The New York Times 2024-08-02 00:10:06


Live Updates: Russia Releases Evan Gershkovich in Sweeping Prisoner Swap

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Russia released three Americans from custody. Here’s the latest.

A prisoner swap at a Turkish airport involving seven countries on Thursday freed The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and two other Americans held in Russia, along with several jailed Russian opposition figures, in the most far-reaching exchange between Russia and the West in decades, the White House said.

The scope of the deal has little precedent in the post-Soviet era. For the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, Moscow freed prominent dissidents as part of a swap; 16 people in total were released from Russian custody. In exchange, eight people were freed by the West, after a complex web of negotiations that took place behind the scenes for months among nations that are otherwise bitterly at odds over Russian aggression in Ukraine.

The deal seemed sure to prompt jubilation among Western nations that had condemned the charges against the imprisoned Americans and opposition figures as baseless and politically motivated. It also delivered a diplomatic victory for President Biden, who has long pledged to bring home imprisoned Americans and to support Russia’s embattled pro-democracy movement.

It was also a triumph of a different sort for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who can use the deal to highlight his loyalty to Russian agents who get arrested abroad. But the deal also carried risks at home for him, by releasing imprisoned politicians who could energize Russia’s moribund, exiled opposition.

Here’s what else to know:

  • The deal freed Mr. Gershkovich, 32, who had spent 16 months in a Russian prison; Alsu Kurmasheva, 47, a Russian American editor for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, who was also arrested last year; and Paul Whelan, 54, a former U.S. Marine arrested in 2018.

  • Prominent Russian political prisoners were also released. They included Ilya Yashin, 41, perhaps the most popular opposition politician who was still behind bars; Vladimir Kara-Murza, 42, a veteran activist who also writes for The Washington Post; and Oleg Orlov, 71, the co-chairman of Memorial, the Russian human rights group.

  • Several of those freed by Russia were German nationals, including Rico Krieger, who had been sentenced to death for “terrorism” in Belarus, Russia’s closest ally. In exchange, Germany released Vadim Krasikov, a Russian convicted of murdering a Chechen former separatist fighter in Berlin in 2019 on orders of the Russian government. The United States released a convicted hacker, Vladislav Klyushin, and two others. Slovenia, Norway and Poland released four accused Russian spies.

  • The swap was the latest and largest of several prisoner exchanges that the Biden administration has negotiated with Mr. Putin even as the relationship between Russia and the United States has hit new lows over the war in Ukraine. In 2022, the United States freed Viktor Bout, a convicted Russian arms trafficker, in exchange for Russia’s release of Brittney Griner, the basketball star arrested that year on drug charges.

  • Some critics of deals like the one that freed Ms. Griner say they encourage further arrests of Americans by the Kremlin. But the newest deal was far broader than any trade that Mr. Biden or his recent predecessors had made with Mr. Putin. For the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, Moscow freed prominent Russian opposition figures as part of the deal.

President Biden, who negotiated this prisoner release at the same time as he was considering leaving the presidential race, according to a senior aide, is expected to deliver remarks from the State Dining Room shortly. Here is the setup.

Robert Thomson, the C.E.O. of News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, thanked the U.S. government for its efforts in releasing Evan Gershkovich in an email to News Corp staff members: “Evan’s emancipation would not have been possible without the concerted efforts of concerned, principled people who recognized that his cruel incarceration was unjust and immoral.”

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Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, an American broadcaster funded by the United States government, announced the release of its journalist Alsu Kurmasheva from the Russian prison. “Alsu was targeted because she was an American journalist who was simply trying to take care of a family member inside Russia,” Stephen Capus, the broadcaster’s president, said in a statement. “She did nothing wrong and certainly did not deserve the unjust treatment and forced separation from her loving family members and colleagues.

Here’s a look at some of the most prominent people released in the swap.

The prisoner swap carried out on Thursday is the most far-reaching exchange between Russia and the West in decades. Here’s a closer look at some of the people who were released.

Released by Russia

Evan Gershkovich

A reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Evan Gershkovich, 32, was detained by security service agents in March 2023 during a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg, a major Russian industrial hub about 850 miles east of Moscow. Shortly after, he was charged with espionage, the first such case against a Western reporter since 1986.

In their indictment, Russian prosecutors accused Mr. Gershkovich of obtaining “secret information” about a Russian military industrial facility that produces tanks and other weapons. Mr. Gershkovich, his employer and the U.S. government have denied the charges and called them politically motivated, and prosecutors did not publicly offer any evidence of his guilt. On July 19, a Russian court in Yekaterinburg sentenced Mr. Gershkovich to 16 years in a high-security penal colony in a swift trial that only took three hearings to complete.

Alsu Kurmasheva

Alsu Kurmasheva is a Russian American editor working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a broadcaster funded by the U.S. government. She was sentenced to six and a half years in a Russian penal colony for spreading false information about the Russian Army, a broad charge used by the Kremlin to stifle criticism of the war in Ukraine.

Ms. Kurmasheva, 47, had lived in Prague for more than two decades with her husband and two daughters. She was arrested during her trip to Kazan, her hometown about 500 miles east of Moscow. She was first fined for failing to report her American citizenship and then accused of failing to register as a “foreign agent” and put in pretrial detention. In December she was also charged with spreading false information about the Russian Army. The charges were related to a book Ms. Kurmasheva edited that featured 40 Russians who opposed the invasion of Ukraine.

Paul Whelan

Paul Whelan, 54, a former U.S. Marine who had served in Iraq, was attending a friend’s wedding in Moscow at the swanky Metropol Hotel when he was arrested on Dec. 28, 2018.

Mr. Whelan had made several previous trips to Russia, so he readily accepted a flash drive that a Russian friend said contained pictures of his travels. Russian agents then swooped down, claiming the drive held classified Russian military information.

Mr. Whelan is a citizen of the United States, Canada, Britain and Ireland. He was sentenced to 16 years in a high-security penal colony, where he was forced to sew industrial garments and suffered at least one assault by another inmate. He spoke out repeatedly about being left behind while other Americans were exchanged.

Ilya Yashin

A longtime fixture of Russian opposition politics, Ilya Yashin was sentenced in December 2022 to eight and a half years in prison after a court found him guilty on charges of “spreading false information” about atrocities committed by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, near Kyiv.

Previously, he served as the chairman of a municipal council in one of Moscow’s districts and took part in many anti-Kremlin protests. After the death of Aleksei Navalny, Mr. Yashin, 41, is considered to be one of the most popular Russian opposition leaders.

Before his arrest, he spoke about the war in Ukraine on his YouTube channel, often voicing criticism of President Vladimir V. Putin and his “special military operation.” While many Putin critics have fled Russia, especially immediately after its invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Yashin vowed to remain, even if it meant serving prison time.

Oleg Orlov

A veteran activist and human rights defender, Oleg Orlov, 71, served as a leading member of the Memorial, one of the oldest human rights organizations in Russia. Memorial started in the late 1980s as a grass-roots effort dedicated to researching mass purges under Stalin.

Over years, the Russian state grew increasingly wary of Memorial and its members. In 2021, a Russian court ordered it to be dissolved for failure to fulfill its duties as a “foreign agent” after the government designated the group as such. The next year, Memorial was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In February, a Moscow court sentenced Mr. Orlov to two and a half years in prison for repeatedly discrediting Russia’s military by voicing his opposition to the war in Ukraine.

Vladimir Kara-Murza

A veteran Russian activist, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for treason, the longest sentence given to an opposition politician in modern Russia. Mr. Kara-Murza, 42, drew the Kremlin’s ire when he lobbied in Washington for the use of sanctions to punish Russian government officials engaged in human rights abuses. In 2024, Mr. Kara-Murza, a Russian-British national and permanent resident of the United States, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in commentary for columns he had written in his prison cell and published in The Washington Post.

Mr. Kara-Murza twice survived what he characterized as government attempts to poison him — both times he was hospitalized in critical condition with organ failure.

Released by Germany

Vadim Krasikov

Vadim N. Krasikov, 58, is a Russian citizen who was sentenced to life in prison in Germany in 2021 for the brazen assassination of a Chechen separatist fighter in broad daylight in a park in central Berlin in 2019. German prosecutors indicated in their case that Mr. Krasikov worked for the Russian Federal Security Service, the most powerful security agency in Russia. The German judge suggested that the killing was ordered by Mr. Putin; the Kremlin denied involvement.

In a televised interview in February, Mr. Putin spoke glowingly of Mr. Krasikov, calling him “a person, due to patriotic sentiments, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals.”

Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas and the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, celebrated the news of the release in a statement and stressed the need to continue advocating for other detained Americans.

“I remain concerned that continuing to trade innocent Americans for actual Russian criminals held in the U.S. and elsewhere sends a dangerous message to Putin that only encourages further hostage taking by his regime.”

