The uneasy truce between Israel and the militant group Hezbollah largely held through its second day in Lebanon on Thursday, although Israel conducted an airstrike that it said targeted militants violating terms of the cease-fire deal.

The Israeli strike was the first of its kind since the U.S.-backed cease-fire went into effect before dawn on Wednesday. But despite an exchange of blame between two parties of the deal — Israel and Lebanon — neither of the war’s combatants, Israel or Hezbollah, seemed keen to immediately return to full-scale fighting.

The Israeli military said its airstrike, near the border in southern Lebanon, had targeted two militants arriving at a Hezbollah rocket facility that had been used to fire into Israel. Lebanon’s army, which is set to play a major role in enforcing the truce, accused Israel of violating the cease-fire “several times” on Thursday afternoon. Hezbollah did not immediately comment.

The Israeli military also said its soldiers had stopped militants from advancing into southern Lebanon. “With the same power we used to secure the agreement, we will now enforce it no less so,” Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the military’s chief of staff, said in a video statement on Thursday. He added that Israel would respond to any deviations from the agreement “with fire.”

But after months of fighter jets and rockets in the skies and explosions erupting on the ground, quiet reigned over much of Lebanon and northern Israel on Thursday.

Israeli communities near the border passed a second consecutive day without sirens warning of incoming rockets. And in Lebanon, displaced people began heading home to Beirut’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah holds sway and which Israel bombarded heavily in recent months.

Although Hezbollah was badly battered by Israel’s campaign, the group’s supporters and political officials have tried to strike a defiant tone. A Hezbollah lawmaker in Lebanon’s Parliament, Hassan Fadlallah, told reporters on Thursday that the group would defend itself if Israel attacked. But he also said that it was still abiding by the agreement.

The war forced more than a million people in Lebanon — about a quarter of the country’s population — to flee their homes, and thousands have been moving back toward their war-ravaged communities since the cease-fire took effect.

But it is still far from clear when hundreds of thousands of displaced Lebanese will be able to return to their homes in the country’s south, parts of which are still occupied by Israeli forces. According to the cease-fire agreement, Israeli forces will gradually withdraw from southern Lebanon over the next 60 days.

In the meantime, the Israeli military has warned displaced Lebanese to stay away from much of southern Lebanon and imposed an overnight curfew across the area.

Lebanon’s army said on Thursday that it had moved troops into Hezbollah’s strongholds outside Beirut and in the country’s south and east, in accordance with the cease-fire. The Lebanese Parliament also extended the term of Joseph Aoun, the military’s top commander, for another year.

The Lebanese army also said it was operating “temporary checkpoints,” detonating unexploded ordnance and working to open roads that had been closed or damaged during the fighting. It said its goal was to help displaced people return to their homes.

One of those who went back home was Taflah Amar, 79. She returned to Baalbek, in Lebanon’s northeast, on Thursday after two months in Beirut. She said she had “been crying all day.”

“I’m an old woman,” said Ms. Amar, who returned home to find much of her neighborhood destroyed. “I’m not affiliated with anyone. What did I do to deserve this?”

Some of the most heavily damaged communities in Lebanon are the towns along its border with Israel. For years they were effectively governed by Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran.

Beginning in October 2023, the group used those towns to launch near-daily rocket attacks on northern Israel in solidarity with Hamas, its Iran-backed ally in the Gaza Strip. The attacks forced tens of thousands in Israel to flee their homes.

But few in Israel, where the government has provided assistance to people who fled the conflict, appeared eager to rush back when the truce began.

“We have no intention of going back home yet,” said Gal Avraham, 29, a dog trainer from Margaliot, a small village in Israel just 200 yards from the border. Ms. Avraham and her husband took advantage of the cease-fire to visit their home for the first time in over a year. The house, which they had abandoned in haste, reeked of rotted food left behind after the electricity failed, she said.

Several homes in the village were damaged and many henhouses were destroyed. Ms. Avraham expressed doubts that the cease-fire would hold, citing a siren that sounded overnight in a nearby border town as a reminder of the lingering instability. “As far as we know, no one is returning home,” she said.

Israel intensified its military response to Hezbollah’s attacks in mid-September and began a ground invasion on Oct. 1. The war killed about 3,800 Lebanese and 100 Israelis, according to their governments.

Under the cease-fire agreement, both Israel and Hezbollah will observe a 60-day truce. During that time, Israel will gradually withdraw its military from Lebanon, Hezbollah will move its fighters out of southern Lebanon, and the Lebanese Army will move in, helping enforce a de facto buffer zone between Israel’s border and the Litani River.

