Anelli, who aspires to join Club dei 27. During a dream sequence, he imagines killing off a member to gain his position and doing so in a regionally apropos way — by dropping a wheel of Parmesan cheese on his head. Mr. Petrolini said that these days, Giacomo, now a teenager, has other things on his mind. At least for now.

Club wannabes have to be sponsored by an existing member who can attest to their passion for Verdi, said Stefano Bianchi, 60. The oldest member is 85.

The process to select new members is not dissimilar to a papal conclave, he said, when cardinals gather in a closely guarded meeting to select a new pope. The Verdi lovers close themselves into their clubhouse and vote in secret, though there is no white smoke as there is when a new pope is chosen, Mr. Bianchi noted with a laugh.

Those are not the only things the club has in common with the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. Both are also all-male clubs.

Mr. Petrolini contends that this is not a problem because, he said, women were not clamoring to join.

But that is not entirely true, according to Luciana Dallari, a Verdi aficionado from Parma, who started a women-only fan club in 2008.

“I always thought it wasn’t right that there were only men in the Club dei 27,” she said, noting that some of Verdi’s operas were, after all, named for women.

Members of her group take the names of female characters from Verdi’s operas.

The group is called Verdissime.com, and its motto, “sempre libera,” which means “always free,” the title of a duet from Verdi’s “La Traviata,” is a reference to the group’s less regimented approach to membership than the men’s club. As in, no one has to die for someone new to join.

They also eschew the commemorations that the men’s group is big on. “As women,” Ms. Dallari said, “we don’t have much free time because of balancing work and families.”

For Club dei 27, Verdi’s birthday is a particularly busy day.

This year, it began with a pilgrimage to the composer’s birthplace, Roncole Verdi. Club members gathered in a room where he is said to have been born in 1813, above the tavern his father ran. The building is now a museum.

After laying a bouquet of roses on the bed, the men launched into a rousing version of “Va Pensiero.” Mr. Petrolini noted that their voices were much improved since they began taking singing lessons.

A wreath-laying ceremony at the Verdi monument in downtown Parma followed, which ended with a chorus of, yes, “Va Pensiero,” by two choirs.

It was only after a lunch of horse meat tartare, in a clubhouse surrounded by opera paraphernalia, that they finally sang “Happy Birthday.” Not to Verdi, but to Mr. Bianchi, or “Aida,” who happens to share a birthday with the maestro.

His family was not opera loving, he said, but that has not stopped him from pursuing his passion. He said his life changed in middle school when a teacher introduced him to the beauty of opera and assigned him to learn an aria from “Rigoletto” by heart.

“Something clicked then,” he said, “and it never stopped.”

Plates with half-eaten dinners were still sitting on the white tablecloths in the nursing home’s dining hall on Thursday, amid muddy and overturned wheelchairs and walkers. Six people died in the facility on Tuesday, as a raging river exploded out of its banks and swept through villages and towns around the Spanish city of Valencia, on the country’s east-central coast.

Among them was the town of Paiporta, where residents said the water came without warning. It had not even been raining on Tuesday night when the water from the river swept in suddenly.

Staff members at the nursing home tried to move residents to safety on the second floor but did not manage to get everyone, and some of them drowned, said a town official.

The floods killed at least 205 people in Spain, in the deadliest natural disaster in the country’s recent history, with almost all of those deaths, 202, in the Province of Valencia, the authorities said on Friday. More than 60 of the victims were killed in Paiporta, a working-class town on the southern outskirts of the city of Valencia, according to the official, Vicent Ciscar, the town’s deputy mayor.

The body of a teenage girl was pulled out of her parents’ cafe in Paiporta, according to several residents who saw it, and laid with her favorite white shoes in the town’s square in front of a pink church.

Many older people in Paiporta died trapped in their ground-floor apartments. Other people drowned in their cars, which, two days after the disaster, now lay overturned, crashed and piled together amid weeds, like huge dominoes of sheet metal.

“It was like a tsunami,” said Carmen Aviles, 53, who said people put their heads and hands out of their car windows and cried for help as their cars spun wildly like boats adrift in the furious current on Tuesday night. “The worst was to see people die,” she said. “It swallowed them up.”

Rescuers in Paiporta were still pulling bodies out of the mud on Thursday. First they had extracted the bodies they found on the streets, then those they found in homes.