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Screens in the lobby of the Wall Street Journal’s building in London are lit up with Evan Gershkovich’s smiling face: “WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich is free.”

Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, cheered the prisoners’ release in a statement. “This exchange speaks volumes about what our two countries value. Vladimir Putin is getting back a crew of thugs, murderers, and low-life criminals. The United States is welcoming home journalists, voices for democracy and former service members.”

In a statement, President Biden announced the release of Paul Whelan, Evan Gershkovich, Alsu Kurmasheva and Vladimir Kara-Murza, calling it a “feat of diplomacy.”

“The deal that secured their freedom was a feat of diplomacy. All told, we’ve negotiated the release of 16 people from Russia—including five Germans and seven Russian citizens who were political prisoners in their own country. Some of these women and men have been unjustly held for years. All have endured unimaginable suffering and uncertainty. Today, their agony is over,” Biden said.

Biden added: “I am grateful to our allies who stood with us throughout tough, complex negotiations to achieve this outcome — including Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway and Turkey. This is a powerful example of why it’s vital to have friends in this world whom you can trust and depend upon.”

Emma Tucker, the editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal, emailed staff to announce Evan Gershkovich’s release. She said he would shortly get on a flight back to the United States, and she would travel to meet him when he arrives in Texas.

“I cannot even begin to describe the immense happiness and relief that this news brings and I know all of you will feel the same. This is a day of great joy for Evan and his family, and a historic day for The Wall Street Journal,” Tucker wrote, according to a copy of the email seen by The New York Times.

Tucker added: “We have a plan in place to ensure Evan is well looked after. We want him to take as much time as he needs to recuperate privately and are doing everything we can to support him and his family.”

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President Biden will speak about freeing Americans detained in Russia at noon from the White House.

Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement: “After years of detention in the harshest Russian prisons, Paul Whelan, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva have been freed of their abuse at the hands of the Kremlin and are soon to be returned to their families. Paul has spent five long, punishing years in prison on false charges, and I am relieved he will finally be safe at home. The news that seven Russian political prisoners were freed in this exchange is also good news. These Russian citizens’ only crime was that they dared to speak the truth that Vladimir Putin is afraid to hear.”

He added, “The United States paid a steep price for this exchange, as those returning to Russia are some of Putin’s most valuable assets.” He also said efforts must continue to free two other Americans: Marc Fogel and Ksenia Karelina.

Russia has not confirmed the prisoner swap announced by Turkey. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, just told reporters that the Kremlin would comment on the matter “in due time,” Russian state media said.

The Wall Street Journal kept Gershkovich’s detention front and center.

For more than a year, the top of The Wall Street Journal’s website has featured prominent coverage of the imprisonment of Evan Gershkovich, one of the news organization’s reporters. His image and the words #IStandWithEvan appear on a large screen in The Journal’s New York newsroom. Colleagues wear “I Stand With Evan” T-shirts and “Free Evan” pins.

The maneuvering behind the international prisoner swap on Thursday, involving Mr. Gershkovich and around two dozen others, was far outside the bounds of what The Wall Street Journal could do to help him. But since Russia imprisoned Mr. Gershkovich in March 2023, The Journal has pushed to keep his detainment top of mind.

The organization has operated letter-writing campaigns, launched social media blitzes and staged a 24-hour read-a-thon of Mr. Gershkovich’s reporting. Colleagues across the world took part in runs on the first anniversary of his arrest, while employees in New York plunged into the cold waters at Brighton Beach in Brooklyn for a swim event.

“After an initial flurry of attention in the weeks following Evan’s arrest, keeping the spotlight on his ordeal became a huge challenge for the newsroom amid jam-packed news cycles,” Emma Tucker, the editor in chief of The Journal, told The New York Times in an email earlier this year.

“We used every grim milestone as a moment to organize publicity and get Evan back into the headlines: 100 days, his birthday in October, 250 days, every one of his court appearances,” she wrote.

The Journal has continuously and strenuously denied the espionage charges against Mr. Gershkovich, saying he was an accredited journalist doing his job.

His arrest happened just five weeks after Ms. Tucker began her tenure as The Journal’s top editor. The Journal set up a dedicated section on its website featuring news updates on Mr. Gershkovich. It also has a counter logging the number of days since he had been arrested and it included resources for writing messages of support to Mr. Gershkovich and his family.

In October, The Journal moved its Washington bureau chief, Paul Beckett, into a new role to work full time on securing Mr. Gershkovich’s release.

Mr. Gershkovich’s family members, who live in the United States, are in regular contact with The Journal, which has helped to coordinate their interviews with the media.

On March 29, to mark his year of detainment, The Journal wrapped its newspaper in a special section with a blank front page bearing the headline “His Story Should Be Here.”

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Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, called on Russia to release all jailed journalists and end its harassment of those in exile. The reported release “is welcome – but it does not change the fact that Russia continues to suppress a free press,” Ginsberg said.

The Committee to Protect Journalists found in December that there were 22 journalists imprisoned in Russia.

Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas and the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement: “If these reports are true, I am thrilled Evan, Paul, Alsu, Vladimir, and many others who have been illegally held by Putin’s regime are finally coming home to their families. But I remain concerned that continuing to trade innocent Americans for actual Russian criminals held in the U.S. and elsewhere sends a dangerous message to Putin that only encourages further hostage taking by his regime.”

Live Updates: Israel Claims Killing of Militant Leader as Funerals Are Held for 2 Others

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Here are the latest developments.

The Israeli military said Thursday that its airstrike in mid-July on a Gaza compound had succeeded in killing Muhammad Deif, the leader of Hamas’s armed wing who is believed to have been one of the main planners of the Oct. 7 attacks.

The announcement came as thousands attended the funerals of major Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in Tehran and Beirut, whose assassinations have amplified fears of a wider war in the Middle East and endangered negotiations for a cease-fire in Gaza.

In a statement on Thursday, the Israeli military said its conclusion that Mr. Deif had died was based on an intelligence assessment, though it did not offer details.

The death of Mr. Deif would make him the most senior Hamas leader killed in Gaza. His fate has been unclear since Israel targeted him in a major attack that killed at least 90 people, according to Gaza health officials. Hamas has neither confirmed nor denied his death.

Israeli leaders, who have made clear that their goal is to destroy Hamas and take out senior figures in the group and other enemies, were quick to celebrate the announcement — the latest revelation in a dizzying two days that have shaken the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah, both of which are backed by Iran.

Ismail Haniyeh, one of the most senior Hamas leaders, was assassinated by a bomb smuggled into his guesthouse in Tehran on Wednesday. Hours earlier, Israel said it had struck Fuad Shukr, a senior member of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that has been fighting a low-level war with Israel since October.

Funerals were being held for both men on Thursday, with the region on edge about how Iran and Hezbollah would respond to the killings. Mr. Haniyeh was mourned in Tehran, where Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, led funeral prayers, an honor reserved for the highest-ranking figures. Iran and Hamas have both accused Israel of killing Mr. Haniyeh, and Mr. Khamenei has ordered a direct strike on Israel in retaliation.

While Israel has not directly discussed the killing of Mr. Haniyeh, it announced the strike on Mr. Shukr, blaming him for an attack last week that killed 12 children and teenagers in an Israel-controlled village.

Here’s what to know:

  • In a relatively measured speech played on a screen at Mr. Shukr’s funeral, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, condemned not just Mr. Shukr’s assassination but the killing in Tehran of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh. Addressing Israel, he said: “You do not realize the red lines you have crossed.” He added that Hezbollah and its allies were working on “a true response, not a show response as some are trying to suggest,” but did not elaborate.

  • Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken called for a cease-fire in Gaza during a news conference in Mongolia, warning that the region was on a path “toward more conflict, more violence, more suffering, more insecurity.” The assassination of Mr. Haniyeh added a new hurdle to talks, which have dragged on for months.

  • It was unclear how Iran would respond to the killing of Mr. Haniyeh, but the country’s officials have said the military is considering a combination of drone and missile attacks on military targets near Tel Aviv and Haifa. In April, Iran directed a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel but calibrated that attack to avoid the risk of further escalation.

  • The State Department has advised Americans not to go “within 2.5 miles of the Lebanese and Syrian borders” in northern Israel because of the tension in the region. United Airlines and Delta Air Lines suspended flights to Israel.

Fatima Nizan al-Din, 18, was bracing for war as she left the funeral the Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, who was killed in an Israeli strike. “We certainly expect an escalation,” she said after hearing Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, tell mourners that the Lebanese group was preparing a “true response” to Israel. She said Shukr’s death had changed nothing, and vowed, “I will not leave if the enemy decides to attack.”

The Israeli strike on a school compound near Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood has killed at least 15 people, including two children, and injured more than 40 others, according to Gaza’s Civil Defense.

