The New York Times 2024-11-23 12:10:46


A Difficult Few Days for Bolsonaro’s Right-Wing Movement

Brazil’s far-right movement and its leader, former President Jair Bolsonaro, have had a challenging few days.

First, a supporter of Mr. Bolsonaro blew himself up near the nation’s Supreme Court, an institution many on the right see as an enemy, in a terrorist attack that the police attributed to political extremism.

Days later, the authorities accused members of an elite military unit — including a former top aide to Mr. Bolsonaro — of planning to kill Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, weeks before he was to become president. The assassination plan, the police said, was printed out in the presidential offices while Mr. Bolsonaro was in the building, according to a police report reviewed by The New York Times.

Now, the police are seeking criminal charges against Mr. Bolsonaro himself, along with three dozen of his allies, over a broad plot to stage a coup to keep him in power after he lost the 2022 presidential election to Mr. Lula.

The dramatic events, which unfolded over the span of eight days, have cast a shadow over a movement that Mr. Bolsonaro mobilized as he rose to power, consolidated as president and continued to nurture following his narrow defeat at the polls.

“It’s terrible news for the far-right,” said Fábio Kerche, a professor of political science at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro. “It deals a blow — including to Bolsonaro.”

Yet Mr. Bolsonaro has weathered many storms, during his presidency and following his reluctant exit from power.

Now, facing potential criminal charges that could lead to prison, Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters have been quick to downplay the severity of the situation, chalking it up to “leftist” political persecution by the judiciary.

In sharp contrast to Mr. Bolsonaro’s woes, Mr. Lula has spent the last week basking in the global spotlight.

During a gathering of world leaders in Rio, Mr. Lula posed for photos with President Biden, led an ambitious international pact to fight hunger and poverty, and positioned himself as a leading voice on global efforts to fight climate change, ahead of hosting the world’s most important climate summit in Brazil next year.

“With all this, Lula is on the rise,” said João Roberto Martins Filho, a political scientist at the Federal University of São Carlos.

But even as Mr. Lula enjoyed a moment of glory, it is unclear whether he will succeed in advancing his international agenda once President Biden hands over the reins of power to President-elect Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Lula has said he hopes to forge “civilized” relations with Mr. Trump, but he has also openly expressed worries about some of the president-elect’s plans. Mr. Lula, in an interview with CNN this month, urged Mr. Trump to “think as an inhabitant of the planet Earth” when shaping climate policy.

Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies, on the other hand, have loudly cheered Mr. Trump’s victory.

On election night, one of Mr. Bolsonaro’s sons watched the votes being counted at Mar-a-Lago and, following Mr. Trump’s victory, the former Brazilian president drew parallels between himself and the American president-elect on social media, casting both men as part of a global populist movement.

And even though Mr. Bolsonaro is forbidden to travel outside Brazil because of the investigations targeting him, he has asked Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is overseeing the case, for permission to attend Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January.

“He’ll say no to the most powerful guy in the world?” Mr. Bolsonaro said, referring to the next U.S. president, in an interview with Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo.

Mr. Bolsonaro, perhaps trying to follow Mr. Trump’s road map, seems to want to stage his own political comeback, signaling that he intends to run in Brazil’s next presidential election in 2026.

There is a hitch though: An electoral court has barred him from holding office until the end of the decade.

After Mr. Trump’s victory, “it seemed that Bolsonaro might return to the electoral game,’’ said Guilherme Casarões, a professor at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, who has studied Brazil’s far-right movement.

“This enthusiasm was lost throughout this week” of legal blows for Mr. Bolsonaro, Mr. Casarões said.

Still, a significant slice of Brazilian voters may be rooting for Mr. Bolsonaro’s political resurrection anyway.

In a poll this month, nearly a fifth of those surveyed said they would vote for Mr. Bolsonaro in the next presidential election even though, for now, he cannot run. Mr. Lula, who is eligible to run, was the preferred candidate of 27 percent of those polled.

This week was a culmination of mounting legal troubles for Mr. Bolsonaro after the federal police urged prosecutors to charge Mr. Bolsonaro and three dozen others, including members of his inner circle, with crimes of “violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, coup d’état and criminal organization.”

Brazil’s top federal prosecutor must now decide whether to pursue the case. If he does, Mr. Bolsonaro could eventually end up in handcuffs.

Even if Mr. Bolsonaro stands trial, it may not be enough to tarnish him in the eyes of his most fervent supporters, according to Mr. Kerche. “Bolsonaro could do whatever he wanted, and they would continue to support him.”

That is another similarity with Mr. Trump, whose support seemed to only grow with the legal cases against him.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Bolsonaro has cast himself as a political martyr, leaning into a false narrative of a stolen election.

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

When he did lose, Mr. Bolsonaro never officially conceded defeat. His supporters set up camps outside military headquarters, calling on the military to overturn the election.

Then, in a violent episode reminiscent of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, they invaded and vandalized Brazil’s congressional, Supreme Court and presidential offices just days after Mr. Lula was sworn in, hoping to provoke a military intervention.

Lawmakers in Congress have been mulling legislation that would pardon the rioters and, according to legal experts, possibly benefit Mr. Bolsonaro himself, enabling him to hold elected office again.

But, as Mr. Bolsonaro’s legal troubles have piled up, there are signs that his political alliances may be fraying. After days of silence, one of Mr. Bolsonaro’s most prominent allies, Tarcísio de Freitas, the governor of São Paulo, spoke out to defend the former president but stopped short of echoing his sharp criticisms of the investigation and the judiciary.

This signals that the country’s political right may be moving to shield themselves and their movement from the crisis facing Mr. Bolsonaro, Mr. Martins Filho said.

