Recent unrest at two Israeli military bases has highlighted a growing divide among Israelis about the conduct of their soldiers, and revived a deeper and older battle over the nature of the Israeli state and who should shape its future.

The trouble began on Monday after 10 soldiers were detained on suspicion of raping a Palestinian man held at Sde Teiman, a military jail in southern Israel, according to court records. Two of the soldiers were later released.

Dozens of protesters gathered outside the base in solidarity with the detained soldiers, including at least three far-right lawmakers from the ruling coalition. Hundreds later massed outside Beit Lid, a second base in which the 10 men had been brought for interrogation. Dozens surged inside both bases, brushing aside the guards at the gates.

The incidents were widely broadcast across Israel, spreading an image of disunity at a time when the country is fighting enemies on multiple fronts.

Amid fears of further unrest and accusations of police complicity, the military sent two battalions of reinforcements on Tuesday to protect the second base. The country’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, called for an investigation into whether the police force had been ordered to stand aside by Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right minister who oversees the police; Mr. Ben-Gvir denied the claim.

The decision to deploy more troops inside Israel came as the military leadership questions whether it has enough resources to fight all-out wars in both Gaza and Lebanon, amid fears of a regional escalation.

The unrest at the bases reflected the depth of disagreement among Israelis, including within the military, about the extent to which soldiers should be held accountable for abusing Palestinians accused of participating in the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the subsequent ground war in Gaza.

More widely, it gave fresh momentum to a wider battle among Israelis about the future and character of their democracy, a dispute that was mostly put to one side at the start of the war to foster greater wartime unity.

In the months before the war broke out in October last year, that existential debate centered around the role of the country’s judiciary.

On one side were Israelis who see their country as a liberal democracy in which the judiciary should act as a strong check on government overreach. On the other were those who feel it would be more democratic to bestow more power to the elected representatives of an increasingly conservative population than to unelected judges.

This schism was exacerbated by the perception on the Israeli right that, despite winning most elections since the 1970s, they still lacked significant influence over the state’s main unelected power centers. That includes the Supreme Court, the military high command and the influential legal departments of government ministries and regional authorities.

Now, these prewar tensions have become enmeshed with wartime disagreements over battlefield strategy, military conduct and the question of who should take responsibility for Israel’s military failures.

To the government’s opponents, the unrest at the military bases, coupled with the involvement of far-right lawmakers, revived their longstanding fears for Israel’s democracy.

“All red lines were crossed today,” Yair Lapid, the Israeli opposition leader, said on social media. “Lawmakers and ministers who participate in breaking into military bases with violent militias are sending a message to the state of Israel: They are done with democracy, they are done with the rule of law.”

But for protesters like Oren Buta, 52, a right-wing activist who joined the protest outside Sde Teiman, it was the detentions of the guards, which had been ordered by the military’s judicial branch, that highlighted the weaknesses in Israel’s democracy.

Mr. Buta said he saw it as the latest example of the left’s enduring influence over the watchdog bodies that guide the state from behind the scenes.

“What we saw yesterday underscores how much we need that judicial reform,” he said. “We saw how only one segment of society — leftists — reach positions of power in the state of Israel.”

To the protesters, the arrests also fostered the impression that the military is in a greater rush to hold soldiers to account for their treatment of Palestinians than high-ranking generals for their failure to prevent Hamas’s invasion of Israel on Oct. 7.

“The elites don’t see anyone else but themselves,” said Daniela Mehertu, 28, an engineering technician who protested outside Beit Lid on Tuesday. “Most Israeli citizens feel they are not seen.”

The unrest also revealed a deep disagreement in Israel over the rights that should be afforded Palestinians detained in Gaza.

Since the start of the war, the Israeli military has captured at least 4,000 Gazans, mostly from inside Gaza, and brought them to Sde Teiman, for detention and interrogation. More than 1,000 were later judged to be civilians and returned to Gaza, while others have been held on suspicion of links to Hamas and its Nukhba commando brigade.

Former detainees and some Israeli soldiers have said that guards routinely abuse Gazans held at Sde Teiman; at least 35 detainees have died either at the site or shortly after leaving it.

Amid international scrutiny of Israel’s wartime conduct, some Israelis have pushed for improvements at the base, leading rights groups have petitioned the Supreme Court to close it and military prosecutors have been more proactive about investigating allegations there.

But many Israelis have decried this scrutiny, saying that soldiers should not be punished for how they treat prisoners believed to have committed atrocities during the Oct. 7 attacks that Israel says killed roughly 1,200 people.

“The soldiers are angry, and you can understand why,” said Yakir Ben-Zino, 31, a handyman from southern Israel who joined the crowds inside Sde Teiman on Monday. “It tears your heart out, what they did to us,” Mr. Ben-Zino added, referring to Hamas.

A military doctor at the field hospital in Sde Teiman, Prof. Yoel Donchin, said by telephone that the Palestinian detainee had been brought to the site’s field hospital roughly three weeks ago with signs of abuse across his body.

Professor Donchin said doctors immediately sent him for several days of treatment at a bigger civilian hospital and informed the military police that he might have been mistreated by either guards or fellow prisoners. Lawyers for the detained soldiers said they were accused of using an object to rape the Palestinian.

The ensuing unrest set off alarm from some senior politicians, who said the protesters’ actions — and the support for them from parts of the ruling coalition — threatened the country’s cohesion at a time when unity was needed.