The rescuers then moved on to garages, where people got caught by the water as they rushed but failed to drive away from the floods in their cars in time.

Firefighters were pumping water out of the underground garage of the Hiperber supermarket on Thursday, where they believed they would find more bodies in the two floors of underground parking, said Sgt. Daniel Álvarez of Spain’s Civil Protection and Emergencies agency who is also a diver. “They can be under their cars, inside or outside.”

Sheyla Castillo, who was standing outside the supermarket, had not heard from her boyfriend’s cousin since the day of the flood, when he was walking home from the factory where he worked.

In Paiporta on Thursday, some people cried as they sat by torn-down palm trees on a roundabout. Others wept on the phone as they threw buckets of brown water out of their homes. Still others cried as they searched the ravaged landscape for objects they had lost.

Mr. Ciscar cried in the town hall, in front of the Rambla del Poyo River that on Tuesday night swelled and swallowed his town.

“Inside the houses there was a lot of wreckage, a lot of mud and a lot of dead people,” he said.

Outside town, the highways were empty of cars but lined with chairs, sofas, doors and overturned trash cans. The orange groves alongside the highways were battered and covered in mud.

Crowds of people were walking away from Paiporta, where there was no running water, food or electricity. Some were fleeing on foot, carrying their pets. Others pushed shopping carts, bearing bottles of water and food.

Virtually nobody in Paiporta had a car anymore. Hundreds of overturned cars filled the town’s streets, so damaged and dirty that it seemed impossible they had only been there for a little more than a day.

Help was coming, though not nearly as fast as residents needed. Hundreds of army personnel, police officers and firefighters have been deployed to the area for rescue operations, as well as helicopters and planes.

In Paiporta, the authorities started distributing food on Thursday, the deputy mayor said, and in the city of Valencia, they have been offering shelter to people stranded there.

Ms. Aviles ran a shop that the swollen river had swept through. On Thursday, she found some of her hard drives hundreds of yards away.

“We are alive,” she told her neighbor. “But we have lost everything.”

In the neighborhood of La Torre, José Amaro, the owner of a tropical fish shop, was sweeping up with his bare hands the dead fish from the tanks now filled with mud.

“They drowned in the mud,” Mr. Amaro said of the fish. “It was my passion for a lifetime and my work for eight years.”

He had been inside when water entered his shop and quickly reached up to his chest. He tried to force open the doors, but he couldn’t at first.

“I thought it was the end,” he said.

Then the glass doors broke, and he could jump outside. But everything else was gone.

In the neighborhood, anger mixed with sorrow as many locals wondered why nobody had warned them about the incoming flood. It did not rain in the area before the flood, local residents said, but in the upper reaches of the river, torrential downpours — a year’s worth of rain in a few hours — caused the waters of the Rambla del Poyo to swell.

“How did nobody tell us,” asked Isabel Vicente. “We are in the 21st century.”

José Bautista contributed reporting from Madrid, and Roser Toll Pifarré from Barcelona.

In the months leading up to a high-profile global climate summit in November, the government of Azerbaijan has been intensely preparing for its role as host, renovating building facades, training volunteers and retrofitting a stadium for tens of thousands of delegates.

The energy-rich nation in the Caucasus Mountains region has engaged in more ominous activity as well: It has locked up dozens of activists and journalists in what experts describe as the country’s most aggressive campaign of repression in years.

The spate of arrests, which began last year, has surprised some observers who expected that Azerbaijan’s authoritarian ruler, President Ilham Aliyev, would feel international pressure to project an image of political openness before the summit, which is convened by the United Nations. Instead, human rights monitors and political analysts say, Mr. Aliyev appears intent on stamping out the last vestiges of independent civil society and free press in his country.

“We haven’t seen repression like this in the country in a long time,” said Stefan Meister, who studies Azerbaijan and other parts of the former Soviet Union for the German Council on Foreign Relations. Some of the arrests, he said, appeared to be an effort to “eliminate everything that could lead to criticism around COP,” as the climate change meeting, officially the Conference of the Parties, is known.

