On the morning that Hamas raided Israel last year, a top Israeli general called his prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to tell him that hundreds of militants appeared to be preparing to invade.

Now, aides to the prime minister are under investigation for altering details about that call in the official record of Mr. Netanyahu’s activities that day, according to four officials briefed on the investigation.

The investigation is seen as deeply sensitive in Israel, where the question of what Mr. Netanyahu knew in advance of Hamas’s invasion, and when he was told, could prove crucial to his political future. It is expected to play a key part in a postwar assessment of the role political and military leaders may have played in one of the worst military failures in Israel’s history.

The accusation is just one of several leveled at Mr. Netanyahu’s aides in recent weeks. While Mr. Netanyahu himself is not a subject of a police inquiry, officials in his office are under investigation for trying to bolster his reputation throughout Israel’s war with Hamas by leaking classified military documents, altering official transcripts of his conversations and intimidating people who controlled access to those records.

Though disparate and complex, the cases have helped foster the impression among Mr. Netanyahu’s critics that his team has used illicit means to improve how he is perceived, at the expense of either the truth or national security, or both. Mr. Netanyahu and his office have denied the accusations, countering that it is his accusers who, by spreading falsehoods, have undermined Israel at a time of national peril.

The full extent of the new claims has not been revealed because most of them are subject to a gag order. Officials who told The New York Times about the investigations did so on the condition of anonymity because they were barred from speaking publicly about the matter.

Case 1: Phone records

On the day that Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the prime minister spoke frequently by phone with senior security officials, including with his military secretary, Maj. Gen. Avi Gil.

Police officers are assessing if aides to the prime minister secretly changed the records of those phone calls, according to the four officials briefed on the investigation.

The investigation began after General Gil, who left his post in May, complained in writing to the attorney general that the official transcripts of the calls he had that morning with the prime minister appeared to have been altered, the officials said. General Gil said in his complaint that a senior aide to the prime minister had forced one of the transcribers to doctor the transcripts, the officials said.

In one of the conversations early on Oct. 7, General Gil told the prime minister that hundreds of Hamas operatives had started behaving in a way that suggested that they may be about to invade Israel, according to three officials briefed on the investigation. The timing of that call is one of the details that is said to have been changed in the official transcripts.

The content and timing of these calls are important because they could help shape the way that Mr. Netanyahu is seen by both voters and historians.

For more than a year, Mr. Netanyahu has denied being briefed in advance about the invasion. He has avoided setting up a state inquiry to assess the culpability of Israel’s military and political leaders, including himself.

Case 2: An embarrassing video

The forgery case has been compounded by fears that an aide to Mr. Netanyahu intimidated a military officer who controlled access to the phone records, according to four officials briefed on the incident.

The officer was filmed on a security camera installed in the prime minister’s headquarters committing an act that could cause him personal embarrassment, the officials said.

After the incident, a senior aide to the prime minister approached the officer and told him that he had obtained a video of the embarrassing act, the officials said. The senior aide was the same person accused of ordering the transcriber to tamper with the records of Mr. Netanyahu’s conversations, according to the officials.

The officer told his commanders about the approach, saying that he feared that the aide might use the video to blackmail him in the future, the officials said.

Case 3: A leaked document

Mr. Netanyahu’s aides are also accused of secretly giving a sensitive document to a foreign news outlet, according to six officials briefed on the case.

The document was published in early September, as Mr. Netanyahu came under pressure from large parts of Israeli society to agree to a cease-fire deal with Hamas that would allow for the release of dozens of hostages held by the group.

Mr. Netanyahu argued against a truce, saying that the terms of the deal would allow Hamas to regroup. His stance infuriated many of the hostages’ families, who argued that he had forsaken the captives in favor of far-right lawmakers who had threatened to collapse his coalition if he agreed to a truce.

To bolster his position on Sep. 8, Mr. Netanyahu made a statement at his weekly cabinet meeting citing an article published days earlier in Bild, a German tabloid.

The article was an account of a memorandum, written by a Hamas intelligence officer and later obtained by the Israeli military, that had been leaked to the newspaper.