“No one is saying they are splitting with Bolsonaro,” he said. “But there are a lot of people willing to leave him standing alone.”

Lis Moriconi contributed research.

Iran Declares It Is Doing More Nuclear Enrichment After I.A.E.A. Rebuke

Iran said Friday it would begin operating new machines to enrich more uranium, which could bring it closer to having a weapon. The move came in response to a censure by the International Atomic Energy Agency for failing to cooperate fully with atomic inspectors.

The announcement did not say how many of the machines began spinning, nor how much uranium they will produce. But Western experts said Iran’s act could initiate a significant escalation in the moves and countermoves between Tehran and the U.N. nuclear inspectors based in Vienna, who have struggled for decades to keep the nation from getting the means to make an atom bomb.

Iran will activate “a substantial number of advanced centrifuges of various models,” which are able to produce highly enriched nuclear fuel, read a joint statement from Iran’s Foreign Ministry and its Atomic Energy Organization. It condemned the censure as “politicized and destructive,” saying it undermined “the positive momentum” achieved between Iran and the I.A.E.A.

Behrouz Kamalvandi, a spokesman for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, said Friday in an interview with media in Iran that the country began accelerating its enrichment right after the order was announced. “We immediately started,” he was quoted as saying. “We will significantly increase enrichment.”

Having a supply of highly enriched uranium fuel is just one step of many it would take to build a deliverable atom bomb. Other crucial steps include turning the material into a metallic sphere and making arrays of explosive detonators, and may take many more months to complete.

Late Thursday in Vienna, the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency voted 19 to 3, with 12 abstentions, for Iran’s censure. The move could lead to penalties against Tehran, including new economic sanctions. The agency sees the censure step as exercising its mandate to try to keep the world’s peaceful nuclear programs from crossing lines that would let them make warheads.

The technical aspect of the current impasse involves Iran’s enrichment of uranium to a purity of 60 percent — very close to the level needed for a weapon. Iran had offered to freeze its enrichment at that level if the censure move was abandoned. It is now racing ahead.

Critics objected to the freeze, arguing that Iran could restart nuclear fuel enrichment quickly. The country already has enough material in its stockpile to rapidly make fuel for four or five nuclear weapons. Iran insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. But uranium enriched to 5 percent is used to fuel most civilian nuclear reactors, while the purity level must be raised to roughly 90 percent for atom bombs.

Iran agreed to give up much of its enriched uranium stock in 2015 under an international accord, but that fell apart in 2018 after President Donald J. Trump said the deal was inadequate for curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions and regional influence.

Then, in early 2021, Iran began a push to raise its enrichment levels to 60 percent. That level is considered quite threatening. As the purity level rises, the tricky process of enrichment becomes far easier and requires fewer centrifuges. In other words, it’s much less complicated to get to 90 percent purity from a starting point of 60 percent than from 30 or 20 percent.

“The higher the concentration, the easier it gets,” said Houston G. Wood III, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Virginia who specializes in nuclear enrichment.

In an interview, David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks nuclear proliferation, said Iran had “put in place a very large capacity” to enrich uranium “and they’re now expanding their use of it.”

The basic measure of Iran’s capacity for making nuclear fuel is its number of centrifuges — tall machines that spin at supersonic speeds to raise concentrations of the rare form of uranium needed to fuel reactors and atom bombs. That process is known as enrichment.

Mr. Albright said Iran has installed 19,000 centrifuges at its main enrichment plants, based at its Natanz and Fordo sites. The Fordo plant is inside a mountain to shield it from aerial attack. All the country’s major nuclear sites are ringed by barbed wire and antiaircraft guns. As of earlier this week, Mr. Albright added, 5,200 of the installed centrifuges were in a standby state — deployed and ready to go but not yet enriching.

The quick Iranian response to the censure, Mr. Albright said, is undoubtedly throwing some unknown number of those thousands of idle machines into action.

“They already have a huge amount of activity,” he said. “Now they’re adding to that.” Mr. Albright said his group laid out the centrifuge numbers and other Iranian nuclear developments in a report published Thursday.

In July, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Iran’s breakout time — the period of rapid enrichment needed to make enough weapon-grade material for a single nuclear weapon — “is now probably one or two weeks.” His estimate appeared to be one of the shortest breakout estimates that American officials had ever made in public.

Mr. Albright has estimated that if Tehran pulled out all the stops, it could make a crude atom bomb in about six months.

Israel Is Not an I.C.C. Member. How Can the Court Prosecute Israeli Leaders?

The arrest warrants issued this week by the International Criminal Court for leaders of Israel and Hamas, for crimes it accuses them of committing in Gaza, offer important insights into both the extent of the court’s jurisdiction and the limits of its power.

Here is what to know about the court’s legal reach, as it seeks the arrests of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel; his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant; and the chief of Hamas’s military wing, who may or may not be still alive.

More than 120 countries have joined an international treaty, the Rome Statute, and are members of the court. The court, based in The Hague, in the Netherlands, was created more than two decades ago to prosecute crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide and the crime of aggression.

The court has accused Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant of using starvation as a weapon of war, among other charges, in the conflict with Hamas in Gaza. And it accused Muhammad Deif, a key plotter of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel, of crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, sexual violence and hostage taking.

Powerful countries, including Russia, the United States and China, do not recognize the authority of the court. They have not ratified the Rome Statute, do not honor international warrants issued by the court and would not turn over their own citizens for prosecution.

Neither Israel nor Gaza are members of the court. But while many nations do not recognize a State of Palestine, the court has done so since 2015, when leaders of the Palestinian Authority, which controls much of the West Bank, signed on.