Those arrested have included at least 12 journalists for at least three prominent independent media outlets, human rights watchdogs say. They have also included well-known activists like Anar Mammadli, who was arrested weeks after he co-founded a group in February called the Climate Justice Initiative that aimed to use the climate summit to pressure the government to improve human rights and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr. Aliyev has dismissed international criticism of the arrests as a “smear campaign” intended to distract from “our noble mission to cope with the negative impacts of climate change.” The authorities have cited alleged financial crimes and violations of Azerbaijan’s stringent code for nongovernmental organizations as reasons for the arrests.

“Being a journalist and being a civil society representative doesn’t mean that somebody should be above the law,” Mr. Aliyev’s foreign policy adviser, Hikmet Hajiyev, said in a phone interview. “All actions that have been taken are taken with the framework of law.”

International human rights groups call the arrests politically motivated and the charges baseless. In a report last month documenting the arrests, Human Rights Watch urged countries that participate in the climate meeting in Baku, the capital, to “speak out vocally” about “the worsening environment for civil society.”

But the international response has been muted. In the Caucasus, the mountainous region where Europe and Asia meet, Mr. Aliyev has emerged as a dominant player after 21 years of rule. With modern weaponry funded by oil and gas revenues, his military defeated neighboring Armenia in 2020 and again last year in a long-running conflict.

At the same time, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have elevated Azerbaijan as a key partner for the West. The European Union sees Azerbaijan as an alternative to Russia as a source of fossil fuels, and it pledged after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to double imports of natural gas from Azerbaijan by 2027.

Azerbaijan is also a key partner for Israel, importing Israeli weaponry and selling Israel oil.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has spoken to Mr. Aliyev at least five times this year, according to the State Department, hailing “a growing number of partnership initiatives” between the United States and Azerbaijan. A senior European diplomat, insisting on anonymity to speak candidly, said Mr. Aliyev’s recent crackdown stemmed from a calculation that, in Azerbaijan’s view, the West “needs us more than we need them.”

“We have our own role to contribute in the energy security of the European Union,” Mr. Hajiyev, the adviser to the Azerbaijani president, said. He condemned “the weaponization of human rights issues,” describing them as attempts “to push Azerbaijan into a corner.”

Highlighting his geopolitical options, Mr. Aliyev has telegraphed an ever-closer relationship with Russia without endorsing President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Mr. Putin made a two-day visit to Azerbaijan in August, and Russia’s foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, followed up with a trip last month.

Announcing Mr. Naryshkin’s trip, his spy agency said Azerbaijan was an ally in countering Western intelligence services trying to undermine “internal political stability in our states.”

Last week, Mr. Aliyev traveled to Kazan, Russia, for Mr. Putin’s marquee geopolitical event of the year: the BRICS summit, which brought together an expanding club of non-Western countries including Brazil, India, China and South Africa.

Mr. Aliyev “doesn’t have to fear a harsh reaction from the West,” said Rauf Mirgadirov, an Azerbaijani political analyst living in exile in Switzerland. “As long as he’s not totally come under Russia’s sway, the West will be in dialogue with him.”

The U.N. climate conference, scheduled for Nov. 11-22 and with scores of world leaders in attendance, is likely to further raise Mr. Aliyev’s global stature. He has said that this year’s meeting will feature the slogan “In Solidarity for a Green World” — even though the meeting is being held in a fossil-fuel-rich autocracy, as was the case in Dubai last year.

The conference’s organizing committee, he said in a speech to delegates last month, “involves women, parliamentarians and civil society representatives.”

But Abzas Media, an independent news organization known for investigating corruption among government officials, will be among the Azerbaijani media outlets struggling to cover the conference. Six of its journalists, including its top editors, have been arrested since last November.

Leyla Mustafayeva, an Azerbaijani journalist who now runs Abzas Media from exile in Berlin, said in an interview that the summit “is a disaster for us” because it provides a distraction from Azerbaijan’s human rights abuses.

“This event is going to completely cover up all these issues,” Ms. Mustafayeva said.

The conference will come as Mr. Aliyev, 62, cements his dominance inside his country of about 10 million people. Abandoning decades of mediation efforts involving both Russia and the West, Mr. Aliyev used his modernized military to crush Armenian forces in a 44-day war in 2020 and again in a lightning operation last year.

The victories recaptured the mountainous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding areas, which for more than 20 years had existed as an ethnic Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized borders. Tens of thousands of Armenians who had inhabited the region were forced to flee.

In Azerbaijan, where about 10 percent of the population was displaced from the same area by Armenia’s victory in a war between the countries in the 1990s, the victories increased Mr. Aliyev’s popularity.