The Israeli military on Thursday said that it “struck terrorists” operating in a school compound in the Shejaiya area of Gaza City. “The compound was used by Hamas as a hideout for commanders and operatives and to plan terror attacks against the State of Israel,” the military said in a statement emphasizing its efforts to limit civilian casualties. Schools that have been used to house displaced people in Gaza have been targeted by the Israeli military throughout the war. Gaza’s Civil Defense confirmed that their teams were at the scene of the strike and are seeking to recover bodies.

After Nasrallah finished his speech, Shukr’s coffin was carried onto the street outside and met by a sea of mourners. They frantically jostled back and forth to get closer to his body, pumping their fists in the air as the funeral procession moved through Beirut’s southern suburbs. “No escape, no retreat,” the crowd shouted, repeating chants that echoed over the loudspeaker. Some held up pictures of fighters who had been killed. Other hoisted the flags of Hezbollah and Palestine.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke about Israel’s claim that it had killed Muhammad Deif, the leader of Hamas’s armed wing, in a strike last month, saying: “Deif was responsible for the terrible massacre of Oct. 7 and for many murderous attacks against Israeli civilians. He was Israel’s most wanted person for years.” In a meeting with the military’s Home Front Command, Netanyahu said the killing “establishes a very clear principle — whoever harms us, we will retaliate against them,” according to his office. Hamas has not confirmed Deif’s death.

Thousands attend Hamas leader’s funeral in Tehran, including Iran’s supreme leader.

Thousands of people crowded Tehran’s streets during a four-hour funeral procession on Thursday for a top Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated a day earlier by a bomb planted in the guesthouse where he had stayed while visiting Iran’s capital.

Waving the flags of Iran, Palestine and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, throngs of mourners surrounded a canopied truck, adorned with flowers and streamers, bearing Mr. Haniyeh’s casket as it drove through Tehran.

Video of the funeral showed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and its new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, wiping away tears during prayers for Mr. Haniyeh. Although Iran supports Hamas in the nearly 10-month war against Israel, Mr. Haniyeh’s funeral displayed an unusual outpouring of emotion by leaders of the Shiite government for a Sunni militant.

In a social media post after the funeral, Iran’s government said Mr. Pezeshkian had called an unnamed Hamas official in the organization’s political office to convey that “Iran has not failed to support the oppressed Palestinians and continues to support the resistance with a firmer determination.”

Additionally, the Iranian foreign minister, Ali Bagheri, called Egypt’s top diplomat to press for an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, demanding “all regional Muslim states to take a measure in order to counter the terrorist aggression,” according to a government statement.

Iran and Hamas blame Israel for killing Mr. Haniyeh, who had been in Tehran to attend Mr. Pezeshkian’s inauguration. American officials have also assessed that Israel was responsible for the attack, although Israel has not publicly acknowledged that.

In contrast, Israel was quick to describe a strike it launched in Lebanon on Tuesday night, killing a senior Hezbollah official, hours before Mr. Haniyeh was assassinated with an explosive device nearly 1,000 miles away. The funeral for the Hezbollah official, Fuad Shukr, was also held on Thursday.

The strikes, and pledges of retaliation by Iran and its allies, have raised concerns among Western officials about a wider regional war.

During prayers for Mr. Haniyeh in Tehran, Mr. Khamenei appeared to repeatedly look up and scan the sky, prompting social media speculation that he was worried about being targeted during the funeral.

In his speech, the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah repeated his group’s denials that it was responsible for a rocket strike on an Israeli-occupied village that left 12 children and teenagers dead and sparked a flare-up in tensions. Israel and the United States have said the rocket, which was fired from Lebanon, was clearly Hezbollah’s.

In discussing the Israeli strike on a Beirut suburb this week, Nasrallah said Hezbollah and its allies were working on “a true response, not a show response as some are trying to suggest.” He said he could not elaborate further.

The coffin of Fuad Shukr, the senior Hezbollah commander who was killed in an Israeli strike this week, was slowly marched into the auditorium in Beirut’s southern suburbs where his funeral is taking place. Thousands are packed inside, including religious figures and Hezbollah lawmakers and fighters. “Death to Israel,” the crowd chanted. “We are here for you, Nasrallah,” they shouted as Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s chief, appeared on a screen. He began his speech by commemorating not Shukr but Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, who was assassinated hours after Shukr was killed.

“We have entered a new phase,” Nasrallah said, commenting on the Israeli strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Addressing Israel, he said: “You do not realize the red lines you have crossed.”

With strife at home, security concerns grow for Israeli Olympians in Paris.

Israeli athletes who had already been moving around the Paris Games with a security apparatus befitting a head of state can expect heightened protection after the recent assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas leaders caused security officials to fear for the athletes’ safety.

On Saturday, a rocket from Lebanon hit a soccer field in Majdal Shams, an Arab Druse village in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. Israel blamed the deadly rocket attack on Hezbollah, which denied responsibility. On Tuesday, an Israeli airstrike killed a Hezbollah commander near Beirut, the Lebanese capital, in retaliation.

The tension in the region intensified on Wednesday morning, when Hamas and Iran accused Israel of assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, one of the most senior Hamas leaders. Israel has not addressed the killing.

“There’s no doubt that an attack by Hezbollah, which knows and is capable of operating abroad, should increase the level of security provided to the delegation,” Shmulik Philosof, a former head of a Shin Bet unit that was responsible for securing Israeli delegations, said of the Israeli team now competing in the summer Olympics.

Concerns for the Israeli team — which has been shrouded in protection at every Games since 11 of its athletes and coaches were killed at the Munich Olympics in 1972 — have substantially increased since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, the subsequent war in Gaza, global protests and continuing threats.

Before traveling to Paris, Israeli athletes reported receiving anonymous emails that threatened, “we intend to repeat the events of Munich 1972.”

Mark Adams, a spokesman for the International Olympic Committee, would not comment on whether security had been augmented Wednesday for the Israeli team. “Rest assured there is very good, very strong security,” he said.

The French authorities have dedicated a special team to protect the Israeli delegation, according to Mr. Philosof, as host countries have done in previous Olympics. But, he added, “our policy is not to rely solely on local security anywhere, ever.”

Israel is one of the few nations that rely on its own security operation to supplement the security provided by the Olympic host country. Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, spent two years preparing the plan for the Paris Olympics, a process that included numerous meetings between agency officials and their French counterparts, according to two former Shin Bet senior officers. In early June, Israel’s culture and sports minister, Miki Zohar, said the delegation’s security budget had increased by 50 percent.

Israeli athletes had already been preparing for an abnormal Olympic experience. They expected their time at the Games to be marked as much by protests, heavy security, intense scrutiny and questions around politics and the war raging in Gaza as their own competitions.

“It’s a bummer, but it is what it is,” Maor Tiyouri, an Israeli marathoner, said before she arrived in Paris.

Ms. Tiyouri, who also ran the marathon at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago, has competed internationally since she was 16. Now 33, she doesn’t wear any national gear when she travels, she said, and has taped over the Israeli flag on her national team backpack.

“It’s always been this way,” Ms. Tiyouri, said, adding, “It’s hard but that’s just the reality of things, and if that means I’m more safe, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

It’s not so different for Anat Lelior, an Israeli surfer, who has reached the round of 16 in the women’s event. Representing Israel is “nowadays a lot different,” she said from Teahupo’o, Tahiti, where the surfing competition is being held. “I don’t go around saying I’m Israeli as much as I have, just for my safety.”

Israeli athletes have been instructed to not engage in protests or discussions, or to share their own opinions about the war, regardless of what they may be. Being asked to censor themselves is exhausting yet expected, many say. The athletes said they felt that to many, they were a flag — not a person or athlete with their own beliefs or political views but a repository for anger or frustration.

There have been some strained interactions among athletes. Adam Maraana, an 100-meter backstroke swimmer and the first Israeli-Arab to represent Israel since 1976, tried to swap pins with Algerian athletes but was turned away, he said. (Pin trading is a tradition at the Olympic Games. Countries, sports and brands make special Olympic pins, and athletes flash their finds along their identification lanyards.)

“I do understand it’s their choice, but it’s a little bit disappointing,” Maraana said.

Still, athletes are clinging to the joy of participating in the Olympics.

Itamar Einhorn, a soft-spoken Israeli cyclist competing in his first Olympics, has worked to balance the emotions and complexities that come with representing Israel with the fulfillment of a childhood dream.

News back home affects him a lot of the time. But, he said, with a sigh, “This is a very special experience.”

Relatives of Israelis held hostage in Gaza blocked a major highway in Tel Aviv this morning to press Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to seal a cease-fire deal with Hamas that would free the hostages. The protesters accused Netanyahu of blocking the agreement to prolong the war, amid fears that the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas political leader, had undermined negotiations. At the protest, Nathalie Tsengauker, the sister of hostage Matan Tsengauker, rappelled down the side of an overpass and spray-painted a message to Netanyahu: “Enough with the torpedoing!” Netanyahu blames Hamas for the failure to reach a deal.

