Israeli prosecutors indicted one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s aides on Thursday, charging the aide with leaking classified information on Hamas and most likely harming national security, the latest development in a web of legal scandals that has entangled the country’s leader.

The aide, Eliezer Feldstein, a media adviser in the prime minister’s office, deliberately acquired and illegally leaked a top-secret document to Bild, the German tabloid, in an attempt to influence how the Israeli public viewed negotiations for a deal to reach a cease-fire and free the roughly 100 hostages still held by Hamas, prosecutors said in a nine-page indictment.

The leak “exposed Israeli intelligence capabilities to Hamas, which was likely to harm national security and the functioning of security agencies,” according to the indictment. “It would also likely put people in life-threatening danger, particularly at a time of war.”

The families of the remaining hostages have denounced Mr. Netanyahu, arguing that he has favored the survival of his hard-line government over reaching a deal to win the release of their loved ones held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Mr. Netanyahu has said he is doing all he can, but he has also used the document Mr. Feldstein is accused of leaking to suggest that pressuring him serves Hamas’s agenda.

Mr. Feldstein was arrested, along with the military officer who leaked him the document, on Oct. 27. Lawyers for both men did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The indictment comes as Israeli authorities have pursued several lines of inquiry in recent weeks involving officials in Mr. Netanyahu’s office. They are being investigated for trying to bolster Mr. Netanyahu’s reputation by allegedly altering official transcripts of his conversations and intimidating people who controlled access to those records.

Mr. Netanyahu has also been on trial since before the war in Gaza in three separate corruption cases. The prime minister has staunchly denied any wrongdoing, accusing Israeli justice officials of a witch hunt against him, his family and his aides. He has similarly accused Israeli prosecutors of aggressively cracking down on Mr. Feldstein while ignoring his critics’ leaks to the news media.

“One case! And what about the rest of the leaks which are causing great damage to Israeli security?” Mr. Netanyahu said in a speech this week in Israel’s Parliament. “Well, we all understand what’s happening here.”

Mr. Feldstein, 32, a former military spokesman, acquired the classified document from the military officer, who was also indicted, prosecutors said. The document purported to lay out Hamas’s strategy in talks with Israel: waging psychological warfare to compel Israel to make concessions, in part by inciting public pressure to free the hostages.

Prosecutors say that the military officer, whose name has not been released publicly, first contacted Mr. Feldstein in June, offering to share classified information. But they made little use of the secret document until September, after Israeli soldiers found the bodies of six hostages who had been killed by their Hamas captors in a tunnel beneath the Gaza Strip.

Israelis had grown to intimately recognize the hostages’ names and faces after months of campaigning by their relatives. The abductees’ killings shocked the Israeli public and prompted large protests in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem calling on the government to reach a deal with Hamas to return the remaining hostages alive.

According to the indictment, Mr. Feldstein decided to leak the document in the hopes of “shifting the public discourse about the hostages in the wake of their murder.” He informed Yonatan Urich, another media adviser to Mr. Netanyahu, that he intended to leak the document, the indictment said.

Mr. Feldstein later sent the document by the messaging app Telegram to Raviv Golan, a journalist at an Israeli broadcaster. To comply with Israeli national security restrictions, Mr. Golan submitted the article for approval to the Israeli military, which banned it from publication, according to the indictment.

In an attempt to circumvent Israeli censorship, the indictment says, Mr. Urich connected Mr. Feldstein with a former adviser to Mr. Netanyahu, who helped him leak the document to foreign news organizations. Excerpts were ultimately published in Bild, although it did not publish an image of the document itself.

It is unclear what Mr. Netanyahu knew about the decision to leak classified information. According to the indictment, Mr. Feldstein sought to bring at least some of the information to the attention of the prime minister.

After the document was published in Bild, Mr. Feldstein urged local Israeli news outlets to pick up the report. Traditionally, Israeli outlets have been allowed to publish some news censored at home as long as they attribute it to the international press.

“Take your time; the boss is happy,” Mr. Urich wrote to Mr. Feldstein at the time, prosecutors said.

Mr. Feldstein subsequently ordered the military officer who had leaked him the document to erase their correspondence on messaging apps, according to the indictment.

Reporting was contributed by Johnatan Reiss from Tel Aviv and Myra Noveck from Jerusalem.

The Brazilian authorities announced on Thursday that they were recommending criminal charges against former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro over his role in a broad plot to cling to power after he lost the 2022 presidential election.

The accusations sharply escalate Mr. Bolsonaro’s legal troubles and highlight the extent of what the authorities have called an organized attempt to subvert Brazil’s democracy. After Mr. Bolsonaro narrowly lost to the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist, he refused to acknowledge defeat but left office anyway.