Armenia and Azerbaijan are now negotiating a peace deal and potential transportation links through Armenia toward Turkey. The talks could redraw the map between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea in a way that, depending on the outcome, might reduce the influence of Russia and Iran in the region while increasing the sway of Turkey, a NATO ally.

As a result of his pivotal role in the West’s geopolitical conflicts, Mr. Aliyev does not expect any Western criticism of human rights abuses in Azerbaijan to lead to real consequences, Mr. Meister, the analyst in Berlin, said.

“Aliyev has a good negotiating position in all directions,” he said. “These regimes notice it right away when threats aren’t really meant seriously — then they go a step further.”

Farmers in the Gaza Strip once tended eggplants, peppers and tomatoes in modest plots squeezed between the territory’s urban sprawl and the watchtowers of the Israeli border wall.

But after more than a year of war, the farms are in ruins, their fields damaged by tanks and troop movements, their equipment destroyed and many farmers killed.

In Beit Lahia, once a relatively verdant area in northern Gaza in which neighbors worked together to grow food, Yousef Saqer, 24, surveyed the land where his greenhouses and irrigation systems once stood.

“That is all gone now,” he said recently, shortly before Israel began another deadly offensive in the area targeting what it has described as a regrouped Hamas presence. “The tanks destroyed all of it.”

“We used to use machines and tractors and now we are back to digging with hoes, forks and shovels,” he said. “We went back to the old ways of doing everything.”

Gaza never had enough farmland to feed all of its 2.2 million people, who live in a densely populated and highly urbanized place. Most of Gaza’s food supply before the war was brought into the territory by relief agencies, a consequence of an Israeli and Egyptian blockade on the territory intended to weaken Hamas.

But agriculture and fishing were nonetheless an important part of the economy, producing jobs, a trickle of export revenue and food for the population.

Now, as Israel has imposed extensive restrictions on aid into Gaza, the enclave is on the edge of famine. A U.N.-backed panel of experts, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, has warned of the risk in Gaza for nearly a year. Last month, it said almost every person in the territory still faced high levels of acute food insecurity, calling on Israel to ensure “unimpeded access” for aid, but also to restore food production.

“I don’t know of any place on this planet that has gone through something like this at this scale,” said Arif Husain, the chief economist at the U.N. World Food Program, noting that nearly the entire population of the enclave is at risk of starvation.

Israel has tightly regulated the entrance of all goods and restricts the import of what it calls “dual use” items: civilian products and supplies that it says could also be used for military purposes.

In response to a list of questions for this article, the Israeli military said it “does not aim to inflict damage to civilian infrastructure” and “most certainly does not use water, agricultural lands, or any humanitarian resources as a weapon of war.” It accused Hamas of embedding in civilian areas, including “in and near agricultural areas in question.”

Since the war began, the World Food Program, on average, had been able to bring only 20 percent of the food aid needed by Gaza into the enclave, Mr. Husain said. At the same time, farms have been debilitated. In May, an analysis of satellite and other data by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization found that the war had damaged 57 percent of Gaza’s farmland, destroyed 33 percent of its greenhouses and killed 70 percent of its livestock.

The losses have hit Gaza’s farmers hard. Growing peppers and other crops used to provide Raed Abu Asad, 47, with what he described as “a luxurious life,” even amid the deprivations of the blockade. He employed 15 men and made enough money to provide his family with foreign educations for his son and daughter, a nice house and garden, a car, and a solar power system.

But war has destroyed that life, even in Deir al Balah, his hometown, a central Gazan city that has been spared some of the worst of Israel’s bombardment.

A large part of his land has become unusable, and the rest has become extremely expensive to farm, he said. He used to pay around $1,700 per acre for tarps for his greenhouses, but the price has jumped to more than $12,000 because so many people now live in tents made of plastic sheeting. And he had to buy two new generators to run his irrigation systems, at an expense of almost $8,000.

He has lost about $100,000 since the war began, he said. The thought of rebuilding everything he has lost is too much to bear, especially with no end to the conflict in sight, he said.

“I have to keep farming now to at least survive and feed my family,” he said. “But I am giving up and planning to flee Gaza for good when this war is over. I am taking my family and leaving here for sure.”