Bild said the document showed that Hamas sought to manipulate the hostage families into persuading Mr. Netanyahu to compromise in the truce talks and agree to terms less favorable to Israel. Mr. Netanyahu cited Bild’s reporting to argue that Hamas sought to “sow discord among us, to use psychological warfare on the hostages’ families.”

Investigators are examining if Mr. Netanyahu was citing a document that his own aides had leaked, the officials said. But there is no suggestion that Mr. Netanyahu is under investigation himself or that he has been questioned.

Why the leak is being investigated

Israeli officials often give documents to reporters, but the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, is examining this particular leak because the document was taken from a highly classified military intelligence database, according to the six officials briefed on the case. One of Mr. Netanyahu’s aides, Eli Feldstein, has been arrested as part of the investigation, along with four unnamed officers accused of helping to procure the document. All five were detained through a rare legal provision only intended for use in cases in which there are extreme threats to national security.

Mr. Feldstein’s lawyer declined to comment.

The Shin Bet is not investigating a separate article, published in early September in the Jewish Chronicle, a London-based newspaper, that also bolstered Mr. Netanyahu’s narrative, according to four of the officials. That article, which The Chronicle has since retracted, is thought to have been completely fabricated instead of being based on a leaked document, the officials said. It is therefore not considered a security threat worthy of investigation, the officials said.

The investigation into the document leaked to Bild is focused on why officials without full security clearance, like Mr. Feldstein, were allowed to access such a classified document, how such a sensitive document found its way to the press and whether the leak compromised a method by which Israel gathers intelligence. By publicizing the fact that Israel had obtained this document, the leak risked revealing to Hamas that Israel had gained access to a particular stream of information that the group may have previously believed was secure.

While the content of the Bild article is not the focus of the investigation, military leaders are privately frustrated at how the document appears to have been presented by the prime minister’s office to Bild, the officials said.

The newspaper said the document reflected the position of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s hard-line leader in Gaza until his killing in October. But defense officials say that the document was most likely never seen by Mr. Sinwar and that, either way, it suggested that Hamas was willing to show more flexibility in the negotiations than Mr. Netanyahu had acknowledged in public.

Asked for comment, Bild declined to say who had given it the document. The Shin Bet and the police did not respond to requests for comment.

Why the claims have angered some Israelis

To the prime minister’s opponents, the accusations foster the impression that Mr. Netanyahu’s team has used underhanded means to distract from his failures. Critics argue that his aides have prioritized his own political survival, at a time when he should have been singularly focused on the country’s defense.

That impression has been boosted by the fact that Mr. Netanyahu has for years refused to resign despite standing trial for bribery and fraud. To opponents, that refusal suggests he cares more about his own fate than the country’s stability. To Mr. Netanyahu and his allies, the trial is a spurious attempt to overthrow an elected leader.

Mr. Netanyahu’s response

The prime minister’s reaction to the new investigation echoes how he has approached his trial.

He and his office have issued several statements rebutting the accusations, portraying them as a witch hunt.

“As with the previous attempts to inflate accusations against the Prime Minister and those around him, the present matter will also not yield anything whatsoever, but will certainly lead to difficult questions regarding arbitrary enforcement,” his office said in a statement.

Days later, the bureau issued an even stronger response, denouncing the detentions of people under investigation and saying that, “In a democratic country, people are not detained in solitary confinement for 20 days — without access to a lawyer for extended periods — simply to extract false statements against the prime minister.”

Myra Noveck contributed reporting.

It was the type of political attention reserved for only the biggest of sporting occasions.

Emmanuel Macron, the French president, the prime minister and other political grandees sat in the stands on Thursday to watch the national team play soccer.

But the French side was not chasing a big prize before a packed house. Instead, it was playing a run-of-the-mill match, without its star player Kylian Mbappé, against a mediocre opponent — the type of game that usually attracts scant attention, as demonstrated by the vast empty spaces in the stands at the national stadium just outside Paris.