Although Gaza has been controlled by Hamas since 2007 and the militant group does not recognize its subjugation to a Palestine state, the court ruled that it has jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories of Gaza, the occupied-West Bank and East Jerusalem.

“I would argue it makes Hamas actions even more susceptible to I.C.C. jurisdiction because Hamas has demonstrated its role as the governing authority of that part of the State of Palestine, and, thus, with such authority comes responsibility, including for the commission of atrocity crimes,” said David Scheffer, a former U.S. ambassador and a chief negotiator of the statute that established the court.

Critical to the court’s power, its jurisdiction can extend beyond member states. The Rome Statute empowers the U.N. Security Council, acting under U.N. Charter, to refer crimes of atrocity committed in any country — member of the international court or not — to the legal body for investigation.

The Security Council referred Sudan to the court in 2005 over the humanitarian situation in Darfur, and Libya in 2011 though neither country is a member of the court.

Experts said that, given the current tensions among the Council’s five permanent members (Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States), it was unlikely that the Council would unanimously refer an individual to the court for prosecution anytime soon.

“Given the dysfunctional character of the U.N.S.C. in recent years, it is unlikely any such proposed referral of any particular situation in the world would survive a veto,” Mr. Scheffer said.

Yes. Russia is not a member of the court, but in 2023 it issued an arrest warrant for the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, over Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which is not yet a member but granted the court jurisdiction and invited it to investigate. Ukraine is on track to become a member of the court in 2025.

The court also issued arrest warrants for Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the former president of Sudan, and Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the former leader of Libya. Neither country is a member of the court.

In 2017, the court’s prosecutor began to investigate allegations of war crimes in Afghanistan, including any that might have been committed by Americans. In response, Washington imposed sanctions on and revoked the visa of Fatou Bensouda, the court’s chief prosecutor at the time. The court later dropped its investigation.

While the court’s reach may be virtually universal in theory, its power is ultimately in the hands of its members.

The court cannot try in absentia those accused of crimes and has no mechanism to make defendants stand trial. It relies on member states to act as enforcers and to detain suspects before they can stand trial in The Hague. Not all member states, however, abide by the agreement.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary said on Friday that he had invited Mr. Netanyahu to visit his country, which is a member of the court, and that he would overlook his formal obligation to act on the court’s arrest warrant.

In September, Mr. Putin visited Mongolia, another member, without being arrested.

Mr. al-Bashir visited South Africa, which is also a member, to attend the 2015 African Union summit. But he left hastily to escape impending orders from a local court.

With Mr. Deif, it is unclear if he is dead or alive. Israel announced in August that it had killed him in an airstrike in southern Gaza that killed dozens of Palestinians, although Hamas has yet to confirm his death.

Terms of Proposed Lebanon Cease-Fire Begin to Take Shape, Officials Say

After weeks of deadly Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon and punishing combat between Israeli forces and the Hezbollah militant group, the contours of a potential cease-fire agreement appear to be taking shape, according to several regional and U.S. officials briefed on the ongoing diplomacy.

The officials cautioned that critical details around implementation and enforcement needed to be worked out and that disagreements could still scupper any deal. But some cited reasons for cautious optimism. The officials, from Lebanon, Israel, neighboring countries and the United States, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive and evolving negotiations.

The proposed agreement calls for a 60-day truce, during which Israeli forces would withdraw from southern Lebanon and Hezbollah fighters would pull back to the north of the Litani River, which runs roughly parallel to the Lebanon-Israel border, some of the officials said.

During that time, the Lebanese Army and a U.N. peacekeeping force would ramp up their deployment in the border zone, and a new enforcement mechanism headed by the United States would ensure that Hezbollah and Israel remained outside the area.

Israeli airstrikes over the past two months have decimated Hezbollah’s leadership, severely degraded its military capabilities and displaced hundreds of thousands of the group’s Shiite Muslim followers. That has pushed the group’s remaining leaders, and their backers in Iran, toward interest in an agreement that could stop further damage, according to officials who speak with the group.

In a video address on Wednesday, Hezbollah’s new leader, Naim Qassem, said his group had made some comments on the proposed agreement, showing that “we have agreed to this path of indirect negotiation.”

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Hezbollah’s two conditions, he said, were that an agreement would stop all Israeli attacks on Lebanon and preserve Lebanese sovereignty.

“We’ll see what the result is,” he said.

On the Israeli side, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under pressure to return tens of thousands of Israelis to their homes after evacuations from the north, fleeing Hezbollah rocket and missile fire and fearing cross-border infiltrations by Hezbollah fighters.

Israel’s military, which invaded Lebanon seven weeks ago, says it has destroyed much of Hezbollah’s military infrastructure in the border area, and officials are encouraged that the group appears to have dropped its previous insistence that a Lebanon cease-fire coincide with a similar truce in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, a Hezbollah ally.

Israel says it has destroyed many of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles, but the group has kept firing barrages of shorter-range rockets, sometimes as many as 100 per day. Ending Hezbollah’s ability to launch such rockets, which are easier to hide than large missiles, is a major challenge, so a truce could be the best way to end the threat they pose to northern Israel.

The war began last year when Hezbollah began striking Israel in solidarity with Hamas after that group’s deadly surprise attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. For many months, the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah remained largely confined to the border zone. But since September, Israel has drastically escalated the fight, extensively bombing Hezbollah strongholds across Lebanon, assassinating many of the group’s leaders and sending troops across the border.

Seeking to broker the agreement is Amos Hochstein, a senior envoy from the Biden administration, who visited Lebanon and Israel this week to negotiate with officials on both sides.

