The New York Times 2024-11-28 00:11:05


Live Updates: Lebanon Sends Troops to Support Cease-Fire as Thousands of Civilians Head South

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Here is the latest on the cease-fire.

The Lebanese Army said it was sending more forces to southern Lebanon on Wednesday as a U.S.-backed cease-fire began to take effect between Israel and Hezbollah militants, and as thousands of Lebanese displaced by the deadliest war between the two sides in decades began to return to areas ruined by Israeli strikes.

Bumper-to-bumper traffic jammed roads leading out of Beirut, the capital, as people sought to make their way back to devastated towns and villages in southern Lebanon. Suitcases, mattresses and blankets were stacked on the roofs of cars moving south, even as Israel’s military warned civilians against immediately returning to some of those areas and declared a curfew over much of southern Lebanon until Thursday morning.

Under the agreement, which was mediated by the United States and France, Israel will withdraw its forces from Lebanon over the next 60 days; Hezbollah will move its fighters north of the Litani River, which runs roughly parallel to the Israel-Lebanon border; and the Lebanese military will send more troops to the country’s south.

Lebanese military convoys were seen on roads in southern Lebanon early Wednesday, as the country’s armed forces said in a statement that the army was “reinforcing its deployment in the sector south of the Litani and extending the state’s authority in coordination with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon,” or UNIFIL, an international peacekeeping force made up of about 10,000 civilians and soldiers from 50 countries.

But many questions remained about the durability of the truce, which was underscored when Israel’s military shelled two villages in southern Lebanon, Khiam and Kfar Kila. Asked about the shelling, the military said in a statement that its soldiers had opened fire after identifying a vehicle in “a zone prohibited for movement” in Lebanon, forcing it to turn around. It was not immediately clear where the incident had taken place.

The fighting since last October displaced more than a million people. It intensified in recent months as Israel killed Hezbollah’s longtime leaders, wiped out much of its weapons stockpiles and invaded southern Lebanon. Israel’s military continued its intense bombardment of areas it called Hezbollah strongholds until the last hour before the cease-fire took effect.

Hezbollah has long wielded considerable power in Lebanon, both as a political party with representation in Parliament and ministers in the government and as a military force that is not under the state’s control.

Here is what else to know:

  • Biden’s Gaza push: President Biden said on social media that the United States would “make another push” in the coming days for a cease-fire in Gaza, where a truce between Israel and the militant group Hamas has proved much harder to reach. He said the cease-fire with Hezbollah “brings us closer to realizing a future I’ve been pushing for my entire presidency where the Middle East is at peace, prosperous, and integrated across borders.”

  • Israel’s aims: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed the deal on Tuesday night and argued that a truce would allow Israel to rebuild its weapons stockpiles while it works to isolate Hamas, the Hezbollah ally Israel is fighting in Gaza. He also said it would allow Israel to focus on the threat posed by its regional adversary, Iran.

  • Displaced Israelis: The cease-fire agreement elicited mixed emotions from some of the tens of thousands of displaced residents of northern Israel who have been moving between hotels, rentals and friends’ and relatives’ homes for more than a year. Some hailed the truce as a chance to return to their homes, while others worried that Hezbollah would be able to rearm and again threaten their communities.

  • Gazans feel forgotten: A lasting cease-fire has proved harder to reach in Gaza because the hostages held by Hamas give it more leverage in negotiations, and because any deal with the group could create political peril for Mr. Netanyahu. That leaves Gazans heading into a second straight winter of war with little hope of an end to Israel’s military campaign there.

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A Battered and Diminished Hezbollah Accepts a Ceasefire

For years, Hezbollah told the Lebanese that it alone could defend them from Israel. It boasted of powerful weapons and hardened commandos who would unleash deadly “surprises” if war broke out. And it assured its followers that a regional alliance of militias supported by Iran would jump in to support it in battle.

Those myths have now been shattered.

After 13-months of war, Hezbollah entered a cease-fire with Israel on Wednesday that it will struggle to convince anyone, other than its most fervent loyalists, is not in fact a defeat.

The 60-day truce, which is supposed to lay the groundwork for a more lasting cease-fire, comes after three months of withering Israeli attacks that have thrown the organization into disarray.

Deep intelligence infiltration enabled Israel to assassinate many senior leaders, including Hezbollah’s secretary general of 32 years, Hassan Nasrallah. Israel bombarded the group’s most loyal communities, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee and blowing up dozens of villages, ensuring that many people have no homes to immediately return to.

And Hezbollah’s fateful decision to consult no one before firing rockets at Israel, setting off a conflict that grew into Lebanon’s most deadly war in decades, has left it isolated in the country and in the wider Middle East, with Lebanon facing an exorbitant bill for reconstruction.

Many of Hezbollah’s opponents in Lebanon and elsewhere hope that the war has weakened it enough that it will no longer be able to impose its will on the country’s political system. But it remains unclear whether Lebanon’s other parties will now feel empowered to stand against it.

Hezbollah still has many thousands of fighters in Lebanon and commands the loyalty of a large share of the country’s Shiite Muslims.

After the cease-fire took hold on Wednesday, thousands of them poured back into Beirut’s southern suburbs to inspect the damage. Many honked their horns, waved yellow Hezbollah flags and said the fact that Hezbollah’s survival amounted to a win.

“Morale is high and there is victory,” said Osama Hamdan, who was cleaning out the shop where he sells water pumps. His family’s apartment had been damaged and would cost more than $5,000 to fix so they could move back in, he said.

“None of this is important,” he said. “What is important is the victory and the resistance. We are with them to the end.”

Yet Israel’s battering of Hezbollah will likely echo in Lebanon and across the region for years.

The group, which was founded in the 1980s with Iranian guidance to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, grew into the most powerful political and military force in Lebanon. It also served as a senior proxy force in the Iranian-backed network of anti-Israel militias known as the “axis of resistance.”

At Iran’s behest, it sent fighters to Syria to help quash a rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad, joined battles in Iraq against the Islamic State and sent experts to Yemen to enhance the capabilities of the Houthi militia there.

At the height of its power before the war, it was perceived to be such a military threat that Israel and the United States feared that a war with the group could set the region ablaze and devastate Israel.

But as the war escalated, Hezbollah’s allies failed to come to its aid in any effective way, undermining the credibility of Iran’s network. And Israel stepped up its attacks so fast — incapacitating thousands of Hezbollah members by detonating wireless devices and heavily bombing their communities — that Hezbollah found itself unable to mount a response close to what it had threatened for years.

Securing the cease-fire required the group to make serious concessions.

Hezbollah began firing on Israel in solidarity with Hamas after that group’s deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. For months, as Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire across the Israel-Lebanon border, Hezbollah’s leaders swore that the battle would end only when Israel stopped attacking Gaza.

That demand is nowhere to be found in the new cease-fire, leaving Israel free to continue its quest to destroy Hamas.

The new cease-fire also gives an oversight role to the United States, which Iran and Hezbollah have long railed against for its staunch support for Israel. Iran and Hezbollah would have only accepted such an arrangement if they were desperate to stop the war, analysts said.

“It indicates the degree to which Iran is concerned and worried about its new vulnerability and the incoming Trump administration,” said Paul Salem, a Lebanon expert at the Middle East Institute, a think tank.

Hezbollah’s presence on Israel’s border also deterred Israel from attacking Iran, because of fears that Hezbollah would bombard northern Israel in response. That threat has been drastically reduced, depriving Iran of a key defense. Iran and Israel have exchanged direct fire in recent months but Iran has yet to respond to Israel’s most recent bombardment, apparently to avoid a broader war.

“The shoe that hasn’t fallen yet is the obvious fact that there is a huge imbalance between Israel and Iran,” Mr. Salem said. “Israel can attack Iran at will and Iran cannot do the same.”

In Lebanon, too, Hezbollah is likely to face an array of economic, social and political challenges if the cease-fire holds.

For years, it justified its arsenal to other Lebanese as essential to defend the country against Israeli attacks. Now, it has not only failed in that defense but must answer to fellow Lebanese who are angry that it single-handedly dragged the country into a costly war that no one else wanted.

“Hezbollah is worried about the internal dynamics in the country,” said Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “There are many people who are not happy with what happened, and not just opponents but people in Hezbollah’s orbit.”

The war has displaced 1.2 million people, the government says, mostly Shiite Muslims from Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon, the southern suburbs of Beirut and the eastern Bekaa Valley.

Many of them are now sheltering in areas dominated by other sects — Sunni Muslims, Christians and Druse — many of whom do not want them to stay and fear that Hezbollah members could draw Israeli fire.

Caring for the displaced and repairing the war’s damage will pose a major challenge to Lebanon, whose economy was in crisis before the fighting began, and to Hezbollah, whose supporters have been the hardest hit.

A World Bank report this month estimated that nearly 100,000 housing units had been damaged or destroyed and about 166,000 people had lost their jobs in the war. It estimated the total physical damage and economic losses at $8.5 billion.

Given Iran’s own economic troubles and Hezbollah’s unpopularity with other Middle Eastern governments, it is unclear who may contribute funds for reconstruction, and with what conditions.

Nevertheless, Hezbollah’s remaining public figures have already begun marketing the cease-fire as a victory, saying their fighters kept firing missiles, rockets and drones into Israel and valiantly confronted the Israeli troops who invaded southern Lebanon.