Who is Muhammad Deif?

Muhammad Deif, the shadowy leader of Hamas’s military wing, was believed to be an architect of the Oct. 7 assault on southern Israel that the Israeli authorities say killed about 1,200 people and that ignited the war in Gaza. The Israeli military said on Thursday that it had confirmed Mr. Deif’s death in an airstrike last month, though Hamas has not explicitly confirmed or denied that he is dead.

A mysterious figure who repeatedly escaped Israeli assassination attempts, Mr. Deif was one of Israel’s most wanted men for decades.

He has been revered within some Palestinian circles for overseeing the development of Hamas’s military abilities and has been a symbol of the group’s resilience, finding ways to survive despite being a top target of one of the most powerful militaries in the Middle East.

On Oct. 7, as Hamas launched an attack on Israeli towns and military installations, Mr. Deif released a recorded speech declaring that the group had launched its operation so “the enemy will understand that the time of their rampaging without accountability has ended.”

“Righteous fighters, this is your day to bury this criminal enemy,” he said in the speech, which was broadcast on Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV. “Its time has finished. Kill them wherever you find them,” he added. “Remove this filth from your land and your sacred places. Fight and the angels fight with you.”

Hamas is backed by Iran, and Mr. Deif has supported the relationship.

He has not been seen publicly in years, and few photographs of him are in the public domain. In January, the Israeli Army published an image of a man it said was Mr. Deif; the picture showed him resting under a tree with a wad of cash in hand.

He is believed to have been disabled, possibly missing an eye and limbs. Israel bombed his home in 2014, killing his wife and infant son.

In May, Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, requested an arrest warrant for Mr. Deif, accusing him and two other Hamas leaders of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Hamas rejected the prosecutor’s claims.

Mr. Deif was born in 1965 to a poor Palestinian family and grew up in the Khan Younis refugee camp near Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, and Mohammed Dahlan, an exiled leader of Fatah, another Palestinian faction that rivals Hamas.

Ibrahim Madhoun, an analyst close to Hamas, said of Mr. Deif in an interview: “His fingerprints are on the transformation of the Qassam Brigades from a limited number of armed cells to a formal army that has tens of thousands of fighters.”

Mr. Deif commanded the so-called Shadow Brigade, which guards Israeli captives held by Hamas, and invested significantly in manufacturing weapons and bringing new technologies to the Qassam Brigades such as reconnaissance drones, Mr. Madhoun said.

Fearing an all-out war, Lebanon anxiously awaited a speech this evening by the leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. He is set to outline his group’s “political stance” on the Israeli strike on Beirut, according to a statement. The attack on Tuesday targeted and killed a senior Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, but also left at least five civilians dead and scores more wounded.

The assassination of such a high-ranking figure, coupled with civilian casualties and the brazen nature of the strike — less than three miles from downtown Beirut — was a first in the conflict and would likely necessitate a strong response from Hezbollah, analysts said. Last month, Nasrallah vowed to retaliate for civilian deaths in Israeli strikes by hitting new areas inside Israel.

Nasrallah’s speech will take place after Shukr’s funeral, which he is unlikely to attend in person. A funeral procession will make its way through Haret Hreik in Beirut’s southern suburbs, the site of the attack and an area where Hezbollah enjoys significant support.

Israeli leaders were quick to celebrate the military’s announcement that Muhammad Deif had been assassinated. Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister, called his death “a significant milestone in the process of dismantling Hamas” in Gaza, one of Israel’s avowed war aims. Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, called it even more of a reason to press on with the war. “The collapse of Hamas is closer than ever as we fight on every front,” he wrote on social media. “We cannot stop just a moment before victory.”

Muhammad Deif, a top Hamas commander, is dead, Israel says.

The Israeli military said on Thursday that it had killed Muhammad Deif, the elusive commander of Hamas’s military wing who has long been one of the country’s most wanted militants. He was widely seen as one of the chief architects of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

The announcement culminated weeks of speculation about the fate of Mr. Deif after an airstrike on July 13 on the outskirts of Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, that targeted him. At the time, the Israeli military did not say for certain whether he had been killed. Hamas has not explicitly confirmed or denied Israel’s claim on Thursday.

“Following an intelligence assessment, it can be confirmed that Muhammad Deif was eliminated in the strike,” the Israeli military statement said, without offering any more specific evidence that he was dead.

At least 90 people on the ground in the vicinity of the strike were killed that day, according to the Gazan health ministry. Its tally does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but health officials said some were women and children.

Mr. Deif, who survived several previous Israeli assassination attempts, has been the No. 2 Hamas leader inside Gaza. He is the highest-ranking Hamas figure inside Gaza that Israel says it has killed since Oct. 7.

Israel’s government made eliminating Hamas’s leadership a stated goal of the war, and Mr. Deif’s death would be counted as a victory in that effort. How Hamas’s operations could be affected remains to be seen, though: Israel has killed many senior commanders in the past, only to see the group swiftly replace them.

The announcement came a day after the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the Qatar-based leader of Hamas’s political bureau. He was killed in an explosion in the Iranian capital, Tehran. Both Hamas and Iran blamed Israel, which has not confirmed or denied its involvement.

Mr. Deif has been de facto second in command to the group’s leader inside Gaza, Yahya Sinwar.

Born in 1965 to a poor Palestinian family, Mr. Deif grew up in the Khan Younis refugee camp and joined Hamas as a young man, around the time the group was founded in the late 1980s.

He quickly rose through the organization’s ranks, developed a reputation as a master bomb maker and orchestrated a number of attacks on Israel, including a series of deadly bus bombings that undermined the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the mid-1990s.

Analysts credit him with transforming Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, into a powerful and well-organized fighting force with tens of thousands in its ranks.

Mr. Deif’s success at escaping previous Israeli efforts to kill him — he was believed to have lost an eye and been seriously wounded — only enhanced his status in the eyes of some Palestinian admirers.

He survived more than eight attempts on his life, according to Israeli intelligence. In 2014, an Israeli airstrike killed one of his wives and at least one of his children, an infant son. In a brief 2021 conflict in Gaza, Israel’s military said it had tried to kill him several times.

When the Oct. 7 attack on Israel was underway, Mr. Deif released a recorded speech saying that Hamas had launched the assault so that “the enemy will understand that the time of their rampaging without accountability has ended.”

Since October, Israel has again had Mr. Deif in its cross hairs, killing his deputy, Marwan Issa, in March.

In May, Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, requested a warrant for Mr. Deif’s arrest, accusing him and two other Hamas leaders of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The prosecutor also sought arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and its defense minister, Yoav Gallant.

Hamas criticized Mr. Khan for seeking to prosecute its leaders alongside Israeli officials, which it deemed “equating between the executioner and the victim.”

Mr. Deif spent decades underground in the tunnel network that typically shields Hamas leaders, according to Israeli intelligence officials, and had not been seen publicly in years. But officials recently said the Israeli military believed that he had developed health problems that forced him to spend more time above ground.

The strike that the Israeli military said killed him was authorized after prolonged surveillance of a house in southern Gaza where another top Hamas lieutenant, Rafa Salameh, was believed to be staying with his family, according to Israeli officials.

After learning that Mr. Deif appeared to be at the location, Israeli fighter jets struck with at least five precision-guided bombs, the officials said. Israel has said Mr. Salameh was also killed, a claim Hamas has not directly addressed.

That evening, Mr. Netanyahu said that an airstrike had targeted Mr. Deif but that there was not yet “absolute certainty” as to whether he had been killed.

“His hands are steeped in the blood of many Israelis,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “At the beginning of the campaign, I laid down a rule: The Hamas murderers are dead men, from the first to the last.”

Cassandra Vinograd and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.

The Israeli military announced that it had succeeded in its attempt to kill Muhammad Deif, the leader of Hamas’s armed wing, in a strike in Gaza in mid-July. In a statement, the military said its conclusion was based on an intelligence assessment. Hamas has yet to explicitly confirm or deny Deif’s death. The Israeli bombardment aimed at Deif killed at least 90 people, according to Gazan health officials, who do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

For weeks, Israeli officials said that a growing body of evidence pointed to Deif’s death in the attack, but that it remained unconfirmed. As the leader of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, Deif was one of the architects of the Oct. 7 attack that killed 1,200 people, according to Israel.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, prayed over the body of Ismail Haniyeh while the new president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, stood next to him. After the prayer, Khamenei embraced some of Haniyeh’s sons and kissed their foreheads. Haniyeh had been in Tehran for the new president’s inauguration when he was killed.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was asked at a news conference whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had misrepresented his desire to get to a cease-fire deal with Hamas, given the killing of Ismail Haniyeh and an Israeli strike in Lebanon that killed Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah official.