Since American officials cannot meet with Hezbollah, which the United States considers a terrorist organization, Mr. Hochstein’s main interlocutor in Lebanon is Nabih Berri, the speaker of Parliament and a close Hezbollah ally. The key officials representing Israel in the talks include Mr. Netanyahu and Ron Dermer, the prime minister’s trusted confidant and minister of strategic affairs.

Before leaving Beirut on Wednesday, Mr. Hochstein told reporters that unspecified “progress” had been achieved and that he had coordinated his negotiations with the incoming Trump administration. That appeared to be an effort to reassure the warring parties that an agreement negotiated by a lame duck administration would not be overturned after President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office in January.

The key issues that remain unresolved revolve around implementation, the officials said. The proposed agreement is based on a United Nations Security Council resolution passed after the last major war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, which stipulated that the only military forces allowed in southern Lebanon would be the Lebanese Army and a U.N. monitoring force called UNIFIL.

But in the 18 years since that war ended, those forces failed to prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding and expanding its military infrastructure in the south, which includes tunnels, bunkers and weapons stores. Officials tracking the current talks acknowledged the shortcomings of this setup but said there were no realistic alternatives to deploy on the ground.

The proposed solution, the officials said, is a new oversight committee led by the United States to monitor truce violations. It remains unclear which other countries might participate in this mechanism and how it will function, although there appears to have been no discussion of a direct American military role. Israel has sought freedom to intervene against any Hezbollah activity it may detect in southern Lebanon, a demand the Lebanese side would likely resist.

If the truce holds though the 60-day period, negotiators hope that it would become permanent, an eventuality that, it if occurs, would likely happen under the Trump administration.

A senior Israeli military official said three weeks ago that Israeli forces were close to achieving the goal of taking out Hezbollah’s infrastructure in the 2.5-mile strip abutting the border, diminishing the threat of any Oct. 7-style infiltration of Israel from the north. Expanding the campaign would further strain Israel’s already stretched reserve forces.

American intelligence officials have also assessed that the Israeli operations against Hezbollah were far more successful than Washington had expected, taking out vital military and political leaders throughout the chain of command. They also believe that Israel has vastly diminished Hezbollah’s ability to launch long-range strikes on Tel Aviv and other major Israeli cities.

But Israeli officials acknowledge that only a cease-fire deal will stop the daily rocket attacks on northern Israel, maintain the military achievements without having to keep Israeli boots on the ground, and allow the evacuees from the north to return home.

U.S. officials say they are confident that Israel appears to be more eager to reach a cease-fire agreement in Lebanon than in Gaza, based on Israel’s engagement in the Lebanon talks and a realistic assessment of Israel’s military options.

But Hezbollah’s persistent rocket fire will prevent the return of Israelis to the north, the officials said, and they believe that Israel’s negotiators understand that the easiest way to stop them is a cease-fire agreement.

Adam Rasgon and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem and Michael Crowley from Washington.

‘This Helps Netanyahu’: Israelis Rally Around Leader Over Warrant, for Now

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The more Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is cast as an international pariah, the more many Israelis appear to embrace him.

The arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court on Thursday for Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip spurred a wave of outrage and condemnation across Israel’s political spectrum.

“It is embarrassing to see Netanyahu and Gallant in the same place as Muammar el-Qaddafi, Slobodan Milosevic, Ratko Mladic and several African dictators,” wrote Sima Kadmon, a political columnist and longtime Netanyahu critic, in the Friday editions of the popular Yediot Ahronot newspaper. Still, she added, “the allegations of anti-Israel-ism are understandable. Perhaps even antisemitism.”

Despite deep domestic polarization, analysts said, most Israelis were likely to rally around Mr. Netanyahu’s repudiation of the court’s decision, which he denounced as “antisemitic” for “falsely accusing” the democratically elected prime minister of Israel.

“This helps Netanyahu,” said Mitchell Barak, an Israeli pollster who worked as an aide to Mr. Netanyahu in the 1990s, portraying him as “the lonely man standing against all the evil in the world.”

“It turns him into the victim he likes to be, the person fighting for Israel’s rights,” Mr. Barak said, adding that Israelis have been largely unified in their support for the war.

The warrants came as Mr. Netanyahu’s domestic image has eroded in recent months and as international censure has grown over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where more than 44,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to local health officials who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Public trust in Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership plummeted after the surprise Hamas-led assault in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killed about 1,200 people, making it the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust and plunging the region into a long war.

Many Israelis have accused him of prolonging the war in Gaza for political reasons: to keep his right-wing governing coalition together and to remain in power even as he battles corruption charges in an Israeli court.

Yet, most were likely to reject the international court’s decision.

Mr. Netanyahu is also probably not losing any sleep over the warrants, according to a recently retired Israeli government official who worked on issues related to Israel’s international affairs for years and requested anonymity to be able to speak frankly.

For one thing, the United States, Israel’s most important ally, has rejected the court case against Israeli leaders. For another, Israel is not a member of the international court and does not recognize its jurisdiction in Israel or Gaza.

“Do I have some issues with how this war has been conducted? Absolutely,” said Thomas R. Nides, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel in the Biden administration. “That said,” he added, “I think the I.C.C. decision is outrageous.”

The reaction to the warrants has underscored the gulf between widespread Israeli perceptions of the war in Gaza and the way it is viewed from the outside.

Few Israelis have publicly expressed empathy for Gaza’s civilians, blaming Hamas for their suffering. And with most of the country’s 18-year-olds drafted for mandatory military service in the so-called people’s army and with many serving in the reserves into middle age, most Israelis find it hard to imagine the soldiers as war criminals.