“From now, we confirm that the resistance will remain, will continue, will carry on,” Hassan Fadlallah, a Lebanese parliamentarian from Hezbollah, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.

In fact, Hezbollah’s social service arms were already prepared to help the displaced return home, he said.

“When Israel’s aggression against Lebanon ends, then the resistance that was fighting in the battlefield will itself be working to help its people to return and to rebuild,” he said.



France suggests it would not immediately arrest Netanyahu, despite the I.C.C. warrant.

France’s foreign ministry strongly suggested on Wednesday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel would not immediately be arrested if he came to French territory, despite an International Criminal Court arrest warrant targeting him.

France has been cautious so far in its reaction to the arrest warrants the I.C.C. issued last week for Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense minister, and it did not say outright that Mr. Netanyahu would be free to travel to France. But it argued that I.C.C. rules on immunity applied to Mr. Netanyahu and would have to be considered by French authorities.

“France will comply with its international obligations,” the foreign ministry said in a statement. But it added that while the Rome Statute — the 1998 treaty that established the I.C.C. — demands “full cooperation” with the court, it also says that a state “cannot be required to act inconsistently with its obligations under international law with respect to the immunities of States not party to the I.C.C.”

The foreign ministry said: “Such immunities apply to Prime Minister Netanyahu and the other ministers concerned and will have to be taken into account should the I.C.C. request of us their arrest and surrender.”

The court’s warrant accuses Mr. Netanyahu of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Some countries, like Ireland, have taken a firm line on the arrest warrants, saying Mr. Netanyahu would be arrested on their soil. But others, like Italy, have also raised questions about the feasibility and legality of an arrest.

President Emmanuel Macron and Mr. Netanyahu have a strained relationship, but France has played a key role in trying to keep the conflicts in the Middle East from spiraling out of control, especially in Lebanon. The French foreign ministry’s statement came a day after France and the United States helped broker a cease-fire to stop the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

France and Israel are “two democracies committed to the rule of law” that have a “longstanding friendship,” the French foreign ministry said, adding that France would continue to work “in close cooperation” with Mr. Netanyahu and other Israeli authorities.

Some of Mr. Macron’s opponents criticized the foreign ministry’s position and suggested it was politically motivated, with the aim of securing the cease-fire in Lebanon.

“France has once again bowed to Benjamin Netanyahu’s demands, choosing him over international justice,” Marine Tondelier, the head of France’s Green party, said on X.

Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s foreign minister, said on Franceinfo radio on Wednesday that “France is very attached to international justice” and that “France, as always, will apply international law.”

But Mr. Barrot did not directly answer when asked if Mr. Netanyahu would be arrested on French soil, and he also said that the Rome Statute provided “immunity for certain leaders.”

“The final decision rests with the judicial authorities,” he added — suggesting that Mr. Macron’s government would let French courts rule on the validity of the arrest warrant before potentially enforcing it.

French officials have not publicly laid out which parts of the I.C.C.’s founding treaty were applicable to Mr. Netanyahu’s situation. The foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.

Article 27 of the Rome Statute says that it applies to all officials, including heads of state or government, and that “immunities or special procedural rules which may attach to the official capacity of a person, whether under national or international law, shall not bar the Court from exercising its jurisdiction over such a person.”

But Article 98 of the statute says that the I.C.C. “may not proceed with a request for surrender or assistance” that would require a state to “act inconsistently with its obligations under international law” relative to the diplomatic immunity of a person.

It was not immediately clear whether France believed that the same legal reasoning would apply to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Putin is the target of an I.C.C. arrest warrant tied to the war in Ukraine, and Russia, like Israel, is not a member of the I.C.C.

But French authorities voiced full-throated support for the arrest warrant against Mr. Putin when it was issued last year, calling it a “landmark” decision and adding that “no one responsible for crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine, whatever their status, should escape justice.”

Philippe Dam, the E.U. director for Human Rights Watch, said on X that the ministry’s statement about Mr. Netanyahu was “absurdly insane.”

“Does this also apply to Russia’s Putin??” he asked, adding that French officials were “weakening France’s commitments to justice and its credibility on the world stage.”

The Lebanese Army said it had started to deploy additional forces south of the Litani River, as the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah takes hold. “Specified military units are moving from several regions to the sector south of the Litani, where they will take up their positions accordingly,” it said on social media. The Lebanese Army, which is funded in part by the U.S., is set to play a key part in enforcing the truce, although many Israelis doubt that it will act vigorously against Hezbollah.

Lebanese military vehicles were seen traveling in a convoy through southern Lebanon hours after the cease-fire agreement came into force. Under the 60-day agreement, the Lebanese Army is expected to move troops into the south to enforce peace, as Hezbollah and Israeli forces withdraw from the area.

The Israeli military declared a curfew in southern Lebanon from 5 p.m. today until 7 a.m. on Thursday. People north of the Litani river — which runs roughly parallel to the border with Israel and as much as 15 miles away from it — are prohibited from moving south, Avichay Adraee, an Israeli military spokesman, said on social media. Those already in the southern zone must remain where they are, he added. “We do not want to harm you — but our forces will not hesitate to engage with any forbidden movements in this zone,” Adraee said.

Residents of Metula, a heavily damaged Israeli town near the border with Lebanon, are visiting their homes for the first time in many months, with the military’s permission. Galit Docotorsh, whose house was hit by Hezbollah rockets, saw the destruction for the first time when she and her husband returned to collect warm clothing. “We heard gunshots during our brief visit today,” she said.

President Biden said on social media that in the coming days the United States would “make another push” to achieve a cease-fire in Gaza. He said the Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire “brings us closer to realizing a future I’ve been pushing for my entire presidency where the Middle East is at peace, prosperous, and integrated across borders.”

Gazans feel forgotten amid the cease-fire in Lebanon.

As a tenuous cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah began to take hold early Wednesday, some Palestinians in Gaza said they felt forgotten, nearly 14 months into a war that has shattered the enclave and killed tens of thousands of Gazans.

Announcing the deal on Tuesday, President Biden said he hoped it could pave the way to an end to the war in Gaza. But for months, cease-fire talks between Israel and the Palestinian armed group Hamas, which sparked the war with its deadly October 2023 attack on Israel, have stalled as Israeli airstrikes and shelling have continued to pound Gaza.

Palestinians there say they have lost hope that the war will ever end.

Majed Abu Amra, a 26-year-old displaced from his home and living in Deir al Balah in central Gaza, said he was frustrated that the international community had managed to secure a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, while Gazans were still trying to survive relentless Israeli bombardment.

“There is no global pressure to achieve an agreement here,” he said. “It is not only the occupation that is killing us — the world is complicit in what we are suffering,” Mr. Abu Amra added, referring to the presence of Israeli forces in Gaza.

“The blood of Gazans has become cheap,” he said.

A lasting cease-fire has proved harder to reach in Gaza because the hostages held by Hamas give it more leverage in negotiations, and because any deal with the group could create political peril for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

That leaves Gazans heading into a second straight winter of war. United Nations agencies have repeatedly warned that Gazans face a worsening crisis, with falling temperatures adding to the plight of hundreds of thousands living in makeshift shelters. The war in has displaced the majority of the enclave’s 2.2 million people, many of them multiple times.

“Another winter in Gaza. How to describe misery on top of a human tragedy?” Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, wrote on social media on Tuesday, renewing his pleas for a cease-fire in Gaza and for more humanitarian aid to be allowed into the territory.

Mohammed Ahmed, a 23-year-old businessman displaced from Gaza City to Deir al Balah with his family, said they felt “betrayed by the truce” reached between Israel and Hezbollah, which began attacking Israel in October 2023 in support of Hamas. He said he believed it would lead to an escalation of the bombardment in Gaza, as Israel’s military would intensify its focus there.

“We’re disappointed with this news because we will be alone in facing the occupation without anyone to support us or relieve the pressure from us,” he said.

Ahmed Al-Mashharawi, a 26-year-old father of two in northern Gaza, said he had similar fears.

“Last night it felt like an earthquake,” he said of the intensity of the Israeli airstrikes. “My children woke up from the bombardment and were terrified. I thought the cease-fire had happened and they had withdrawn the army from Lebanon and brought it to Gaza.”

Abdul Aziz Said, a 33-year-old social worker, said that he was glad a cease-fire had been reached in Lebanon, and that Hezbollah should never have started its hostilities in support of Hamas.

“I want to see war in Lebanon end, even though that might not be the best thing for the Gaza war, as Israel will be freed up to focus on Gaza,” he said. “But let’s hope lives can be saved in Lebanon at least.”

Rawya Ahmed Al-Nabih, a 42-year-old who has been displaced multiple times, also welcomed the news but said she saw no end in sight to the plight of Palestinians.

“We need the attention of all Arab countries and the whole world to turn to the tragedy of the Palestinian people, because our suffering has become enormous,” she said.

She said she hoped that “a cease-fire will be achieved in Gaza as well, because we have the right to live in peace like the rest of the peoples of the world.”

Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.

‘We can finally go home.’ The road from Beirut is packed with people returning to the south.

The road heading south from Beirut was packed with bumper-to-bumper traffic on Wednesday as people displaced from southern Lebanon made their way home on the morning the cease-fire took effect.

Suitcases, mattresses and blankets — the necessities people grabbed as they fled and what they received in shelters over the past two months — were stacked on the roofs of cars. Some people hung out of their windows, waving the yellow flags of Hezbollah.