Brazil’s federal police urged prosecutors to charge Mr. Bolsonaro and three dozen others, including members of his inner circle, for the crimes of “violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, coup d’état and criminal organization.”

The police did not provide any specifics about Mr. Bolsonaro’s actions that led to their recommendations.

The charges are the culmination of a sweeping two-year investigation in which police raided homes and offices, arrested senior aides to Mr. Bolsonaro and secured confessions and plea deals with people involved in the plot.

The announcement comes two days after four members of an elite military unit, including a former top aide to Mr. Bolsonaro, were arrested and accused of planning to assassinate Mr. Lula shortly before he took office in January 2023.

The police have already recommended criminal charges against Mr. Bolsonaro in two separate cases: an effort to falsify his Covid-19 vaccination records and a plot to embezzle jewelry that he received as gifts from foreign leaders while in office.

Federal prosecutors have still not decided whether to pursue charges in any of these cases. If they do, it will be the first time Mr. Bolsonaro faces criminal charges.

The authorities said that Mr. Bolsonaro, along with dozens of close aides, ministers and military leaders, had participated in a plan to reverse the results of the elections and prevent Mr. Lula from taking office in January 2023.

Earlier this year, the police said there was evidence that Mr. Bolsonaro had overseen a broad conspiracy to hold on to power, including planning the arrest of a Supreme Court judge, personally editing a draft decree aimed at overturning the election results and presenting coup plans to top military leaders, seeking their support.

Efforts to keep Mr. Bolsonaro in office also included spreading disinformation about voter fraud, drafting legal arguments for new elections, surveilling judges and encouraging and guiding protesters who eventually raided government buildings, police said at the time.

Mr. Bolsonaro’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mr. Bolsonaro has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, calling the investigation political persecution.

Although the police in Brazil can make recommendations about criminal prosecutions, they do not have the power to formally charge Mr. Bolsonaro. The country’s top federal prosecutor, Paulo Gonet, must now decide whether to pursue charges against Mr. Bolsonaro and compel him to stand trial before the nation’s Supreme Court.

More than a year before Brazil’s 2022 elections, Mr. Bolsonaro began loudly sowing baseless doubts about the security of the nation’s voting machines, warning that he could be defeated only if they were rigged in his opponent’s favor.

When Mr. Bolsonaro narrowly lost the vote, he declined to formally concede. His supporters soon set up camps outside military headquarters, calling on the military to overturn an election that they claimed had been stolen from Mr. Bolsonaro.

Then, in an episode reminiscent of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, they invaded and vandalized Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential offices just days after Mr. Lula took office, hoping to provoke a military intervention.

The episode alarmed many in Brazil, a country that was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.

In June, Brazil’s electoral court barred Mr. Bolsonaro running for office until 2030, ruling that he had violated the law when he summoned diplomats to the presidential palace and made baseless claims that the nation’s voting systems were likely rigged against him.

Paulo Motoryn contributed reporting from Brasília.

President Vladimir V. Putin escalated a tense showdown with the West on Thursday, saying that Russia had launched a new intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine in response to Ukraine’s recent use of American and British weapons to strike deeper into Russia.

In what appeared to be an ominous threat against Ukraine’s western allies, Mr. Putin also asserted that Russia had the right to strike the military facilities of countries “that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.”

His warning came hours after Russia’s military fired a nuclear-capable ballistic missile at Ukraine that Western officials and analysts said was meant to instill fear in Kyiv and the West. Though the missile carried only conventional warheads, using it signaled that Russia could strike with nuclear weapons if it chooses.

“The regional conflict in Ukraine, previously provoked by the West, has acquired elements of a global character,” Mr. Putin said in a rare address to the nation. “We are developing intermediate- and shorter-range missiles as a response to U.S. plans to produce and deploy intermediate- and shorter-range missiles in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.”

Mr. Putin has frequently wielded the threat of nuclear weapons to try to keep the West off balance and stem the flow of support to Ukraine. But sending an intermediate-range missile with nuclear capabilities into Ukraine and brandishing the strike as a threat to the West ratcheted up tensions even further.

Sounding by turns boastful and threatening, Mr. Putin called Thursday’s missile strike a successful “test” of a new intermediate-range ballistic missile called the Oreshnik. And he made clear that the attack on Ukraine was in response to a recent decision by the Biden Administration to grant Ukraine permission to use American-made ATACMS ballistic missiles to hit targets inside Russia.

Ukraine used ATACMS and the British Storm Shadow missile against Russia for the first time this week, Ukrainian and Western officials said.

Since Mr. Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine in February 2022 — and Ukraine’s western allies began supplying Kyiv with weapons and other support — both Russia and the West have taken pains to avoid a direct confrontation that all sides agreed could lead to a disastrous military conflict, and possibly nuclear war.