The area will also be policed by a U.N. peacekeeping force; it and Lebanon’s military were not combatants in the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. The deal was mediated by the United States and France, and formally accepted by the governments of Israel and Lebanon.

But the timeline for complete implementation of the agreement remains uncertain. Israel has said its actions will depend on how events unfold in Lebanon. A similar cease-fire that ended a war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006 was never fully enforced.

Liam Stack reported from Tel Aviv, Euan Ward from Baalbek, Lebanon, and Aaron Boxerman from Jerusalem. Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

In mid-November, Iran dispatched a top official to Beirut to urge Hezbollah to accept a cease-fire with Israel. Around the same time, Iran’s U.N. ambassador met with Elon Musk, an overture to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inner circle. And on Friday, it will hold talks in Geneva with European countries on a range of issues, including its nuclear program.

All this recent diplomacy marks a sharp change in tone from late October, when Iran was preparing to launch a large retaliatory attack on Israel, with a deputy commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps warning, “We have never left an aggression unanswered in 40 years.”

Iran’s swing from tough talk to a more conciliatory tone in just a few weeks’ time has its roots in developments at home and abroad.

Five Iranian officials, one of them a Revolutionary Guards member, and two former officials said the decision to recalibrate was prompted by Mr. Trump winning the Nov. 5 election, with concerns about an unpredictable leader who, in his first term, pursued a policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran.

But it was also driven by Israel’s decimation in Lebanon of Hezbollah — the closest and most important of Iran’s militant allies — and by economic crises at home, where the currency has dropped steadily against the dollar and an energy shortage looms as winter approaches.

Taken together, these challenges forced Iran to recalibrate its approach, to one of defusing tensions, the current Iranian officials familiar with the planning said. They asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, which could put them in danger.

They said Iran suspended plans to strike Israel following Mr. Trump’s election because it did not want to exacerbate tensions with the incoming administration, which was already lining up cabinet nominees who were hostile to Iran and staunch supporters of Israel. Mr. Trump’s stated plans to end the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, however, appealed to Iran, the officials said.

Before the U.S. election was even held, Iran sent word to the Biden administration that, contrary to claims by some American intelligence officials, it was not plotting to assassinate Mr. Trump.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Wednesday that Iran welcomed the truce between Hezbollah and Israel, adding that “Tehran maintains its right to respond to Israel’s airstrikes on Iran last month, but it will take into consideration regional developments such as the cease-fire in Lebanon.”

In the view of Sanam Vakil, the Middle East director for Chatham House, a British policy research group, it seems clear that Iran is responding to the coming changes in Washington, as well as the changed domestic and regional geopolitical landscape it now faces.

“It all came together, and the shift in tone is about protecting Iran’s interests.” Ms. Vakil said.

Iran’s opaque regime, and a governance rife with factional rivalries, can sometimes lead to mixed messages to external audiences and sharp internal differences, though the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, always has the final word.

The hard-line president Ebrahim Raisi died this year and a moderate, Masoud Pezeshkian, was elected in July to replace him, with a mandate to bring some economic and social reform and engage with the West. Mr. Pezeshkian has a lot of power over domestic policy and some influence in foreign affairs.

Just days after the U.S. election, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Amir Saeid Iravani, met with Mr. Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who has Mr. Trump’s ear, at the ambassador’s residence in New York to discuss reducing tensions with the incoming Trump administration. Two Iranian officials described the meeting as promising.

In Iran, the reformist and centrist factions rejoiced at the news.

But conservatives lashed out, calling the ambassador a traitor, signaling the kind of internal struggle the government faces over engagement with anyone in the orbit of Mr. Trump, who exited the nuclear deal with Iran in 2018, imposed tough sanctions on the country and ordered the killing of a top general, Qassim Suleimani, in 2020.

Facing backlash over the meeting with Mr. Musk, Iran’s foreign ministry issued a denial after three days that it had ever taken place. And last week, after a U.N. agency censured Iran for preventing international monitoring of its nuclear program, Tehran reacted defiantly, saying it was accelerating the program, while also insisting that it “stands ready for productive engagement.”

Several senior Iranian officials have publicly said Iran was open to negotiations with the Trump administration to resolve nuclear and regional issues. This itself is a shift from Iran’s position during the first Trump administration that it would not negotiate with Washington and that its regional policies and weapons development were strictly its own business.

“Iran is now applying restraint to give Trump a chance to see whether he can end the Gaza war and contain Netanyahu,” said Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian diplomat and nuclear negotiator who is now a Middle East and nuclear researcher at Princeton University, referring to Israel’s prime minister. “If this happens, it will open the path for more comprehensive negotiations between Tehran and Washington.”