Blinken, speaking in Mongolia on his final stop on a trip to Asia, did not name Israel in his reply. “The path that the region is on is toward more conflict, more violence, more suffering, more insecurity. And it is crucial that we break the cycle, and that starts with a cease-fire,” he said. “It’s urgent that all parties make the right choices in the days ahead.”

A truck is carrying the bodies of Ismail Haniyeh and his guard, who was also killed Wednesday, to Tehran’s Azadi Square, according to Iran’s state-run Press TV. The live broadcast on the channel showed a flatbed truck, decorated with flowers, moving through a crowd of mourners.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, led the funeral prayers for Ismail Haniyeh, a live broadcast on Press TV showed. The state-run channel described the event as a “state funeral.”

A large number of people gathered at the University of Tehran on Thursday morning for Ismail Haniyeh’s funeral ceremony, Iran’s state-run Press TV said during a live broadcast. It showed a crowd of what appeared to be hundreds of participants, many of them carrying Palestinian and Hezbollah flags.

A photo shows the building in Tehran where Haniyeh was killed, official says.

A photograph of a damaged building in Tehran that is circulating on Telegram is the site where the senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed on Wednesday, according to an Iranian official who shared the image with The New York Times.

Much remains unknown about the killing of Mr. Haniyeh in Tehran early Wednesday, after he attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president and a meeting with the country’s supreme leader. Although Iran and Hamas announced Mr. Haniyeh’s death, accusing Israel of the killing, they have given few details about what took place. Israel has neither acknowledged nor denied responsibility.

The official who shared the image spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. The photo, which is circulating on Telegram channels affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, shows a six-story structure in the upscale, leafy neighborhood of Zafaranieh in northern Tehran. The building is adjacent to the Saadabad Palace, which is used for government ceremonies. Its location is consistent with early reports of an explosion in northern Tehran, and The Times matched the building visible in the photo with satellite imagery of the site, confirming it is a building at the northern edge of Tehran.

One corner of the building appears to have sustained damage and is covered with a green cloth. Rubble can be seen on the roof of the first floor.

Just six days ago, another image of the same building, taken by the satellite company Maxar Technologies on July 25, shows no visible damage and no green tarp. That suggested that the image showing damage was taken more recently. It was not clear exactly when the tarp was placed on the building.

Two Al Jazeera journalists were killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza.

Al Jazeera, the influential Arab news network, said that two of its journalists were killed on Wednesday in an Israeli airstrike on their car in Gaza City.

The Qatar-based network said the reporter Ismail al-Ghoul and his cameraman, Rami al-Rifee, were killed in Shati camp in northern Gaza after reporting from or near the house of the deceased Hamas political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Tehran on Wednesday. The network accused the Israeli military of targeting the journalists with a “direct hit,” and reported that “their car was clearly marked as a press vehicle.”

“The assassination of Ismail and Rami, while they were documenting the crimes of Israeli forces, underscores the urgent need for immediate legal action against the occupation forces to ensure that there is no impunity,” Al Jazeera Media Network said in a statement.

Mohammed Moawad, Al Jazeera’s managing editor, praised Mr. al-Ghoul’s courage in a post on social media.

“Ismail was renowned for his professionalism and dedication, bringing the world’s attention to the suffering and atrocities committed in Gaza,” he said.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has said the war in Gaza has led to the deadliest period for correspondents since it began gathering data in 1992, with at least 111 journalists and media workers among the more than 39,000 people killed in Gaza.

Mr. Moawad posted a message that he said had been written by Mr. al-Ghoul, in which the journalist reflected on being haunted by the incessant civilian suffering and death he’d seen while reporting on the conflict in Gaza.

“Let me tell you, my friend, that I no longer know the taste of sleep,” Mr. al-Ghoul wrote. “The bodies of children and the screams of the injured and their blood-soaked images never leave my sight. The cries of mothers and the wailing of men who are missing their loved ones never fade from my hearing.”

He added: “I am tired, my friend.”

An Al Jazeera video from outside a hospital showed two corpses on stretchers wearing vests meant to protect journalists, marked with the word “press.” The journalists were on their way to a hospital after being asked to leave the area by Israeli forces, according to Al Jazeera.

Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a statement on social media that the organization was “dismayed” by the journalists’ deaths.

“Journalists are civilians and should never be targeted,” she said. “Israel must explain why two more Al Jazeera journalists have been killed in what appears to be a direct strike.”

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Israel has a fraught relationship with Al Jazeera. In May, the Israeli government shut down the organization’s local operations in a step that critics denounced as anti-democratic and part of a broader crackdown on dissent over the war against Hamas.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Al Jazeera, a major source of news in the Arab world that has often highlighted civilian suffering in Gaza, of harming Israel’s security and inciting violence against its soldiers, though Israeli officials offered no examples. The initial order to shut down, set for 45 days, has since been extended.

The New York Times and other major international outlets have evacuated Palestinian journalists who had been working for them in Gaza. Israel and Egypt have restricted entry by international journalists into Gaza — with the exception of coordinated visits to specific sites with the Israeli military — so the stories that emerge from the war have often been left to local Palestinian reporters to document alone, working in extremely dangerous conditions.

“It is clear that journalists need to be protected,” Stéphane Dujarric, a United Nations spokesman, told reporters in a briefing on Wednesday. “These and other similar incidents must be fully and transparently investigated, and there must be accountability.”

Anushka Patil contributed reporting.

Ayatollah Khamenei orders Iranian retaliation directly against Israel for the Haniyeh killing, officials say.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has issued an order for Iran to strike Israel directly, in retaliation for the killing in Tehran of Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, according to three Iranian officials briefed on the order.

Mr. Khamenei gave the order at an emergency meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council on Wednesday morning, shortly after Iran announced that Mr. Haniyeh had been killed, said the three Iranian officials, including two members of the Revolutionary Guards. They asked that their names not be published because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Iran and Hamas have accused Israel of the assassination; Israel, which is at war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, has neither acknowledged nor denied killing Mr. Haniyeh, who was in Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new president. Israel has a long history of killing enemies abroad, including Iranian nuclear scientists and military commanders.

Through almost 10 months of war in Gaza, Iran has tried to strike a balance, putting pressure on Israel with sharply increased attacks by its allies and proxy forces in the region, while avoiding an all-out war between the two nations.

In April, Iran made its biggest and most overt attack on Israel in decades of hostility, launching hundreds of missiles and drones in retaliation for an Israeli strike on its embassy compound that killed several Iranian military commanders in Damascus, Syria. But even that show of force was telegraphed well in advance, nearly all the weapons were shot down by Israel and its allies, and little damage was done.

Now it is unclear how forcefully Iran will respond, and whether it will once again calibrate its attack to steer clear of escalation. Iranian military commanders are considering another combination attack of drones and missiles on military targets in the vicinity of Tel Aviv and Haifa, but would make a point of avoiding strikes on civilian targets, the Iranian officials said. One option under consideration is a coordinated attack from Iran and other fronts where it has allied forces, including Yemen, Syria and Iraq, for maximum effect, they said.

Mr. Khamenei, who has the last word on all state matters and is also the commander in chief of the armed forces, instructed military commanders from the Revolutionary Guards and the army to prepare plans for both an attack and a defense in the event that the war expands and Israel or the United States strike Iran, the officials said.

In his public statement about Mr. Haniyeh’s death, Mr. Khamenei signaled that Iran would retaliate directly, saying, “we see avenging his blood our duty,” because it happened on the territory of the Islamic Republic. He said Israel had set the stage for receiving “a severe punishment.”

Statements from other Iranian officials, including the new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, the foreign ministry, the Guards and Iran’s mission to the U.N., also said openly that Iran would retaliate against Israel and that it had a right to defend itself against a transgression on its sovereignty.

Iran and the regional forces it backs — Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and multiple militias in Iraq — form what they call the “axis of resistance.” Leaders of those groups were in Tehran for the inauguration of Mr. Pezeshkian on Tuesday. Mr. Haniyeh was assassinated at about 2 a.m. local time, after attending the ceremony and meeting with Mr. Khamenei.

The killing shocked Iranian officials, who described it as crossing red lines.

It was a humiliating security breach for a country eager to project strength but long frustrated by its inability to prevent Israel from carrying out covert operations on its soil. The embarrassment was compounded by Mr. Haniyeh’s prominence, the presence of other allies, and that he was attacked at a highly secure Revolutionary Guards guesthouse on a day of heightened security in the capital.

Many Iranian supporters of the government and officials expressed outrage at the failure to thwart the assassination, saying only a handful of senior security officials would have known where Mr. Haniyeh was staying. Some took to social media to say that Iran’s first priority should be to clean house and ensure the safety of its senior officials.

“Before revenge first ensure the safety of the supreme leader,” said Alireza Katebi Jahromi, a journalist and supporter of Iran’s government, in a post on X.