The reason for the V.I.P. turnout was the opponent, Israel’s national team, and what was happening on the Stade de France field was very much overshadowed by what was happening away from it. The violence a week earlier in Amsterdam surrounding a soccer match between a Dutch team and a different Israeli squad guaranteed that Thursday’s game would be far more a political event than a sporting one.

As Dutch authorities investigate what they call antisemitic attacks on Israeli fans, as well as incendiary behavior by both sides, French authorities have vowed to prevent such scenes from being repeated here.

The result has been a massive security operation befitting a G20 summit. The security forces that blanketed the vicinity of the stadium in Saint-Denis, at key sites across Paris and throughout the transit system, resembled the operation for the spectacularly successful Olympic Games held here this summer.

The city’s police chief said there would be 4,000 officers deployed for the game, with 2,500 stationed around the stadium itself and the others spread across the city. Another 1,600 private security guards and stewards were on duty at the game, where fans as well as journalists went through several security checks even before entering the stadium.

In contrast, in Amsterdam, for the club game between the Dutch team Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv, there were 800 officers on duty, and more than 3,000 fans from Israel.

“We are a big country. We know how to put on big events like we did during the Olympics. We won’t tremble before this match,” Laurent Nuñez, Paris’s police chief, said during a radio interview Wednesday morning. He was also responsible for the security bubble that cocooned the Israeli Olympic team during the recent Games.

Stores and shops in the vicinity of the stadium were ordered shuttered by 3.45 p.m. — five hours before kickoff. The surrounding streets were largely deserted except for police officers.

No specific threat had been made to the game, and the contingent of Israeli fans was small. The Israeli security council issued an alert telling Israeli citizens to “categorically avoid attending Israeli sports/cultural events abroad,” particularly this Paris match.

But with the heavy security, and the presence of the president and other dignitaries, French authorities wanted to make clear that the event was safe and that no disturbance would be tolerated. Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said, “It is out of the question that we take the risk of seeing a repeat” of what occurred in Amsterdam.

Mr. Macron is a die-hard soccer fan, known to post photos of himself congratulating the team in their locker room. But his attendance this time was also meant to send a “message of fraternity and solidarity after the intolerable antisemitic acts that followed the match in Amsterdam,” said a member of his staff in a text message.

“We will yield nothing to antisemitism anywhere,” President Macron told BFMTV on Thursday shortly before the match. “And violence, including within the French Republic, will never prevail.”

He was joined at the game by Michel Barnier, the prime minister, and both of France’s living former presidents, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande. Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the American special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, was also planning to attend the match.

Before the game, helicopters thumped overhead and sirens blared, but there were few fans on the concourse leading to the stadium, which would normally be crowded. Police officers seemed to outnumber spectators, and two officers cautioned a fan that the Israeli flag draped across his shoulders could make him a target. Inside the stadium, a mix of jeers and cheers greeted the Israeli anthem.

Hosting Israeli soccer teams has proved problematic for countries across Europe since the Hamas-led attack on Israel of Oct. 7, 2023, and a devastating Israeli response that has fueled widespread anger.

Belgium moved its Nations League home game against the Israeli national team in September to Hungary, after cities across Belgium refused to host it. Italy switched its game against Israel from Florence to Udine, where the occasion was met with pregame pro-Palestinian protests in nearby streets. And Maccabi Tel-Aviv’s next game in Europe has been moved to a neutral venue in Hungary, without fans of either team present, because of security concerns.

French officials said they would not consider moving Thursday’s match, especially in light of the events in Amsterdam, as it would send the wrong signal.

“France does not retreat,” said Mr. Retailleau, the interior minister. “France does not submit, and the France-Israel match will take place where it’s supposed to.”

While condemnation of the incidents in Amsterdam arrived swiftly, a more complex picture of what happened in the Dutch city emerged in the following days.

Videos circulating on social media, verified by The New York Times, showed some Israeli fans chanting racist anti-Arab phrases and defiling a Palestinian flag. After the game, the authorities said that men on scooters and on foot went in search of Israeli fans, punching and kicking them, after social media messages called for targeting Jews.

A police investigation is continuing, and arrests have been made, including of visitors from Israel.