For more than 13 months after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel, Iran and allied forces in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq insisted that they would not cease attacks on Israel as long as Israel was at war in Gaza.

But Hezbollah’s devastating losses concerned Iran, which exerts considerable influence over the Lebanese group. Iranian media also reported resentment rising among the more than one million displaced Shia Lebanese, who looked to Iran as their protector and patron.

In an unusually brazen assessment, Mehdi Afraz, the conservative director of a research center at Baqir al-Olum University, an Islamic institution, said Iran underestimated Israel’s military power and that war with Israel was not “a game on PlayStation.”

“Our friends from Syria called and said the Lebanese Shia refugees who support Hezbollah are cursing us up and down, first Iran, then others,” he said during a panel discussion at the university. “We are treating war as a joke.”

Mr. Khamenei, who has demonstrated a degree of pragmatism when survival of the Iranian regime seemed at risk, sent a senior adviser, Ali Larijani, a veteran centrist politician, to Beirut in mid-November. Mr. Larijani delivered a message from the ayatollah to Hezbollah leaders, according to two Iranian officials: It was time to accept the cease-fire and end the war, and Iran would help Hezbollah rebuild and rearm.

Less than 48 hours later, Lebanon announced a breakthrough in negotiations: that Hezbollah had agreed to keep its forces away from the Israeli border, a condition it had previously rejected as unacceptable.

At the same time, Iranian officials faced mounting domestic economic and energy crises. The government announced two-hour daily power cuts, inciting public anger and accusations from critics that its regional conflicts were too costly for average Iranians.

Mr. Pezeshkian, the president, who has promised to engage with the world to lift sanctions and improve the economy, said in a meeting with officials in the energy sector last week that he needed to “honestly tell the public about the energy situation.” Iran’s energy infrastructure, he said, cannot meet its energy needs.

Tehran has said it will send an experienced diplomat and former nuclear negotiator, Majid Takht-Ravanchi, to meet on Friday with officials of Britain, France and Germany, the countries that, along with the United States, sponsored the censure over Iran’s nuclear program.

“Without doubt in Iran, among senior officials and ordinary people, there is a real desire to end the tensions with the West and to get along,” Naser Imani, an analyst close to the government, said in a telephone interview from Tehran. “Cooperation with the West is not viewed as defeat, it is seen as transactional diplomacy and can be done from a position of strength.”

Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting.

The call arrived — it was go time. The medical doctor rushed to the airport, bound for a midnight operation hundreds of miles away in western India.

But this mission was not about saving lives. The doctor carried a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, a blade and a cellphone — tools for a heist. His target was something worth more than gold in India’s cutthroat competition for government jobs and university placements: the question sheets for a police constable exam.

After landing in the city of Ahmedabad, the doctor, Shubham Mandal, was hurried to a freight warehouse on its outskirts, according to police documents and interviews with the lead investigator by The New York Times. To avoid surveillance cameras, Dr. Mandal climbed through a back window into a room stacked with boxes. There, the police say, he pried open one marked “confidential” and took out an envelope.

He used his phone’s camera to photograph each page inside before resealing the envelope and locking the box. He would repeat the exercise at least once in the nights that followed, as new sheets arrived at the warehouse from the printing house, in between staying at a one-star hotel nearby. Waiting in a car each time were three men, including, the police say, the burglary’s mastermind, Ravi Atri.

Mr. Atri saw himself as part criminal, part Robin Hood. He had taken the national medical school entrance exam five times, and ultimately passed, but never became a doctor. Instead, he turned to stealing tests to help others.

No job was too small for him and his gang. He had previously had a hand in leaking questions on exams for nursing jobs, banking jobs, teaching jobs and slots at vocational institutes, the police say, and had been jailed at least twice.

The constable exam, his latest quarry, would be taken in February of this year by nearly five million people vying for 60,000 vacancies in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, Mr. Atri’s home base. A new constable is paid about $400 a month. But even the lowest-paid government jobs in India are coveted for their stability, and aspirants endure months of grueling study in expensive tuition centers to prepare for the exams that govern hiring.

Mr. Atri offered a leg up. And now, with the constable test in his hands, the race was on. Mr. Atri sent the signal to his vast network of local agents in Uttar Pradesh. They had already booked a big restaurant hall and a lush resort where thousands of his clients would be bused in for a crash course in the answers.

They just had to avoid getting caught.

“If this works, you will get so much money that you will not need to do anything else in your life,” Mr. Atri told one of the warehouse workers he had patiently cultivated to get access to the exam, according to a police report. “And you will also get a government job.”

A Huge Imbalance

Mr. Atri and people like him capitalize on what has long been a structural problem in India’s economy: too many educated young people, too few jobs.