“Do we want a state here, or militias that do whatever they want?” Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, wrote on social media. “Stop pouring fuel on the fire.”

But several ministers and right-wing lawmakers backed the protesters, and in some cases suggested the need to punish Hamas superseded the military’s need for accountability.

In Parliament, a lawmaker from Mr. Netanyahu’s party, Hanoch Milwidsky, was asked whether it was acceptable to sexually abuse a detainee.

“Yes,” he replied. “If he is Nukhba,” he added, referring to the Hamas commando unit, “everything is legitimate to do. Everything.”

Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel.

Olha Predchenko held hands with her 85-year-old mother as they looked at the makeshift memorial on the grass in central Kyiv, each blue and yellow flag marked with the name of a soldier who had died fighting in the war with Russia.

They come here often to Maidan Square, to spend time thinking about the dead and the war. Ms. Predchenko said she dreamed of something heavy falling on the Kremlin. But she also hoped for a peace deal soon.

“Better a bad peace than a good war,” added Ms. Predchenko, 61.

Increasingly frustrated, more Ukrainians appear to be opening up to the idea of a negotiated peace, even as they remain vague about what that means.

Most Ukrainians still oppose ceding any territory to Russia, not even the Crimean peninsula that was seized by Russia 10 years ago, polls show. But those polls and recent remarks by the country’s leaders also highlight a palpable shift in the conversation around peace talks — from a no-deal-not-ever to a maybe-compromise-at-some-point.

In mid-July, a survey by the Ukrainian independent media outlet ZN.UA found that about 44 percent of Ukrainian civilians favored starting official talks with Russia. On July 23, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology released a poll showing that nearly a third of Ukrainians would agree to cede some territory to Russia to end the war. That’s more than three times as many as the year before.

Nadia Ivashchenko, 28, a railway signal operator from the central Kirovohrad region, said she couldn’t describe a good peace settlement. But her husband has been fighting in the army since Russia invaded in February 2022, and the couple has a 5-year-old son who hasn’t seen his father in years.

“So many people died, and what for?” Ms. Ivashchenko said. “But I want everything to be finished, at least somehow, because I have a son, and I don’t want him to grow up in such a wartime as now.”

In Ukraine, the third year of the war is grueling: The Russians are inching forward every day, and Ukraine has been unable to mount a successful counteroffensive since 2022. The country has been beset by frequent power outages and a growing death toll.

Ongoing support from the West seems unpredictable, especially if Donald J. Trump regains the White House in November. Germany will cut military aid for Ukraine in half if its proposed budget for 2025 is adopted; that is seen as a bellwether for Western commitment, especially after the six-month delay in the United States for a military-aid package delivered this spring.

International pressure is building on Ukraine and Russia to come to some kind of agreement, although experts agree neither side is ready. The barriers to any settlement are huge: Russia occupies about 18 percent of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, according to DeepState, an analytical group with close ties to Ukraine’s army.

In June, President Vladimir Putin said he would order a cease-fire and enter negotiations with Ukraine only if Kyiv withdrew from the regions that Moscow has claimed — but does not yet completely control — and dropped aspirations to join NATO. Ukraine dismissed the proposal as a demand for capitulation; President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he wants Ukraine to return to its 1991 borders and gain a NATO berth.

Russia was not invited to Switzerland in June for the first international peace summit, a 92-country gathering meant to promote Ukraine’s vision for how the war should end. Since then, Ukraine has publicly signaled that Russia should come to the next one, and Mr. Zelensky, in an interview with the BBC, expressed hope for a diplomatic solution.

Ukraine’s foreign minister was in Beijing this month expressing a willingness to have China play a more central role in peace negotiations, and on Wednesday Ukraine invited China’s top diplomat to visit Kyiv.

Russia has so far been noncommittal about participating in a second peace summit. But the Kremlin has also signaled in recent weeks that it could enter negotiations even if Kyiv doesn’t fulfill Mr. Putin’s June demands. Regardless, many Western officials and analysts question whether Mr. Putin is ready to negotiate anything other than a peace deal on his terms.

A key adviser to Mr. Zelensky last week said making a deal now with Mr. Putin was akin to signing “a deal with the devil.” And while the Kyiv Institute poll showed a threefold increase in people willing to give up land for peace, it also found that 55 percent of Ukrainians oppose any territorial concessions whatsoever.

Kateryna Predchenko, Olha’s 85-year-old mother, chastised her daughter for suggesting a deal and thought Ukrainian soldiers should keep fighting.

“It’s not just Ukraine, they protect the whole world,” she said. “Why doesn’t the world want to understand this? We need everyone to rise up against this Russian idiot.”

In the south, one of the regions most affected by the war, the change in attitude over the past year was striking, the Kyiv Institute’s poll showed. More than half of the respondents said they either supported ceding some territory or weren’t quite sure. Only 46 percent said they opposed any concessions. A year ago, 86 percent in this region — encompassing Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv, Kherson and Odesa — said they opposed giving any territory to Russia.

Mykola, 33, a resident of Odesa, who didn’t want his last name used because he was avoiding the military draft, said he could see ceding the Crimean peninsula, already in Russia’s control, or the area near the city of Luhansk in eastern Donbas as part of a deal. But he added: “As a person who’s sitting home and not fighting on the battlefield, I don’t feel I have any moral right to say how this agreement should look.”