Israelis are aware that international warrants could yet be served against officers and soldiers, adding to their animus toward the court. But at the same time, they are largely insulated from the antipathy toward Israel abroad.

“Internally, we are in a bubble,” said Mazal Mualem, an Israeli political commentator for the Middle East news site Al-Monitor and the author of a biography of the Israeli leader, “Cracking the Netanyahu Code.”

For Mr. Netanyahu, Ms. Mualem said, this is “another war to fight.” She added, “This won’t harm Netanyahu; it will strengthen him with his own base on the right.”

Even his political opponents are saying what most of the Israeli public appears to be thinking.

“Israel is defending its life against terrorist organizations that attacked, murdered and raped our citizens,” Yair Lapid, the centrist leader of Israel’s parliamentary opposition, wrote on social media on Thursday, adding, “These arrest warrants are a reward for terrorism.”

The warrants come at a turbulent time for Mr. Netanyahu and Israel. The country is on the brink of a potential cease-fire deal over the conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon, while about 100 hostages, at least a third of whom are assumed to be dead, remain in Gaza.

Mr. Netanyahu recently fired Mr. Gallant as defense minister because of differences over the continuation of the war in Gaza and domestic policies, further undermining trust in the government.

Mr. Netanyahu’s office has also been increasingly scrutinized over a series of investigations focused on the mishandling of intelligence material. On Thursday, Israeli prosecutors charged one of his aides with leaking classified information on Hamas in a way that prosecutors say was likely to harm national security and put people in life-threatening danger at a time of war.

Next month, Mr. Netanyahu is expected to take the stand in his own corruption trial. He has been charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate but interrelated cases being heard in parallel. He has denied any wrongdoing in the cases, which center on accusations that he arranged favors for tycoons in exchange for gifts and sympathetic news coverage for himself and his family.

Some Israeli critics say Mr. Netanyahu contributed to the international court’s decision to issue arrest warrants by preventing the establishment of an independent Israeli commission of inquiry, with a panel headed by a judge, to examine the government’s failures on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s conduct in the war.

Instead, eager to stave off any personal blame toward Mr. Netanyahu for those failures, and with the time approaching for him to testify in his corruption cases, Mr. Netanyahu’s supporters, perhaps emboldened by the Trump victory, have doubled down on their attacks against Israel’s judicial system. They’ve fed into the notion that Mr. Netanyahu is being persecuted by liberal forces at home and abroad.

“Since the election of Trump, the gloves have come off,” said Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Israelis expect the new Trump administration to be more accommodating toward the Israeli government, the most right-wing and religiously conservative in the country’s history.

Ms. Talshir added that Mr. Netanyahu’s depiction of the international court as antisemitic might only widen the chasm between Israel and much of the rest of the world.

Notwithstanding the widespread Israeli rejection of the decision to issue warrants, sympathy for Mr. Netanyahu may wane in the longer term, some analysts say.

Being a “diplomatic persona non grata” is not a good look for a prime minister, said Mr. Barak, the pollster, especially given that Mr. Netanyahu’s outsize international stature was once one of his electoral calling cards.

Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant face no risk of arrest at home because of the warrants. They could, however, be detained if they were to travel to one of the court’s 124 member nations, which include most European countries but not the United States.

Even flying to the United States could be risky should someone on board, say, require urgent medical treatment, forcing an emergency landing along the way.

Referring to the new limits on Mr. Netanyahu’s ability to travel abroad, Mr. Barak said: “You can’t be a prime minister on Zoom.”

Israel Strikes Across Lebanon After Ordering Evacuations of Southern Towns

Israel pressed on with its bombardment of Lebanon on Friday after issuing widespread evacuation warnings in the country’s south, as its conflict with Hezbollah militants showed no sign of abating despite a U.S.-led push for a cease-fire.

The Israeli military launched “a series of raids” on the Dahiya, the area near Beirut that is in effect controlled by Hezbollah, a military spokesman, Avichay Adraee, said on Friday afternoon. The area, once home to a large civilian population, has been a frequent target of Israeli strikes since the war began and has been hit especially hard in recent days.

Other strikes, which came as Lebanon celebrated its independence day, hit near the southern port city of Tyre, after calls by the Israeli military for civilians to evacuate entire towns in the area and flee more than 20 miles north.

Lebanon’s health ministry said two separate Israeli strikes in the south had killed five paramedics.

Lebanon’s health system has sustained 126 attacks this year that have killed 223 health workers and injured 183 others, Abdinasir Abubakar, the U.N. World Health Organization’s representative in Lebanon, told reporters on Friday. The majority of these casualties have occurred in attacks on ambulances, he said.

Analysts say Israel’s ramped-up strikes across Lebanon are intended to pressure Hezbollah into agreeing to a cease-fire on terms that are favorable to Israel. Amos Hochstein, the Biden administration’s point man in the quest to end the war, discussed the terms of a possible deal with Israeli officials on Thursday during a visit to Israel.

U.S. and Israeli officials have provided few details in public about the terms of a deal. An Israeli official said on Friday that there was “cautious optimism” in Israel about the prospect of finalizing the terms in the coming days. A Lebanese official briefed on the talks said that the ball was in Israel’s court, and that Lebanon’s government remained “realistic” that a cease-fire could still fail to materialize. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.

Mr. Hochstein earlier this week held two days of discussions with Lebanese officials in Beirut, which he said had made progress. Hezbollah’s leader, Naim Qassem, said that Hezbollah had responded to the U.S. proposal and that a truce depended on the “seriousness” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

But Israel and Hezbollah have both pledged to keep fighting during the negotiations, and the violence appears only to have intensified.