At one bakery along the highway, employees gave out Lebanese flags and small cookies with tiny banners that said “Smile, better days are coming” to customers. Songs by the Lebanese singer Nouhad Wadie Haddad, known as Fairuz, blasted from the speakers.

“The songs we’re playing today are especially for this occasion,” Abdullah Daher, the manager of the bakery, Al Forno, said. “Even a week ago I couldn’t have imagined this war would end. Now, look, all these people are returning home.”

As people filled their carts, their sense of relief was mixed with nervous anticipation: Did they still have homes to return to? Would the temporary peace last?

Hanna Trad, 39, was displaced from her home in Maarakeh, a village in southern Lebanon, in late September and had spent the past two months in a school-turned-shelter in Beirut with her husband and three children. She heard that many of her neighbors had been killed in a bombardment and that the windows of her house were completely shattered. But as she made her way back on Wednesday her mind was not dwelling on that.

“We can finally go home. We’re so happy, thank God,” Ms. Trad said. “I didn’t think I would be able to go back home.”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.

Displaced Lebanese returned to the Hezbollah-dominated areas south of Beirut to find entire blocks turned to rubble and smoke still billowing after intense Israeli strikes on Tuesday.

Ismael Faris, 52, a postal worker, stood near the entrance to his apartment building surveying the destruction. “All of the glass, the window frames and the doors are gone,” he said. He didn’t think his family, including his wife and two kids, could return home because they didn’t have the money to rebuild. “There is no way we can come back now and there is no way we can find a new house,” he said.

Displaced Israelis ‘don’t know what we will be returning to.’

When Odie Arbel saw news reports that Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to a cease-fire, he felt a mix of relief and worry about the prospect of returning to Kibbutz Yiftah, just over a mile from the Israeli-Lebanese border.

He was excited about seeing the view of Mount Hermon from his home and the smell of grilled meat on his barbecue, he said, but he worried that the tight-knit community that existed before the war would be gone.

“We don’t know what we will be returning to,” said Mr. Arbel, 77. Families who left temporarily and enrolled their children in schools elsewhere, he noted, might choose to stay away permanently.

The cease-fire agreement has cast a light on what lies ahead for tens of thousands of displaced residents of northern Israel who have been moving between hotels, rentals and friends’ and relatives’ homes for more than a year.

It has made those residents wonder about the social fabric of their communities and whether they should return home at all. Some express worry that it is still not safe to go back, while others sound more hopeful.

Orly Gavishi-Sotto said that she, her husband and three daughters hoped to return to Hanita, a hilltop kibbutz with a view of the Mediterranean Sea, but added that she was worried the deal would leave Hezbollah in a position in which it can still threaten Israelis.

“Do I believe in UNIFIL and the Lebanese military? No,” Ms. Gavishi-Sotto, 46, said, referring to the United Nations peacekeepers and the U.S.-backed Lebanese armed forces, the entities that the agreement makes responsible for keeping Hezbollah out of the border region in Lebanon.

Referring to the aftermath of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict, she added: “When we tried that after the last war, Hezbollah armed itself and built tunnels. What will be different this time?”

Hezbollah started firing at Israeli positions in northern Israel more than a year ago in solidarity with Hamas, its ally that ignited the war in Gaza. In the succeeding months, Israel and Hezbollah exchanged cross-border fire, but Israeli forces exponentially increased their attacks against the Lebanese militant group in September and invaded southern Lebanon in October. Hezbollah responded by firing deeper into Israel.

The cease-fire deal calls for Israel to withdraw from Lebanon and for Hezbollah to move north, in effect creating a buffer zone between the two sides.

Avichai Stern, the mayor of Kiryat Shmona, a city near the border, criticized the agreement and predicted that many residents would elect not to return.

“I don’t dispute that we’ve achieved a lot in the war. But what happens the minute we withdraw?” Mr. Stern said in an interview late Tuesday. “They’ll return to the same place, just a minute from the border, with a clear line of sight — ready to conquer northern Israel.”

Mr. Arbel, however, said he believed that Israel would be making a mistake if its forces pushed deeper into Lebanon, risking becoming entangled in a war of attrition. The most important thing, he said, was whether Israel would act with force against any attempt by Hezbollah to reconstitute itself near the border.

“This is the main question now,” he said.

Lior Shelef, 42, a resident of Kibbutz Snir in the Galilee Panhandle, said the Israeli military had achieved as much as it could in Lebanon.

“We have accomplished what we came in to do,” he said. “Nothing matters more to me than bringing my family back to Snir, back to our home.”

Still, he said that his family would not return to the kibbutz immediately, and he predicted that it would take at least a few months to make the transition back.

Idan Ishach Erez returned months ago to Betzet, a moshav, or cooperative village, just over a mile from Lebanon, but she said that she hoped the cease-fire would finally bring quiet for her family.

“We would like to hear the birds chirping outside, not rocket sirens,” said Ms. Ishach Erez, 42, an owner of a dried fruit factory.

Rockets and drones fired by Hezbollah have set off air raid sirens in northern Israel for more than a year, sometimes several times in the same town in a single day.

Ms. Ishach Erez said that she was conflicted about whether Israel had made the right decision in agreeing to a cease-fire.

“If you ask me in general, I think we still could have accomplished more,” she said. “But if you ask me as a mother, it was time to bring our kids home.”

Myra Noveck and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting to this article.

In a statement responding to the Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire deal, Hamas praised Hezbollah for its “pivotal role” in supporting “the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian resistance” and said it was committed to working with any efforts to achieve an end to the war in Gaza, based on terms it had previously agreed to. Hamas said those terms included a cease-fire, an Israeli withdrawal, the return of displaced people to northern Gaza and an exchange of Palestinian prisoners for hostages.

Will the Lebanon deal help break the deadlock over Gaza?

Buoyant after helping to forge a cease-fire in Lebanon, President Biden has declared that the deal could build momentum toward a similar breakthrough in Gaza.

But that assessment is premature, analysts said on Wednesday, because Israel and Hamas are much further from a deal in Gaza than Israel and Hezbollah were in Lebanon.

The truce in Lebanon was possible in part because Hezbollah — weakened by months of assassinations and battlefield losses — had lost its leverage at the negotiating table. On the Israeli side, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could afford to compromise because a deal in Lebanon would not significantly weaken his grip on power at home.

A breakthrough in Gaza is harder to achieve because Hamas still holds roughly 100 hostages, a significant trump card that allows the Palestinian group to maintain its hard-line negotiating position. Secondly, Mr. Netanyahu cannot compromise with Hamas because doing so might collapse his ruling coalition, forcing early elections.

Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition allies, many of whom hope to settle Gaza with Jewish civilians after the war, have threatened to abandon his alliance if the conflict there ends without Hamas’s complete defeat. When it came to Lebanon, Mr. Netanyahu was under less domestic pressure to deliver a knockout blow to Hezbollah, even if many Israelis remained deeply concerned about the long-term threat of the group.

“The Lebanon deal happened because Netanyahu wanted it and Hezbollah needed it — and because it wasn’t a deal breaker for Netanyahu’s coalition,” said Aaron David Miller, an American analyst and former negotiator in previous Mideast peace talks. “The Gaza deal is different,” he said.

Still, both U.S. and Israeli leaders expressed optimism that the Lebanon deal could be a turning point.

In announcing the Lebanon truce on Tuesday, President Biden said he hoped the agreement would lead to renewed momentum in parallel negotiations over Gaza. In Israel, Mr. Netanyahu suggested that Hezbollah’s withdrawal from the fight might isolate its ally Hamas and force the group to also back down.

“Hamas was counting on Hezbollah to fight by its side,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a recorded speech. “With Hezbollah out of the picture, Hamas is left on its own. We will increase our pressure on Hamas and that will help us in our sacred mission of releasing our hostages.”

But Palestinian analysts said that Hamas, having already weathered many serious setbacks over the past year, was unlikely to suddenly give up the hostages or relinquish power in Gaza. Though Hamas’s leadership has been decimated and ordinary Gazans yearn for an end to the suffering, the group’s remaining leaders are holding out for a deal that would allow the group to survive the war intact.

To that end, Hamas is expected to continue to push for an arrangement in which Israel permanently withdraws from Gaza, allowing the group to reestablish full control in the enclave.

“I really do not think the cease-fire in Lebanon will have any impact on Gaza,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a Palestinian political scientist displaced by the war. “There is no light at the end of the black tunnel for Gaza.”

In a televised address, Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, confirmed his government’s acceptance of the cease-fire deal and called on Israel to respect its terms. He did not name Hezbollah, which is supposed to withdraw its fighters from the south under the agreement, but said the government would support the Lebanese Army’s deployment there. “It is a new day, on which the page is turned on one of the harshest periods of suffering that the Lebanese have lived in their modern history,” Mikati said.

Vehicles overflowing with mattresses and personal belongings are streaming out of Beirut, following the roads south as families try to return to areas they fled when Israel’s offensive in Lebanon intensified.

The Israeli military said its soldiers opened fire after identifying a vehicle in “a zone prohibited for movement” in Lebanon, forcing it to turn around. It was not clear where the incident took place. The military has warned civilians against returning immediately to southern Lebanon, where Israeli troops are still stationed.

Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, said he had ordered the military to “operate aggressively” given the entry of some Hezbollah members into the area of Kfar Kila, a town in southern Lebanon. “Every Hezbollah member arriving in the forbidden zones should be arrested, and if they threaten Israeli forces they should be struck,” Katz’s office said in a statement.