Freezing the lines of battle would leave those in occupied areas, which include the relatives of many Ukrainians, in Russian control indefinitely. And the areas Ukraine has liberated are grim, destroyed by Russian strikes and rife with allegations of human rights abuses.

The sociology institute’s survey did not identify how large concessions should be, whether territory should be officially conceded or whether it should be controlled temporarily by Russia in a less formal way.

“It’s just in general, what’s your emotions?” said Anton Grushetskyi, the institute’s executive director. “And surely, more and more people are ready. And the key reason is the failed expectations from the last year, because lots of people had more hopes.”

He added that many Ukrainians had seen those hopes dashed, particularly because of the delay in U.S. military aid.

For some Ukrainians, their desired deal sounds more like a pipe dream.

“I’d like Russia to go home, stop interfering in our country and deal with their internal problems,” said Oleksandr Melnyk, 26, a car mechanic in the southeastern city of Kryvyi Rih. He said he has submitted his papers to serve in the army. “I’d like them to stop their aggression, pay for the damage, and return all our prisoners and children.”

Many in Ukraine said they were nervous about what the re-election of Mr. Trump might mean. The former president has said he plans to bring a swift end to the war, although he hasn’t specified how. Ukrainians worry that he would cut America’s support or push to allow Russia to keep the territory it now occupies.

Mr. Trump’s inner circle is filled with Ukraine war skeptics, including JD Vance, his pick for vice president, who once said: “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”

But other Ukrainians said that Mr. Trump would at least give Ukraine an answer.

“If Trump comes to power, everything will be clear,” said Natalia Fomenko, 47, who lives in Irpin, one of the Kyiv suburbs ravaged early in the war by the Russians. “Either he will provide Ukraine with weapons, or we will have to agree to negotiate.”

Some Ukrainians on the front lines also said they were skeptical that Russia would actually honor the terms of a peace deal.

“I’d rather believe in the chastity of a prostitute,” said Oleksandr Tsebrii, a soldier of the 58th motorized brigade, in a Facebook video posted on July 15, shortly after Mr. Zelensky publicly suggested Russia could come to the next peace summit. He added: “The only formula for our security and the existence of Ukraine is our resistance.”

Last week, he was killed in heavy fighting in the eastern region of Donetsk.

Anton Troianovski, Andrew Kramer and Dzvinka Pinchuk contributed reporting.

Sudan’s army said two drone strikes hit an army base in the country’s east on Wednesday after a graduation ceremony attended by the country’s de facto leader, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who has been locked in a civil war for over a year with a rival military general.

At least five people were killed and several others injured in the attack in the town of Gebeit, the army said, which has been held by the army and is about 50 miles from its wartime capital of Port Sudan.

The Sudanese army spokesman, Nabil Abdallah, told the BBC that General al-Burhan had survived an assassination attempt, and blamed it on the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group that has been battling the army for power for 15 months.

A military spokesman could not be reached for comment. In statements posted on social media, the military did not say whether General al-Burhan had been hurt or where he was during the attack. But it posted a video purportedly showing him attending a burial ceremony in Port Sudan for those killed in the attack.

No group has claimed responsibility for the strikes. The paramilitary group’s media office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The war between General al-Burhan and his rival, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, who leads the Rapid Support Forces, has devastated Sudan, one of Africa’s largest nations. More than 18,000 people have been killed, according to an estimate from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, though aid workers estimate the death toll to be higher.

At least 10 million people have been driven from their homes, according to the United Nations, while more than half the country’s 48 million people face hunger, and hundreds of thousands of others are facing a looming famine.

The army and the paramilitary group have both used drones in the war, which are sometimes supplied by close foreign allies such as Iran or the United Arab Emirates, according to Western and Sudanese officials.

The paramilitary group, which has dominated the capital, Khartoum, and the western region of Darfur, has in recent weeks been ramping up its attacks on areas controlled by the army in the east. The paramilitary group has also recently clashed with the army in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, and in the southeastern state of Sennar.

The two military leaders were once allies who brutally cracked down on Sudan’s pro-democracy forces after a popular revolt forced out the country’s longtime dictator, Omar Hassan al-Bashir. But they fell out over who should hold supreme power in the country and how swiftly their forces should merge into a single army.

The reported drone attacks on the base come just two weeks before mediation talks to end the war, hosted by the United States, were set to begin in Switzerland. The U.S. secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, said in a statement this month that Saudi Arabia will co-host the talks, which will include the African Union, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Nations as observers.

The paramilitary force’s leader, General Hamdan, said his group will participate in the talks. On Tuesday, Sudan’s foreign ministry, which is allied with the army, signaled it was ready to join the talks in Geneva on Aug. 14. but said the paramilitary should stop its attacks and open humanitarian corridors.

The army, however, has also been accused of thwarting the flow of food aid, especially to the Darfur region in the west, by preventing United Nations trucks from passing through a crucial border checkpoint. The army says it is necessary to stop the flow of weapons.

Even as they indicate their willingness to talk, observers say both sides hope to reach the negotiating table with an upper hand.

“We want the war to stop while our heads are held high and we are victorious,” General al-Burhan told officers at the graduation ceremony on Wednesday, before the drone strike, in a video posted by the army on social media.