Israeli security restrictions in Gaza’s coastal waters have also made fishing impossible since the war began, according to aid workers and fishermen in the enclave. Nezar Ayyash, the president of the Gaza fishermen’s association, said at least 120 fishermen have been killed during the war.

“Desperate and hungry fishermen now go to the sea only to fish very close to the shore,” said Mr. Ayyash. “They are risking their lives, but they have no other option. The army have been shooting everyone going to the sea.”

The Israeli military did not dispute that its forces have opened fire on people in fishing boats off the coast of Gaza, saying that “this maritime zone is considered a combat area.”

“The Israeli naval forces’ objective is to protect the state of Israel from security threats in the maritime area in general, and specifically in the maritime space of the Gaza Strip,” the military said in a statement. “The population in the Gaza Strip has been informed of these restrictions.”

In Beit Lahia, Mr. Saqer lamented the days when he and his neighbors used to plant strawberries. “Beit Lahia was known as part of Gaza’s bread basket,” he said. “Everyone here is a farmer.”

He described the Israeli military as pushing “us back in history around 100 years” by destroying solar panels — which Israel considers to be “dual use” — that powered farms, restricting the entry of fuel for generators and machinery, and reducing the amount of land available for use with military activity.

Mr. Saqer’s family fled their house early in the war, but they later returned home like many of their neighbors. When they got there, they planted new crops in the ruins. Leaving their land felt like abandoning a way of life, Mr. Saqer said, not to mention a source of food as famine loomed.

But as they planted vegetables like mallow and zucchini, they avoided about one third of their land. “We avoided the farmland very close to the border,” he said. “Tanks and snipers are there.”

In recent weeks, northern Gaza has again become the focus of an Israeli military offensive, a sign of its struggle to defeat Hamas as the armed group fights on as a guerrilla force.

This week, the main emergency service in Gaza said it has had to cease all rescue operations there, and Gaza’s Civil Defense, which doesn’t differentiate between fighters and civilians, said renewed Israeli airstrikes had killed more than 1,000 people in the area.

Mr. Saqer was one of them.

Three weeks after he was interviewed for this article, he was killed by an Israeli airstrike on Oct. 21, his family said.

Airports have tried an array of methods to combat traffic jams outside terminals, like dedicated taxi lanes, ride-share bans and police officers telling drivers to move along, or else.

Another tactic has now joined that list: Limiting hugs.

Last month, signs reading “max hug time 3 minutes,” appeared outside the terminal at Dunedin Airport in New Zealand, a polarizing edict that has prompted international news coverage, debates and tongue-in-cheek commentary. Under an outline of two bodies locked in an embrace, the signs add, “for fonder farewells, please use the car park.”

The signage is the airport’s “way of being a little quirky and reminding people that the drop-off zone is for quick farewells,” said Daniel De Bono, the airport’s chief executive. He added that the airport had recently changed the location of the drop-off area to enhance safety and traffic flow.

He tried to assuage any concerns about what the new rule might do to travelers’ brain chemistry. “Don’t worry, just a 20-second hug is enough to release oxytocin and serotonin, the happy hormones that boost well-being, so three minutes is plenty of time to say goodbye and get your dose of happiness,” Mr. De Bono said.

Social media users posted photos of similar signage around the world, with varying intimacy time limits, like a Danish airport that restricts the duration of kisses. There was no word on similar rules about hand-holding or longing gazes.

Commenters responded to the change with a mix of outrage and humor. One Facebook user said of the time limit, “that’s inhumane,” though whether such remarks were meant sarcastically was not always clear.

Others noted that three minutes is actually a long time — maybe even awkwardly long — to be locked in a public display of affection, and even suggested that offenders find a hotel room. “That’s generous,” one commenter said. “A hug only takes 10 seconds.”

Other questions lingered. What would become of a couple caught in a four-minute embrace?

There are no dedicated hug police, said Megan Crawford, the airport’s General Manager of Business Development, in an interview on Australia’s Today show. But staff do encourage people to keep goodbyes quick.

“They’re not going around breaking up long embraces, but they are out there trying to get people to move along,” Ms. Crawford said.

The new rule has attracted disproportionate attention, considering how few travelers pass through Dunedin, near the southern end of New Zealand’s South Island. The airport there reported welcoming over 900,000 passengers over the last year, compared to the tens of millions of travelers — and hugs — handled each year by global hubs like London’s Heathrow, Tokyo’s Haneda or New York’s J.F.K.