India has one of the fastest-expanding economies in the world. But much of that growth comes from the services sector, and it is not generating enough jobs for the country’s huge working-age population. Labor-intensive manufacturing has stalled out as a share of the economy before it has had a chance to make India a developed nation. Nearly half of Indians still toil on farms, and a vast majority of private jobs in India are informal.

That makes government jobs highly prized. Last year, 1.3 million people applied for 1,000 slots in the prestigious civil service of the central government. Newspapers frequently run stories about large numbers of people with advanced degrees contending for menial jobs like sweeper or “peon.”

Allotting jobs on the basis of exam results conveys a sense of fairness. But with competition so fierce, the temptation to seek shortcuts can be strong.

Some aspirants, while spending long hours in study groups, also keep an eye out for shadowy figures offering access to exams. They exchange phone numbers with local agents; negotiate tentative prices, often in the hundreds of dollars or more; and pray that the scheme succeeds.

“When four million students prepare for an exam, half of those would also be busy searching for a leaked paper — not just them, their parents, their grandparents, everyone,” said Brijesh Kumar Singh, a senior police officer in the city of Meerut in Uttar Pradesh who investigates organized crime, with much of his time spent on gangs pursuing exam leaks.

An investigation by one of India’s largest newspapers, The Indian Express, found that more than 40 examinations had been compromised by leaks over the past five years, affecting 14 million aspirants in 15 states.

This year, the national exam for seats in medical schools faced widespread questions after an unusual number of the two million candidates achieved perfect scores. As the government tried to contain the fallout from that case, it canceled a national exam for graduate school fellowships and junior positions at universities because of a leak.

Protesters camped outside the home of the education minister in New Delhi. The anger only grew when two young men who had been preparing for an exam drowned in a basement study center as the streets flooded after overnight rain.

“We are working hard for several years, and rich students are taking advantage of the system by spending money,” Harsh Dubey, 22, who had been attempting to pass the medical school entrance test for four years, said during a protest in Delhi.

A Pyramid Plot

Mr. Atri once hoped to achieve his dreams the old-fashioned way.

After finishing high school, he packed up his home in Uttar Pradesh and left for Kota, a small town in Rajasthan known across India for its hundreds of test-prep centers generating hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

But as he kept failing the medical school entrance test (after ultimately passing the exam, he did not complete his medical course), he began focusing more on the exam industry itself and less on the job that an exam could lead to.

On the legitimate end of the spectrum, in thousands of small towns with their own mini-Kotas, are tutors with large followings, as well as managers of “libraries” where people can pay for a desk and study late into the night.

Mr. Atri at first offered his services as a “solver” — taking tests for others. Later, he moved into the wholesale business of exam theft, the authorities say.

Around the time he was starting out, an exam scandal in the state of Madhya Pradesh in 2015 made clear just how much money there was to be made, with billions of dollars in kickbacks traced to politicians, criminal gangs and others.

Mr. Singh, the police officer in Meerut, explained the exam breaches as a pyramid model. At the top is the procurer of the leak. Below him are middlemen. They work with agents at the village level, who recruit customers.

Before the constable test heist, Mr. Atri had been introduced to Dr. Mandal, who, the police say, would become his hired thief.

His story is similar to Mr. Atri’s: Even as he was studying for a medical degree, which he completed in 2021, he kept one foot in the lucrative world of exam leaks. Dr. Mandal eventually became known in test-theft circles for his precise box-opening skills. He landed in jail in 2017 for helping to leak a medical exam, police records show.

This year, as Dr. Mandal performed his day job at a health clinic in the state of Bihar, Mr. Atri had him on standby. If Mr. Atri heard about a shipment of question sheets from one of the people he had on retainer along the supply chain, Dr. Mandal would get a call.

Another Round

The call for the Ahmedabad job had come, Mr. Atri’s clients had taken the constable test — and Dr. Mandal wanted his money.

But there was a problem: After the exam had been administered, news got out that the questions had been leaked.

That alone did not mean that Dr. Mandal, who the police say had been promised a final payment of about $20,000 for stealing the test, would not be compensated. According to his agreement with Mr. Atri, he would be paid as long as the exam results were not canceled. That usually happens only when a leak is found to be widespread.

It was; the results were canceled. Mr. Atri stopped answering Dr. Mandal’s calls.

Mr. Atri’s racket had been busted through routine police work. While investigating another leak case, the police found evidence of the constable test breach.

The police essentially worked their way from the bottom of the pyramid to the top, tracing the leak from a village-level agent up the chain to Mr. Atri and Dr. Mandal.