A spokesman for the U.S. State Department said it was aware of the drone strikes on Wednesday, and that it was in “active communication” with both parties on the invitation to attend the peace negotiations in Switzerland.

The war in Sudan has become one of the world’s most urgent, and ignored, humanitarian emergencies. The country’s health care system has been all but decimated, disrupting treatment for millions. Disease outbreaks have risen, with aid groups saying hundreds have died from malaria, dengue, measles and other illnesses.

Schools and universities have been shuttered in a nation that once drew many foreign students. Looting has been widespread, with banks, private homes and government institutions burned and robbed.

Venezuela’s electoral body announced on Monday that the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, comfortably won another six years in office, beating his main opponent by seven percentage points in a vote that was marred by widespread irregularities.

But partial election results, provided to The New York Times by a group of researchers associated with Venezuela’s main opposition alliance, supply new evidence that calls the official result into question.

Their figures suggest that an opposition candidate, a retired diplomat named Edmundo González, actually beat Mr. Maduro by more than 30 percentage points. The researchers’ estimate of the result — 66 percent to 31 percent — is similar to the result obtained by an independent exit poll conducted on Election Day across the country.

It was not possible for The Times to independently verify the underlying tallies, which the researchers say were collected from paper receipts produced by about 1,000 voting machines, about three percent of the country’s total. By Wednesday, Venezuela’s government-controlled election authority had still not released detailed results, despite growing international pressure.

But several independent survey and election analysts reviewed the researchers’ approach and said that, based on the tallies shared by the researchers, the estimates appeared credible. And given the partial tallies, The Times was able to broadly replicate the researchers’ estimates of the result within two percentage points.

The announcement of Mr. Maduro’s victory triggered deadly protests on Monday and led several Latin American countries to suspend or downgrade diplomatic relations with Venezuela, plunging the polarized country into a new period of flux.

The Times analysis shows that the election tallies provided by the researchers are not compatible with a victory by Mr. Maduro, by any margin.

What the researchers did

There are about 30,000 voting machines in Venezuela. After polls close, each machine prints a vote tally, and volunteers observing the vote on behalf of political parties have a legal right to a copy.

To estimate the overall vote count, the research group, called AltaVista, created a random sample of 1,500 voting machines across the country, about 5 percent of the total. They designed the sample to proportionally represent the overall geography and partisanship of the country.

After the polls closed, AltaVista began collecting scanned copies of the tallies collected by opposition volunteers. Intimidation by government supporters, organizational lapses and patchy cellphone coverage prevented the researchers from obtaining all the tallies in the sample, but they collected and verified data for more than two-thirds of those precincts.

AltaVista made the data, including images of the printed receipts, public on Tuesday night.

The vote totals in these precincts show Mr. González, the opposition candidate, would be projected to defeat Mr. Maduro by a margin of 66 percent to 31 percent, the researchers said. Even in the ruling party’s strongholds in previous elections, the data shows that voters shifted away from Mr. Maduro.

Reasons to believe the researchers’ data

A similar approach would have yielded accurate estimates in previous elections. Because historical election data in Venezuela is public, we can see that the precincts sampled in this election have been representative of the nationwide vote in the past. In three prior elections, the weighted results from these precincts were within two points of the final national result, a Times analysis found.

The only significant difference is with the government-declared results of Sunday’s election.

Venezuelan elections under Mr. Maduro have long ceased to be considered free or fair, beset by voter suppression and other irregularities. But the validity of the actual voting tallies has never before been cast into such doubt in a competitive national election.

The researchers’ results are consistent with an independent exit poll. An exit poll by Edison Research conducted on Election Day found overwhelming support for Mr. González. Its poll, conducted across 100 polling stations and based on interviews with nearly 7,000 voters, found Mr. González leading, 65 percent to 31 percent.

Independent survey and election analysts said AltaVista’s methodology and techniques appeared sound. Dorothy Kronick, an expert on Venezuelan electoral data at the University of California, Berkeley, independently assessed the validity of the opposition researchers’ sample at The Times’s request. She arrived at a similar conclusion.

Ms. Kronick found the sample slightly favored the opposition-leaning areas, but not nearly enough to explain the tremendous difference between the numbers claimed by the government and the opposition. “The numbers are irreconcilable,” she said. “One of them is wrong.”

Adam Berinsky, an expert in survey methodology at M.I.T., said that the researchers’ approach seemed reasonable and that, if anything, challenges the researchers faced while collecting data, including witness suppression, may lead to an underestimate of opposition support.

Different statistical techniques would not affect the overall conclusion. The researchers’ data suggests a strikingly different result from the one claimed by the Venezuelan government.

If the claims were closer, smaller methodological choices — how to select which precincts to validate or how to weight data from those precincts — could be decisive. But that is not the case here. This kind of analysis may not be conclusive enough to adjudicate a two-point difference, but it can offer clarity on a 30-point difference.

What’s still uncertain about the data

The researchers are aligned with the opposition party. The activists behind the project have a history of opposing Mr. Maduro’s government, and supporting opposition causes, which makes them a vested party in the country’s political standoff. But they have not held political office, and they have designed their methodology in collaboration with independent academics in the U.S. and Brazil.

There may be some biases in the data we don’t fully understand. The researchers’ sample of 1,500 precincts was drawn to assure representativeness in both partisanship and geography. But it’s possible that the selection is unrepresentative in some way the researchers did not detect.