Iranian officials don’t view Mr. Haniyeh’s assassination as just Israel’s opportunistic killing of one of its foes, but also as an affront to their security apparatus that suggests anyone in Iran, at any level, could be targeted and killed.

Analysts said that Iran sees retaliation as necessary for both avenging the killing of Mr. Haniyeh but also deterrence against Israel killing other powerful enemies, like Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, or Gen. Ismail Qaani, the commander of the Quds Forces who oversees the militant groups outside Iran.

“Iran likely believes it has no choice other than retaliating to deter further Israeli attacks, defend its sovereignty, and preserve its credibility in the eyes of its regional partners,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran director of the International Crisis Group.

Here’s a closer look at Hamas’s most prominent remaining leaders.

Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed on Wednesday in Iran, was among the most senior members of Hamas’s leadership, a group that is tightly coordinated despite being scattered inside and outside Gaza.

Hamas’s leaders, especially those in Gaza, have repeatedly been targets of Israeli assassination attempts, but the group has swiftly replaced those who have been killed.

The group’s leadership structure is often opaque, but here is a look at what we know about some of Hamas’s most prominent leaders who are either believed to be alive or whose fate is unclear.

Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza

Mr. Sinwar helped establish Hamas in the late 1980s around the time of a Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule. He was arrested by the Israeli authorities several times, spending over 20 years in Israeli prison until he was released in a prisoner exchange in 2011.

After rising through Hamas’s ranks, he was elected its leader in Gaza in 2017. Israeli officials said that he was one of the leaders who had masterminded the Oct. 7 attack, alongside Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza, and Marwan Issa, the deputy commander, who was killed in an Israeli strike in March. Mr. Sinwar is believed to be hiding in the group’s tunnel network beneath Gaza.

A number of Hamas’s leaders in Gaza, including Mr. Sinwar, are seen as more radical than Mr. Haniyeh, the leader who was killed in Iran. The death of Mr. Haniyeh, who was considered a relatively pragmatic counterpoint, “will make a cease-fire much more difficult to achieve,” said Hugh Lovatt, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Khaled Meshal, a former political head of Hamas

Born near the West Bank city of Ramallah, Mr. Meshal became the leader of Hamas’s political office in 1996, directing the group from exile. Two years later, Israeli agents injected him with a slow-acting poison in Jordan, sending him into a coma before he was saved by an antidote provided by Israel as part of a diplomatic deal with Jordan.

Mr. Meshal spent his career moving from one Arab nation to another, living in Kuwait, Jordan, Qatar and Syria. When he stepped down as head of the political office, he was succeeded in 2017 by Mr. Haniyeh. Mr. Meshal, who is still influential in the organization, remains a top official in the group.

Khalil al-Hayya, the deputy leader of Hamas in Gaza

Mr. al-Hayya, who lives in exile, has been a Hamas official for decades and is currently Mr. Sinwar’s deputy. He survived an Israeli assassination attempt in 2007, when an airstrike on his home in Gaza killed members of his family while he was not there.

He was thought to be a contender to succeed Mr. Haniyeh in future internal Hamas elections, Mr. Lovatt said.

Mousa Abu Marzouk, a member of Hamas’s top political bureau

One of Hamas’s founders, Mr. Abu Marzouk started his political career in the United Arab Emirates, where he helped found a branch of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, from which Hamas was formed, according to the European Council on Foreign Relations.

He later went to the United States, where he helped found Islamic institutions, including those focused on the Palestinian cause. In 1996, he faced Israeli charges of financing and helping organize terrorist attacks, when he headed Hamas’s political bureau. After 22 months spent in a Manhattan jail on suspicion of terrorism, he agreed to relinquish his permanent residence status in the United States and said he would not contest the terrorism accusations that led to his detention. The United States then deported him to Jordan.

He is now a senior member of the political bureau and splits his time between Gaza, Egypt and Qatar. He is another member of the cast of likely successors to Mr. Haniyeh, Mr. Lovatt said.

Muhammad Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military

Mr. Deif, another of the suspected planners of the Oct. 7 attacks, joined Hamas as a young man soon after its founding. In 2002, he became the leader of Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, succeeding its founder, who was killed in an Israeli strike. Mr. Deif has since orchestrated multiple attacks on Israel, including a series of suicide bombings in 1996.

Last month, Israeli forces bombarded a densely packed coastal area of Gaza with heavy munitions in an attempt to kill Mr. Deif. Scores of Gazans were killed in the attack. Israel’s military said on Thursday that it had killed Mr. Deif in the strike. Hamas has neither confirmed nor denied his death.

He had been at the top of Israel’s list of most-wanted terrorists for decades, earlier evading more than eight attempts on his life, according to Israeli intelligence. In 2014, an Israeli airstrike killed one of his wives and their infant son. Israeli officials believe that Mr. Deif, who for years has not been seen publicly, has spent much of the past decades in Hamas’s underground tunnels.

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.

News Analysis

Double strikes raise the risk of escalation, but all-out war is not inevitable.

Through nearly 10 months of intense war with Hamas in Gaza, Israel has fought a parallel, slower-paced conflict with Hamas’s allies across the Middle East in which all sides have risked major escalation but ultimately avoided dragging the region into a bigger, multi-front war.

The attacks on two of Israel’s leading foes on Tuesday and Wednesday have created one of the biggest challenges to that equilibrium since the fighting began in October.

Israel’s Tuesday night strike on Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut, was a response to an attack on an Israeli-controlled town on Saturday that killed 12 children and teenagers. The strike on Beirut was the first time during this war that Israel has targeted such an influential Hezbollah leader in Lebanon’s capital. Hours later, the killing in Iran of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was considered the most brazen breach of Iran’s defenses in years.

Taken together, the seniority of the targets, the sensitive location of the strikes and their near simultaneity were viewed as a particularly provocative escalation that has left the region fearing an even bigger response from Iran and its regional proxies, including Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq. The scale of that reaction could determine whether the low-level regional battle between Israel and the Iranian alliance tips into a full-scale, all-out conflict.

Iranian military commanders are considering a large combination attack of drones and ballistic missiles on military targets in Israel but would avoid striking civilian targets, three Iranian officials have said.

Still, while Iran and Hezbollah are likely to respond, they may yet choose methods that give Israel room to avoid further retaliation, at least for now, some analysts said. For months, Hezbollah has appeared wary of a war that would likely devastate Lebanon, while Iran — whose leadership has already said it will respond forcefully — may want to avoid actions that draw the United States into the conflict more directly. Both parties may also decide to view each assassination as a distinct event, rather than as a combined attack that requires a massive, joint response, analysts said.

Hezbollah will face pressure to respond because the strike on Beirut hit one of its own commanders, rather than one of its allies, according to Michael Stephens, a non-resident expert on the Middle East at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based research organization. But it is by no means clear that Mr. Haniyeh’s death in Iran will change Hezbollah’s calculations in Lebanon, Mr. Stephens said.

“We need to be very clear and very careful about how we conflate the two issues,” Mr. Stephens said. “Over the past nine months, Hezbollah has repeatedly shown that what happens to Hamas is not related to Hezbollah’s strategic imperatives. That doesn’t mean there won’t be conflict. I just think the route to getting there is more complex than it seems.”

For Iran, the attack on its soil was deeply embarrassing in part because it occurred the same day as the country’s newly elected president was being inaugurated, exposing Iran’s security vulnerabilities. Still, because the attack targeted a foreign guest rather than senior Iranian officials, Iran has some room to calibrate its response, according to Andreas Krieg, an expert on the Middle East at King’s College, London.

“I don’t think necessarily that the Iranians’ strategic calculus has changed,” Mr. Krieg said.

“Iran will have to respond in some way,” he said. “But it’s not a turning point.”

Some analysts said the killing of Mr. Haniyeh, Hamas’s top negotiator, made a cease-fire deal in Gaza less likely in the immediate future. Israelis hoped that the killing of such an influential leader would eventually help break Hamas’s resolve, making the group more willing to compromise in the long term. But others said that the organization was unlikely to be seriously affected by Mr. Haniyeh’s death.

Despite his title as Hamas’s political leader, Mr. Haniyeh is replaceable, said Joost Hiltermann, the Middle East and North Africa program director for the International Crisis Group.

“Hamas will survive,” he said. “They have plenty of other leaders.”

While escalation is more likely now that at any time since October, past experiences show that de-escalation is still possible. In January, Israeli strikes killed a senior Hamas leader in Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut, leading to fears that Hezbollah would mount a particularly fierce response on Hamas’s behalf. Days later, Hezbollah instead chose what was construed as a largely symbolic response, firing a barrage of rockets at an Israeli army base that caused little damage. And after Israel killed several Iranian commanders in Syria in April, Iran responded with one of the biggest barrages of cruise and ballistic missiles in military history. After a symbolic Israeli counterstrike, the two sides then chose to step back from the brink.