“We found in their phone the papers for the U.P. constable exam — and when we checked the timing, it was before the exam,” said Mr. Singh, who was the case’s chief investigative officer.

Officials in Uttar Pradesh said there would be a retest with different questions — this time, a higher-security affair. A repeat leak would be a humiliation.

Six months after the first test, in late August, millions of aspirants streamed once again into towns for the exam. At bus stops and train stations, it was chaos.

In Meerut, the train platforms were crowded with people making themselves comfortable for the night. The nearby bus station was flooded with youths in backpacks. As they prepared to sleep on the pavement, some watched sped-up YouTube videos of tutors lecturing in front of a whiteboard.

On the day of the new exam, a police officer named Raghvendra Kumar Mishra had the difficult task of making sure it went well in Meerut. The graveyard of confiscated motorcycles outside his office spoke of his usual job — he is in charge of the city’s traffic.

His large office was a makeshift war room. Half a dozen officers watched footage from the 36 centers where the examination was taking place.

At one exam center, police officers checked documents as a line of students made their way under a billboard advertising a hair tonic for balding.

“Only pens allowed,” a police officer kept announcing through a megaphone. “Shoes in your hand when you enter. Belts not allowed inside. Jewelry not allowed. Sleeves should not be folded.”

Among the aspirants was Subhash Gupta, 24, who had come from central India to take the test for a second time, in addition to trying any test he could in his home state. He and his twin brother, who worked part time as tutors, had left their village focused on one thing: finding a government job anywhere and at any cost.

When he left the exam hall early in the afternoon, he said he had managed to answer 138 out of 150 questions. The math ones were easy, but his weakness was general knowledge.

Before boarding a bus to meet his twin, who was taking the same exam in a different district, he summed up why he was hellbent on a government job.

“The mentality is such in society that only if you land a government job you are considered a success,” he said.

Mr. Atri and Dr. Mandal, the men who the police say forced millions to retake the constable exam, were both arrested in the case. Mr. Atri now sits in jail, awaiting trial. His lawyers have argued that he was falsely implicated. Dr. Mandal was later granted bail.

Mr. Atri’s father, Gorakh Singh, described him as hard-working, saying he would stay up all night poring over books during his student days. “He may be a wrongdoer to the police,” his father said, “but not to us.”

He said his son’s legal expenses had put the family back by 10 to 15 years. If his son is, indeed, in the wrong, he said, he would prefer that the government finish him off in an “encounter” — an extrajudicial police killing.

“We will weep for 10 days and then will go on with our day-to-day activities,” he said. “Our harassment will be over.”

Pragati K.B. contributed research.

After he escaped from a London jail last year, strapped by a sling made from trousers to the underside of a food-delivery truck, Daniel Khalife spent three days on the run, evading a nationwide manhunt launched by Britain’s embarrassed authorities.

On Thursday the former British soldier was found guilty of spying for Iran after a trial that revealed the bizarre activities of a young man who claimed he was partly drawn to the world of espionage by watching the Emmy-winning drama “Homeland.”

At Woolwich Crown Court, Mr. Khalife, 23, was convicted of collecting information useful to an enemy — in this case the government of Iran — but cleared of a charge of planting fake bombs in his military barracks.

Mr. Khalife had contested the spying charges, claiming he wanted to work for the British intelligence agencies as a double agent.

Perhaps a more convincing defense, however, was the amateurishness of his efforts to become a spy. Gul Nawaz Hussein, who defended Mr. Khalife in court, described his client’s aspirations as naïve, stupid and bordering on slapstick, adding that it was more “Scooby Doo” than “007.”

Certainly, Mr. Khalife made spying look less glamorous than in the movies. On one occasion his Iranian handlers sent him to a park in north London to collect around $2,000 left in a bag for dog excrement, prosecutors said.

Mr. Khalife pleaded guilty to the audacious prison escape in September 2023 — a breakout that exposed embarrassing flaws in prison security.

A huge manhunt ensued, with airports and other travel hubs on high alert. After three days, a police officer pulled him from a bicycle on a canal towpath about 12 miles from Wandsworth jail, in southwest London, where he had been held.

But in his own mind, the prison break had proved his abilities as an undercover agent. “I was finally demonstrating what a foolish idea it was to have someone of my skill-set in prison,” he told the court. “What use was that to anyone?”

Whatever his motives, Mr. Khalife did pass documents to the Iranians, in one case visiting Turkey to meet a contact, and prosecutors dismissed his claims that he wanted to be a double agent as “a cynical game.” Instead, they contended that he had gathered “a very large body of restricted and classified material.”

Joining the British Army aged 16, Mr. Khalife was a member of the Royal Corps of Signals, a communications unit, but was rejected for intelligence work because his mother is from Iran.