It’s also possible that the precincts for which the researchers were not able to find voting receipts were meaningfully different from the ones where they were successful. (That would be unlikely, however, because the researchers selected the precincts randomly and say they were able to find voting records in most places where they sought them.)

Historical comparisons are challenging in a country with a history of election problems. Ensuring a sample with a representative number of Maduro supporters and opposition supporters is challenging without trusted, detailed historical election data. The migration of millions of Venezuelans in recent years makes any demographic estimates particularly challenging.

Ismail Haniyeh, a founding member of Hamas who rose to lead the Palestinian militant group’s political office from exile, was killed while visiting Iran on Wednesday. He was 62.

Mr. Haniyeh played a central role in Hamas’s evolution over the past two decades as it seized control of Gaza by force and then led the territory for 17 years, through multiple wars with Israel. More recently, he managed high-stakes negotiations and diplomacy for Hamas, including the ongoing indirect cease-fire talks with Israel seeking to end the war in Gaza.

He was assassinated in the Iranian capital, Tehran, where he was attending the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian. He was there along with other senior members of Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance” — allied forces that include Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

He had already survived a previous assassination attempt in 2003, when Israel targeted him and his mentor, the spiritual leader and a founder of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin. The Israeli military assassinated Mr. Yassin the next year.

“You don’t have to cry,” Mr. Haniyeh told a crowd gathered outside Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City at the time. “You have to be steadfast, and you have to be ready for revenge.”

Mr. Haniyeh was killed hours after meeting with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Tuesday. At the time of his death, Mr. Haniyeh was staying at a guesthouse affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The overseas arm of the Guards, the Quds Force, is responsible for overseeing and nurturing the allied armed groups outside of Iran like Hamas.

Iran and Hamas blamed Mr. Haniyeh’s killing on Israel, which had no immediate comment. Israel has vowed to kill Hamas’ leaders and defeat the group in the wake of the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, which set off the war in Gaza.

It was unclear how much control he and the other exiled Hamas political leaders exercised over the group’s leaders in Gaza and its military wing, which carried out the Oct. 7 attacks.

Hamas’s leadership was blamed by some Palestinian residents of Gaza for helping to start a war that led to an unprecedented Israeli military offensive that brought massive death and destruction across the entire territory. Gazans have also blamed leaders for being too slow to agree to a cease-fire deal. Now Mr. Haniyeh’s assassination threatens to further set back prospects for a truce.

Mr. Haniyeh was born in 1962 in the Shati refugee camp north of Gaza City to Palestinian parents who in 1948 had been permanently displaced from their home in what is now the Israeli city of Ashkelon in what Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe. He studied Arabic literature at the Islamic University of Gaza.

In 1988, he was among Hamas’s founding members. Israel arrested him for participating in the first intifada, or uprising, against the Israeli occupation. That was during Israel’s decades-long occupation of Gaza, and he served several sentences in Israeli prisons in the 1980s and 1990s.

In 1992, Mr. Haniyeh was among about 400 Palestinians expelled by Israel from their homes in Gaza to southern Lebanon, which was then occupied by the Israeli military.

At the time, Israel said that the forced exile of hundreds of leaders of Palestinian armed groups was meant to strike hard against Hamas. But it had undesired effects.

“It shed international light on the movement,” said Tareq Baconi, the author of “Hamas Contained” and president of the board of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, a think tank. “I think surprisingly for Israeli authorities who thought they were being effective by exiling these leaders, it actually shed more light on them.”

It also gave the newly established Hamas an international platform, and many of the group’s leaders who would later emerge were part of those forced into exile from Gaza, he said.

Mr. Haniyeh once served as personal secretary to Mr. Yassin, who aided the younger man’s ascent to power in Gaza, and in 2006, he became the leader of Hamas in the territory.

That same year, Hamas won legislative elections against Fatah, a rival Palestinian faction.

Mr. Haniyeh briefly served as prime minister of a Palestinian unity government with other factions. But it was dissolved after months of tensions that erupted into armed conflict between the groups. Hamas routed Fatah forces from Gaza and forcibly seized control of the territory.

The group went on to rule Gaza with an authoritarian hand, tolerating little dissent.

Mr. Haniyeh moved to Qatar in 2017, when he was named the Hamas political leader. Inside Gaza, he was succeeded by Yahya Sinwar, who is considered one of the chief architects of the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. At the time of his move, Hamas was trying to soften its public image as it jockeyed for influence both with Palestinians and the international community.

Living in exile, Mr. Haniyeh shuttled regularly between Qatar and Turkey.

At first, Mr. Haniyeh was seen as a leader who could not rise to the military capabilities of Mr. Sinwar or the diplomatic charisma of Khaled Meshal, a former chief of the group’s political office, Mr. Baconi said. But he was not overshadowed.

Mr. Haniyeh was “someone who was politically savvy and was able to engage in sort of playing the diplomatic game internally within the movement and trying to carry Hamas’s strategic and military goals into the negotiations,” he said.

“He was quiet and effective,” Mr. Baconi added. “And quite a tactful leader internally within the movement and someone who could have nudged toward a cease-fire if a serious offer was on the table.”