Iran’s government said it welcomed the cease-fire that took effect this morning in Lebanon, and called for a similar deal in Gaza with Hamas. Israel and Iran, which backs both Hamas and Hezbollah, appeared to be on the brink of an all-out war last month.

Vehicles streamed into the neighborhoods south of Beirut after the cease-fire came into effect. Some passengers waved the yellow flag of Hezbollah while waiting in traffic.

Construction teams are beginning to repair and open roads in the Dahiya, the area just south of Beirut where Hezbollah is headquartered and which has been pounded by Israeli airstrikes in recent weeks. The once densely populated cluster of neighborhoods has been almost entirely abandoned in recent weeks.

Many who left the area are now vowing to return. Mohammed Awada, 52, fled with his two children to the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli in October. He says his Dahiya apartment was flattened in an Israeli airstrike, and that he would look for a new home in the area.

The Lebanese military called on displaced civilians to wait for Israeli soldiers to withdraw before returning to towns and villages in southern Lebanon. The military also warned about the dangers of unexploded ordnance in that region.

Hours after the cease-fire came into effect, displaced families began returning to southern and eastern Lebanon, the country’s state-run news agency reported. The Israeli military had warned earlier that people should not return immediately to southern Lebanon, where Israeli ground troops are still deployed.

What will U.N. peacekeepers do under the new truce deal in Lebanon?

A cease-fire deal to end the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon that went into effect on Wednesday morning in Lebanon relies in part on an international peacekeeping force already on the ground.

The organization, known as the United Nations Interim Peacekeeping Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL, is made up of about 10,000 civilians and soldiers from 50 countries. Its primary job is to monitor and report any violations of a 2006 cease-fire deal that ended the last war between Israel and Hezbollah and that will also provide the basic framework for the latest cease-fire agreement.

On Tuesday, in anticipation of a new deal, UNIFIL said in a statement that it supported a truce and would fulfill its mission “impartially,” noting that “responsibility for implementing the mandate rests with the parties involved.”

The force, which has been in Lebanon for more than four decades, has a stake in keeping the peace, beyond doing its job. Peacekeepers are in personal danger and have come under fire from both sides over the last two months of fighting.

On Tuesday, Israel kept up intense airstrikes in southern Lebanon, including in the town of Naqoura, where the peacekeeping mission is based. The UNIFIL spokesman, Andrea Tenenti, who was sheltering in a bunker as bombs pummeled the area, affirmed that the peacekeepers had no intention of leaving.

Last week, UNIFIL said four Italian peacekeepers had been injured by rockets that were “likely launched by Hezbollah or affiliated groups,” and it blamed “non-state actors” for an earlier strike that had injured four Ghanaians. In October, Israeli soldiers fired on UNIFIL members at an observation post, the group said. And earlier this month, the force accused the Israeli military of taking a series of “deliberate and direct actions” against peacekeepers and their positions.

“Despite the unacceptable pressures being exerted on the mission through various channels, peacekeepers will continue to undertake our mandated monitoring and reporting tasks under Resolution 1701,” UNIFIL said, referring to the 2006 truce deal.

The U.N. Security Council created UNIFIL in 1978 to monitor Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and help the Lebanese government restore security and authority after a three-month invasion by Israel. The incursion was partly in response to an attack in Israel by Palestinian militants based in Lebanon who had landed by sea and commandeered a bus, killing 35 Israelis and an American. When Israel withdrew, it handed control of southern Lebanon to a Lebanese Christian militia, and oversight was given to the U.N. peacekeeping force.

Resolution 1701 expanded the peacekeepers’ mandate. UNIFIL was to monitor the cease-fire; support the Lebanese Army, which is not a party to Hezbollah’s conflict with Israel; and help provide humanitarian assistance to civilians and displaced populations.

That deal called on Israeli troops to withdraw from southern Lebanon to an area in the Golan Heights below what is known as the Blue Line. Hezbollah was to withdraw north of the Litani River in Lebanon. The area in between would become a buffer zone that the peacekeeping force would monitor for violations by either party.

The latest deal is based on a similar arrangement, and it will still require UNIFIL to oversee and report violations. But there are new developments meant to address the failings of Resolution 1701, which was never fully put into effect, largely because the Lebanese Army did not or could not force Hezbollah — also a political party with significant power in the Lebanese government — out of southern Lebanon.

Among the new twists, an international committee, including two countries that helped broker the latest deal, the United States and France, will report any violations of the commitments that the countries have made in the latest agreement. Israel and Lebanon will report violations to both UNIFIL and this committee.

The agreement will “create the conditions to restore lasting calm and allow residents in both countries to return safely to their homes,” President Biden and President Emmanuel Macron of France said in a joint statement announcing the cease-fire on Tuesday. They pledged that their countries would “work with Israel and Lebanon to ensure this arrangement is fully implemented, and enforced, and remain determined to prevent this conflict from becoming another cycle of violence.”

Euan Ward, Eve Sampson and Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting.

In Beirut, residents took to the streets to celebrate the cease-fire, with some firing bullets into the air. Smoke still clung to the city’s skyline, a reminder of the heavy Israeli strikes that continued until 4 a.m.

Avichay Adraee, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said that Israeli forces remained inside southern Lebanon “as the cease-fire comes into effect and in accordance with its terms.” Adraee warned Lebanese displaced from the country’s south that they could not head back immediately. “We will update you when it is safe to return to your homes.”

As the 4 a.m. cease-fire took effect, the situation appeared relatively calm in Israel. There have been no new air-raid sirens in the country since before midnight. In past truces between Israel and militant groups, both sides have engaged in minor exchanges of fire at roughly the same time those agreements were set to go into effect.

How Israel’s conflict with Lebanon escalated into an intense war.

The cease-fire deal that is set to begin early Wednesday is intended to end more than a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, a conflict that has wrought vast displacement and destruction, particularly in Lebanon.

The Israeli military’s bombardment and ground operations in Lebanon have killed nearly 3,800 people there, according to the country’s health ministry. Over a million people, nearly a quarter of the tiny Mediterranean nation’s population, have also been forced to flee their homes.

For nearly a year after it began, the conflict appeared to be limited with casualties gradually rising as Hezbollah and Israel exchanged fire in a contest of wills adjacent to Israel’s war against a Hezbollah ally, Hamas, in Gaza.

Then, in September, Israel went on the offensive in Lebanon.

Exploding wireless devices

Israel’s offensive did not begin with tanks rolling over the border or fighter jets above Beirut, the Lebanese capital. Instead, it started in people’s pockets.

On a quiet Tuesday afternoon in mid-September, thousands of pager devices belonging to Hezbollah members began exploding across Lebanon, killing dozens of people and maiming thousands more. The country’s hospitals were swamped, with many of the patients women and children. The attack dealt a serious blow to Hezbollah’s rank-and-file fighters, incapacitating many.

The next day, walkie-talkies began exploding, causing more casualties and spreading panic. Many people began shutting off all manner of devices, including baby monitors, televisions and laptops.

Airstrikes on leaders

Days later, an Israeli airstrike targeted the Dahiya, the densely populated southern outskirts of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway. The strike, a rare case of an attack just miles from downtown Beirut, killed at least 37 people, among them more than a dozen Hezbollah commanders. One was Ibrahim Aqeel, the commander in chief of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit that Israel has accused of plotting an operation similar to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks.

Israel then unleashed a wave of airstrikes across Lebanon, attacking what it called Hezbollah weapons and ammunition stockpiles. The day of strikes, which experts called even more intense than Israel’s early bombing of Gaza, forced hundreds of thousands to flee the country’s south. By the day’s end, more than 500 people had been killed in Lebanon, making it the deadliest single day since the country’s civil war, which ended in 1990.

Then, in late September, an Israeli airstrike killed Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, a figure widely considered untouchable.

It was a tectonic shift for Lebanon: The most powerful man in Lebanese politics, who led the country’s most powerful military force for more than 30 years, was abruptly gone. The killing sent Hezbollah into disarray and thwarted a U.S.-French cease-fire proposal.

An Israeli invasion

With Hezbollah’s leadership decapitated and much of its arsenal destroyed, the Israeli military began a ground invasion of southern Lebanon on Oct. 1, targeting what it called Hezbollah military infrastructure in villages close to the border. It was the first such incursion by Israel into Lebanese territory in nearly two decades.

Days later, another Israeli strike killed Mr. Nasrallah’s expected replacement, Hashem Safieddine.

Since then, Israeli troops have fought a slow-moving offensive in a narrow stretch of southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah has fought with guerrilla tactics in response, killing dozens of Israeli soldiers and firing rockets at Israeli cities.

A rising civilian toll

The war has driven a humanitarian crisis in Lebanon, outpacing even the Israeli-Hezbollah war of 2006, the last major conflict between the two sides.

Nearly 3,800 have been killed in the current war, more than a quarter of them women and children, and over 15,000 others injured, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. The country’s embattled health sector has been pushed to the limit, with hospitals forced to shut down and more than 223 health workers killed, according to the World Health Organization.

The war has also left more than a million people displaced, created compounding crises and sometimes inflamed tensions in Lebanon’s fragile patchwork of disparate communities. For many in Lebanon, the risk of potential civil unrest is a pressing concern even after a cease-fire.

Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure has been devastated, too. Much of Beirut’s once bustling southern outskirts have been destroyed, entire towns have been razed, and even the country’s treasured antiquities have not been spared damage.

The World Bank estimated this month that the conflict had caused $8.5 billion in damage and losses to Lebanon, which was already reeling from an economic crisis.

Andrew Cuomo joins Netanyahu’s legal defense team.

Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York has joined a group of lawyers who are planning to defend Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for him.

Mr. Cuomo, who is considering running for mayor of New York City next year, said on Sunday that he was proud to work with other lawyers to support Mr. Netanyahu. Mr. Cuomo served as state attorney general from 2007 to 2010 and graduated from Albany Law School.

“This is a pivotal moment, and this is the moment when true friends stand shoulder to shoulder and fight for the state of Israel,” Mr. Cuomo said at an event in Manhattan held by the National Committee for Furtherance of Jewish Education.

Last week, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip. The court also issued a warrant for the arrest of Hamas’s military chief, Muhammad Deif, accusing him of crimes against humanity.

The prominent defense lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz said recently that he was putting together a “legal dream team” to defend Mr. Netanyahu in the “court of public opinion.” The group includes former U.S. attorneys general Michael Mukasey and William P. Barr.

The group will argue that “Israel’s actions in Gaza don’t violate any international law or laws of war over which the I.C.C. has jurisdiction,” Mr. Dershowitz said.

Mr. Cuomo served as governor of New York from 2011 until 2021, when he resigned amid a wave of sexual harassment allegations. A House subcommittee recently referred him to the Justice Department for potential prosecution, accusing him of lying to Congress about his involvement in a state Covid report on nursing home deaths. He denies all the allegations.

Mr. Cuomo is considering challenging Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted in September on federal corruption charges. Several prominent candidates have entered the race ahead of the primary next June.

news Analysis

Biden hopes to parlay the Lebanon cease-fire into a broader regional peace.

Finally, President Biden got his Rose Garden peace deal. It was not exactly the one he has been straining to land for most of the past year, but it was a breakthrough nonetheless — and, coming after a bitter election, a sweet moment of validation.

The question is whether the cease-fire in Lebanon that Mr. Biden announced on Tuesday will be the coda to his diplomatic efforts in the Middle East or a steppingstone to more sweeping agreements that could at last end the devastating war in Gaza and potentially even set the stage for a broader regional transformation.

If it holds, the Lebanon cease-fire by itself could make an important difference. It was designed to restore stability along the border between Israel and Lebanon, permitting hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians on both sides to return to their homes while providing a buffer zone to ensure Israeli security and offering an opportunity for Lebanon’s government to reassert control over its territory from a weakened Hezbollah.

But as he stepped out of the Oval Office into the Rose Garden on a sunny November day in the winter of his presidency to hail the agreement on Tuesday, Mr. Biden clearly had grander ambitions still in mind. “It reminds us that peace is possible,” he said. “I say that again: Peace is possible. As long as that is the case, I’ll not for a single moment stop working to achieve it.”

With just 55 days left in office, Mr. Biden is racing against the clock of history. He would prefer to be remembered as the president who set the Middle East on a path toward a lasting settlement of longstanding animosities than one who turned over a mess to his successor.

With the Lebanon accord in hand, Mr. Biden said he would now renew his push for a cease-fire in Gaza, working along with Egypt, Qatar and Turkey, and he called on both Israel and Hamas to seize the moment. He described the cataclysmic violence that Palestinians have endured in Gaza in more visceral terms than he typically has over the past 14 months of war.

“They, too, deserve an end to the fighting and displacement,” Mr. Biden said. “The people of Gaza have been through hell. Their world has been absolutely shattered. Far too many civilians in Gaza have suffered far too much.”

Mr. Biden laid most of the blame for the continuing fighting in Gaza with Hamas, which “has refused for months and months to negotiate a good-faith cease-fire and a hostage deal,” he said. But he also called on Israel, which “has been bold on the battlefield,” to now “be bold in turning tactical gains against Iran and its proxies into a coherent strategy.”

An end to the fighting in Gaza accompanied by the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas — including seven Americans, four of whom are believed to still be alive — would be a gratifying final accomplishment for Mr. Biden and his team. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has made it his highest priority for the final weeks of his tenure. Mr. Biden’s advisers Jake Sullivan, Jon Finer, Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein, along with the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, have all devoted much of the past year to the project.

At so many points along the way they thought they were on the cusp of a deal, only to have something blow it up — a new burst of violence, the targeted assassination of Hamas leaders, the killing of Israeli hostages. Yet they kept going back again and again, never giving up, perhaps naïve in the view of some, but certainly determined and relentless.

After so many close calls, it is hard to imagine that they could pull it off in the time they have left, especially if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel concludes that he would be better off waiting for President-elect Donald J. Trump to take office on Jan. 20. But Mr. Biden’s team insisted again on Tuesday that it was possible.

More elusive, yet endlessly attractive, for Mr. Biden is the broader realignment of the region represented by a long-sought agreement with Saudi Arabia that was derailed by Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, triggering the Gaza war. Even now, at this late hour, Mr. Biden said he might be able to nail down a deal to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia by providing American security commitments and civilian nuclear assistance to the kingdom and creating a credible pathway to a Palestinian state.

“I believe this agenda remains possible,” Mr. Biden said. “In my remaining time in office, I’ll work tirelessly to advance this vision for an integrated, secure and prosperous region, all of which strengthens America’s national security.” The chances seem remote, but if nothing else, he hopes he can set the table for the next administration to complete such a deal.

Administration officials said they were staying in touch with Mr. Trump’s team about their efforts. Mr. Hochstein briefed the president-elect’s national security advisers shortly after the Nov. 5 election and again in the past two days about the approach and came away feeling that the incoming team was supportive, according to a senior administration official who discussed the sensitive contacts on the condition of anonymity.

The official said that “the political and geopolitical stars both are aligned” for the Saudi deal, which would build on the normalization agreements that Mr. Trump helped seal between Israel and several smaller Arab nations during his first term. Mr. Trump has a close relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who has made clear he is eager for a deal if one can be reached.

In the meantime, the Biden team has work to do to ensure the success of the agreement it has now negotiated in Lebanon, which could easily unravel given the fraught history of the benighted Arab state. Under the agreement, fighting was to halt at 4 a.m. local time on Wednesday, and over the next 60 days Hezbollah and Israeli forces are to make phased withdrawals from southern Lebanon while the Lebanese Army moves in to ensure the peace.

“This is designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities,” Mr. Biden said. “What is left of Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations will not be allowed — I emphasize, will not be allowed — to threaten the security of Israel again.”

Mr. Biden said that the United States and France would work to ensure that the agreement was successfully enacted, but he repeated that no American combat troops would be involved in the effort. “We’re determined this conflict will not be just another cycle of violence,” he said.

That cycle has been hard to break. Among other things, the latest deal’s negotiators said that Israel would retain the right to respond to any new attacks by Hezbollah, raising the question of whether the cease-fire would really hold. Hezbollah is technically not a party to the agreement, but the Lebanese government ostensibly negotiated on its behalf.

The Biden team was mindful of the unsatisfying end to the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, when the international community brokered a cease-fire, only to essentially move on to other issues even as Hezbollah never really gave up its hold on the south. Mr. Biden’s aides said they had learned the lessons of 2006 and sought to craft this agreement to avoid the same pitfalls.

A “tripartite mechanism” created shortly after the 2006 war will be reformulated and enhanced to include France and to be led by the United States. The group will receive complaints about potential violations and work with the Lebanese Army to build its capacity to ensure security in the southern part of the country. A recently revived military technical committee will include other countries that can provide equipment, training and financial support for Lebanon’s security forces.

Mr. Biden in his televised speech on Tuesday made a point of guaranteeing that no American combat forces would be involved in securing the border. But officials separately said that noncombat American troops working out of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut could be involved in providing training and other support.

Those, of course, were important details, but they were details, best left to aides to describe. For a lame-duck president increasingly fading into the backdrop, the bigger picture loomed. Yes, his time at the top is coming to an end. Yes, his successor is now setting the tone. But for now, the Oval Office is still his. The final legacy is yet to be written.

It was almost possible to hear Mr. Biden trying to write it in the Rose Garden on Tuesday. “Today’s announcement,” he said, “brings us closer to realizing the affirmative agenda that I’ve been pushing forward during my entire presidency, a vision for the future of the Middle East where it’s at peace and prosperous and integrated across borders.”

Closer, perhaps. But not there, at least not yet.

Will Lebanon Deal Break Gaza Deadlock? Experts Doubt It

Will Lebanon Deal Break Gaza Deadlock? Experts Doubt It

Hamas is unlikely to compromise in Gaza, despite the decision by its ally, Hezbollah, to stop fighting. A deal in Gaza would also be harder for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.

Patrick Kingsley

Reporting from Jerusalem

Buoyant after helping to forge a cease-fire in Lebanon, President Biden has declared that the deal could build momentum toward a similar breakthrough in Gaza.

But that assessment is premature, analysts said on Wednesday, because Israel and Hamas are much further from a deal in Gaza than Israel and Hezbollah were in Lebanon.

The truce in Lebanon was possible in part because Hezbollah — weakened by months of assassinations and battlefield losses — had lost its leverage at the negotiating table. On the Israeli side, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could afford to compromise because a deal in Lebanon would not significantly weaken his grip on power at home.