The following year he reached out to a man connected with Iranian intelligence and began passing information, according to prosecutors.

Mr. Khalife gained NATO security clearance when he took part in a joint exercise at Fort Cavazos, Texas, in 2021, and British security officials remained unaware of his contacts with the Iranians until he told them himself.

Claiming to have earned the trust of his Iranian handlers, he anonymously emailed MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service.

Ignored by that agency, Mr. Khalife turned to MI5, the domestic spy network, in November 2021. It informed the police and Mr. Khalife was arrested in January 2022 and released on bail. He was, he claimed, inspired to make a fake defection to Iran by watching “Homeland,” starring Claire Danes and Damian Lewis, on Netflix.

In January 2023 he was reported missing by his army unit and, when his room was searched, the police found what they said appeared to be a potential explosive device, along with a note indicating that Mr. Khalife had left for fear of criminal charges. Later that month, he was arrested in Staffordshire, charged and sent to the prison from which he made his escape.

The court heard that, while in the army, Mr. Khalife had gathered the names of 15 serving soldiers — including some from the special forces — though he denied sending the list to the Iranians and claimed to have given them mostly fake information.

Most of the messages he exchanged with his contacts were on the encrypted app Telegram and were deleted.

But prosecutors said some of Mr. Khalife’s army documents were genuine, and presented evidence from mobile phones, notes he wrote to himself, and surveillance footage.

“He surreptitiously sought out and obtained copies of secret and sensitive information which he knew were protected and passed these on to individuals he believed to be acting on behalf of the Iranian state,” Bethan David, of the Crown Prosecution Service, said in a statement on Thursday.

The trial also heard that Mr. Khalife could have endangered Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian citizen who was held in Iran for six years, by sending a fabricated intelligence document to Iran that said the British government was unwilling to negotiate her release.

Sentencing is scheduled for Dec. 12. Dominic Murphy, head of the counterterrorism command at the Metropolitan Police, said in a statement on Thursday that the threat to Britain from “states such as Iran is very serious, so for a soldier in the army to be sharing sensitive military material and information with them is extremely reckless and dangerous.”

Mr. Khalife, he added, “claimed that he wanted to help the U.K.’s security by becoming a so-called ‘double-agent’ but the reality we uncovered is that he simply put U.K. security at great risk by what he was doing.”

For his part, Mr. Khalife still seemed to visualize himself in the glamorized world of undercover espionage depicted in “Homeland” and other fictions.

“I had seen one of the characters in the program had actually falsely defected to a particular country and utilized that position to further the national security interests of that character’s country,” he explained of one of his plans.

Mr. Khalife told the court he was a “patriot,” adding: “I do love my country. All I wanted to do was help.”

After 50 days surviving in the remote, frigid wilderness of Canada’s northern Rocky Mountains, a missing hiker was found alive this week, the Canadian authorities announced on Wednesday.

The hiker, Sam Benastick, was reported missing on Oct. 19 after he went camping in Redfern-Keily Provincial Park in British Columbia, an area of jagged mountains, fast-changing weather, forest valleys, glaciers, waterfalls and lakes. The police, rescue workers and his family took part in the search, scanning a landscape of austere mountains and blankets of snow.

But as the days passed without sign of Mr. Benastick, hope began to fade. Temperatures plunged to below zero Fahrenheit. In winter, the park warns of avalanches. Year-round, it warns of bears. At some point, the official search was called off, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

During the search, Mr. Benastick’s family spent weeks at the Buffalo Inn Pink Mountain, a hotel near the park, having nightly meetings in the hotel’s fireplace room, Michael Reid, the general manager, said in a phone interview. The family checked out before Mr. Benastick had been found, he said.

Then, over a month after he was reported missing, two men heading to work down a trail spotted a man heading toward them, the police said in a statement.

The men recognized Mr. Benastick and took him to the hospital, where the authorities confirmed his identity, the police said.

“Finding Sam alive is the absolute best outcome,” said a police spokeswoman, Cpl. Madonna Saunderson, in the statement. “After all the time he was missing,” she added, the police had feared this “would not be the outcome.”

The sequence of events that led to Mr. Benastick going missing was not immediately clear. According to the police, Mr. Benastick said he had stayed in his car for a few days before walking to a creek on a mountain side and camping for another 10 to 15 days. He told the police that he had then moved into a valley and made camp in a dried-up creek.

The health care provider Northern Health said that he had been taken to a hospital and was “doing well.” Mr. Benastick would not provide comment at this time, it said in a statement.