In April, three of Mr. Haniyeh’s sons and several of his grandchildren were killed in an Israeli strike near Gaza City. Israel identified the three adult sons as Amir, Mohammad and Hazem Haniyeh and said that all three were Hamas military operatives.

In June, Hamas said that Mr. Haniyeh’s sister and her family were killed in a strike by the Israeli military on the family home in Gaza.

Mr. Haniyeh was defiant in the face of the loss, a running theme in his life.

“We shall not give in, no matter the sacrifices,” he said at the time.

Tahani Mustafa, a senior Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group, called Mr. Haniyeh one of Hamas’s most astute diplomats. His assassination would likely extend the war in Gaza, she said.

“It’s not to say he renounced armed resistance, but at the same time, he was of the centrist moderates who thought conciliation, diplomacy were better routes to take,” Ms. Mustafa said. “In that sense, it’s a huge blow.”

In May, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court said he would seek an arrest warrant for Mr. Haniyeh, along with two other Hamas leaders and two Israeli leaders.

Karim Khan, the prosecutor, said he had “reasonable grounds to believe” that Mr. Haniyeh and the other Hamas leaders were responsible for “war crimes and crimes against humanity,” including “the killing of hundreds of Israeli civilians in attacks perpetrated by Hamas.”

In one of his last interviews, Mr. Haniyeh spoke to a Palestinian news agency on Tuesday as he toured a theme park exhibition in Tehran of replicas of landmarks from “axis of resistance” nations.

“We were filled with great pride and honor as we roamed the land of civilizations, moving from one country to another and from one state to another, with Jerusalem at its heart,” Mr. Haniyeh said as he stood in front of a replica of the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting.

The former president of the West African nation of Guinea was found guilty on Wednesday of crimes against humanity for overseeing a massacre in a stadium and the mass rape of pro-democracy demonstrators 15 years ago, a landmark verdict long awaited by survivors and relatives of the 150 people who were killed.

The trial of the former president, Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara, as well as 11 others, including the former head of the presidential guard, government ministers and security officials, was seen as a test for the region in holding military rulers to account. It was televised in Guinea and followed avidly by many of the country’s 14 million citizens.

Captain Camara was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and Lieutenant Aboubacar Diakité, the former head of the presidential guard, was sentenced to 10. The judge found six other defendants guilty and acquitted four, including a former health minister.

“Moussa Dadis Camara should be declared guilty of crimes against humanity on the basis of command responsibility,” said Ibrahima Sory II Tounkara, the judge in the trial, which was held in a courtroom built for the occasion in the capital, Conakry.

The massacre, which traumatized a generation of Guineans, happened on Sept. 28, 2009, when pro-democracy protesters were holding an enormous rally in a stadium in Conakry against Captain Camara, who had seized power in a coup in December 2008.

He was accused of overseeing the massacre, in which hundreds of security forces burst into the stadium and opened fire on the demonstrators.

In addition to those killed, hundreds of people were wounded and at least 109 women were raped or sexually assaulted, some with batons and bayonets, according to witness accounts and a 2009 United Nations investigation.

The bodies of those who had tried to flee or hide were found scattered across the stadium’s field and around its gates, walls and locker rooms.

Afterward, security forces tried to cover up the massacre, burying bodies in mass graves and sealing off the stadium, according to Human Rights Watch, which asserted that the abuses on and after Sept. 28 were premeditated and organized, and amounted to crimes against humanity.

For over a decade, survivors and victims’ family members tried to get justice for the massacre, to no avail. The elected government that followed Captain Camara’s, led by President Alpha Condé, conducted an investigation into the massacre and promised a trial. But one never materialized.

It was another military junta that finally held the trial — this junta headed by Col. Mamady Doumbouya, who overthrew President Condé in 2021.

The trial was seen by many observers as an opportunity for Colonel Doumbouya’s government to build its credibility internationally, and give the impression that it is committed to justice and the rule of law.

When Colonel Doumbouya seized power, many Guineans welcomed him, hoping he offered a break with President Condé, who had become increasingly repressive and intent on staying in power.

But their honeymoon period with Colonel Doumbouya was short-lived. Under his rule, demonstrations have been banned. Protests have taken place nonetheless, and 47 people have died in them, according to Amnesty International. The opposition coalition was dissolved. Recently, three of the country’s main independent media outlets have been shuttered.

And earlier this month, two leading opposition figures were arrested and then disappeared. This has led to a major outcry in the country, including among lawyers, who boycotted the trial of Captain Camara and the other defendants.

The only independent observer monitoring the polls in Venezuela said that Sunday’s vote for president did not meet international standards and was undemocratic, raising more questions about the legitimacy of the results.

The mission, led by the Carter Center, a pro-democracy organization, said late Tuesday that the election violated Venezuela’s own laws and the government’s failure to release a vote count was a “serious breach of electoral principles.”

The group joined the United States and many other countries that have said Venezuela’s election was marred by irregularities. At least 16 people have been killed in protests that erupted after election officials declared the country’s autocratic leader, President Nicolás Maduro, the winner.

The condemnation by the Carter Center, which was the lone independent election monitor the government allowed into Venezuela ahead of the vote, came hours after opposition leaders announced updated election results, which they said showed Mr. Maduro received less than a third of votes cast.

Venezuelans went to the polls Sunday to choose between Mr. Maduro, who has been in power since 2013, and Edmundo González, a former diplomat who served as a stand-in for María Corina Machado, a more popular opposition leader who had been barred by the government from running.