But as the war in Ukraine approaches the end of its third year, the guardrails preventing such a confrontation appear to be under strain like never before.

“This is an escalation,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “I really believe the situation is very dangerous.”

In his nightly address, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said, “Putin is the only one who started this war, a completely unprovoked war, and who is doing everything to keep the war going for more than a thousand days.”

He called the missile strike “yet another proof that Russia definitely does not want peace.”

The use of an intermediate-range missile drawn from Russia’s strategic arsenal was notable, Ukrainian and Western officials said. The target inside Ukraine was well within the range of the conventional weapons that Moscow has routinely used throughout the war.

But this time, Russia launched a longer-range missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads that is mainly intended as nuclear deterrence; that choice, the officials and military analysts said, signals a warning aimed at striking fear into Kyiv and its allies.

Fabian Rene Hoffmann, a weapons expert at the University of Oslo, said that from a Russian perspective, “what they would like to tell us today is that ‘Look, last night’s strike was nonnuclear in payload, but, you know, if whatever you do continues, the next strike might be with a nuclear warhead.’”

There was initially debate on Thursday over exactly what Russia fired at Ukraine. Ukraine’s air force along with Mr. Zelensky initially claimed it was an intercontinental ballistic missile, a weapon capable of hitting targets thousands of miles away, including in the United States. Ukrainian officials said the missile struck a military facility in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, though the extent of the damage was not immediately clear.

Senior U.S. officials and a Ukrainian official, however, said the weapon appeared to be an intermediate-range ballistic missile, not an ICBM.

Dimitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said that under protocol, Russia was not required to notify the American side in advance of the missile launch because the Oreshnik is not an intercontinental missile. But an automatic notification to the U.S. was triggered 30 minutes before the launch, Mr. Peskov told Tass, the Russian state media outlet.

The U.S. Department of Defense confirmed that it received that warning.

In a statement on Thursday, the National Security Council in the U.S. said that Russia launched what it called “an experimental medium-range ballistic missile against Ukraine.” The statement said Russia likely had “only a handful” of these missiles and had likely used it to try to “intimidate Ukraine and its supporters.”

The Ukrainian Air Force said the missile was launched from the Russian region of Astrakhan. Ivan Kyrychevskyi, a military analyst with Defense Express, a Ukrainian consulting agency, said the launch area suggested it was fired from a truck based at the Kapustin Yar training range — a Cold War-era testing ground for Soviet ballistic missiles, strategic bombers and other weaponry, underscoring the threat intended with the launch.

Ukraine has no radars capable of detecting such missiles in flight through the upper atmosphere, nor does it have air defense systems capable of shooting them down, Mr. Kyrychevskyi said. “Our Western partners might have seen this launch before us,” he said.

Analysts said the name Mr. Putin gave for the new weapon, Oreshnik, appeared new, but that the weapon itself was likely not much different from known versions of Russian intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

Although other Russian missiles that have been launched into Ukraine can also carry nuclear weapons — like the Iskander and the Kh-101 — what makes the intermediate-range missile alarming, in addition to its range, is its ability to fire multiple nuclear warheads when it re-enters the earth’s atmosphere, said Tom Karako, director of the missile defense project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

That makes it difficult, if not nearly impossible, to intercept them. The missiles are also large and can fly far, high and fast, reaching hypersonic speed.

It represents “a nuclear saber-rattling for both Ukraine and Europe itself,” Mr. Karako said. “It’s a pretty sharp signal.”

Roman Kostenko, the chairman of the defense and intelligence committee in Ukraine’s Parliament, said that Thursday’s attack would not prompt Ukraine to alter how it is fighting the war, including striking back at targets in Russia in self-defense.

But Ukraine halted its nuclear missile production after gaining independence in 1991, and now, Col. Kostenko said, “we have nothing to answer to this class of weapons.”

If there was any doubt about Russia’s intent, Mr. Putin laid out the threat explicitly.

“We have always preferred — and are still ready — to resolve all contentious issues by peaceful means,” he said. “But we are also ready for any development. If anyone still doubts this, it is in vain. There will always be a response.”

On top of everything else, Russian and Western officials have sparred over who is to blame for the recent spate of escalation. While the Kremlin blames Washington for granting Ukraine permission to strike Russian targets with Western weapons, the White House has said Russia’s own actions brought about the decision, specifically citing Russian’s decision to invite thousands of North Korean troops to help dislodge a Ukrainian occupation of part of Russia’s Kursk region.

Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Thursday that “the escalation at every turn, at every step, is coming from Russia.”

She repeated the White House’s position that the decision to bring North Korean troops into the conflict was the important escalatory action, and that changes in policy about U.S. weapons were not. “This is their aggression: not Ukraine’s, not ours,” she said.

In Dnipro, at the site of Thursday’s missile strike, officials were still evaluating the extent of the damage of the missile strikes, though it did not appear to be extensive. The city’s mayor, Borys Filatov, wrote on Facebook that an explosion had broken windows at a rehabilitation center for disabled people.

The Ukrainian government does not provide damage assessments of attacks directed at strategic military assets, but local residents suggested the PA Pivdenmash Machine-Building Plant was struck. The precise work that now takes place at the plant is a closely guarded secret, but its history as a missile producer in the Cold War is well known, making it a frequent target for attacks throughout the war.

Michael Schwirtz, Aritz Parra, Oleg Matsnev Maria Varenikova, Nataliia Novosolova and Liubov Sholudko contributed reporting.

The ruling junta of Mali appointed its spokesman as the country’s new prime minister on Thursday, after his civilian predecessor was fired for criticizing the administration.

The spokesman, Col. Abdoulaye Maiga, replaced former Prime Minister Choguel Maiga — the two are not direct relatives — after Choguel Maiga told reporters that the junta was making decisions about the postponement of elections in “total secrecy.” He condemned the administration for failing to transition the country back to democracy within two years, as it had promised after seizing power in 2020.

Choguel Maiga, who had served as prime minister since 2021, had consistently defended the junta before his comments, even as Mali’s neighbors and former Western partners criticized it for delaying elections and working with Russia.

On state television, the new prime minister and the president, Gen. Assimi Goita, said that key ministries would remain under the same leadership. The influential cabinet members include Abdoulaye Diop, a veteran diplomat and former ambassador to the United States in the 2000s, and Defense Minister Sadio Camara, who has played a major role in strengthening relationships with Russia.

Colonel Maiga — an expert in international affairs and good governance who has a doctorate, according to his résumé — represented Mali at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September, and at the U.N. climate conference known as COP29 in Azerbaijan this month.

The appointment of a military man to a position previously held by a civilian fuels uncertainty over Mali’s presidential election, which was scheduled for February but has been indefinitely postponed. The military cited “technical reasons” for the delay but did not provide additional details. Whether General Goita will run in that election, if it takes place, to retain power remains unclear.

Soumaila Lah, a political analyst focused on Mali, said the latest developments pointed to a power struggle between General Goita and Choguel Maiga.

“Goita wants to eventually become a civilian in order to be able to stand as president should elections eventually happen,” Mr. Lah said. But, he added, “Choguel Maiga also has political ambitions and wants to be president.”

Although Mali is rich in natural resources — it is West Africa’s largest cotton producer and second-largest gold producer — its population remains chronically poor, with 45 percent of its 23 million people living in poverty, according to the African Development Bank Group. For more than a decade, Mali has been battling a jihadist insurgency that has spread across the region.

“In their mind, there’s no other possibility than answering this crisis with weapons,” Oumar Mariko, the leader of an opposition party, said in an interview in September in the neighboring Ivory Coast. “But an all-military approach won’t solve our problems. Where are peace and respect for democratic values?”

Mali’s junta has had several setbacks in recent months. It suffered a severe defeat in July against separatists from the Tuareg ethnic group in the north. In September, a deadly terrorist attack on the capital, Bamako, by Islamist insurgents affiliated with Al Qaeda killed more than 70 members of the country’s armed forces.

At least 38 people, most of them Shiite Muslims, were killed in northwestern Pakistan on Thursday as gunmen ambushed convoys of vehicles that had been under the protection of security forces.

The attack was one of the deadliest in months of sectarian violence in the Kurram region, a scenic mountainous district bordering Afghanistan.

Pakistan is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, but Kurram’s population of 800,000 is nearly half Shiite Muslim, contributing to a cauldron of tribal tensions.

Conflicts, often rooted in disputes over land, frequently escalate into deadly sectarian clashes. The violence highlights the government’s persistent struggle to maintain control in the region.

Javedullah Mehsud, a senior district government officer, and Hidayat Pasdar, a journalist from Kurram, said that the latest attack involved separate ambushes of two convoys passing through Sunni-majority villages.

The vehicles had been traveling in opposite directions on the main road connecting Parachinar, a Shiite-majority town in Kurram, to Peshawar, the provincial capital 135 miles away.

The road, a vital lifeline for the district, had only recently reopened after being closed for three weeks because of an ambush on Oct. 12 that left at least 16 people dead.

During the closure, residents of Parachinar were cut off from essential supplies, including food and fuel, leading to a growing humanitarian crisis.

Earlier this month, thousands of people from Parachinar staged a peaceful 10-mile march demanding the road’s reopening and guarantees of security. The authorities responded by temporarily restoring access and promising government-protected convoys three times a week.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but various militant groups, including Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or T.T.P., have a history of targeting Shiite Muslims in the district.

Ali Amin Gandapur, the chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, which includes Kurram, condemned the attack and directed the authorities to establish a provincial highway police force to secure key transport routes.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent rights body, said that the repeated attacks in Kurram showed the federal and provincial governments’ failure to protect citizens.

“We demand immediate and decisive steps from both governments to permanently break this cycle of violence,” the commission said in a statement.

This year has been particularly deadly in Kurram. In late July, a weeklong clash between Sunni and Shiite communities left 46 dead and hundreds injured. Another bout of violence in September claimed 45 lives and wounded dozens.

“This violence has become a cycle that the authorities seem unable to break,” said Sharif Hussain, a university student from Parachinar who had planned to travel to Peshawar in the coming days. “The state has abandoned us. Even in security-escorted convoys, we are left to die at the hands of terrorists.”

It has been nearly a month since Israel sent more than 100 jets and drones to strike Iranian military bases, and the world is still waiting to see how Iran will respond.

It is a loaded pause in the high-risk conflict this year between the two Middle East powers. Israel’s counterattack came more than three weeks after Iran launched over 180 ballistic missiles — most of which were shot down — on Oct. 1 to avenge the killings of two top Hezbollah and Hamas leaders.

The first volley of strikes came in April, when Iran decided to avenge an attack on one of its diplomatic compounds by directly bombarding Israel with at least 300 missiles and drones. Even then, Israel waited days, not hours, to respond.

Not long ago, analysts might have predicted that any direct strike by Iran on Israel, or by Israel on Iran, would have prompted an immediate conflagration. But it has not played out that way.

Partly that is the result of frantic diplomacy behind the scenes by allies including the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. But the calculated, limited strikes also reflect the fact that the alternative — a war of “shock and awe” between Israel and Iran — could lead to dire consequences not just for the region but also much of the world.

“The nature of the attacks seem to speak to a shared acknowledgment of the acute risk of an even deeper regional war that both sides still probably want to avoid,” said Julien Barnes-Dacey, the Middle East director at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

That does not mean there are not dangers to the current approach, he noted. “It’s an extremely precarious and likely unsustainable pathway that could quickly spin out of control,” he said. “There is also a possibility that Israel may be more deliberately working its way up the escalatory ladder with the intention of eventually doing something wider and more decisive.”

In a video message last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel appeared to warn that he could ratchet up the intensity of the conflict if Tehran were to strike again. “Every day, Israel gets stronger,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “The world has seen but a fraction of our power.”

The Nature of War is Changing

The tit-for-tat strikes by Iran and Israel bear little resemblance to warfare known as shock and awe — the use of overwhelming firepower, superior technology and speed to destroy the enemy’s physical capabilities and its will to resist — that was first introduced as a concept in 1996 by two American military experts.

Perhaps its most memorable demonstration was the barrage of airstrikes that started the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which were followed by ground troops that sent Saddam Hussein into hiding. But its core tactics were deployed earlier, in the 1991 Gulf War, as well as in the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

Shock and awe warfare would be difficult to carry out in this current Middle East conflict, where launching ground troops would likely require more land, air and sea assets than either Israel or Iran would want to deploy across the hundreds of miles that separate them.

There is also an ongoing debate in military circles as to whether a shock and awe offensive is still viable. Autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence are transforming warfare, argued the retired Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen. Mark A. Milley, and Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive, in an August analysis for Foreign Affairs. “The era of ‘shock and awe’ campaigns — in which Washington could decimate its adversaries with overwhelming firepower — is finished,” they wrote.

Two analysts at Britain’s Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre countered last month that shock and awe warfare is evolving, not over, and pointed to Israel’s exploding pager and walkie-talkie attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Dozens of people were killed, and thousands wounded, but the fear that the attacks created struck a psychological blow to the militant group. Two weeks later, Israeli airstrikes killed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s longtime leader.

“Far from being a thing of the past, shock and awe must be an integral part of our approach to multi-domain warfare,” they wrote.

These Strikes Are About Domestic Politics as Much as Deterrence

For decades, Iran and Israel were locked in a shadow war, with Israel carrying out covert attacks and Iran relying on proxy militias in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen as its front line forces.

All that changed on April 1. While almost all the missiles and drones that Iran aimed at Israel were intercepted, the airstrikes marked the first time that Tehran had directly attacked Israel from Iranian soil.

That put officials around the globe on alert for a broader regional war. Hours after the strikes, Gen. Hossein Salami, the commander in chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Iran had decided to create “a new equation” in its yearslong conflict with Israel.

But so far, the conflict has been carried out solely with deep precision missile strikes, mainly targeting military bases in the other’s country. Farzan Sabet, an analyst on Iran and Middle East politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland, said the restrained volley of missile attacks appeared to signal a new kind of warfare.

“Deep precision strikes aren’t new, but their use on such scale as the centerpiece” of a conflict “is novel,” Mr. Sabet said.

Still, “we may not have seen the worst of it,” he said, noting that Tehran had recently signaled that it was prepared to strike Israel’s key energy sources — including gas fields, power plants and oil import terminals — if Iran’s civilian infrastructure was hit. “That would be a new element,” Mr. Sabet said.

He and other analysts said the airstrikes so far, combined with the public warnings that preceded them, were part of a deterrence campaign by both nations to try to keep the conflict from spiraling out of control.

“It’s ‘I slap, therefore you get slapped, so you understand, and so now you can decide whether you want to step down or you want to step up,’” said Assaf Orion, a retired Israeli brigadier general and defense strategist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The fact is that both parties are taking their time to calculate, to collaborate, to shape their own operations,” he added.

The Stakes Are High, and The Situation Could Still Explode.

While Israel has not used conventional shock and awe against Iran, it has been far less restrained in its attacks on Iran’s proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, as the pager attacks demonstrated. And Hamas’s attack on Israel, which incited the ongoing wars on Oct. 7, 2023, was brutal and unconstrained.

Israel has since pounded Gaza with airstrikes that have killed more than 43,000 people, many of whom were women and children. In Lebanon, the United Nations estimates that more than 3,300 people have been killed by Israeli attacks since Oct. 8, 2023, when Hezbollah joined the fight to show solidarity with Palestinians.

But Iran has been spared the scale of death and humanitarian disaster that Israel has exacted on its proxies. It has even sought to portray its own missile attacks against Israel as a resounding success.

Mr. Sabet said Tehran appeared to care as much about showing its public the number of “spectacular” strikes it was launching against Israel as about how many of them hit their targets. “Iran is trying to have the last word, in a sense,” he said. “It wants to show a response, and show its domestic and regional audiences that’s done something, but it doesn’t want to escalate the conflict.”

But, he added, “I’m just not sure that’ll work.”

Israel’s debilitating attacks on Hezbollah and Hamas, on which Iran has long relied for what it calls forward defense, are a blow to Tehran. And the re-election of President Donald J. Trump, a staunch ally of Mr. Netanyahu, changes the equation again.

One of Mr. Trump’s close advisers, the tech billionaire Elon Musk, met last week with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in what was described as an opening attempt to diffuse tensions between Tehran and the incoming American president.

But Mr. Trump is widely expected to make U.S. foreign policy more favorable to Israel, and is stacking his cabinet with Iran hawks. That could very well bring the war between Iran and Israel into new terrain.

When his daughter turned 12, Gighe Dutta decided this would be the year that he and his wife quit cutting sugar cane in the fields of western India. The work required a long migration, and his daughter would have to drop out of school — the first step for many girls on a lifelong path of abuse and poverty.

But his employer refused to let them quit. He and his friends beat up Mr. Dutta and forced him into a car, Mr. Dutta said. According to a report that he filed with a local government agency, the men drove him to a mill that says it supplies sugar to many international companies.

Mr. Dutta was locked there for two days, he said, and left to sleep on the floor to reconsider his decision.

The sugar-rich state of Maharashtra supplies companies like Coca-Cola, Pepsico and Unilever. Local politicians and sugar barons say that laborers like the Duttas are free to leave. The work is hard, they concede, but laborers can always seek work elsewhere.

But the sugar workers of Maharashtra are far from free. With no written contracts, they are at the mercy of their employers to decide when they may leave. They frequently work under the threat of violence, abduction and murder.

There is no official data about how often such treatment occurs, and abuses often go unreported because workers fear retaliation. But workers’ rights groups, local government authorities, experts and even some mill owners say that kidnapping is not uncommon and that workers have little recourse.

The New York Times and Fuller Project obtained police reports and local government records, interviewed factory owners and collected the firsthand accounts of a half dozen families involved in recent kidnapping cases.

“Some say they will murder you. People say all sorts of things,” said Vinobai Taktode, a laborer who reported to the police that her husband had been kidnapped by his employer. “There are so many fears on our minds.”

Earlier this year The Times and The Fuller Project revealed that household-name companies and Indian politicians profit off a brutal system that forces children to work, pushes them into underage marriages and coerces women to get unnecessary hysterectomies to keep them working in the fields, unencumbered by menstruation or routine ailments.

All of those abuses can be linked to what is known as bonded labor, a system in which workers are perpetually in debt to their employers and cannot leave.

Bonded labor, or debt bondage, is an internationally recognized human rights violation. It is illegal in India and explicitly denounced by the Western companies that buy sugar from Maharashtra.

Yet worker abuse in Maharashtra is hardly a secret. Bonded labor is endemic across the state, according to researchers, industry officials and workers’ rights groups. A court-appointed government fact-finding team found last year that the sugar industry relies on an extensive system of bonded labor, according to a document obtained by The Times and Fuller Project.

Several Western brands that source from Maharashtra either declined to comment or pointed to their published human-rights policies without addressing the issue of bonded labor in Maharashtra.

Far from addressing the problem, the Maharashtra government denies that it exists. A court affidavit submitted this year on behalf of several state agencies said that sugar laborers were “free to move anywhere and they are never imprisoned by the employer.”

The mill where Mr. Dutta says he was held, Jaywant Sugars, denied any involvement. The mill has many customers and has supplied Sucden, a major commodity broker that says it commands 15 percent of the global sugar trade.

In response to questions, Sucden said that it had not purchased from Jaywant Sugars since 2020. Sucden said that the mill had signed a code of conduct assuring that no labor abuses were involved in its operations. Sucden said that it would not source from Jaywant again without “clear and documented prior clarification on labor practices.”

Debt bondage persists because sugar cutters in Maharashtra are paid through cash advances at the beginning of each season. Almost invariably, according to laborers and contractors alike, it is impossible to repay the money in a single year. The debt rolls over, and families are trapped, typically with no contract and no recourse.

Violence can occur when workers try to break that cycle.

One sugar cutter, Prahlad Pawar, said that his employer told him last year that he and others had not worked hard enough during the harvest.

So the employer ordered Mr. Pawar, his wife and children, and another family to work as his personal servants during the off-season, according to a report filed with a local government agency and interviews with family members. Mr. Pawar and his family eventually escaped, hiking for days toward their village, begging for food and sleeping in fields.

“People in the cities, who drink these cold drinks and eat chocolates, they are living their lives and they do not even think of us,” Mr. Pawar said. “I wish they, for once, tried working like us.”

Women Pay the Price

Vinobai Taktode isn’t sure how old she is — maybe 30, she said, or 35. Like many female sugar cane cutters, nobody had recorded her birthday.

She lives in the village of Alepur, many hours’ drive from Mr. Dutta’s family. But, like Mr. Dutta’s preteen daughter, she had grown up among the crops, doing chores for her parents along with her siblings.

Unlike Mr. Dutta, her parents had not sought a way out. When she was in her early or midteens, she was married to a man who cut sugar cane, too.

In Maharashtra, the crop is generally cut by a husband-and-wife team known as a koyta. Each couple supplies a specific sugar mill but is hired by a middleman contractor who doles out the mill’s money every season.

Lump-sum payments allow workers to pay for major costs like home repairs or medical expenses. But most agricultural workers have only oral agreements and no recourse if their contractors change the terms. Sugar mills deny any relationship with the workers or any responsibility for their treatment.

“Labor is completely invisible, and that invisibility is critical for profit making,” said Seema Kulkarni of Makaam, a group that advocates on behalf of female farm workers in India.

Ms. Taktode, her husband and five children struggled financially. She does not know all the details because, as in most farming couples, her husband made all the arrangements with the contractor.

But her husband, Shivaji Bhivaji Taktode, battled alcoholism. Years ago, he missed two weeks of work while bingeing on a sticky, sweet country wine made from molasses. Every night for days, she said in an interview, the contractor and half a dozen friends roughed up Ms. Taktode’s husband for not working.

One night, she recalled, someone beat him with the blunt side of a scythe, the tool used to cut cane. Her husband’s back was covered in bruises. Another night, she said, a man knocked him on the head with a rock, sending him to the hospital.

It was then that Ms. Taktode learned that, while the men control the finances, women and children can pay the price. The contractor forced Ms. Taktode and her eldest son to do days of extra work in the sugar fields, she said.

But that still wasn’t enough to make up for the lost time.

The contractor told Ms. Taktode that her husband had stolen from him by missing work, she said. She was terrified. They had no records and no way to calculate their labor, their debt or a way out.

She knew they had to escape.

“They used to threaten us,” she said. She remembers her contractor saying, “If you leave, we will kill you.”

Late one night in 2022, the family bundled up some possessions and slipped away, marching for hours, she said, through “a jungle” of rustling sugar cane until they reached a train station. When her 6-year-old son could no longer walk, Ms. Taktode carried him.

After two years in hiding, they returned home this summer, assuming that things had quieted down.

They were wrong. The contractor showed up again in late August and forced her husband into a car. A relative recalled having witnessed the abduction and recounted the details, which were also listed in a police report.

The contractor could not be reached despite repeated phone calls. The mill for which he worked declined a request for an interview.

Ms. Taktode, though, said that the contractor had called her family and demanded money for her husband’s release.

Then, this fall, Mr. Taktode returned, shaken up and badly injured, his son said. He escaped, his family said, but details were few. The contractor’s mobile phone was switched off.

It is unclear whether that was the end of Ms. Taktode’s ordeal. They are destitute. Food is scarce. When it rains, droplets of water seep through gaps in the tin roof of her mother-in-law’s home, turning the dirt floor to mud.

If the contractor returns, Ms. Taktode says she has no idea how they will find the money.

A Father’s Desperation

Mr. Dutta and his wife are desperate to avoid the harsh life of sugar cane cutting for their children. This fall, they decided that they would not migrate for the harvest as usual. They were done.

Their daughter was finishing primary school and they wanted her to take her classes seriously. Mr. Dutta never got the education he wanted. “I need to educate them. Both my kids,” he said.

But by the time they had decided to quit, they had already taken their yearly advance. For most workers, that would be the end of it. They would have to return to the fields.

The Duttas, though, had scratched together some money by farming cotton, millet and lentils in the offseason.

Mr. Dutta arranged a meeting with his contractor. He offered to repay 70 percent of the advance upfront, then return with the rest in a few days.

The contractor, who had been drinking with friends, was furious, Mr. Dutta recounted. He demanded that Mr. Dutta pay back double the advance if he wanted to quit. They argued, and the contractor and his friends turned on Mr. Dutta, beating him up.

Mr. Dutta’s contractor did not respond to repeated calls for comment.

“There were eight to 10 people, and they were all drinking. Who listens after drinking?” Mr. Dutta said in an interview, biting his nails as he spoke. “I was alone.”

They pushed him into a car, took his phone away and began to drive southeast. It was half a day’s drive before they arrived at the Jaywant Sugar mill, he said.

Like most of Maharashtra’s mills, Jaywant is controlled by a politically powerful family.

The mill’s president, C. N. Deshpande, denied that anyone had been held against their will at his factory. He said he knew nothing about Mr. Dutta.

But he acknowledged that sugar laborers who refuse to work or cannot repay their advances posed a problem. Ultimately, the mill’s money is at stake. “Contractors come and say that laborers have run away,” Mr. Deshpande said. They ask what to do, he added. “We tell them we don’t know, but we need the money.”

Kidnappings and beatings were common in the industry, he said. Often, he added, mill executives know about these tactics or abet them. And he acknowledged that the mills rarely faced consequences.

Some laborers have even been murdered, he said. In one case in 2014, a contractor beat and abducted a worker, then stabbed his son in the chest, according to arrest records and an interview with the family.

Mr. Deshpande’s mill does not use violence or threats, he said. But, he noted, he has never failed to recoup an advance.

Escape

Mr. Dutta, weak from hunger and his beating, was taken to a dark room without furniture, he later told a government legal aid agency. Over the next two days, he was let out only to use the bathroom.

He said that, despite Mr. Deshpande’s denial, mill workers had seen what was happening. One was even assigned to bring him meals from the canteen but threatened him when he begged to be released.

Mr. Dutta had no idea when, or if, he’d be freed.

“I was so scared,” he said. “I could not think, it was as if my head had stopped working.”

When he could focus, he was torn up by thoughts of his mother, wife and children and how worried they must be. He thought of his daughter, he said, a shy girl who liked animals and who hand-fed the family’s goat.

After two days, Mr. Dutta’s brother discovered what had happened. He phoned the contractor, who reiterated his demand — twice his money back. In response, Mr. Dutta’s brother and wife filed a police report.

The contractor told Mr. Dutta that it was time to leave and ushered him to a car. Mr. Dutta was terrified about where they were taking him, he said. At a roadside stop, he made a break for it.

He arrived home about a week later and filed a report with the legal aid agency.

Weeks passed and nothing happened.

When reporters inquired, the police played down the incident and said that Mr. Dutta and the contractor were working things out.

Mr. Dutta said he was afraid that the contractor would return for him. But he and his wife are adamant that they will not return to sugar cane cutting.

Decades of farm labor harms your body irreparably. Mr. Dutta can feel it in his knuckles and at the base of his spine. His wife is no different.

Harvesting cotton and millet for a living will be painful, too. And it had never before generated enough money to live on. But Mr. Dutta said that didn’t matter. “In any work, one has to suffer,” he said.

He would make sure his daughter stayed in school, he said — whatever it took.

Ankur Tangade contributed reporting from Beed, India.