But even if an escalation is averted, it is unclear what the two strikes will achieve for Israel strategically.

To some of Israel’s critics, they were an attempt to set off a regional war. To dispel that idea, Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, said on Wednesday that a bigger war could still be avoided if both sides adhered to a United Nations resolution that was issued after the last major war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, but never enforced.

Resolution 1701 called for Hezbollah’s withdrawal from the Israeli border, among other stipulations. “Israel is not interested in an all-out war, but the only way to prevent it is the immediate implementation of Resolution 1701,” Mr. Katz said in a statement.

In Israel, the two strikes were hailed as an impressive show of strength and the product of an intricate intelligence-gathering operation. But Israelis also questioned their strategic benefit, beyond settling scores with Hamas for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Hezbollah for the strike on Saturday that killed 12 children and teenagers. (Hezbollah denied it was behind that attack.)

Once the dust settles, more than 100 Israeli hostages will still remain captive in Gaza, Hamas will remain undefeated, and Hezbollah will continue pose a strategic threat along Israel’s northern border. And Iran will still exert influence over several proxy powers that threaten U.S. and Israeli interests in the region.

“Nothing is resolved,” said Itamar Rabinovich, Israel’s former ambassador to Washington. For Israelis, the strikes “lift the spirit here without solving any of the underlying issues,” Mr. Rabinovich said. “We are where we were.”

Some said the double assassination could provide a way out of the war altogether by allowing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to claim a symbolic victory, giving him space to back down in Gaza and perhaps agree to a cease-fire.

But Mr. Netanyahu may still avoid doing so if he believes a truce would result in the collapse of his government; his ruling coalition relies on far-right lawmakers who have threatened to quit the alliance if the war ends without Hamas’s defeat.

Vivian Yee contributed reporting.

Fears of Wider Mideast Conflict Deepen, With U.S. Seen as ‘Not in Control’

For months, diplomats and analysts in foreign capitals have worried that prolonged political upheaval in the United States could invite aggression abroad, whether in Russia’s waging of war in Ukraine, North Korea’s rogue nuclear ambitions or China’s expansionist designs in the South China Sea.

Now, less than 100 days before Americans elect a new president, that broader geopolitical crisis has erupted in the familiar theater of the Middle East. The targeted killings of Hezbollah and Hamas leaders in Beirut and Tehran have deepened fears of a regionwide conflict — one that the United States, caught up in its own political drama at home, may have little capacity to avert or even contain.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the United States had not been involved in, or even informed of, the operation in Tehran, which the Iranian government swiftly blamed on Israel. To some, Mr. Blinken’s statement confirmed a dangerous power vacuum in the region.

“We thought it would be Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping or Kim Jong-un who would take advantage of this period in the U.S.,” said Vali R. Nasr, a professor of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Nobody counted on an American ally doing it.”

“This is going to make the region extremely nervous,” said Mr. Nasr, who served in the State Department during the Obama administration. “It’s never good for the United States to be seen as not in control.”

For President Biden, who expended time and prestige trying to broker a deal between Israel and Hamas to release hostages in Gaza, the back-to-back assassinations of the Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, and the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, could signal the futility of his diplomatic efforts, at least for now.

Moreover, the United States could find itself drawn into a direct conflict with Iran, something both countries have taken pains to avoid through months of tensions over the war in Gaza. In April, American officials worked behind the scenes to persuade Iran to limit its military reprisal against Israel after Israeli jets carried out a deadly strike on a meeting of Iranian generals in Damascus, Syria.

This time, however, the killing of Mr. Haniyeh, while he was in Tehran to attend the swearing-in of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, suggests that American sensitivities counted for little, analysts said. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, quickly blamed Israel and vowed “harsh punishment.”

“That is an attempt to humiliate the Iranians by showing they can’t protect their own guests at that ceremony,” said Daniel Levy, who runs the U.S./Middle East Project, a research organization based in London and New York. “It signifies another crossing of multiple lines by Israel.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel brought his case against Iran directly to Washington. Addressing a joint session of Congress last week, he said: “Iran’s axis of terror confronts America, Israel and our Arab friends. This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization.”

Dozens of Democrats boycotted Mr. Netanyahu’s speech to protest Israel’s handling of the war in Gaza. But he appeared undeterred, and the visit gave him a firsthand look at a country in unusual political flux. He met with Mr. Biden only four days after he withdrew from the presidential race, as well as with Vice President Kamala Harris, who has swiftly become the presumptive Democratic nominee.

While Ms. Harris echoed Mr. Biden’s support of Israel’s right to defend itself from terrorism, she also made clear that she would speak out on behalf of the civilians killed and maimed in the Gaza conflict.

“We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies,” she said, in language notably stronger than that normally used by Mr. Biden. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.”

Mr. Netanyahu later traveled to Palm Beach, Fla., to meet with former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee. When Mr. Netanyahu handed him a photograph of a child who he said had been taken captive by Hamas during its deadly Oct. 7 attacks, Mr. Trump told him, “We’ll get it taken care of.”

Some analysts have suggested that Mr. Netanyahu, an astute observer of American politics, saw an opportunity in the political tumult in the United States to act against Hamas and its sponsor, Iran.

“Maybe he decided there is a definite vacuum in Washington, so this is the time to act,” Mr. Nasr said.

The loss of American influence in the Middle East would normally worry allies in Europe. But they have their own problems. In France and Germany, leaders are preoccupied by surging right-wing populist parties. In London, a new Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, has edged away from the United States in its handling of Israel, after months in which London had been in lock step with Washington.

Britain last week dropped its objections to arrest warrants sought by the International Criminal Court for Mr. Netanyahu and the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant. It is weighing whether to suspend weapons shipments to Israel, though it has put off a decision pending further legal review.

The strikes also came at a moment of rising Israeli anxiety about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which have expanded since the Biden administration’s efforts to revive parts of a 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran collapsed in 2022.

Pointing out the lack of leverage the United States has over Iran on its nuclear program, some analysts suggested that Israel might have acted partly out of frustration that the West had not prevented Iran from edging closer to producing a bomb. Provoking a conflict, they said, could give Israel the pretext to strike its nuclear facilities.

“Israel has been quite concerned about the creeping development of the Iranian nuclear program,” said Jonathan Paris, a former Middle East fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The U.S. is noticeably not doing much about it. If I were an Israeli interested in deterrence, this might be one way to do it.”

The assassination could deprive the United States of a fresh diplomatic partner in the form of Iran’s new president, Mr. Pezeshkian. A heart surgeon who beat a hard-line conservative in July, he has portrayed himself as a reformer. But analysts said it would be difficult for him to pursue any diplomatic engagement with the West after such an embarrassing attack.

Still, other experts warned against exaggerating the importance of Mr. Pezeshkian, given the paramount role of Mr. Khamenei. The president’s “relative impotence was exposed on day one,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an expert on Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

Mr. Sadjadpour also cautioned against assuming that Iran would risk an all-out war over the killing of Mr. Haniyeh. It did not do so after the United States assassinated Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the powerful leader of its Quds Force, in 2020. Iran’s previous reprisals against Israel have never proved all that effective.

“Israel has routinely humiliated the Islamic Republic by assassinating high-level targets inside Iran, but Iran’s retaliations have never deterred future Israeli operations,” Mr. Sadjadpour said. “The parameters of an Iranian retaliation need to be face-saving but not life-threatening for the regime.”

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Track Keeps Banning Drug Cheats. It Worries That Other Sports Are Not.

The announcements of track and field’s latest doping case or multiyear suspension arrived on an almost weekly basis this spring. A world champion. An Olympic medalist. And, most recently, three record-holders in a month.

The most immediate consequence, according to the official charged with pursuing doping violations in the sport, has been to create the impression that track has a serious doping problem, one perhaps much bigger than that of other sports in the Paris Olympics. The reality, he said, is that catching athletes who break the rules is the point.

“I would be much more concerned to be a fan of other sports that don’t have any doping cases,” said Brett Clothier, the Australian lawyer who leads the Athletics Integrity Unit, the body charged with catching track’s doping cheats. “Having no cases doesn’t mean no doping.”

To Mr. Clothier, then, a string of investigations and suspensions in a sport with a well-documented doping history is not a cause for concern but rather an inherent contradiction: To restore his sport’s reputation, he and his colleagues must first in the eyes of some besmirch it even more.

As a case involving positive tests for Chinese swimmers hangs over the Olympic pool, Mr. Clothier also has joined elite athletes and government investigators in publicly questioning whether the current global antidoping system can ever fully eradicate drug cheats. Each sport is left to arrange its own antidoping procedures.

Still, each new violation uncovered in track and field is, to him, proof that the sport is doing what many others are not: unapologetically pursuing elite athletes who might be taking banned substances, and providing a fairer platform for everyone.