Ms. Machado released data showing that with more than 81 percent of the machines counted, Mr. González received 67 percent of the vote, compared with 30 percent for Mr. Maduro. The opposition’s count came from voting machine tallies provided to election observers, which they scanned and calculated, she said.

The government-controlled election authority said Mr. Maduro had received 51 percent of the vote, and Mr. González 44 percent. But the authority has yet to provide voting data, and critics say the body essentially expected that the nation would take its word that Mr. Maduro won another six years in office.

On Wednesday President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, a leftist like Mr. Maduro who had made drawing Venezuela closer a priority early in his administration, expressed serious doubts about the results in his first public statement about Sunday ’s vote.

“The grave doubts that have arisen around the Venezuelan electoral process can lead its people to a deep violent polarization with serious consequences,” Mr. Petro wrote on X.

“I invite the Venezuelan government to allow the elections to end in peace, allowing a transparent vote count.”

As the president of a bordering nation, Mr. Petro has a vested interest in the outcome: millions of Venezuelans have left the country on foot for Colombia. Pressure had been mounting inside Colombia for Mr. Petro to say something.

Mr. Maduro was clearly annoyed. He said at a news conference on Wednesday at the presidential palace that Colombia was the “epicenter” of the conspiracy against him and stressed that he never meddled in that country’s business.

The Carter Center, which is based in Atlanta and was founded by former President Jimmy Carter, has observed more than 100 elections around the world and sent a delegation of 17 people to Venezuela. They met with the elections council, the candidates, political parties, the armed forces and other interested groups.

The Venezuelan election “cannot be considered democratic,” the Carter Center said in a statement late Tuesday. “The Carter Center cannot verify or corroborate the results of the election.’’

The Carter Center’s statement is noteworthy because, in the past, Mr. Maduro has often cited the number of observers present to prove that elections were fair.

José Ignacio Hernández, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the statement could sow division among the leadership of the Maduro regime, some of whom may not have been on board with the government’s actions.

“Maduro will dismiss the report,” Mr. Hernández said, “but Maduro invited the Carter Center, and the defense minister had praised the labor of the Carter Center.”

José R. Cárdenas, a former Bush administration official who follows Venezuela closely, said the statement was important, because the Carter Center had defended Venezuela’s electoral system after a 2004 recall referendum failed to oust Hugo Chávez, Mr. Maduro’s predecessor as president and his longtime mentor.

In 2012, Mr. Carter called Venezuela’s electoral process, which had undergone significant improvements, “the best in the world.”

“They have now done a 180,” Mr. Cárdenas said.

Mr. Maduro, during the news conference, accused Carter Center of not questioning the last U.S. election, after it was contested by former President Donald J. Trump.

“Everyone who came here to Venezuela from the Carter Center came here with the report already written,” Mr. Maduro said.

While there were other election observers in Venezuela, they are friendly to Mr. Maduro and not considered impartial, analysts said.

The United Nations sent a panel of experts to Venezuela, but it was not an official observation mission, and its report has not been made public.

But Volker Türk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said on Tuesday that he was “alarmed by reports of disproportionate use of force by law enforcement officials.”

Mr. Maduro said Mr. Turk was either “badly misinformed” or “malicious.” “He says whatever the gringos tell him to say,” he said.

After summoning journalists to the palace, Mr. Maduro, who spoke for two hours, excoriated the international media, blaming it for sowing violence. He said a hack of the voting system, along with vandalism to various election authority buildings, amounted to a “coup against the electoral system.”

“Venezuela has its truth,” he said, “and I came here to defend the truth.”

He also defended the government’s refusal to release the vote count, claiming that the country’s Supreme Court would ultimately have to make that decision. Yet, experts noted, that has not been the practice in past elections, and the high court is aligned with Mr. Maduro and has already congratulated his victory on Sunday.

Human rights groups, government officials and family members of victims said that 16 people, including one soldier, had died amid protests. Penal Forum, a human rights organization, tallied 11 deaths, but The New York Times identified at least four more cases at a Caracas morgue.

“They are young people who were simply protesting,” said Alfredo Romero, the group’s president.

Ms. Machado said at least 177 opposition activists had been arrested “arbitrarily.”

John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, urged the Maduro government to make the voting data public.

“Our patience, and that of the international community, is running out,” Mr. Kirby said. “It’s running out on waiting for the Venezuelan electoral authorities to come clean and release the full, detailed data on this election so that everyone can see the results.”

In Caracas, security forces, according to opposition leaders, had surrounded the Argentine Embassy, where several members of Ms. Machado’s campaign facing arrest warrants have been holed up for months.

The Venezuelan government has threatened to arrest opposition leaders after accusing them of inciting violence. Jorge Rodríguez, Mr. Maduro’s campaign chief and the national assembly leader said he hoped that Ms. Machado and Mr. González would be arrested soon.

“I am not only referring to María Corina Machado, who has to go to jail,” Mr. Rodríguez said on Tuesday. “I am referring to Edmundo González Urrutia, because he is the head of the fascist conspiracy that they are trying to impose in Venezuela.”

The attorney general’s office in Venezuela did not respond to a request for comment about whether any criminal charges were being pursued.