Mr. Benastick began a 10-day camping trip in the park on Oct. 7 and his family reported him missing after he failed to check in, according to a GoFundMe page that appeared to be set up by his sister. The fund-raiser’s organizer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Reid, the hotel manager, said that there had been jubilation when they heard the news that Mr. Benastick had been found.

“We all gave each other a hug, and we had tears in our eyes,” Mr. Reid said. “I’ve got three kids and five grandkids so I know what they were going through.”

Mr. Reid said Mr. Benastick was still in the hospital but that his family would be stopping by “on their way back.”

For 22 years, John Burt has cut and trimmed steaks, chops and roasts in a butcher shop across the street from Smithfield, the oldest meat market in London. In that time, he said, he has watched the market’s slow decline, from a carnivore’s bustling bazaar to a hulking relic of an earlier London.

Still, the news this week that Smithfield will close — its owner, the City of London Corporation, killed a plan to move the market to a new site in East London — came as something of a jolt to him.

“I’m sad about it,” said Mr. Burt, 64, whose shop is separate from the market and will stay in business. “You wouldn’t have thought that Smithfield Market would ever shut down because it’s been around since the time of Henry VIII.”

Even longer, actually: Smithfield has been the site of a market since at least 1174, when medieval traders brought horses, cows, oxen and pigs to be sold there. In 1327, King Edward III gave the governing body of the City of London the right to operate Smithfield and other food markets. The current market, completed in 1868, is a marvel of Victorian engineering, with a cavernous roof and train tracks running underneath it (to transport the livestock).

It is, however, “totally out of date,” said Simon Jenkins, a journalist and the author of “A Short History of London.”

In an era of supermarket chains, which buy produce directly from far-flung food-processing plants, a wholesale meat market in the heart of London makes little sense. The fruit and vegetable market at Covent Garden was moved out of the city center in the 1970s; the fish market migrated to Canary Wharf in 1982.

Mr. Burt said he thought the local authorities had been itching to remove rattling delivery trucks from the warren of streets around Smithfield, which is ringed by upmarket pubs and restaurants. The property, in any case, is more valuable as a site for offices, apartments or retail businesses.

The City of London, an ancient governing body, said that the traders would be allowed to keep operating at Smithfield until at least 2028, and said that they would be compensated for the cost of relocating their business.

Mr. Jenkins, who has campaigned to conserve London’s architectural heritage, said he was hopeful that the market would be turned into a cultural and shopping mecca that would rival the redeveloped Covent Garden. An adjacent building, which housed a poultry market, is being converted into a new home for the Museum of London, though Mr. Jenkins said it was a “scandal” that the meat market hung on long enough to prevent the museum from taking over the entire site.

For the City of London, the sunset of Smithfield is a rare disappointment, given its ambitions and resourcefulness in developing what it refers to as the Square Mile, the oldest part of London. Thrusting skyscrapers have transformed the district into a kind of Chicago-on-Thames. The corporation’s original plan was to move the Smithfield market and the Billingsgate fish market to a vast new site on the Dagenham Docks, in East London.

But the corporation said inflation and rising construction costs had made the project unaffordable. Some critics have argued that the decision was flawed because it failed to account for the impact of the loss of the market on food security in the British capital.

In a glass-is-half-full statement, Chris Hayward, the policy chairman of the City of London Corporation, called it a “positive new chapter for the Smithfield and Billingsgate Markets in that it empowers traders to build a sustainable future in premises that align with their long-term business goals.”

It is not the first time the City of London has had to shelve an ambitious project. In 2021, it pulled the plug on a dramatic new concert hall — estimated to cost 288 million pounds, or $365 million — which would have been a new home for the London Symphony Orchestra. It blamed the coronavirus pandemic, though the departure of Simon Rattle, the orchestra’s conductor and a vocal champion of the project, may have also played a role.

“What this proves again is that while they’re still capable of doing things they’ve been doing for centuries, there’s a limit even to what they can do in terms of development,” said Tony Travers, a professor of politics and an authority on city planning at the London School of Economics.

The decision, he said, also underlines the unsentimental nature of many Londoners toward their history. The City of London, he noted, had long resisted allowing skyscrapers. But after Canary Wharf put up a forest of towers and threatened the city’s status as a financial center, the corporation abruptly reversed course. Nearly a dozen new towers are scheduled to go up there by 2030.

“Intriguingly, for a country as old and interested in its history as the U.K., people are surprisingly willing to move on,” Professor Travers said.

Already, Smithfield has the faintly nostalgic air of a museum. Placards tell passers-by about the history of the market, which is even more blood-soaked than one might imagine. In 1305, the Scottish independence leader, William Wallace, was hanged, drawn and quartered on the site. During the reign of Queen Mary I, in the 16th century, Protestants were burned to death as heretics there.