Bachir Khodr, the head of the Baalbek-Hermel governorate in eastern Lebanon, said Israeli strikes had killed nearly 50 people in his province on Thursday. The attacks struck more than a dozen towns and villages, he said on social media, describing it as some of the most violent bombardment of the war.

At least 10 of those killed were from the village of Flaoui, Lebanon’s health ministry said. The state-run news agency reported that children were among the dead in that village.

Hussein Awada, a driver who fled his home in the Dahiya weeks ago, said he had returned to the area on Friday to collect some money from a friend. “I spent all I have,” he said.

Unable to afford cellphone data, he was unaware that Israel had issued an evacuation warning for the neighborhood, and he escaped just minutes before a building was leveled in an Israeli strike, he said. The human rights group Amnesty International has criticized the evacuation warnings as inadequate, in part because they are issued only on social media.

“I passed by it almost every day,” he said of the building that was hit. “It’s a business center, as far as I know. Doctors. Lawyers. Travel agencies.”

Israel began an intensified military campaign against Hezbollah in September, nearly a year after the group began firing rockets into Israel in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza, which like Hezbollah is backed by Iran. The conflict has killed more than 3,500 people in Lebanon and displaced almost a quarter of the population. It is now the bloodiest conflict inside Lebanon since the country’s 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990.

The fighting in southern Lebanon appears to have escalated in recent days as the Israeli military has conducted deeper raids into Lebanese territory. Hezbollah said on Friday that it had repeatedly attacked Israeli troops near Khiam, a large southern town where Israel has made a renewed push over the past week.

In Chamaa, another town in the south where Israel has been conducting deeper incursions, the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, said four peacekeepers from Italy were injured when its base in the town came under fire for the third time in the past week.

The base was struck by two rockets, which UNIFIL said were “likely launched by Hezbollah or affiliated groups.”

Here are other developments:

  • Gaza hospital: The Israeli military struck Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza overnight, injuring six medical workers, destroying the hospital’s main generator and damaging water tanks, the Gaza Health Ministry said. The hospital, one of the last that is still functioning in the north of the territory, has been struck repeatedly during a weekslong Israeli offensive there, according to the health ministry and doctors who work there. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

  • Aid workers killed: The United Nations said that at least 281 aid workers have been killed worldwide in 2024, more than recorded in any other year. It said the war in Gaza was driving the numbers higher and had cost the lives of at least 10 aid workers so far this month.

Adam Rasgon contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva.

As Ukraine Fires U.S. Missiles, Putin Sends a Chilling Message

In many ways, President Vladimir V. Putin seems to be winning.

Russian forces are pushing ahead in Ukraine. President-elect Donald J. Trump is returning to the White House. War fatigue is spreading across Europe. North Korean troops have boosted the ranks of his army.

And yet on Thursday, Mr. Putin appeared weary, threatened and newly aggrieved as he took his bellicose threats against his Western adversaries to a new level.

Even with the prospect of a friendlier American administration around the corner, he has found himself struggling anew to confront perhaps the biggest failure of his war: Russia’s inability to deter the West from providing colossal amounts of military aid to Ukraine.

As a result, Mr. Putin is bringing Russia closer to a direct conflict with the United States than at any point in decades. He announced Thursday evening that Russia had struck Ukraine with a new intermediate-range missile, one with nuclear capabilities, using a televised speech to cast the West as an aggressor that left Moscow with no choice but to respond.

On Friday, Mr. Putin told a meeting of military leaders that Russia would continue using and begin regular production of the new missile.

Two months from now, Mr. Trump’s second presidency could give Mr. Putin the chance to strike a peace deal with Ukraine that he could portray as a victory. But until then, people who study the Kremlin say, Mr. Putin is intent on driving home the chilling message that America risks nuclear war as it expands its support for Kyiv.

“The Russian side has clearly demonstrated its capabilities,” Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said on Friday. “The contours of further retaliatory actions, if our concerns are not taken into account, have also been quite clearly outlined.”

Capturing the mood, one of Russia’s most influential security hawks, Sergey Karaganov, a political scientist, published an article on Thursday warning that Russia risked “ripping defeat from the jaws of victory.” To prevail over the West, he argued, the Kremlin needed to step up the threat of nuclear weapons being used.

“Russia has started to win in the fight against Western aggression in Ukraine,” Mr. Karaganov wrote. “But it’s early and dangerous to relax. The fight is only beginning.”

Ever since he launched his invasion in February 2022, Mr. Putin has mostly been careful to avoid direct military conflict with NATO, even as Western countries poured modern weaponry into Ukraine that killed tens of thousands of Russian soldiers.

But on Thursday, he said in the most explicit terms yet that he was ready for such an escalation: Russia was “entitled,” he said, to strike the military facilities of countries “that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.”

The main reason for that shift appears clear: President Biden’s recent decision to allow Ukraine to strike deep into Russian territory with American-provided missiles that have a range of 190 miles. That was followed by a similar decision by the British government.

While Ukraine’s present stock of Western missiles is not sufficient to change the course of the war, Mr. Putin appears to fear that the West could provide Ukraine with more powerful, longer-range missiles in the future.

“From that point onward,” Mr. Putin said Thursday, referring to Ukraine’s missile attacks this week, “the regional conflict in Ukraine provoked by the West has assumed elements of a global nature.”

But some analysts see a second reason Mr. Putin may feel prepared to take bigger risks now: Mr. Trump’s looming return to the White House.

After all, Mr. Putin’s threats about a “global” war dovetail with Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about Mr. Biden risking World War III. So Mr. Putin — who quickly praised Mr. Trump after he won the election — may believe that taking more aggressive steps now could help him strike a favorable deal once Mr. Trump is inaugurated.

“I don’t see him being concerned about ruining his chances for a deal with Trump — rather, quite the opposite,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “Trump took the position that Biden’s policies are leading to World War III, and what Putin is doing confirms this.”

Mr. Biden long resisted allowing Ukraine to strike deep into Russia with American missiles, to Ukraine’s great frustration, amid concern about Mr. Putin’s response. In September, Mr. Putin said that such a move would put his country “at war” with NATO, for the first time defining a specific “red line” that he was warning the West not to cross.

This week, the Biden administration crossed it, citing Mr. Putin’s own escalation of the war this fall by bringing thousands of North Korean troops into the fight.

Biden administration officials calculate that the risk of escalation by Mr. Putin diminished with the election of Mr. Trump.

But in Moscow, some question that notion. A former senior Russian official who remains close to the Kremlin said “no one knows” if a deal with Mr. Trump is really possible. But “a threat after Biden’s decision has already emerged,” he added, “so we have to respond.” He spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive Kremlin deliberations.

American officials “are overestimating both themselves and the significance of their agenda for others,” said Dmitri Trenin, a hawkish specialist on security policy at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, suggesting Mr. Putin is not so concerned about who holds power in Washington. “Putin has his schedule and his strategy, and he will follow them.”

Still, Mr. Putin has repeatedly signaled that he is interested in a negotiated settlement, as long as he is able to keep the land Russia has captured in Ukraine and to extract political concessions, like a guarantee that the country won’t join NATO.

He has often pointed to a draft treaty that Ukrainian and Russian negotiators hammered out in the first months of the invasion in 2022, in which Ukraine would have declared itself “permanently neutral” and accepted limits on the size of its army.

Russia may be “quite cynical and skeptical” about the prospects for a deal after Mr. Trump takes office, said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. “But they still recognize that they need a deal eventually.”

Ukrainian and Western officials contend that Mr. Putin is simply looking for a deal only on his terms, tantamount to capitulation.

The 2022 negotiations between Russia and Ukraine fell apart amid disputes over how the West could protect Ukraine from another Russian invasion in the future.

That issue — the shape of “security guarantees” for Ukraine — is likely to loom as the most complicated factor in any renewed talks after Mr. Trump returns to the White House, more important than how much Ukrainian territory Russia is allowed to keep control over.

Until then, conditions appear ripe for further escalation — because Russia and Ukraine are jockeying for better negotiating positions before Mr. Trump takes office, and because Mr. Putin appears determined to deter a further expansion of Western aid to Ukraine that could bring the fighting deeper into Russian territory.

“We’re in an escalatory spiral,” Mr. Charap said. Separate from any preparation for future negotiations, he added, that spiral “is a sort of dynamic of its own.”

Orban Invites Netanyahu to Hungary, Flouting I.C.C. Arrest Warrant

Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, Europe’s perennial rule-breaker and a champion of national sovereignty, said on Friday that he had invited Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, to visit his country and would ignore an International Criminal Court arrest warrant against the Israeli prime minister.

Hungary, unlike the United States, is a signatory to the court and thus formally obliged to act on its warrants. But Mr. Orban, in a letter to Mr. Netanyahu, a copy of which was released by the Israeli prime minister’s office, said he was “shocked” by the international court’s “shameful decision” and promised that the ruling would have “no impact whatsoever on the Hungarian-Israeli alliance and friendship.”

Inviting Mr. Netanyahu to visit, he said that Hungary “will ensure your safety and freedom.”

Mr. Orban’s vow to protect Mr. Netanyahu from arrest made Hungary the first European Union country to openly flout the I.C.C. ruling.

The arrest warrants issued Thursday against Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense chief Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip have put many countries in an uncomfortable position. Many are supporters of the court in general, but also allies of Israel.

This is particularly true for Germany, where a desire to separate itself from the horrors of the Holocaust during Nazi rule has made it wary of criticizing Israel and its leaders.

Steffen Hebestreit, the German government’s main spokesman, said in a statement Friday that the country was “one of the biggest” supporters of the international court, noting that Germany had helped create the I.C.C. statutes under which the arrest warrants were issued. But as “a consequence of German history” it has “a unique relationship with and a great responsibility for Israel,” he said.

Asked to clarify his written statement, Mr. Hebestreit said at a news conference in Berlin on Friday that given Germany’s past, he would not expect the country’s police to carry out the arrests if it ever came to it. “It is difficult for me to imagine that we carry out arrests in Germany on this basis,” he said.

Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, had earlier said that Germany abides “by the law at national, European, and international level” but added that the question of whether the Israelis would be arrested was “theoretical” as they were not in the country.

Britain and France both reaffirmed the court’s standing but stopped short of saying whether they would arrest Mr. Netanyahu if he crossed their borders. One of the countries clearly promising to enforce the arrest warrant should Mr. Netanyahu visit was Slovenia, which in June officially recognized a Palestinian state.

Ireland and Spain, both of which also recognized a Palestinian state this year, took the same firm line.

Mr. Orban appeared to stand alone in his unequivocal response from the other side, and Mr. Netanyahu, in a statement, thanked him for his “moral clarity” and for “standing on the side of justice and truth.”

Mr. Orban has often been accused by critics of stoking antisemitism by casting the Hungarian-born Jewish financier George Soros as the global puppet master behind liberal causes. But the Hungarian leader has been one of Israel’s most stalwart allies in Europe, embracing Mr. Netanyahu as a kindred spirit in step with his own view that countries should not bow to outside pressure.