Summoned by the president, several hundred supporters of the government gathered in downtown Caracas on Wednesday afternoon, banging on pots and pans.

María Prieto, 44, said she had come out to “defend the Bolivarian revolution,” a reference to the movement started by Mr. Chavez, the former president.

“My people and I voted in favor of Nicolás,” said Ms. Prieto, who is a member of an Indigenous community. “Before the arrival of the revolution, we didn’t have rights. They didn’t even count us in the census to see how many Indigenous people were in this country.”

Aris Ferrer, 62, a university professor, said Ms. Machado should just accept that her candidate lost.

“It does not seem right to us,” she said, “that they want to burn down a country.”

Genevieve Glatsky and Julie Turkewitz contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia, and María Victoria Fermín and Anatoly Kurmanaev contributed reporting from Caracas.

It had already been clear for months that Venezuela’s presidential election on Sunday, would not be free or fair, as the government jailed opposition leaders or disqualified them from running for office, and prevented millions of Venezuelans abroad from voting.

But as the day progressed it became all the more evident just how flawed the country’s democratic process had become and why the victory claim by the country’s autocratic leader, President Nicolás Maduro, has provoked such fury.

Voter intimidation

Across the country citizens, local reporters and journalists for The New York Times observed instances of voter intimidation.

In the early morning about 15 men in unmarked black jackets temporarily blocked access to one voting center in the capital, Caracas, a Times journalist observed. One volunteer vote monitor was punched.

The crowd eventually started demanding the right to vote and the long line started moving inside, more than an hour and a half after voting was officially supposed to start.

In the eastern city of Maturín, a woman was hit by a bullet when men on motorcycles drove by a line of people waiting to vote, according to a former lawmaker, María Gabriela Hernández, who was at the scene.

And in another polling place in the northern city of Cumaná, roughly 50 armed police officers and national guardsmen formed a long line outside, wearing helmets and body armor, in what appeared to be a show of power to anyone considering voting against the government.

In the nearby city of Carúpano, citizens and local journalists said that government security forces had tried to remove a vote monitor allied with the opposition and replace the person with a different monitor who had not been authorized by the country’s electoral authority.

Changing some voting stations

About 17,000 Venezuelans saw their voting stations changed at the last minute according to Carlos Medina, who helps direct the Venezuelan Electoral Observatory, an independent group.

That was the case for many voters in Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second largest city.

Sonia Gómez, 65, said she had checked the election council website on Saturday to verify her polling station. But when she arrived on Sunday, election workers told her she was registered somewhere else.

“They moved us older people because they know we don’t have that much energy,” she said, “but I’m going to look for someone to take me to vote.”

Five people in Cumaná said a new, unofficial voting station had been installed in a community center. A journalist working for The New York Times who tried to enter the site was stopped by government supporters.

Keeping other polling places open late

Some stations stayed open beyond the scheduled end of the vote, giving members of Mr. Maduro’s party a chance to round up voters who had yet to cast their ballots.

“The opposition vote is more spontaneous, it arrives by its own means,” Mr. Medina said. “On the other hand, the pro-government vote has behind it a machinery that mobilizes the vote.”

“So they left the centers open longer,” he added, “which allows the machinery to have more time to continue doing the work of searching and mobilizing the vote in favor of the ruling party.”

Withholding paper tallies

There are two vote counts in Venezuela, a digital tally received by the country’s election authority — which is led by an ally of Mr. Maduro — and a paper count printed by each voting machine at polling places.

The opposition invested heavily in an effort to have supporters present at each voting station to obtain a physical printout of the voting tally from every voting machine after the polls closed.

That access is required by Venezuelan election law, and the paper counts are typically the way that everyday citizens can verify that the digital count is correct.

But officials at some polling places refused to release the printouts to election monitors.

This was the case at one of the largest voting stations in Caracas, the Rafael Napoleon Baute school in Petare, where about 15,000 people were registered to vote.

In Maracaibo, local leaders said they had not been able to get the paper counts for all the voting centers in the region. At one school, Colegio Gonzaga, citizens protested outside, calling on the electoral officials to turn over the voting receipts.

Without all the paper counts, the country was left without a way to verify the result announced by the ruling party.

Partial election results from the paper counts, provided to The New York Times by a group of researchers associated with Venezuela’s main opposition alliance, supplied new evidence that calls the official result into question. Their figures suggest that the main opposition candidate, a retired diplomat named Edmundo González, actually beat Mr. Maduro by more than 30 percentage points.

Not publishing a full vote count

Shortly after midnight early Monday morning the country’s electoral authority announced that Mr. Maduro had received 51.2 percent of the vote, while the main opposition candidate, Edmundo González, had received 44.2 percent, with 80 percent of voting stations counted.

But the government did not release a full vote count, and its figures did not appear to match statistical estimates based on partial counts gathered by opposition poll watchers and other data that showed the president losing by a wide margin. As of Wednesday, the government had still not provided a full vote count.

The results were immediately called into question by the opposition and by the United States and other countries around the world, including several leftist Latin American governments.

“One of the main guarantees of our automated voting system is accountability, and accountability requires that the election results be published table by table to be able to verify the result,” said Mr. Medina. “Otherwise it is an act of faith, to believe in one number or another.”

If the country’s electoral authority does not reveal the results for every voting machine, he added, “it would be implicitly saying that it cannot support the numbers.”