While French leaders unified behind Thursday’s game as an act of solidarity, support for it to go ahead was not universal. A couple of hours before the match, several hundred protesters gathered in a public square to chant slogans about freeing Palestine, wave Palestinian flags and denounce both the match and the French politicians attending it.

“Antisemitism must be combated. But the central question today is the massacre of a population that is being forbidden to survive,” said Jean-Marc Bourquin, 77, who stood near the edge of the peaceful crowd with his electric bicycle. Some said they considered the low turnout to the match to be a virtual boycott.

Even before the Amsterdam attack, the France-Israel match was bound to stir tension in the capital city of a country that is home to Western Europe’s largest populations of Jews and Muslims. The polarization created by events in the Middle East is visible in protests and on posters across the city.

Earlier this month, the organized fan group of France’s best team, Paris Saint Germain, unfurled an enormous and elaborate banner, covering one section of the stands behind a goal, with the words “Free Palestine.”

During the Israel-Hamas war, the number of reported antisemitic acts in France spiked to 1,676 in 2023 from 436 the previous year. So far this year, more than 1,200 such acts have been reported, according to Isabelle Rome, France’s Ambassador for Human Rights.

Other bias offenses increase at a slower pace, according to government figures: Reported anti-Muslim acts rose to 242 last year, from 188 the year before, and “racist and xenophobic” ones climbed to 1,221, from 1012.

Pro-Palestinian protests have become increasingly common in Paris, and political, with the country’s far-left party France Unbowed regularly speaking at them. Earlier this week, the party demanded that neither the soccer game nor a fund-raising gala for a far-right pro-Israel group be allowed to proceed, so as not to send a message of “total impunity” to Israel.

Tension in the city was heightened on Wednesday evening during the gala event, hosted by “Israel is Forever,” and a counterprotest that drew several thousand people, and ended in clashes and the use of tear gas by the police.

The use of force, and tear gas in particular, by French authorities in connection with sporting events has been under scrutiny since a near disaster, when the Stade de France hosted European soccer’s biggest club game, the Champions League final, in 2022. After the game’s ticketing system collapsed, thousands of Liverpool fans found themselves crushed near entrances and the police responded with tear gas. Officials were forced to apologize after initially blaming fans for the problems, leaving many to successfully claim damages.

In 2015, a series of coordinated attacks across Paris claimed by the Islamic State killed 130 people. In one of those attacks, three suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the national stadium, packed with soccer fans for a friendly France-Germany match. A plaque to Manuel Dias, a bus driver who had just dropped off fans and was killed in the blast, remains affixed to the stadium’s walls near where he died.

Security concerns in the city have run high ever since, but even so, the show of force for the France-Israel game was rare for a soccer match.

“These are situations the players are not accustomed to,” France coach Didier Deschamps said on Wednesday. “But we have to adapt.”

The Israeli military has bombed a densely populated tent encampment in southern Gaza designated as a humanitarian zone for thousands of displaced Palestinians, saying the airstrike targeted a loaded weapons launcher in the area.

The Palestinian news agency Wafa and a paramedic based at a medical center where the wounded were taken said that at least one person had been killed in the airstrike on the zone, called Al-Mawasi, which took place on Wednesday. Wafa reported that the victim was a child and that more than 20 other people had been injured.

The Israeli military said that it had targeted the launcher because it posed a threat to Israeli civilians but did not give further details or say what type of weapons the launcher was carrying. The military added that it had issued advanced warnings to civilians in the area to evacuate.

The Israeli military has carried out a number of strikes on Al-Mawasi in the past and has accused Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, of systematically using the humanitarian zone and civilian infrastructure to attack Israelis.

Video on social media, verified by The New York Times, captured a projectile and a large explosion. The projectile hits the ground with a deafening boom, and people can be seen running away as a cloud of dust flies into the sky.

Other video from the scene captured the aftermath of the explosion, showing a large crater and damage to a number of tents.

The international aid group Doctors Without Borders said that one of its clinics, which was about 250 yards from where the strike hit, was also damaged and medical equipment destroyed.