A breakthrough in Gaza is harder to achieve because Hamas still holds roughly 100 hostages, a significant trump card that allows the Palestinian group to maintain its hard-line negotiating position. Secondly, Mr. Netanyahu cannot compromise with Hamas because doing so might collapse his ruling coalition, forcing early elections.

Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition allies, many of whom hope to settle Gaza with Jewish civilians after the war, have threatened to abandon his alliance if the conflict there ends without Hamas’s complete defeat. When it came to Lebanon, Mr. Netanyahu was under less domestic pressure to deliver a knockout blow to Hezbollah, even if many Israelis remained deeply concerned about the long-term threat of the group.

“The Lebanon deal happened because Netanyahu wanted it and Hezbollah needed it — and because it wasn’t a deal breaker for Netanyahu’s coalition,” said Aaron David Miller, an American analyst and former negotiator in previous Mideast peace talks. “The Gaza deal is different,” he said.

Still, both U.S. and Israeli leaders expressed optimism that the Lebanon deal could be a turning point.

In announcing the Lebanon truce on Tuesday, President Biden said he hoped the agreement would lead to renewed momentum in parallel negotiations over Gaza. In Israel, Mr. Netanyahu suggested that Hezbollah’s withdrawal from the fight might isolate its ally Hamas and force the group to also back down.

“Hamas was counting on Hezbollah to fight by its side,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a recorded speech. “With Hezbollah out of the picture, Hamas is left on its own. We will increase our pressure on Hamas and that will help us in our sacred mission of releasing our hostages.”

But Palestinian analysts said that Hamas, having already weathered many serious setbacks over the past year, was unlikely to suddenly give up the hostages or relinquish power in Gaza. Though Hamas’s leadership has been decimated and ordinary Gazans yearn for an end to the suffering, the group’s remaining leaders are holding out for a deal that would allow the group to survive the war intact.

To that end, Hamas is expected to continue to push for an arrangement in which Israel permanently withdraws from Gaza, allowing the group to reestablish full control in the enclave.

“I really do not think the cease-fire in Lebanon will have any impact on Gaza,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a Palestinian political scientist displaced by the war. “There is no light at the end of the black tunnel for Gaza.”

‘Mr. Every Man’: The 50 Others Accused in France’s Mass Rape Trial

The last of 50 men to be cross-examined in the rape of a drugged and naked Gisèle Pelicot stood before the judges in a white sweater and jeans.

Philippe Leleu: Single, no children, a dedicated weight lifter and professional gardener who, at 62, was nearing retirement when the police came knocking. His mother opened the door — they live beside one another, and since her stroke 10 years ago, they dine together and he spends most nights at her home.

“I never imagined I’d come before a court for him, never, never,” she told the judges recently.

Yet here he was, among the accused, standing in the crowded courtroom in the southern city of Avignon, part of a mass rape trial, now in its 12th week, that has deeply shaken France.

Ms. Pelicot’s ex-husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot, has pleaded guilty to drugging her for almost a decade to rape her, and offering her unconscious body up to strangers he met online. Prosecutors on Monday requested the maximum sentence for him: 20 years in prison.

He’s on trial with 50 other men — all but one charged with aggravated rape, attempted rape or sexual assault of Ms. Pelicot. The French media have dubbed them “Monsieur Tout-le-monde” — Mr. Every Man — because of how varied the men are, and how ordinary.

They are short, tall, flabby, lean, clean-shaven, bearded, bald and pony-tailed. All but 14 were employed, in jobs that reflect the spectrum of middle- and working-class rural France: truck drivers, carpenters and trade workers, a prison guard, a nurse, an I.T. expert working for a bank, a local journalist.

They range in age from 27 to 74. Just over two-thirds have children. Around 40 percent had criminal records, several for domestic abuse and two for rape.

There are few common denominators: Eighteen suffered from addiction to alcohol or drugs; the rest did not. Around a dozen reported being sexually abused as children. Some others, like Mr. Leleu, spoke of loving childhood homes.

“The profile of the rapist does not exist,” said Antoine Camus, one of Ms. Pelicot’s two lawyers, in his closing statement last week.

The men appeared before the court in groups of five to seven over 10 weeks — offering only small glimpses into each man’s life.

Mr. Leleu was the last person in the final group.

“I stopped thinking and I stopped having a connection with my brain,” explained Mr. Leleu, his short, wiry body weaving from side to side as he spoke.

Like dozens of the men who came before him, Mr. Leleu pleaded not guilty to raping Ms. Pelicot. In his defense, he said Mr. Pelicot told him she had taken the drugs herself.

“I’m sorry to Madame Pelicot for involuntarily participating in her suffering,” he said before squeezing back down on his bench.

Among the others in that group was Christian Lescole, 57, a firefighter and divorced father of two daughters. His new partner, with whom he had planned to open a dog kennel, told the court he was an amazing man. “I don’t think he’s capable of committing rape,” she said.

Mr. Lescole is among five of the accused who also face charges of possessing images of child sexual abuse. He has been in pretrial custody for four years.

“I have no future left. I spent my life protecting people. I never had a problem with justice before,” said Mr. Lescole. In contrast to many other defendants, he was relatively loquacious during his testimony.

Since the court case began in early September, Mr. Lescole has attended regularly, sitting in one of two prisoners’ boxes, often stroking his long beard while watching intensely. He was there in search of some existential answers, he said, “because this is not me. This doesn’t reflect my values. How did I get here?”

During the trial, he said he counted 18 men who’d said they’d been offered a drink by Mr. Pelicot after arriving at the Pelicots’ home. He now says he believes they’d all been drugged. He told the court he had no memory after stepping inside the bedroom.

“I have big doubts about my free will at that moment,” he said.

“Materially, I committed a rape,” he added. “But it was my body, not my brain.”

Joseph Cocco, 69, appeared before the judges as part of the same, final group. A retired manager of a beer company subsidiary, Mr. Cocco, 69, is one of only two defendants not charged with raping Ms. Pelicot. Instead, he has been charged with sexually assaulting her.

He is a father, cancer survivor and karate champion who led courses for the police. Like about half of the accused, Mr. Cocco was a swinger. He told the court he had started to swing with his former partner, the “love of my life,” who had recently left him after 23 years together. He said he was invited to the Pelicots’ home for a threesome, and Mr. Pelicot “never talked about rape or drugging his wife.”

That night, another accused man arrived around the same time. They both were captured naked by Mr. Pelicot’s camera, moving around Ms. Pelicot’s listless body. Mr. Cocco sat on the bed, stroked Ms. Pelicot’s backside — which he called a “libertine caress” — and went no further.

“At that moment, I heard snoring,” he said. “I posed the question — what is happening? Why is she not moving?”

When he did not receive answers, he left. But he didn’t call the police either. None of the accused did.

“I don’t accept that I victimized Gisèle Pelicot,” he said. “When you are trapped, you are really trapped.”

The final week included one of the youngest defendants: Charly Arbo, a laborer at a cement company. He was 22 when he first went to the Pelicots’ home in 2016. While most of the men admit to having gone to the home once, Mr. Arbo went six times. Police found 47 edited video clips of those visits on Mr. Pelicot’s electronic devices — two of which were watched by the court.

Stéphane Babonneau, another of Ms. Pelicot’s lawyers, said he struggled to understand how Mr. Arbo could “not admit this was rape.”

“He told me she was consenting,” he responded, staring wide-eyed at the judges, referring to Mr. Pelicot.

Mr. Arbo was reluctant to offer the court his personal story. Judges pulled answers from him like rusty nails from hard wood. Though psychiatrists described his upbringing as dysfunctional, Mr. Arbo defended his family as loving.

The court heard in one video Mr. Arbo and Mr. Pelicot discussing a plan to drug Mr. Arbo’s mother so Mr. Pelicot could come and rape her. Mr. Arbo said he felt pressured by Mr. Pelicot to offer someone he knew, and his mother “was the first thing that popped into my head.”

Mr. Pelicot gave him three sedatives, wrapped in tin foil, according to his testimony. But Mr. Arbo told the court that he threw them away. Police found very small traces of sedatives in a sample of his mother’s hair, but he has not been charged with drugging her.

“I never, never, never gave medication to my mother,” Mr. Arbo said.

Asked about their relationship, he said he loved her “like any son loves their mom, nothing special or bizarre.”

What Is Russia’s Oreshnik Ballistic Missile?

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The dust has settled in Dnipro, Ukraine, where investigators are analyzing the wreckage at a weapons factory struck by a new Russian intermediate-range ballistic missile last week. But the debate continues over the strategic impact of the missile, known as the Oreshnik, both on the battlefield in Ukraine and what it means for NATO states in Europe.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia touted the missile as an example of Russian technological prowess, built by a domestic military industry unimpeded by Western economic sanctions. Experts say it appears to share many features with other missiles that Russia has developed.

The Oreshnik is also capable of carrying nuclear weapons, at a time when Moscow has increased threats of nuclear war. It is still not clear what explosives, if any, the missile delivered in the strike on Dnipro.

Here’s what you need to know about the Oreshnik missile

  • Is it a new weapon?
  • How much damage did it do?
  • The nuclear threat

The Pentagon says the Oreshnik is a tweak of Russia’s RS-26 Rubezh missile, an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that has been tested since 2011.

The name Oreshnik means “hazelnut tree” — a potential reference to its sub-munitions, which resemble clusters of hazelnuts, said Timothy Wright, an expert on Russian missiles at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based research group.

“This system has been in development for a while,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies.

There are some physical differences between the Oreshnik and Rubezh missile systems. Wreckage from the crash site shows that the Oreshnik measured about three and a half feet in circumference, compared to nearly six feet for the Rubezh, according to Mr. Wright.

That might be because the Oreshnik is designed to fly shorter distances than the Rubezh. As an intercontinental ballistic missile, the Rubezh would effectively be able to reach targets anywhere on earth, experts said, while an intermediate ballistic missile like the Oreshnik would only be able to fly about 3,410 miles. That would allow it to reach most of Europe.

Despite the Oreshnik’s sub-ICBM range, Nick Brown, an analyst at Janes, the British-based defense intelligence firm, said it was the longest-range weapon to ever have been used in conflict in Europe.

Based on previous tests, experts believe the Rubezh can carry up to four warheads. Ukrainian officials said the Oreshnik carried six warheads, each with a cluster of six submunitions, in the strike on Dnipro. Ukraine said that Russia may have stockpiled as many as 10 Oreshnik missiles.

Submunitions on longer-range ballistic missiles are “quite unusual,” Mr. Wright said. But many missiles share some of the same technology. “You don’t reinvent the wheel every time you make a new missile,” he said.

The Oreshnik strike “resulted in damage to civilian infrastructure facilities and the infrastructure of the city of Dnipro in particular,” a Ukrainian security official told The Associated Press on Sunday. There were no deaths reported in the attack.

The weapons factory that was hit probably suffered no serious damage, Mr. Lewis said, based on satellite images taken after the attack.

“The damage to the facility is quite specific — no large explosions, just big holes punched in the roofs,” Mr. Lewis said in an interview. “It’ll inconvenience them, and probably put the factory out of operations for a few days.”

Ballistic missiles are propelled into the atmosphere by rockets before descending at high speeds because of gravity’s pull. That can make them very difficult for air defense systems to intercept, and near impossible if submunitions are released. A Janes analysis found that American missile systems like the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense could intercept the Oreshnik as it travels above the atmosphere, as could the Arrow 3 defense system used by Israel, but Ukraine does not have these systems.

Mr. Lewis and Mr. Wright each said that the Oreshnik warheads probably carried very small amounts of explosives or perhaps none at all, based on video images of the small blasts they caused on impact. Just the force of empty munitions crashing into the weapons factory at high speed could cause the types of explosions seen in the videos.

“Frankly, when you’re coming in at those speeds, inert warheads cause a heck of a lot of damage,” said Tom Karako, director of the missile defense project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

But Mr. Wright warned that clear pictures of the crash site are not yet available. “It’s really difficult for us to make a battle damage assessment at this time,” he said.

Experts said the Kremlin appeared to be using the missile launch to stoke fears that it could use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Mr. Putin has tried to establish a series of red lines for the United States and NATO, such as the use of American-supplied weapons to strike targets within Russia, but with limited success.

Days before the Oreshnik attack, the Biden administration gave Ukraine permission to fire deep-strike missiles known as ATACMS into Russia, infuriating Mr. Putin, who accused the United States of becoming an active combatant in Ukraine. Ukraine struck inside Russia with the missiles on Nov. 19, and Russia’s Oreshnik strike took place two days later.

The Oreshnik is “not about the battlefield significance — it’s about saber rattling,” Mr. Karako said.

But Mr. Lewis said that the Oreshnik also had a “real military capability” in Russia’s war in Ukraine, noting that targeting the weapons factory in Dnipro would inhibit Kyiv’s forces. “We’ll see how much damage it did, but I don’t think they did this just to make a point,” he said.

Russia’s state-run Tass news service reported that the Kremlin gave the United States a warning 30 minutes before the missile launch, as required under a 1988 agreement between the two countries, which requires notifications of the timing and location of missile tests.

“If the Russians hadn’t supplied notification, the Americans would have been exceedingly concerned about what the Russians just launched,” Mr. Wright said. “Because, you know, there has always been a nuclear shadow that’s overhanging this conflict.”

Pakistan Arrests Hundreds in Crackdown on Protests Backing Ex-Leader

Supporters of Imran Khan, the jailed former prime minister of Pakistan, who had marched on Islamabad leading to violent clashes with security forces were dispersed in a crackdown on Tuesday, with many fleeing the city. Four civilians were reported to have been killed by gunfire in the unrest, according to local media reports.

Thousands of protesters, led by Bushra Bibi, Mr. Khan’s wife, had gathered in the capital since Monday night. They vowed to stage a sit-in at a major town square near important government buildings, demanding Mr. Khan’s release. He has been in jail since last August on charges that his party claims are politically motivated.

Pakistan, an impoverished, nuclear-armed nation of 241 million people with a struggling economy, has been in a constant state of political turmoil since Mr. Khan’s removal from office in 2022 following a parliamentary no-confidence vote. Since then, he has accused the powerful military of orchestrating his removal and has led a protest campaign to reclaim power through public rallies.

The political crisis intensified after general elections earlier this year. Mr. Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, claimed victory in the elections and accuses the current civilian government of being a puppet of the military.

The crackdown by paramilitary troops and police began shortly before midnight on Tuesday. Authorities turned off streetlights at the protest venue and ordered nearby shops, cafes and markets to close. The protesters, most of whom had come from the neighboring Khyber-Pakhthunkwa province, quickly dispersed as security forces used tear gas and rubber bullets, officials said. Mr. Khan’s supporters claimed that security forces had opened fire on the protesters, which the security officials deny.

By 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi appeared before journalists at the protest venue and announced that the area had been cleared. Officials said at least 500 protesters were arrested.

Ms. Bibi and Ali Amin Gandapur, a political ally of Mr. Khan who has led previous protests, managed to evade arrest and escaped to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which is controlled by Mr. Khan’s party. Mr. Gandapur serves as its chief minister.

The protesters’ “hasty retreat,” as described by Dawn, one of Pakistan’s leading English dailies, surprised many and disappointed Mr. Khan’s supporters. For days, Ms. Bibi had vowed not to leave Islamabad unless her husband was released. “I will stay here till my last breath,” she declared in a speech earlier on Tuesday.

Tensions were high in the capital, with security officials ordered to use lethal force, if necessary, to protect key buildings. A day earlier, security officials said that three paramilitary troops had been killed during the unrest after being run over by a vehicle.

After the crackdown, Mr. Khan’s party called off the protest and accused security forces of killing dozens of protesters. The claim could not be independently verified and was denied by officials. Local media, citing hospital sources, reported that four civilians had died from gunshot wounds and dozens had been injured. Dozens of security officials were also injured in the clashes.

The country’s information minister, Attaullah Tarar, said that protesters had fled in disarray, leaving behind vehicles and even their shoes. “The miscreants had made big claims but failed,” he said.

On Wednesday, the authorities began removing roadblocks. The protest site was strewn with debris and trash, and several vehicles lay damaged. A truck used by Ms. Bibi had been burned to a char.

The political crisis has left Islamabad’s residents frustrated, with frequent protests and blockades disrupting daily life. Anticipating the protest, the authorities blocked major roads and suspended internet and cellular services in parts of the city. Schools, closed since Monday, are scheduled to reopen on Thursday.

Political analysts and rights groups condemned the violence and called for dialogue.

“The government and the opposition, the PTI, must immediately engage in purposeful political dialogue — both on the floor of the house and among political parties,” the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said in a statement. “It is high time they agree on a peaceful way forward instead of inciting their supporters and bringing the country to a standstill.”

Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States and now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a public policy think tank in Washington, echoed the sentiment. He noted that the political crisis had led to repeated conflicts.

“The solution to Pakistan’s problems lies in grand reconciliation among political parties and the state’s permanent institutions,” Mr. Haqqani said.

A Battered and Diminished Hezbollah Accepts a Ceasefire

news analysis

A Battered and Diminished Hezbollah Accepts a Ceasefire

Thirteen months of war left Hezbollah weakened, isolated and desperate for a way to stop the fighting.

Ben Hubbard

Reporting from Beirut

For years, Hezbollah told the Lebanese that it alone could defend them from Israel. It boasted of powerful weapons and hardened commandos who would unleash deadly “surprises” if war broke out. And it assured its followers that a regional alliance of militias supported by Iran would jump in to support it in battle.

Those myths have now been shattered.

After 13-months of war, Hezbollah entered a cease-fire with Israel on Wednesday that it will struggle to convince anyone, other than its most fervent loyalists, is not in fact a defeat.

The 60-day truce, which is supposed to lay the groundwork for a more lasting cease-fire, comes after three months of withering Israeli attacks that have thrown the organization into disarray.

Deep intelligence infiltration enabled Israel to assassinate many senior leaders, including Hezbollah’s secretary general of 32 years, Hassan Nasrallah. Israel bombarded the group’s most loyal communities, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee and blowing up dozens of villages, ensuring that many people have no homes to immediately return to.

And Hezbollah’s fateful decision to consult no one before firing rockets at Israel, setting off a conflict that grew into Lebanon’s most deadly war in decades, has left it isolated in the country and in the wider Middle East, with Lebanon facing an exorbitant bill for reconstruction.

Many of Hezbollah’s opponents in Lebanon and elsewhere hope that the war has weakened it enough that it will no longer be able to impose its will on the country’s political system. But it remains unclear whether Lebanon’s other parties will now feel empowered to stand against it.

Hezbollah still has many thousands of fighters in Lebanon and commands the loyalty of a large share of the country’s Shiite Muslims.

After the cease-fire took hold on Wednesday, thousands of them poured back into Beirut’s southern suburbs to inspect the damage. Many honked their horns, waved yellow Hezbollah flags and said the fact that Hezbollah’s survival amounted to a win.

“Morale is high and there is victory,” said Osama Hamdan, who was cleaning out the shop where he sells water pumps. His family’s apartment had been damaged and would cost more than $5,000 to fix so they could move back in, he said.

“None of this is important,” he said. “What is important is the victory and the resistance. We are with them to the end.”

Yet Israel’s battering of Hezbollah will likely echo in Lebanon and across the region for years.

The group, which was founded in the 1980s with Iranian guidance to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, grew into the most powerful political and military force in Lebanon. It also served as a senior proxy force in the Iranian-backed network of anti-Israel militias known as the “axis of resistance.”

At Iran’s behest, it sent fighters to Syria to help quash a rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad, joined battles in Iraq against the Islamic State and sent experts to Yemen to enhance the capabilities of the Houthi militia there.

At the height of its power before the war, it was perceived to be such a military threat that Israel and the United States feared that a war with the group could set the region ablaze and devastate Israel.

But as the war escalated, Hezbollah’s allies failed to come to its aid in any effective way, undermining the credibility of Iran’s network. And Israel stepped up its attacks so fast — incapacitating thousands of Hezbollah members by detonating wireless devices and heavily bombing their communities — that Hezbollah found itself unable to mount a response close to what it had threatened for years.

Securing the cease-fire required the group to make serious concessions.

Hezbollah began firing on Israel in solidarity with Hamas after that group’s deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. For months, as Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire across the Israel-Lebanon border, Hezbollah’s leaders swore that the battle would end only when Israel stopped attacking Gaza.

That demand is nowhere to be found in the new cease-fire, leaving Israel free to continue its quest to destroy Hamas.

The new cease-fire also gives an oversight role to the United States, which Iran and Hezbollah have long railed against for its staunch support for Israel. Iran and Hezbollah would have only accepted such an arrangement if they were desperate to stop the war, analysts said.

“It indicates the degree to which Iran is concerned and worried about its new vulnerability and the incoming Trump administration,” said Paul Salem, a Lebanon expert at the Middle East Institute, a think tank.

Hezbollah’s presence on Israel’s border also deterred Israel from attacking Iran, because of fears that Hezbollah would bombard northern Israel in response. That threat has been drastically reduced, depriving Iran of a key defense. Iran and Israel have exchanged direct fire in recent months but Iran has yet to respond to Israel’s most recent bombardment, apparently to avoid a broader war.

“The shoe that hasn’t fallen yet is the obvious fact that there is a huge imbalance between Israel and Iran,” Mr. Salem said. “Israel can attack Iran at will and Iran cannot do the same.”

In Lebanon, too, Hezbollah is likely to face an array of economic, social and political challenges if the cease-fire holds.

For years, it justified its arsenal to other Lebanese as essential to defend the country against Israeli attacks. Now, it has not only failed in that defense but must answer to fellow Lebanese who are angry that it single-handedly dragged the country into a costly war that no one else wanted.

“Hezbollah is worried about the internal dynamics in the country,” said Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “There are many people who are not happy with what happened, and not just opponents but people in Hezbollah’s orbit.”

The war has displaced 1.2 million people, the government says, mostly Shiite Muslims from Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon, the southern suburbs of Beirut and the eastern Bekaa Valley.

Many of them are now sheltering in areas dominated by other sects — Sunni Muslims, Christians and Druse — many of whom do not want them to stay and fear that Hezbollah members could draw Israeli fire.

Caring for the displaced and repairing the war’s damage will pose a major challenge to Lebanon, whose economy was in crisis before the fighting began, and to Hezbollah, whose supporters have been the hardest hit.

A World Bank report this month estimated that nearly 100,000 housing units had been damaged or destroyed and about 166,000 people had lost their jobs in the war. It estimated the total physical damage and economic losses at $8.5 billion.

Given Iran’s own economic troubles and Hezbollah’s unpopularity with other Middle Eastern governments, it is unclear who may contribute funds for reconstruction, and with what conditions.

Nevertheless, Hezbollah’s remaining public figures have already begun marketing the cease-fire as a victory, saying their fighters kept firing missiles, rockets and drones into Israel and valiantly confronted the Israeli troops who invaded southern Lebanon.

“From now, we confirm that the resistance will remain, will continue, will carry on,” Hassan Fadlallah, a Lebanese parliamentarian from Hezbollah, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.

In fact, Hezbollah’s social service arms were already prepared to help the displaced return home, he said.

“When Israel’s aggression against Lebanon ends, then the resistance that was fighting in the battlefield will itself be working to help its people to return and to rebuild,” he said.

Will Namibia’s Liberation Party Be the Next to Fall in Africa?

Voters in southern Africa this year have delivered blow after blow to parties that helped free their countries from colonialism. And on Wednesday, one of those parties, the South West Africa People’s Organization, or SWAPO, in Namibia is expected to face its toughest electoral test ever.

High unemployment, government corruption, a housing crisis and poor social conditions have all contributed to the unpopularity of SWAPO, which has governed the country since it gained independence in 1990.

In May, the African National Congress, the party that led the defeat of apartheid in South Africa, lost its absolute majority in Parliament for the first time since democracy took hold in that country 30 years ago. The party was forced to form a governing coalition with rivals.

In neighboring Botswana, the Botswana Democratic Party, which had governed since the country became independent 58 years ago, suffered a stunning setback in last month’s national election: It lost the presidency, going from being the largest party in Parliament to the smallest.

And while Frelimo, the party that has governed Mozambique since its independence in 1975, was declared the winner of its election in October, there are widespread allegations that it manipulated the vote to win. As a result, weeks of protests across the country have led to dozens of deaths.

These setbacks could spell trouble for SWAPO, though the party may well maintain its electoral dominance.

Here’s what you need to know:

  • The youths are becoming a rising electoral force.
  • Economic conditions are at a breaking point.
  • Could SWAPO buck the trend?
  • Here’s what else to know about the race.

Africa has the youngest population of any continent, and as these young people become voters, analysts say they are disrupting politics as usual.

“The euphoria of liberation movements is rapidly disappearing among the Gen Z generation,” said Oscar Van Heerden, a member of the African National Congress and political analyst in Johannesburg. “They simply are not interested in talking about former glories and former oppressions. Their reality today is that they can’t find jobs.”

Former liberation movements must rely on aging, mostly rural supporters, who lived through the freedom struggle and have more loyalty to them.

In Namibia, more than 40 percent of the 1.4 million registered voters are 35 or younger. In order to woo the youth vote, SWAPO has taken to hiring popular South African pop artists to perform at their rallies. The party’s presidential candidate, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, also handpicked a 22-year-old to be among the candidates for Parliament.

Even though youth voters are strong in numbers, their electoral effect is not guaranteed.

“Young people are generally less likely than their elders to vote,” said Rosevitha Ndumbu, a researcher at the Institute for Public Policy Research in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. “Although young people may register to vote, registration and actual voting are two different processes.”

There comes a time, political analysts in the region say, when the nostalgia of conquering colonizers gives way to the reality that some people are unable to feed themselves.

“The citizens for the most part were in what we call a honeymoon,” said Ndumba Kamwanyah, a lecturer in public policy at the University of Namibia. “But there is that threshold of 30 years when people realize that, ‘No, my situation did not change. I’m still the same just like how I was before independence.’”

Namibia faces a severe housing shortage, with a backlog of 300,000 units. A third of the country was unemployed, according to the most recent labor survey from 2018. Although updated numbers were scheduled to be released this year, they have been delayed until 2025, raising suspicion that the government is doing so to avoid bad press before the election. (Namibia’s statistics agency has denied the allegation.)

Many Namibians are also dismayed over what they feel is the government’s failure to make land ownership affordable to most of the population. Most land is in the hands of wealthy and politically connected elites.

Mr. Kamwanyah, the lecturer, said there are a few specifics in this race that could give SWAPO an edge.

For one, there are 14 opposition candidates running for president, and they could split the vote, clearing the way for SWAPO to win.

Also, the main opposition candidate, Panduleni Itula, was still a SWAPO member when he ran as an independent candidate in the last election five years ago and won about 30 percent of the vote. But Mr. Kamwanyah said a lot of those voters might have been casting a protest ballot against Hage Geingob, the former president who died this year. With Mr. Itula having left SWAPO to form his own party, the Independent Patriots for Change, those voters may return to SWAPO, Mr. Kamwanyah said.

Finally, SWAPO has been hosting huge rallies in rural areas in the northern part of the country, which is its stronghold, suggesting that it could still have a very strong base of support.

The outcome will be significant no matter what.

Namibians will either elect a female president for the first time (Ms. Nandi-Ndaitwah is the first woman to lead the ticket for SWAPO) or a member of an opposing party for the first time.

The election is expected to be a two-horse race between Ms. Nandi-Ndaitwah, 72, who has been in government since independence and is currently vice president, and Mr. Itula, 67, who fell out with SWAPO after the faction he supported lost an internal leadership election in 2017.

Namibians vote directly for the presidential candidate they prefer. If no one gets more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, then the top two candidates go to a runoff — something that has never happened.

The results are expected to be announced within five days.