After Dunedin’s hugging time cap was initiated, Heathrow, Europe’s busiest airport, started displaying signs saying, “Max hug time, unlimited.” But there is a catch: Anyone dropping off a loved one outside of a Heathrow terminal, instead of at a parking area, must pay a fee of five pounds, about $6.50.

As the death toll passed 200 from floods this week that triggered the deadliest natural disaster in Spain’s recent history, southern regions were battered by more heavy downpours on Friday, complicating an already strained rescue effort.

Valencia, the region that suffered the worst of the deluge, recorded 202 deaths, regional president Carlos Mazón said at a news conference at the disaster coordination center.

Three more people have died in neighboring regions, bringing the total of confirmed deaths to 205, according to the authorities. That toll was expected to rise as rescue workers continued to dig through sodden towns, clogged with mud and debris, making access extremely challenging.

Late Thursday and Friday, rains spread to other southern regions. Heavy rain fell overnight in Andalusia, with the western province of Huelva the worst hit. Residents were out celebrating Halloween when sheets of rain began to fall, local news media reported. The authorities urged people to stay home, and avoid celebrating All Saints Day on Friday, which is usually done by visiting a cemetery or church, warning of the risk of flooding.

“This Friday the most complicated situation will be in the southwest of the peninsula,” Rubén del Campo, spokesman for the national meteorological agency, said. “The instability will continue on Saturday.”

While the southwest was on high alert, along the east coast rescue workers were still searching through piles of cars flung by floodwater and homes ripped through by mud. Rain continued on Friday, particularly in Castellón, north of the Valencia region; in Tarragona, in the southern Catalonia region; and on the Balearic Islands, off Spain’s east coast, according to the weather agency.

In Valencia, dozens were still missing. Among them were prominent business executives, older parents in nursing homes and young children trapped with their mothers, according to rolling coverage in Spanish media.

Ainhoa ​​Rojas Mansilla watched as rescue workers combed through her municipality of Catarroja, outside the city of Valencia, where she was taking shelter with friends. Every time a member of the emergency military unit checked a vehicle, she was gripped with anxiety, she said.

“We are very uncertain every time someone enters a garage because we know there may be dead people trapped in the cars,” she said in a text message.

Despite the presence of some rescue workers, Ms. Mansilla, 20, said she felt unsafe and wanted to see more police on the ground. Her family had all survived the flooding but they remained without water or electricity, and information about what to do in this disaster was inconsistent, she said.

In the wake of the huge damage suffered in Valencia, some residents have begun to blame the government for an insufficient response to the disaster. A video posted by the civil guard of a man caught stealing a bag of shoes caused public outrage. Many people sympathized with the man, who was barefoot as he waded through the mud. Spain’s police said they had arrested 50 people, while trying to secure storm-battered neighborhoods.

The flooding has exposed Spain’s economic fault lines. Daiana Iordăchescu, a seasonal laborer from Romania who works in Huelva’s strawberry and raspberry fields, cowered as buckets of rain pounded her shack. The plastic sheeting was not enough to keep water from seeping through the wooden pallets she and other workers used to build their homes.

“I feel scared, I don’t know when this will stop,” she said in a telephone interview. “I feel like I’m in Noah’s Ark. It’s raining inside my house.”

Many of the 3,000 seasonal workers in Huelva are in similar straits, their makeshift homes collapsing, but pleas for help have gone unheeded, said Alfonso Romera, a retired ophthalmologist who runs a nonprofit group, La Carpa, that supports migrant workers.

“These people are the ones who feed us and are essential to the Spanish economy,” he said. “We just want the authorities to put these people under shelter.”

The regional government in Andalusia acknowledged that seasonal workers were vulnerable but said that no incidents had been reported to their office.

The natural disaster has also become a political test for Spain’s fragile coalition government. On Friday, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez visited the national meteorological society’s office in Madrid, far from the worst-affected areas. Observers said it was a show of solidarity for the agency, which has faced criticism from political leaders who say its warnings came too late. Opposition leaders have blamed the government for centralizing response efforts.

Along with hundreds of officers from the national police, civil guard and other security forces, the military sent a further 750 personnel to join the rescue effort, Spain’s defense ministry said.