Gabriella Bianchi, a spokeswoman for Doctors Without Borders, said that the aid group had not received any direct warning that a blast was imminent. Residents who received alerts on their phones from the Israeli military did inform the staff, Ms. Bianchi said, but that left only a few minutes to evacuate personnel and hundreds of patients.

In a statement on social media, Doctors Without Borders condemned the attack, saying, “The use of heavy weapons in zones declared by Israeli authorities as safe, is further proof of the blatant disregard for Palestinian lives and humanitarian law.”

In a few days, President Biden will be presented with a live turkey that he will undoubtedly pardon, partaking in an enduring pre-Thanksgiving ritual that may be “America’s most hokey modern presidential tradition.”

In Italy this year, environmentalists are calling on Pope Francis to stay the execution — so to speak — of a tree towering nearly 100 feet tall that hails from the northern region of Trentino and has been destined to adorn St. Peter’s Square for the Christmas season.

Citing three of Francis’s major documents on the importance of safeguarding the environment, opponents of the tree’s relocation drafted an online petition calling on the pope to “give clear signals so that we can change our approach toward respecting nature” and spare the tree.

The petition demands “no to fircide” (doubtlessly the evergreen tree equivalent of homicide), saying “Christmas trees are a pagan tradition and have nothing to do with the birth of Christ.”

Ancient Romans are believed to have decorated their homes with evergreen boughs to mark the winter solstice during a feast called Saturnalia. But decorated trees later took root throughout Europe as part of the Christian holiday festivities, with Latvia and Estonia having squabbled over being the site of the world’s first decorated Christmas tree.

In Italy, where many churches and families still celebrate Christmas with miniature nativity scenes, the Christmas tree tradition only really took hold after the end of World War II.

But Italians don’t seem particularly sentimental about the tradition. In Rome, one Christmas tree near City Hall was criticized for being too mangy, and another was compared to a piece of Ikea furniture or Frankenstein. In Naples, trees are regularly stolen.

At the Vatican, the Christmas tree tradition dates to 1982, when a Polish farmer brought Pope John Paul II a tree “all the way” from Poland.

“Since then, the offering of the Christmas tree to the Pope has become an honor,” according to the Vatican, which annually accepts a tree donated from a different European country or region.

Renato Girardi, the mayor of Ledro, the town that gives its name to the valley where this year’s tree is from, said his offer had been on a Vatican waiting list for nine years.

“We wanted to unite the community around a tree,” he said in a telephone interview.

At least tens of thousands apparently disagree with the tree’s planned fate, with the online petition drawing signatures from nearly 50,000 people.

This week, organizers of the protest printed out all the names of the signatories and sent them in a hefty package to Pope Francis (with a request for acknowledgment of receipt).

“We heard the pope doesn’t have an email — but he does open letters,” said Ornella Dorigatti, president of Bearsandothers, one of the groups involved in the protest. They used recycled paper, she said.

The protest also encourages people to print and mail to the pope a pre-written letter, which describes the chosen tree as having been a “mute spectator to two world wars” and having given “shade, shelter and delight” to generations of residents of Ledro and visitors.

Actually, local officials have yet to identify which specific tree would be chopped down, since they want to mislead protesters who had pledged to chain themselves to it, Ms. Dorigatti said.

The letter calls on the pope to do as St. Francis of Assisi would have done: Choose nature over notoriety.

But Mr. Girardi, the mayor, noted that the valley’s economy was dependent on the lumber industry, and that the tree was one of several scheduled to be felled this year in compliance with PEFC, the European Commission forestry certification system.

“If it doesn’t go to Rome it will go to a sawmill,” he said.

“The entire community is involved in this project,” he said, adding that some 600 residents, out of the valley’s population of 5,400, were planning to go to Rome for the tree-lighting ceremony in December.

The mayor said that once the tree had done its turn in St. Peter’s Square, it would be brought back to Ledro and carved into a sculpture for a local art park.

The Vatican did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A chemist in Canada says he has identified “with a high degree of confidence” the strange blobs that started washing up on Newfoundland’s shores months ago, although the Canadian authorities said they were still looking into it.