Smithfield’s next chapter is being written in more bloodless language. The City of London said it would work with the traders to help them “transition seamlessly and successfully to new locations.” But they are under no obligation to stay in business, and Mr. Burt said he expected many would retire.

“Most of them are older than me,” he said, noting that he will soon turn 65. “Do they really want to go off and start another business? I don’t think so. There aren’t many meat markets left around the country; it’s a dying trade.”

The largest offensive in years by Syrian opposition fighters against government forces has stirred fears of reigniting a civil war that has been mostly frozen for years.

The new rebel push began Wednesday in Aleppo Province in northwestern Syria. On Thursday, the opposition forces advanced, capturing several new villages, according to a British-based monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The offensive aims to stop attacks by government forces and their Iran-backed militia allies, a rebel commander said.

Two days of fierce clashes have killed more than 150 combatants from both sides: nearly 100 from rebel groups which launched the offensive and 54 regime soldiers, according to the Observatory. The group gathers information from a network of activists and others across Syria, and its numbers could not be independently verified.

In addition to those deaths, more than a dozen civilians have been killed by Syrian and Russian airstrikes, according to the White Helmets, a rescue group based in opposition areas. Russia and Iran have for years robustly helped President Bashar al-Assad’s autocratic regime stave off the rebels.

Who are the rebels?

The offensive unites various rebel factions that represent the last vestiges of a once-sprawling array of opposition groups. Starting in 2011, they fought hard to oust Mr. al-Assad and, at one point, controlled large parts of the country.

The main group is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a faction formerly linked to the terrorist group Al Qaeda. It controls most of the northwestern territory still held by opposition groups.

Several Turkish-backed rebel groups have also joined the offensive, according to commanders of the groups and the Observatory.

Though they share a common enemy, the various rebel factions have often fought among themselves, undermining the cohesion they needed to challenge the Syrian military.

What are the aims of the offensive?

In a video statement announcing the offensive, Lt. Col. Hassan Abdulghany, military commander of the opposition’s operations room, said the attack was aimed at stemming Syrian airstrikes and other attacks on opposition-held territory.

“To push back their fire from our people, this operation is not a choice. It is an obligation to defend our people and their land,” he said. “It has become clear to everyone that the regime militias and their allies, including the Iranian mercenaries, have declared an open war on the Syrian people.”

Iran has backed the Syrian government throughout the war, sending advisers and commanders of its powerful Revolutionary Guards force to bases and front lines and backing militias, with thousands of fighters, to defend the government.

What does the Syrian government say?

Syrian state media reported on Thursday that government forces were confronting a “large-scale terrorist attack” on villages, towns and military sites.

Since the early days of the uprising, the government has characterized all opposition as “terrorists.”

The government said it was responding “in cooperation with friendly forces,” without specifying who those forces were. It also claimed to have inflicted heavy losses on the rebel side.

Is this linked to the regional conflict?

While Syria has not been directly involved in the conflicts roiling the Middle East over the last year, its territory has long been a proxy battlefield for international powers.

For years, Israel has carried out deadly strikes in Syria, saying its targets are Iran-backed militants including the Lebanese group Hezbollah. Those attacks have escalated in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel from Gaza.

The Israeli military has said some of these strikes aim to cut off the flow of weapons and intelligence between Hezbollah and Iran. Weapons and money have long flowed from Iran across Syria’s borders to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

In April, a deadly Israeli strike that hit part of the Iranian Embassy complex in Damascus killed several senior Iranian commanders.

Iranian media reported on Thursday that a commander of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards force was killed in the rebels’ new offensive.

Who controls what in Syria?

More than a decade of civil war, proxy battles and an invasion by the terror group Islamic State have left Syria carved up into different zones of control.

The government now controls more than 60 percent of the country, including most major cities. But that was not always the case.

At the height of the opposition’s strength in the civil war, and after the Islamic State overran parts of Syria, the government had lost control of most of the country.

But the tide turned in 2015 when Russia’s military directly intervened to help Mr. Assad.

Still, large parts of the country are out of government control, including opposition-held areas in the northwest and the northeast, which is dominated by a Kurdish-led militia backed by the United States.

The opposition-controlled area of northwest Syria includes parts of Idlib and Aleppo provinces, and is home to about 5 million people. More than half of them were displaced from their homes elsewhere in Syria.

Though Islamic State lost its last territorial foothold in Syria in 2019, it maintains sleeper cells believed to hide out in Syria’s vast desert and carry out occasional attacks on government soldiers and civilians.

Muhammad Haj Kadour and Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting.