The New York Times 2024-11-28 12:10:41


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

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Euan WardBen Hubbard and Aaron Boxerman

Reporting from Beirut and Jerusalem

Here is the latest on the cease-fire.

The fragile cease-fire between Israel and the militant group Hezbollah appeared to be holding into its first, tense night on Wednesday, as nervous Lebanese traveled back to devastated homes and the United States sought to seize the moment to bolster regional stability.

President Biden said that the United States would “make another push” to achieve a cease-fire in Gaza, where Israel is fighting a Hezbollah ally, Hamas. And while many Gazans expressed despair at the prospects for a truce there soon, the White House sought to shore up relations in the region that had frayed over 13 months of conflict.

Brett McGurk, the president’s Middle East coordinator, met with the Saudi crown prince, the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh said on Wednesday, adding that the two had discussed Lebanon and Gaza. A day earlier, Mr. Biden said the United States was still working to normalize Saudi-Israeli relations, which the crown prince has said depend on the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Against that backdrop, the Lebanese Army took the first tentative steps toward reasserting control in territory devastated by Israeli airstrikes in recent months and dominated by Hezbollah for years before that. Some Hezbollah supporters celebrated the cease-fire, claiming it was a victory despite the group’s battered state.

Under the cease-fire 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 Army will send more troops to the country’s south. Read the agreement >

Lebanese military convoys could be seen traveling south on Wednesday, as were thousands of Lebanese people, who jammed roads to get back to towns and villages devastated by the war, the deadliest between Israel and Hezbollah in decades.

Not all of southern Lebanon was accessible: Israel’s military warned civilians against immediately returning to some areas and declared a curfew over much of the region until Thursday morning.

And 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 that took place.

Here is what else to know:

  • Biden’s Gaza push: President Biden said the agreement between Israel and 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.” But a truce between Israel and Hamas has proved much harder to reach, because the hostages held by Hamas give it more leverage in negotiations, and because any deal with the group could threaten Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition. That leaves Gazans heading into a second winter of war with little hope of an end to Israel’s military campaign there.

  • Israel’s aims: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed the cease-fire deal with Hezbollah on Tuesday night and argued that the truce would allow Israel to rebuild its weapons stockpiles while it works to isolate Hamas. He also said it would allow Israel to focus on the threat posed by its regional adversary, Iran, which backs both Hezbollah and Hamas.

  • Displaced Israelis: The cease-fire agreement drew 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 home, while others worried that Hezbollah would be able to rearm and again threaten their communities.

  • Netanyahu’s arrest warrant: France’s foreign ministry strongly suggested on Wednesday that Mr. Netanyahu would not immediately be arrested if he came to French territory, despite an International Criminal Court arrest warrant accusing him of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel’s war in Gaza.

Here’s what we know about how the cease-fire in Lebanon is going so far.

A cease-fire agreement to end the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon went into effect on Wednesday morning, bringing a fragile peace to an area that has seen more than a year of fighting.

Many questions remain about implementing the deal over the next 60 days, a critical period during which Israel and Hezbollah are expected to withdraw from southern Lebanon — and hold their fire.

Here’s what we know about how things are going so far.

Troop movements

The Lebanese Army, which is not a party to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, is expected to enforce the peace under the terms of the deal. It started to send military convoys into southern Lebanon on Wednesday, posting images of the troop movements on social media and saying the army had “begun to strengthen its deployment” and “extend state authority” in the area.

The Israeli military is still in Lebanon and is expected to withdraw in phases over the next two months. That withdrawal will be coordinated with the Lebanese Army, according to the cease-fire deal. The two militaries, along with an international oversight committee chaired by the United States and including France, are expected to come up with “a specific and detailed plan.”

Hezbollah is expected to withdraw from southern Lebanon, but when is not clear. Israel has killed or injured many members of the armed group’s leadership and rank-and-file and has destroyed its weapons stockpiles and factories.

Heading home in Lebanon

More than a million people in Lebanon were displaced by the fighting, mostly in the last few months as the conflict intensified and Israel invaded. As the cease-fire took effect on Wednesday, thousands immediately began returning to areas ruined by Israeli strikes, packing highways with cars loaded with people and belongings. But the movements of returning residents were still constricted. The Lebanese Army called on civilians returning to towns and villages along the border to avoid areas where the Israeli military was still in position.

Bachir Khodr, the governor of Baalbek-Hermel, a Lebanese province that has been hard hit by the war, posted on social media on Wednesday that about half of the displaced people in his region had returned. In separate posts, he said that he woke up Wednesday to the sound of gunfire and feared an Israeli raid, only to discover the sounds were shots of celebration.

On Wednesday afternoon, the office of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in a statement that he and his defense minister, Israel Katz, had instructed the Israeli military to bar people from returning to communities in Lebanon near the Israeli border, in line with terms of the first phase of the cease-fire.

With little lead time, the Israeli military on Wednesday afternoon declared a curfew in southern Lebanon from 5 p.m. local time until 7 a.m. on Thursday, noting on social media that its troops were still deployed there and would deal “firmly” with violations. People north of the Litani River — which runs roughly parallel to the border with Israel and up to 15 miles away from it — were prohibited from moving southward, and those already in the southern zone were told to remain in place.

Heading home in Israel

In northern Israel, where about 60,000 residents were displaced by the conflict over the last year, some residents began trickling back on Wednesday for short visits to their homes, with the Israeli military’s permission. But most are staying away until it’s clear that the cease-fire is hold, and the Israeli government is not encouraging them to hurry back, at least for now.

The Israeli government has been funding housing for many displaced northern residents. In August, it approved an expansion of the state budget to allow that money to keep flowing this year. Questions remain about when and how damaged homes will be repaired.

Truce violations

The cease-fire largely brought peace to Lebanon and Israel, but both countries claimed some truce violations on Wednesday.

In a briefing with reporters late in the day, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, Israel’s chief military spokesman, said that Israeli troops had killed Hezbollah operatives and had detained and captured suspects who were being interrogated. Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement that Israel would “continue acting forcefully against any violation.”

Lebanon’s state news agency reported that Israeli troops violated the cease-fire on Wednesday, firing at journalists who were reporting from a town in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military said it had received reports that “several journalists” were injured in the Khiam area of southern Lebanon but that “following an initial inquiry” it was “unaware of fire” toward the journalists. It added that the incident was under review.

A United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL and made up of about 10,000 civilians and soldiers from around 50 countries, is tasked with monitoring and reporting violations. The peacekeeping force had a similar mandate under a 2006 cease-fire deal that ended the last war between Israel and Hezbollah and that provides the basic framework for the latest agreement.

On Wednesday, UNIFIL said in a statement that it “welcomes the announcement of the cessation of hostilities” and was “ready to support Lebanon and Israel in this new phase.”

Aaron Boxerman, Johnatan Reiss and Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting.



In northern Israel, soldiers begin heading back from Lebanon and a few residents visit their homes.

A truck was transporting an Israeli tank returned from Lebanon. Residents were visiting their damaged homes near the border for the first time in a year. Israeli soldiers were bathing in a natural hot spring in the rain, in an area where sirens screamed the previous night.

The first signs of the cease-fire agreement between Lebanon and Israel were visible on Wednesday in northern Israel, but most Israelis were hesitant to return to a region that has largely been abandoned for a year under near daily attacks by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group. Many residents have settled into new housing and enrolled their children in schools elsewhere. They don’t plan to return home until they are sure the cease-fire is holding.

The Israeli government promised to retaliate immediately to any violations of the cease-fire, and officials are not encouraging residents to return yet. Those who do show up are generally there for a quick visit.

“It was devastating to see the damage to our house with my own eyes,” said Galit Doctorsh, 45, who used the truce as an opportunity to return home with her husband for the first time in more than six months, picking up warm clothing for their children. Their town, Metula, is just a few hundred yards from the Lebanese border and suffered significant damage during the war. Dozens of homes were in ruins. The Doctorshes’ car was destroyed by a strike that damaged the front of their home.

Nearly two months after Israel launched an invasion into southern Lebanon, a cease-fire agreement that took effect Wednesday offered hope for a return to normalcy in areas largely deserted for over a year, when Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel in solidarity with Hamas in its war with Israel in Gaza.

While Israeli troops remain in Lebanon, the military has begun withdrawing some forces. Along a road leading to the border, several mud-covered tanks returned from the battlefield, surrounded by soldiers in military jackets who said they were both exhausted and relieved.

In Kiryat Shmona, Israel’s northernmost city, shops were still shuttered and streets were mostly empty. Yet a few more civilian cars were moving along its main road as a small trickle of residents seized the opportunity for visits considered too risky before Wednesday.

The clearest sign of the new reality was the quiet. There were no sirens warning of incoming rockets from Lebanon or the deafening blasts of Israeli artillery fire that had shaken the city day and night.

“I brought my 87-year-old mother to visit my father’s grave for the first time since the funeral,” said Lior Bez, 51, a member of Metula’s emergency squad. The town remained closed to visitors. Three soldiers manning the gate allowed entry only to residents, turning away others who braved the rain aiming to see the marks of war.

Residents were conflicted about the deal. While they said they looked forward to returning home, they remained skeptical that the agreement would ensure their safety. Some, however, were already preparing for more peaceful days.

Mr. Bez, who owns several getaway cabins damaged in a Hezbollah strike, was busy repairing them.

Some soldiers who fought in Lebanon took advantage of the calm to relax in a natural hot spring in the Golan Heights.

“Yesterday we were still engaged in intense military missions around the border,” said one, David Abokasis, “but now we can blow off some steam.”

Brett McGurk, the White House’s Middle East coordinator, met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to discuss regional developments, following President Biden’s statement that the U.S. is still working toward an Israel-Saudi normalization deal.

Earlier while announcing the cease-fire deal in Lebanon, Biden reaffirmed that the U.S. is still working to strike historic agreements with Saudi Arabia, including a security pact, economic assurances, a path to a Palestinian state and full normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Israeli forces are keeping up strikes on Gaza.

While Israel and Hezbollah have agreed to a cease-fire in Lebanon, the war in Gaza seems far from over.

On Tuesday night into Wednesday, as the cease-fire was being finalized, the Israeli military struck dozens of sites in Gaza that it said were Hamas military structures. The Israeli attacks killed at least 33 people and injured 134 more in Gaza over the period, according to the Gazan health ministry.

Thirteen deaths came in an Israeli strike on Al-Tabaeen in Gaza City, a school complex that has been operating as a shelter, according to Palestinian Civil Defense, which runs emergency response in Gaza. Among the dead were six women, the agency said. A Hamas official, Fawzi Barhoum, said on Facebook that two of his sons also died in the strike.

The Israeli military said that it struck the school to kill Mumin al-Jabari, identifying him as a Hamas sniper who was operating out of a room in the building and had stockpiled weapons there. The military said it aimed to mitigate harm to civilians by using “precise munitions, aerial surveillance and additional intelligence.”

The military said it also struck sites Hamas used for fighting and storing weapons in northern Gaza, after learning of them in interrogations of militants arrested in the area.

The cease-fire in Lebanon has left many Gazans feeling frustrated and hopeless. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel appears far more reluctant to agree to a truce in Gaza, where Hamas continues to hold roughly 100 hostages, some of them dead. Mr. Netanyahu has vowed to annihilate Hamas in Gaza, but the group has proved resilient, and fighting remains fierce nearly 14 months after the war began.

The result is a humanitarian disaster. More than 44,000 Gazans have died in the war and nearly 105,000 have been injured, according to the Gazan health ministry. The vast majority of the population has been displaced. United Nations officials have warned that hunger and disease are widespread, hospitals are hardly functioning and aid into parts of Gaza has significantly slowed, often restricted by Israeli forces or looted by violent mobs.

Supply shortages have complicated rescue operations. Mahmoud Basal, the spokesman for Palestinian Civil Defense, said that after the strike on Al-Tabaeen school, the agency’s teams could not send crews and equipment to dig victims out because of a lack of fuel. A donation of fuel allowed rescuers to arrive on Wednesday morning.

“We pulled out who we could,” Mr. Basal said. But three people, he said, would only have been reachable by removing the school’s roof, “and that was impossible.”

It was the second time the Israeli military struck Al-Tabaeen school complex. In August, when more than 2,000 displaced people were sheltering at the site, according to Civil Defense officials, a strike killed dozens out of 200 gathered for predawn prayers.

The Israeli military said it killed 30 militants in that strike. Then as now, the military said Hamas was exploiting civilians as human shields.

Israel on Wednesday said it will appeal the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, saying in a statement from Netanyahu’s office that it “renounces” the court’s authority and the legitimacy of the warrants.

The prime minister’s office also noted that it was asking to delay the execution of the warrants if the appeal is rejected. The Israeli leaders were accused of crimes against humanity in connection with the war in Gaza. The warrants were issued last week.

news analysis

A battered and diminished Hezbollah accepts a cease-fire.

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 survived 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.

A member of the court, France has been cautious so far in its reaction to the arrest warrants issued last week for Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense minister. It did not say outright that Mr. Netanyahu would be free to travel to France, but it argued that the court’s rules on immunity applied to him and would have to be considered by French authorities.

“France will comply with its international obligations,” the ministry said in a statement. But it added that while the Rome Statute — the 1998 treaty that established the court — 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 ministry added, “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, which accuses Mr. Netanyahu of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, immediately confronted governments around the world with a vexing question of whether to detain the prime minister. Mr. Netanyahu is the first leader of a modern Western democracy to be accused of war crimes by the court and — unlike other leaders targeted by the court — he is a close ally of the United States and many other countries.

Some I.C.C. members, 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.

The court warrants have drawn outrage in Israel, where the authorities said on Wednesday that they would appeal them before the court and ask for a delay in their execution.

“Israel’s notice of appeal reveals in detail how far-fetched and without any factual or legal basis the decision to issue the arrest warrants was,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.

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 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 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 leader 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 court’s founding treaty were applicable to Mr. Netanyahu’s situation. The Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.

The scope of leaders’ immunity before international courts has long been a subject of intense debates, and there is still no consensus on the issue among scholars, judges or other authorities. But with accusations of atrocities in the wars in Ukraine, Sudan and the Middle East in recent years, countries and activists have increasingly called for leaders to be held accountable under international criminal law.

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 court “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.

Some judges and prosecutors have argued that diplomatic immunity under that article is restricted and does not include large-scale crimes under international law.

France seemed to take a far firmer stance toward President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the target of another arrest warrant issued by the court. Russia, like Israel and the United States, is not a member of the court.

Commenting on Mr. Putin’s recent visit to Mongolia, which is also an I.C.C. member, the French foreign ministry has said that each member nation was obliged to cooperate with the court “and execute the arrest warrants it issues.”

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 European Union 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.”

Several experts on international law said that as an I.C.C. member, France should not defy the court’s judgment simply because it disagreed with it. France would undermine the court if it were to ignore its obligations, said Stephen J. Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador and international prosecutor.

French courts could also come to their own conclusions, he added, noting that a French appeals court had recently found that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria — which is not a member of the I.C.C. — could be tried in France for the use of chemical weapons against Syrians in 2013. Prosecutors have asked France’s highest court to review that ruling.

But some experts also said it appeared unlikely that Mr. Netanyahu would risk setting foot in France or other European nations.

“I don’t think any indicted officials will come to Europe anyway because of the risks,” said Emmanuel Altit, a French lawyer involved in international cases. “The legal issues around arrests are open to debate and nobody knows what sealed arrest warrants may exist.”

And even if the French government tried to reassure such officials, they may not feel confident that they could avoid detention, said William Schabas, a scholar of international law.

“The French justice system is independent and what it might do is unpredictable,” he said.

Ephrat Livni contributed reporting from Washington.

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 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.

With joy and tears, Lebanese return home: ‘Look at all the destruction’

As day broke on the newly established cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel on Wednesday, Hussein Nassour returned to his Beirut neighborhood to inspect the ruins of his former life.

Israeli airstrikes had blown out the doors and windows of his apartment, ruining his furniture. His family’s market was destroyed, along with the nearby buildings where his customers used to live.

He failed to see how the war had done anyone any good.

“We did not win. We lost,” he said. “No one gained anything from any of this.”

Across Lebanon, people greeted the cease-fire that ended the country’s deadliest war in three decades with profound relief, hoping that both sides would stick to it and allow some sense of normalcy to return.

For many of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people who had fled Israel’s airstrikes and ground invasion, it provided a chance to return home and take stock of what they had lost.

Many found homes that would require forbiddingly costly repairs to make them livable again. Some found no homes at all, just piles of concrete and twisted metal with their possessions somewhere beneath.

In one hard-hit neighborhood in the capital, Beirut, Zubaida Amru, 37, stood atop such a pile, looking for her belongings. She spotted her family’s oven, destroyed, and furniture from her late father’s bedroom.

“My whole life was here,” she said. But now, that life was gone. “It is not just your possessions. It’s the way that you felt walking through your own home.”

Throughout the war, Israel focused its attacks on predominantly Shiite Muslim communities near Beirut, in southern Lebanon and in the eastern Bekaa Valley. These were places where Hezbollah operated freely, providing social services and enjoying significant support for what it called its armed “resistance” against Israel.

Hezbollah started the conflict by firing on Israeli troops in support of Hamas in Gaza after that group’s deadly assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Even though the war killed more than 3,800 people in Lebanon, displaced more than a million others and caused billions of dollars in economic losses, Hezbollah and its supporters on Wednesday portrayed it as a win.

“The cease-fire, of course, is a victory for the blood of the martyrs,” said Manal Hamadeh, 49, referring to Hezbollah militants who died fighting Israel.

Her beauty shop supply business in Beirut was destroyed in an airstrike. But she said the most painful loss was Hassan Nasrallah, who led Hezbollah for 32 years before Israel assassinated him in September.

Many of the displaced came from southern Lebanon and loaded up their cars on Wednesday to head back that way. Heavy traffic clogged the highway south. Cars were loaded with the suitcases, mattresses and blankets that people had grabbed when they fled or received in the shelters where they had spent the war.

A bakery along the road blared songs by the Lebanese diva Fairouz, a familiar and comforting soundtrack in the country, and gave out cookies with tiny banners that read, “Smile, better days are coming.”

But the sense of jubilation for returning home faded as people drove further south, passing piles of wreckage where buildings once stood and storefronts shattered by blasts.

At a Lebanese Army checkpoint at the entrance to the southern city of Sidon, soldiers distributed fliers warning not to touch any unexploded bombs people might find near their homes.

“We are happy now, but I know it won’t last,” said Maryam Shoaib, 42, who had stopped for lunch with her relatives in Sidon before heading to their home further south.

“Heartbreak awaits us in the village,” she said.

Samia el Zein, 53, said that she, too, had hit the road in the morning in a good mood, thrilled at the thought of returning to her own bed. But as soon as she arrived in her neighborhood in Tyre, an ancient city on the Mediterranean coast, her chest tightened and tears rolled down her face.

“I’m sad. I’m happy. I don’t know,” she said. “Look at all the destruction.”

As she carried her bags into the entry hall of her apartment, glass from the broken front door crunched under her feet. Inside, the sliding glass doors that once opened onto a large balcony were shattered and curtain rods from the windows were flung across the floor.

Her brother, Mohammad el Zein, 55, had arrived earlier and swept the shards of glass into neat piles. On the dining room table, he had organized the remains of everything he found: plates, teapots, pans, cups and lamps, some of which he hoped to salvage.

His father’s collection of antique ceramic pots was intact — a tiny miracle, he said.

Still, he and his sister felt uneasy, worried that the bombardment could resume at any time.

“We’re not feeling the victory,” Mr. Zein said. “I don’t think it’s over yet.”

Elsewhere in Tyre, some families waved yellow Hezbollah flags from their car windows and young men who appeared to be from the group’s civil defense force flashed peace signs and cheered at the passing cars.

That was too much for Ousama Aoudeh, 60.

“What victory? Look at the destruction. Look at all the death,” she said. “How can anyone say this is a victory? We were defeated.”

She was the first member of her family to return to Tyre and was pleased to find her apartment still standing, she said.

But her daughter’s building had been cleaved in half and a blast had thrown two cars on top of the building’s remains, with windshields shattered and doors hanging from their hinges. Mattresses still wrapped in purple and green bedsheets stuck out of the rubble.

“I was watching the news from Tyre on TV this whole time. But seeing it for myself, I can’t believe it,” she said, taking in the crushed cars and tangled piles of electric wires as men elsewhere in the neighborhood fired celebratory gunshots.

“There’s no electricity. These buildings are all gone,” she said. “Why are they shooting? What do they have to celebrate?”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Tyre and Dayana Iwaza from Beirut.

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.

Residents of northern Israel ‘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.

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 group’s top negotiator, Khalil Al-Hayya, to maintain a hard-line negotiating position. In Israel, 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 — including much of his base — remained deeply concerned about the long-term threat posed by 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. He repeated that promise in a social media post on Wednesday, pledging “another push” for a Gaza deal, even though talks have been stalled for months.

In Israel, Mr. Netanyahu suggested that Hezbollah’s withdrawal from the fight might isolate its ally Hamas and force the group to back down.

“Hamas was counting on Hezbollah to fight by its side,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a recorded speech on Tuesday night. “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 issued a statement on Wednesday, shortly after the Lebanon truce took hold, in which it repeated its core demand for Israel to permanently withdraw from Gaza. Since the killing last month of Yahya Sinwar, the group’s strongman leader, Hamas has said that it is being governed by a five-person leadership council — which appears to have maintained Mr. Sinwar’s aversion to compromise.

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

Gaza is partly stuck in limbo because the Israeli military, despite decimating much of the enclave and killing tens of thousands of people, has avoided holding and governing most of the land it has captured.

Instead, Israeli forces have usually retreated soon after defeating local Hamas battalions, allowing the group’s surviving members to return to fill the vacuum.

Ending that cycle, either through a diplomatic compromise or a decisive battlefield victory, would require Mr. Netanyahu to set out a plan for Gaza’s postwar future, something he has been reluctant to do. That is partly because it would force him to choose between the goals of his domestic partners and those of his potential foreign allies.

Saudi Arabia has said it could normalize its ties with Israel if Israel allows the formation of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank. But Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition partners oppose a Palestinian state.

A deal with Saudi Arabia would give Mr. Netanyahu a landmark foreign policy victory, somewhat salvaging his legacy domestically after presiding over one of the biggest security failures in Israeli history — the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

But the collapse of his coalition would endanger his domestic influence, potentially making Mr. Netanyahu more vulnerable to an ongoing corruption investigation. Since 2020, Mr. Netanyahu has stood trial on charges of bribery and fraud, accusations that he strongly denies.

Against that backdrop, some analysts said, Mr. Netanyahu will be even warier of angering his base, particularly after spending political capital on a Lebanon deal.

He is now “less likely” to cede ground over Gaza, according to Michael Koplow, an analyst at Israel Policy Forum, a New York-based research group.

“If anything this will cause them to ramp up the pressure on him even more not to let up on Hamas in ways they would consider to be premature,” Mr. Koplow said.

Still, pressure works both ways.

Israeli commentators have speculated that Mr. Netanyahu agreed to compromise in Lebanon because he feared that Mr. Biden might freeze arms supplies or withdraw diplomatic support for Israel at the United Nations Security Council. (In a press briefing on Tuesday, a senior Biden administration official denied it had made such a threat.)

In the final weeks of Barack Obama’s presidency, the Obama administration broke with U.S. diplomatic policy and declined to veto a U.N. resolution that criticized Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

“That was a big trauma for Netanyahu and he is afraid that it will happen again under Biden,” said Mazal Mualem, a biographer of Mr. Netanyahu and a commentator on Israeli politics. “He knows there are still two months left in the Biden administration and he needs to be careful,” she added.

Now, some Israelis hope that Mr. Netanyahu, having brushed off his supporters’ opposition to a deal in Lebanon, will be motivated to do the same with a compromise in Gaza.

For the families of hostages held in Gaza, a diplomatic arrangement appears to be their relatives’ best chance of leaving the territory alive — and they are now amplifying their calls for a hostage release deal.

For now, though, Mr. Netanyahu appears to have bought himself some time, according to Ms. Mualem, the prime minister’s biographer.

“Netanyahu is always buying time and maneuvering,” Ms. Mualem said. “Yesterday, he bought time until President Trump takes office.”

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.

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.

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 group’s top negotiator, Khalil Al-Hayya, to maintain a hard-line negotiating position. In Israel, 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 — including much of his base — remained deeply concerned about the long-term threat posed by 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. He repeated that promise in a social media post on Wednesday, pledging “another push” for a Gaza deal, even though talks have been stalled for months.

In Israel, Mr. Netanyahu suggested that Hezbollah’s withdrawal from the fight might isolate its ally Hamas and force the group to back down.

“Hamas was counting on Hezbollah to fight by its side,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a recorded speech on Tuesday night. “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 issued a statement on Wednesday, shortly after the Lebanon truce took hold, in which it repeated its core demand for Israel to permanently withdraw from Gaza. Since the killing last month of Yahya Sinwar, the group’s strongman leader, Hamas has said that it is being governed by a five-person leadership council — which appears to have maintained Mr. Sinwar’s aversion to compromise.

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

Gaza is partly stuck in limbo because the Israeli military, despite decimating much of the enclave and killing tens of thousands of people, has avoided holding and governing most of the land it has captured.

Instead, Israeli forces have usually retreated soon after defeating local Hamas battalions, allowing the group’s surviving members to return to fill the vacuum.

Ending that cycle, either through a diplomatic compromise or a decisive battlefield victory, would require Mr. Netanyahu to set out a plan for Gaza’s postwar future, something he has been reluctant to do. That is partly because it would force him to choose between the goals of his domestic partners and those of his potential foreign allies.

Saudi Arabia has said it could normalize its ties with Israel if Israel allows the formation of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank. But Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition partners oppose a Palestinian state.

A deal with Saudi Arabia would give Mr. Netanyahu a landmark foreign policy victory, somewhat salvaging his legacy domestically after presiding over one of the biggest security failures in Israeli history — the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

But the collapse of his coalition would endanger his domestic influence, potentially making Mr. Netanyahu more vulnerable to an ongoing corruption investigation. Since 2020, Mr. Netanyahu has stood trial on charges of bribery and fraud, accusations that he strongly denies.

Against that backdrop, some analysts said, Mr. Netanyahu will be even warier of angering his base, particularly after spending political capital on a Lebanon deal.

He is now “less likely” to cede ground over Gaza, according to Michael Koplow, an analyst at Israel Policy Forum, a New York-based research group.

“If anything this will cause them to ramp up the pressure on him even more not to let up on Hamas in ways they would consider to be premature,” Mr. Koplow said.

Still, pressure works both ways.

Israeli commentators have speculated that Mr. Netanyahu agreed to compromise in Lebanon because he feared that Mr. Biden might freeze arms supplies or withdraw diplomatic support for Israel at the United Nations Security Council. (In a press briefing on Tuesday, a senior Biden administration official denied it had made such a threat.)

In the final weeks of Barack Obama’s presidency, the Obama administration broke with U.S. diplomatic policy and declined to veto a U.N. resolution that criticized Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

“That was a big trauma for Netanyahu and he is afraid that it will happen again under Biden,” said Mazal Mualem, a biographer of Mr. Netanyahu and a commentator on Israeli politics. “He knows there are still two months left in the Biden administration and he needs to be careful,” she added.

Now, some Israelis hope that Mr. Netanyahu, having brushed off his supporters’ opposition to a deal in Lebanon, will be motivated to do the same with a compromise in Gaza.

For the families of hostages held in Gaza, a diplomatic arrangement appears to be their relatives’ best chance of leaving the territory alive — and they are now amplifying their calls for a hostage release deal.

For now, though, Mr. Netanyahu appears to have bought himself some time, according to Ms. Mualem, the prime minister’s biographer.

“Netanyahu is always buying time and maneuvering,” Ms. Mualem said. “Yesterday, he bought time until President Trump takes office.”

A Battered and Diminished Hezbollah Accepts a Cease-Fire

news analysis

A Battered and Diminished Hezbollah Accepts a Cease-Fire

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 survived 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.

‘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.”

Pakistan Arrests Hundreds in Crackdown on Protests Backing Ex-Leader

More than 600 people were arrested in an overnight crackdown on supporters of Pakistan’s jailed former prime minister in Islamabad, the police said on Wednesday.

The crackdown brought a swift end to the protests that have gripped Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, this week ever since thousands of people gathered in the city to demand the release of Imran Khan, the former prime minister. Mr. Khan has been in prison since last August on charges that his party claims are politically motivated.

The protesters, led by Mr. Khan’s wife, Bushra Bibi, marched to a main square near government buildings in Islamabad on Tuesday. That resulted in violent clashes with security forces, who moved to disperse them. Four civilians were killed by gunfire in the unrest, according to local media reports.

The Inspector General of Islamabad Police, Ali Nasir Rizvi, said Wednesday that 954 people have been arrested in relation to the recent protests — including 610 the previous night.

He told a news conference that 71 members of the security forces had been wounded in clashes, and denied that they had fired on protesters.

“Only nonlethal weapons, tear gas and baton-charge were used during last night’s crackdown,” Mr. Rizvi said.

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 accused the current civilian government of being a puppet of the military.

Tensions were already high in the capital on Tuesday, with security officials ordered to use lethal force, if necessary, to protect key buildings.

The crackdown by paramilitary troops and police began shortly before midnight. The authorities turned off streetlights at the main square where protesters had gathered before they were pushed back and forced to regroup nearby, and they ordered nearby shops, cafes and markets to close.

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 have denied.

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.

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 on Tuesday before the crackdown.

But she and Ali Amin Gandapur, a political ally of Mr. Khan who has led previous protests, managed to evade arrest in the melee. They fled to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which is controlled by Mr. Khan’s party and where Mr. Gandapur serves as its chief minister, officials said.

Mr. Gandapur later vowed to continue the protest — although other officials from Mr. Khan’s party said it had been called off in light of the crackdown.

Mr. Khan’s party also accused security forces of killing dozens of protesters, a claim that could not be independently verified and was repeatedly denied by officials. 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 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.

French Intellectuals Decry a Dissident Writer’s Arrest in Algeria

The arrest of an outspoken writer who flew back to his Algerian homeland and was quietly taken into custody upon arrival has set off alarm in literary and political circles worldwide and threatens to trigger a diplomatic incident.

The 75-year-old novelist, Boualem Sansal, disappeared for about a week after being detained on Nov. 16, with the Algerian government neither announcing his arrest not offering an explanation for it. Rumors swirled. Then on Monday, he was accused at hearing of “endangering the nation” with his proclamations, according to his lawyer in France, François Zimeray.

Mr. Sansal, who since this year has French as well as Algerian citizenship, has a long history of ruffling feathers and is a pointed critic of the Algerian government.

His lawyer suggested that the charges were likely tied to recent comments by the writer that touched on a sore spot for Algeria and came at particularly fraught moment in its relations with France.

Mr. Sansal had endorsed an argument that French colonization benefited Algeria by depriving Morocco of land in the disputed territory of Western Sahara, which was once part of its kingdom. His statements coincided with a visit to Morocco in late October by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, after France backed a plan that would give Morocco sovereignty over the territory.