Globs of the white sticky substance, which have a spongy interior and range in size from a coin to a dinner plate, have been found for miles along Placentia Bay since at least September. Canada’s environmental agency began an investigation, but it has not released any conclusions.

In the meantime, researchers at Memorial University of Newfoundland, including the chemist, Chris Kozak, obtained samples and started their own inquiries.

Dr. Kozak said that one of the first things he noticed was that the blob had “a kind of petrochemical odor to it, kind of like if you walk down the turpentine aisle of your hardware store.”

At first he thought it might be polyurethane, given Newfoundland’s fishing industry and the material’s use in insulating boats. But polyurethane is less dense than water, and when it was tested, the blob sank.

A chemical analysis found that the substance contained carbon, hydrogen and oxygen but not nitrogen or sulfur, strongly suggesting it did not have a natural source. The absence of silicon, he said, ruled out silicone latex or caulking.

Finally, a mass spectrometry test, breaking up chemical chains into easier-to-study fragments, gave Dr. Kozak enough evidence to come forward, first to his local CBC radio station, with an identification.

“I’m quite confident that the sample that I handled was PVA butylene rubber,” he said in a phone interview, describing a mix of synthetic rubber and polyvinyl acetate, known as PVA. That polymer, he said, is “the active ingredient in white glue — the kind of white glue you have at home is a very dilute, kid-friendly version of this stuff.”

The mixture, he said, “suggests some sort of industrial adhesive or some sort of material that could be used in a variety of industrial sectors.”

The Canadian agency whose scientists are investigating the substance, Environment and Climate Change Canada, said in a statement that it “acknowledges the work done in parallel” by Memorial University researchers.

But the agency said that it “does not share hypotheses on the identity or origins of a substance undergoing testing, nor is it in a position to validate or substantiate the theories or findings of others.” Early tests, it has said, indicated that the blobs might be plant based.

Christopher Reddy, a marine chemist who was not involved in the investigation, said Dr. Kozak’s approach was “sound, and his conclusions are reasonable.” He called the findings “an invaluable clue” toward solving the question of where the blobs came from.

The prevalence of the substance and the mystery surrounding its origins have alarmed beachgoers.

“Honestly it is still a bit worrisome because, finding out that this is not a natural organic ‘thing’ and it is more than likely man-made, you have to wonder how dangerous this is to our sea life,” said Philip Grace, a beachcomber who found some of the blobs in September. “More investigating definitely has to be done on what exactly it is, where has it come from, why is it in our waters to begin with and especially, how much more is out there.”

A synthetic rubber and PVA mixture would in theory be safe to handle, Dr. Kozak said, but as plastic pollution it should be cleaned up. If the material has been tainted by a toxic pollutant like crude oil, however, it should be handled with caution, he said.

The greater threat may be toward marine life, he said, especially if more of the material sank to the ocean floor.

“It could be perceived by marine life as food, looking like squid, octopus, jellyfish,” Dr. Kozak said.

The origin of the substance, and how it wound up in the ocean, remains a mystery. The bay has a long history as a center for both fishing and industry, and is home to a shipyard and oil facilities. But the substance may also have crossed vast distances before washing ashore.

“With ocean currents the way they are, this stuff could have originated in a completely different place,” Dr. Kozak said.

Oceanography, shipping and industrial data, weather events, satellite images, and research on synthetic rubber and the environment could all help determine the origin.

“Solving this case requires an ensemble cast of science and scientists,” said Dr. Reddy, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

And whatever the blobs turn out to be, he said, the incident offers a reminder that ocean pollutants are not limited to recognizable objects like plastic bottles, balloons, novelty phones or Legos. “They can be softer, with no definitive features, and even confused with biological materials,” he said.

Dr. Kozak said that while he planned to share his data with other scientists, his focus remained on his main research and university work. The blob investigation, he said, was “really a side quest.”

For more than a century, Norway forcibly suppressed the language and culture of Indigenous people and other minority groups, including removing children from their parents, in a system of “Norwegianization” whose devastation continues to be felt.