The arrest warrant against the Israeli leader, Mr. Orban told Kossuth Radio, was “fundamentally wrong” and an “outrageously brazen” political decision that would only lead to “the discrediting of international law” and “add fuel to the flames” of conflict in the Middle East.

“I will guarantee him that if he comes the International Criminal Court ruling will have no effect in Hungary,” Mr. Orban told the state radio station.

The arrest warrants for Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant amount to the first time that leaders of a modern Western-style democracy stand accused of war crimes by the global tribunal.

The court also issued a warrant for the arrest of Hamas’s military chief, Muhammad Deif, accusing him, too, of crimes against humanity, though he may be dead.

Mr. Orban, who presents himself as a maverick in the mold of the United States President-elect Donald J. Trump, has a long record of breaking ranks with his European allies and defying what he views as anti-democratic judicial overreach by domestic and international tribunals. Just days after Hungary in July assumed the European Union’s rotating six-month presidency and adopted the slogan “Make Europe Great Again,” Mr. Orban dismayed fellow leaders by flying to Moscow to meet President Vladimir V. Putin upending Europe’s policy of trying to isolate the Russian leader.

Peter Kreko, the director of Political Capital Institute, a research group in Budapest, described Mr. Orban’s defiance of the I.C.C. as a “continuation and expansion of his anti-establishment logic” and a gesture to not only Mr. Netanyahu but also to Mr. Trump, who shares his anti-establishment views and strong support for Israel.

Mr. Orban, he said, sees rocking the boat as “his trump card” and “he uses it as much as he can,” no matter what the risks are “for a small country that could benefit from the protection of international law in certain aspects.”

Europe’s top court this week began hearing a case against Hungary on child protection legislation that the European Union says equates pedophilia with homosexuality and constitutes a “massive and flagrant violation” of European laws.

Hungary sees the case before the European Court of Justice as another example of what Mr. Orban, speaking at meeting this month with European leaders, scorned as “judicial activism” that undermines the will of voters by allowing judges to override decisions taken by their elected representatives.

Some other European leaders have voiced reservations about the I.C.C. warrants against Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant, including Prime Minister Petr Fiala of the Czech Republic, which, like Hungary, is a firm ally of Israel. Mr. Fiala said the court’s move undermined its authority because it “equates the elected representatives of a democratic state with the leaders of an Islamist terrorist organization.”

But Mr. Fiala and others said they would abide by their commitments as signatories of the international treaty that established the I.C.C.

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin and José Bautista from Madrid.

A Prominent Figure in Canada’s Trucker Protests Is Found Guilty

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Through his social media influence and his many videos, Pat King rose to become one of the most prominent figures in protests that paralyzed Canada’s capital for over a month, contesting coronavirus restrictions.

Now, more than two years later, an Ottawa judge on Friday found Mr. King guilty of five charges involving mischief and disobeying a court order.

Mr. King’s case is among several high-profile trials of protesters accused of organizing the protests and urging others to participate.

In September, two men were sentenced to just over six years in prison for public mischief and firearm possession for their roles in a protest in Coutts, Alberta, a border town where the police recovered a cache of weapons.

Verdicts are still pending in the trials of two other protest organizers, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, for their roles in the Ottawa demonstrations.

Mischief, which in Canada’s criminal code generally refers to damage to property or disruption, carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. Mr. King’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. King, who lives in Red Deer, Alberta, and had described himself as an investigative journalist, recorded and streamed his arrest in February 2022, and remained in jail for about five months after a judge was persuaded that he was a risk of continuing his protest activities.

He was eventually released in July 2022, but about a year later was taken back into custody briefly for violating his bail conditions by posting on social media.

The protests gridlocked downtown Ottawa for about four weeks and inspired demonstrations in other major cities, including Toronto, and standoffs at border crossings in Windsor, Ontario and Emerson, Manitoba, that disrupted the flow of trade between the United States and Canada.

They were called the “freedom convoy” by some organizers because many of the protesters and their leaders were truckers initially angered over vaccination mandates for cross-border travel at the height of the pandemic.

While social media played a central role as a tool for organizing the demonstrations and attracting participants, Mr. King’s lawyers argued that he was not a key figure, but went to Ottawa as a lone citizen to protest peacefully and exercise his right to free expression.

Much of the prosecution’s case against Mr. King was based on more than 30 videos from his social media feeds.

In one, he said he found it “hilarious” that nearby residents were unable to sleep because protesters kept honking vehicle horns.

In others he can be seen signing autographs and posing for photos with other protesters near Canada’s Parliament. “You are the reason why we’re here,” a supporter tells him on camera in one video, according to the CBC. “We drove five hours yesterday to get here.”

Mr. King, in one social media post, urged people to gather in Ottawa and to “honk those horns, let the heavens hear you.”

During the trial, prosecutors said that Mr. King was responsible for persuading 60 to 70 protesters — most of them driving pickup trucks outfitted with large Canadian flags — to effectively cut off Ottawa’s airport by driving slowly along its access roads.

While vaccine mandates helped spark the demonstrations, the ire of protesters shifted from general fatigue over Canada’s restrictive public health orders to blanket resentment against the policies of the ruling Liberal Party and its leader, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

He became yet more unpopular after invoking the Emergencies Act, a rarely used legal tool that the government argued was needed to clear about 400 trucks from the area surrounding Parliament Hill. The truckers had been honking their horns and blocking the area to get the attention of lawmakers.

The emergency order enabled the authorities to restrict travel, ban gatherings and temporarily freeze hundreds of protesters’ bank accounts.

Ian Austen contributed reporting from Ottawa.