Algeria rejects Morocco’s claim to the land, and cut off diplomatic ties with its neighbor in 2021, so France’s decision to align with the Moroccans angered the Algerian government. Mr. Zimeray said he believed that Mr. Sansal was now “paying the high price for a French-Algerian relationship that has very much deteriorated.”

The arrest, he said, “is a consequence of those tensions — and exacerbates the tensions.”

Mr. Zimeray said that his client was not represented by a lawyer at the hearing on Monday and that he had yet to meet with counsel in Algeria.

Mr. Sansal became a French citizen this year in a ceremony that Mr. Macron attended, and the president’s office says that France has been working to clarify his situation, expressing concern over the arrest. But French officials have declined to elaborate on the steps they are taking, citing the need for discretion in diplomacy.

It was not until age 50 that Mr. Sansal, who had been working as an engineer for the Algerian government, published his first book, “The Oath of the Barbarians,” in 1999. The novel was critical of Islamic fundamentalism and government repression, putting Mr. Sansal out of a job but positioning him as a late-blooming literary luminary.

Ostracized in Algerian society for going against the grain, Mr. Sansal has described himself as “like a castaway on a desert island.” But until now the government in Algiers hadn’t arrested him, according to his lawyer. And however chilly his reception at home, he became a noted literary figure internationally, especially in France, where he is embraced across the ideological spectrum for his anti-authoritarianism and opposition to fundamentalism.

Since reports spread that Mr. Sansal had been detained, writers and publishers have mobilized on his behalf. Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, including Annie Ernaux and Orhan Pamuk, and other renowned authors like Salman Rushdie joined an opinion article by the French-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud in Le Point, a French news magazine.

“In Algeria, writers and intellectuals, publishers, booksellers live in fear of reprisals,accusations of espionage and arbitrary arrests, trials and defamation and violent media attacks on their staff and their loved ones,” they wrote. “A real editorial terrorism is targeting them.”

A former French prime minister, Édouard Philippe, said that he was “profoundly worried.” Mr. Sansal, he said, “embodies everything we cherish: the call to reason, freedom and humanism against censorship, corruption and Islamism.”

Two days before the hearing, an editorial in Algerian state media confirmed the arrest and dismissed criticism of it as “comical,” calling it further proof of “a hateful current against Algeria” in France’s political and intellectual echelons. Mr. Sansal, it said, was “a puppet of anti-Algerian revisionism.”

Repression of Algerian journalists has been increasing in recent years. In 2019, mass protests forced Algeria’s president from power and his replacement, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who was elected with military support, has pushed the country toward harsher authoritarianism. Dozens of journalists are believed to have been imprisoned as the government has sought to prevent mass protests from flaring again, though the figures are murky given the difficulty of independent reporting, experts say.

Mr. Sansal’s lawyers in Algeria on Wednesday met with their client in the prison unit of Mustapha Hospital in Algiers, where he is being detained, Mr. Zimeray said. The writer appeared to be worried but otherwise in good spirits, and did not complain of mistreatment, he said. His lawyers plan to seek his release on bail.

Mr. Zimeray said he was trying to “decrease the temperature” around the case, making it less about diplomatic disputes and more about Algeria’s claim that Mr. Sansal’s words endangered national security — which the lawyer characterized as “a bit of an exaggeration.”

He said his client had not thought he would be arrested.

Daphné Anglès Vivian Yee and Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.

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’s Capital Is Turned Upside Down by Unending Protests

Another anti-government protest had come and gone in Pakistan’s once peaceful capital, and Saira Bano was ready to get her city back.

For four days, Islamabad had been a tense battleground after supporters of a jailed former prime minister, Imran Khan, marched into the city.

The capital, home to 2.4 million people, became a “container city” as the authorities stacked more than 700 shipping containers to block key routes and maintain order. Schools and shops closed, internet service was cut, and roads teemed with thousands of police officers scrutinizing passers-by.

“This is not the Islamabad I grew up in,” said Ms. Bano, a schoolteacher who had to cancel her classes for three consecutive days. “Everywhere I looked, there were barricades and containers. We feel isolated and anxious in our own city.”

A day of intense clashes on Tuesday between Mr. Khan’s supporters and security forces culminated in a hasty retreat by his party’s top leadership, including his wife, Bushra Bibi, who had vowed to stay at the protest site “till my last breath.”

Party supporters were pushed from D-Chowk, an Islamabad square that was the designated endpoint of the march, early on Wednesday. Ali Nasir Rizvi, the city’s police chief, said that 954 protesters had been arrested after defying a ban on public gatherings between Sunday and Tuesday.

For months, Mr. Khan’s detention has stoked political tensions across the country. His backers say they will not stop agitating for his release on what they call trumped-up charges.

But for residents of Islamabad, the disruptions from near-monthly rallies in support of Mr. Khan have caused increasing frustration. People are exhausted by frequent closures and restrictions — what many call an unwelcome new way of life.

“Islamabad was once one of the most peaceful cities in the country, but in recent years, it has become far more turbulent,” said Shabbir Farooq, a clerk in the city government.

“The moment people sense even the slightest sign of chaos, they brace themselves because the authorities lock down the city without hesitation,” Mr. Farooq said. “Some head to their nearby hometowns, while others start stocking up on food and essentials.”

Shop owners said they had been hit hard by the protests.

“Pakistan’s economy is already in a bad situation, and business is already slow,” said Naveed Ali, who sells computer-related items near D-Chowk, which is also referred to as Democracy Chowk. “In this situation, we can’t afford business closures for days.”

Commuters, too, are suffering the effects. In recent days, travel between Islamabad and other cities became nearly impossible because of the shipping containers blocking roads and highways.

Asghar Ali, 45, who was visiting relatives in London, said that to reach the Islamabad airport, he had endured a five-hour ordeal involving two cars and a walk from a district in a neighboring province.

“The government needs to find a better way to handle protests,” Mr. Ali said. “We can’t keep living like this.”

Mr. Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or P.T.I., claimed that several of its workers were killed or injured during the protest because of “indiscriminate firing” of guns and the use of tear gas by the authorities. Attaullah Tarar, Pakistan’s information minister, denied that officers had shot at protesters.

A group of five Khan supporters, hiding in a house in Islamabad to evade the police crackdown, said that clashes between officers and protesters had intensified on Tuesday afternoon.

“Clouds of smoke blanketed the area after the law enforcement agencies fired uncountable tear gases and rubber bullets,” said Jibran Ahmed, a university student. “People were running in every direction.” He acknowledged that amid the chaos, some protesters had picked up tear gas canisters and hurled them back at the police.

Political analysts and even Mr. Khan’s own supporters are increasingly questioning the effectiveness of the protests. The ruling establishment has vowed not to give an inch, and the cycle of unrest has shown no signs of yielding tangible results.

“Pakistan’s protests had no winners,” Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, wrote on X.

The crackdown by the military and the government, he said, had only made the public angrier, while P.T.I., in its retreat, had accomplished little after having made grand statements about its determination to fight until the end. And Pakistan had once again been distracted from its urgent economic and security challenges.

“Every month, workers from across the country gather in Islamabad, enduring the government’s harsh crackdowns in the hope that Mr. Khan will be released,” said Mr. Ahmed, the P.T.I. backer who was holed up in Islamabad. “But each time, our efforts end in vain. It’s starting to exhaust the workers and leave them disheartened.”

Although the protesters had been dispersed by Wednesday morning, the atmosphere in Islamabad remained tense, with the political uncertainty casting a long shadow. Many residents fear another wave of unrest could erupt at any moment, disrupting daily life once again.

“It feels like a never-ending cycle until Mr. Khan is released,” Ms. Bano said. “We just want to live our lives without this constant chaos.”

Moscow Expels 2 German Journalists, Accusing Berlin of Closing Russian TV Bureau

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Germany and Russia engaged in tit-for-tat blows over news media freedom on Wednesday, with each country making moves to expel two of the other country’s journalists.

Russia ordered the expulsion of two German journalists in retaliation for what it said was Germany’s move to close the Russian state broadcaster’s Berlin bureau.

The German government denied that it had closed the bureau of the Russian state broadcaster, Channel One. But it said two Russian journalists working there no longer had residency permits and directed questions to Berlin’s local government, which has jurisdiction over such permits.

In a lengthy written statement, the city government confirmed that it had denied the two journalists’ residency permits last Friday, saying they were hurting German and European interests and noting it had similarly revoked another foreign journalist’s residency permit in February for spreading “Russian propaganda and disinformation.” The agency said that its decision could still be challenged in court.

Christian Wagner, a spokesman for the German foreign ministry, said the German government had not and was not planning to close the office. “Russian journalists can report freely and unhindered in Germany,” he said at a government briefing, calling Moscow’s action “disproportionate.”

Steffen Hebestreit, the German government spokesman, added, “If you don’t fulfill the residency requirements, it doesn’t help that you work as a journalist.”

On Wednesday, Channel One, which is financed by the Kremlin, opened its early morning news show with the accusation that it had been ordered to “close down” its Berlin bureau. The TV channel said the correspondent Ivan Blagoy and the cameraman Dmitri Rodionov had been told to leave by early December.

The Russian foreign ministry said that two German journalists — Frank Aischmann, a correspondent, and Sven Feller, a technician — who were working for Germany’s public broadcaster, ARD, in Russia would be kicked out of the country.

ARD, which has a major presence in Russia, will not be able to bring in replacements until “the German government creates conditions for the Russian journalists in Germany,” Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian ministry, said in a televised briefing.

Two other Russian state-financed TV channels have been operating freely in Germany.

Germany has said there is a major disinformation campaign targeting its Russian-speaking citizens. The foreign ministry in a report this summer accused the Kremlin of deliberately trying to manipulate public discourse and discredit Western foreign policy through its online Doppelgänger disinformation network, which used sites that impersonated legitimate news entities and fake social media profiles.

German officials previously singled out Channel One and Mr. Blagoy for alleged bias. In 2016, German diplomats publicly voiced concerns about Channel One’s coverage of a fake story about the rape of a teenager of Russian descent in Germany.

As the United States and the European Union were rolling out sweeping sanctions against individuals and various sectors of the Russian economy early on in Russia’s war on Ukraine, several Western countries targeted RT, a Russian state-owned media company that broadcasts in foreign languages for audiences abroad. The European Union suspended licenses for several Russian TV news platforms in an attempt to clamp down on the pro-Russian messages being broadcast to Russian speakers in their countries.

Because of the sanctions, Channel One has not been allowed to broadcast in the European Union since 2022.