This week, the country’s Parliament issued a formal apology to the Sami, Kven and Forest Finn peoples, and outlined 17 resolutions to address the discrimination they still face, including protecting minority languages and ensuring that children are taught those languages.

The move, which Parliament approved on Tuesday, was welcomed by Silje Karine Muotka, a Sami leader, who described the moment as “a day with many emotions.” But she also said it needed to be followed up with concrete and significant action.

“Going forward, we expect an active policy of reconciliation,” she said in a written statement. “The decision from today ensures long-term follow-up, and it has both financial and legal repercussions. But unfortunately, no settlement is made with ongoing injustice and conflicts over land and water.”

Norway has some legislation on the Samis’ right to grazing land, but the Sami have long been at odds with the government over land use in relation to their culture and way of life.

The apology and resolutions stem from a report by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, published last year, that outlines how Norway could begin to reckon with its oppressive past. King Harald V has previously apologized to the Sami people, but this is the first time that the Kvens and Forest Finns have received such a public acknowledgment of the harm they endured.

“The assimilation policy that was historically pursued continues to be both the root of personal hardship for the individuals and groups that were subject to this policy, and a source of conflict today,” Svein Harberg, a Conservative Party lawmaker, said in a written response to a reporter’s questions after the apology was read out in Parliament.

Only one group of lawmakers, from the right-wing Progress Party, voted against the resolutions, saying that they would lead to conflict among communities. The party’s leader, Bard Hoksrud, said during a debate in May, “It is fundamentally wrong to give special privileges to some groups at the expense of others.” He added, “We believe history should remain history.”

The Sami are an Indigenous group, now numbering roughly 100,000, who have for hundreds of years inhabited Europe’s northernmost regions, across Finland, Russia, Sweden and Norway, which is home to the largest Sami population. The Kvens and Forest Finns are much smaller groups who migrated to modern-day Norway about 500 years ago.

All three have faced centuries of discrimination that became the foundation of laws in the second half of the 19th century.

The Norwegianization assimilation policies used education and religion to erase the groups’ language and culture, and controlled where they lived.

They lost access to grazing land and fishing, and were not allowed to settle in regions that the government set aside for “suitable populations.” The practices also removed Sami children from their families and placed them into Norwegian foster homes and state-run boarding schools.

Christian mission churches were used to smother cultural beliefs, and scientists submitted Sami, Kvens and Forest Finns to humiliating anthropological tests and exhumed their burial sites to study the remains’ ethnic characteristics.

Although Norway formally ended the legislated prejudice in the 1960s, its consequences have endured. Today, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found, members of these groups have less access to health care, despite Norway’s generous social benefits. Their languages are critically endangered, and bullying, hate speech and harassment of them by other members of Norwegian society persist.

In a 2021 survey conducted as part of an Arctic University of Norway project that studied the efficacy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 60 percent of Norway residents said they thought most people knew little to nothing about how the assimilation policies affected the Sami. That figure rose to 88 percent when it came to how the practices affected Forest Finns and Kvens.

It also found that, even among respondents who said they knew about the injustices endured by the affected peoples, negative stereotypes of those peoples endured.

Eva Josefsen, a political scientist at the Arctic University, who led the project and is Sami, described the parliamentary apology and resolutions as a powerful statement, but said in an interview that its lack of clarity on land rights was a notable weak point.

“There’s a general implementation gap between legal rights and what is actually delivered,” she said.

Norway’s Parliament already has a working relationship with the Sami Parliament, an independent elected assembly established in 1989, and Mr. Harberg, the Conservative lawmaker, said the formal apology could bring greater focus to the Kvens and Forest Finns.

Smaller minorities feel “invisible” in Norway, said Varhild Bakke Berntzen, a board member of Young Forest Finns, an organization that works to revive the group’s culture, including through their advocacy for a museum that is being built.

“A lot of damage has happened, and our generation today suffers the consequences of this,” she said. “It is a wound that can never heal properly, but we expect to see the government do their utmost to make up for this. The real work is yet to be done.”

Henrik Pryser Libell contributed reporting.