“Our track record, first and foremost, indicates we have the means and commitment to actually uncover doping,” Mr. Clothier said in an interview in June. “If I was a fan of other sports, I would worry that not enough is happening.

“Let’s be clear: Most sports don’t do enough to uncover doping.”

Track and field’s commitment to tackling doping was born out of scandal, and a golden plaque attached to a wall near the entrance of the unit’s offices in Monaco serves as a daily reminder of those dark times.

There, engraved in gold, is the name of Lamine Diack, the former president of track and field’s governing body. A Senegalese administrator who was for decades one of the most influential figures in sports, Mr. Diack and several other top track officials were accused of soliciting bribes from athletes who had been caught doping in exchange for covering up their positive results and allowing them to continue competing, including at the Olympics. Mr. Diack was convicted by a French court in 2020; he died a year later.

The scandal was so profound, and so damaging to track and field’s brand, that the sport’s leaders eventually changed the organization’s name and logo as they tried to distance it from the past. Those changes also led to the creation of the Athletics Integrity Unit, known as the A.I.U., and to a commitment to devote a higher percentage of the budget — about 12 percent annually, or roughly $12 million — of the rebranded governing body, World Athletics, to rooting out doping.

The level of independence enjoyed by the A.I.U. is rare in elite sports. While its offices sit two floors below those of track and field’s headquarters in a salmon-colored building in Monte Carlo, Mr. Clothier answers not to the current leader of World Athletics, Sebastian Coe, but to a separate board. That arrangement ensures that track’s current leaders hold little power over the antidoping body’s activities.

That structure has enabled Mr. Clothier and his second in command, Thomas Capdevielle, to build a rigorous and intelligence-driven testing system that the A.I.U. uses to locate and test athletes wherever they are in the world, sometimes at a moment’s notice.

The strategy starts at the top. A group of the top 10 athletes per discipline in both men’s and women’s categories is selected to be part of the World Athletics testing pool. Each athlete has a profile and a bespoke risk score from 1 to 10, calculated from a range of factors, including the athlete’s testing history, performances, nationality — there are athletes from 90 nations in the testing pool — and intelligence reports from testers in the field.

The higher the score, the higher the risk. A rank of red out of four color-coded categories signifies that, according to A.I.U. data, an athlete has a higher likelihood of doping. Those athletes are tested more often and placed under greater scrutiny.

But suspecting, or even being convinced, that an athlete is cheating is very different from catching a cheater. Long gone are the days, Mr. Clothier said, of huge amounts of banned substances lingering in the bloodstream. The window to catch athletes has now shrunk so much, he said, that the so-called washout period for some banned substances — the time when it disappears from an athlete’s system — is sometimes a few hours.

Greater sophistication among cheats and their entourages in microdosing, or taking tiny amounts of prohibited substances at regular intervals, during training periods can make catching them even more difficult. “It’s really become a game of cat and mouse,” Mr. Clothier said.

That is why the A.I.U. expends so much effort on preparation, intelligence and targeted out-of-competition testing, he said, rather than the blanket testing of athletes at regular intervals, as many other sports still do, or only at major events.

That rigorous approach can be exacting for track’s athletes. They have to update their whereabouts every day of the year while they are in the testing pool, and they provide a daily one-hour window when they are available to be tested. Even then, if a tester can track them down outside that time, they are obliged to provide samples.

Failure to be present or to provide a sample results in a “whereabouts failure.” Three of those in a calendar year result in a two-year suspension as part of strict rules in place to prevent evasion. To catch the right athlete at the right time for the right substances, whereabouts “is key,” Mr. Clothier said.

Still, two years is less than a possible longer exile if they are caught doping. That fact, he said, can lead athletes to make calculations about whether to answer a surprise knock on the door from an A.I.U. sample collector.

That was the conundrum the Nigerian sprinter and long jumper Blessing Okagbare faced when testers arrived at her home in Florida shortly before the last Olympics. Investigators had found text exchanges between Okagbare and Eric Lira, a Texas therapist, in which Okagbare appeared to tell Mr. Lira that she did not reply to a visit from testers because she was not sure it was “safe” to take a test.

Okagbare was eventually tracked down in Europe and gave a sample. When that came back positive for growth hormones, she was pulled from her events at the Tokyo Olympics and suspended. But her case was a vivid example of how even intelligence and strict rules aren’t foolproof: Okagbare already had two whereabouts failures when she finally submitted a test.

“If she was on one,” Mr. Clothier said of the failures, “then she probably doesn’t answer the door.”

Okagbare received a 10-year ban from competition and Mr. Lira a prison sentence for supplying her with the drugs.

In an Olympic year, antidoping veterans know, cheating rises.

“This is a real, red-hot, crucial moment,” Mr. Capdevielle, the head of testing, said of the period before the Paris Olympics. The A.I.U. data proves it: The number of athletes in the red zone changes when they make frequent changes to their travel itineraries, which investigators said could be a sign of something nefarious.

To counter that, the agency constantly fine-tunes its matrix to ensure that the right athlete is tested at the right time and for the right substances. In its constant search for reliable testing partners, the A.I.U. favors the use of private companies over national antidoping bodies, which Mr. Clothier said could be slow to act and less interested in seeing their own athletes punished.

The A.I.U. has cited a run of recent cases — a sprinter from Suriname, a pole-vaulter from Brazil, a Kenyan distance runner — as proof that its targeted approach was succeeding. But Mr. Clothier admitted that could be an illusion: He knows that athletes in track and field, and other sports, are still cheating and getting away with it. That may be why he is unflinching in his criticism of the current global antidoping system.

“I don’t think,” he said, “that it’s working particularly well.”

Can Gouda’s Cheesemakers Stall a Sinking Future?

On a recent morning in Gouda, a small city in the Netherlands, hundreds of wheels of yellow cheese lay out in rows on the cobblestones of the town square, a backdrop to the city’s weekly cheese market, which dates to the Middle Ages.

Ad van Kluijve, a farmer dressed in blue work shirt, red bandanna, blue cap and wooden clogs, haggled with a buyer over the price of his latest batch of “jong belegen,” famous for its mild caramel flavor. In the rest of the world, it is one of many cheeses named after the city in which it is traded.

The haggling is largely a performance for tourists as the actual price negotiations take place elsewhere. The cheese industry in the region is very real, though, accounting for about 60 percent of the national cheese production, with an export value of $1.7 billion annually, according to ZuivelNL, which represents the Dutch dairy sector.

But it’s unlikely the cheese market will be here in 50 to 100 years because of a confluence of a few factors, experts say: The city, built on peat marsh, has always been vulnerable to sinking, and that risk is now greater because increased rainfall and rising sea levels — a consequence of climate change — threaten to flood the river delta in which it sits.

“We’re not in good shape,” said Gilles Erkens, a professor at Utrecht University and the head of a team focused on land subsidence at Deltares, a nonprofit research institute. “It’s a very worrisome situation.”

Jan Rotmans, a professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam and the author of Embracing Chaos: How to Deal With a World in Crisis?, has made projections of rising sea levels in the region and predicts that the Green Heart, as the Gouda region is known, will be inundated, or built on floating cities, by century’s end.

“I wouldn’t expect much cheese from Gouda anymore in 100 years,” he said. “If the land turns into water and the cows disappear, the cheese will have to come from the eastern part of the country, and it won’t be Gouda anymore.”

Much of the Netherlands was built centuries ago on peat marsh, a spongy soil that compresses easily. In Gouda, it is constantly subsiding under the weight of the city, said Michel Klijmij-van der Laan, a city alderman who focuses on sustainability and subsidence issues.

The oldest part of the city center subsides at a rate of about 3 to 6 millimeters each year, he said, and newer parts sink by 1 to 2 centimeters, or about half an inch, a year.

“We have until 2040 or 2050 to come up with a new plan,” Mr. Klijmij-van der Laan said. “We have to find new solutions, because the solutions we’ve always used are not future proof. Just continuing to pump water out isn’t practical, because eventually it will become too expensive.”

In an effort to tackle the problem, Gouda, which has about 75,000 residents, is spending more than $22 million a year on water mitigation efforts, including daily maintenance, repairs, system upgrades and pipe replacements. Mr. Klijmij-van der Laan said that amount is expected to increase exponentially.

He helped establish a national knowledge center in a building on the market square, where policymakers, scientists, architects and other experts discuss possible solutions.

The municipality also recently approved a short-term plan dubbed “Gouda Firm City” to manage the water levels in the city center by damming a local canal, the Turfmarkt, on both sides, and pumping water out into local rivers. This is expected to gradually lower the water level by 25 centimeters, or about 10 inches.

But Mr. Rotmans, the Erasmus University professor, said the country needed to develop a radical new approach within 10 years, adding that he was frustrated by the lack of urgency given that the region is low-lying and has such a high density of people, cows and industry.

“There is no other delta area that is so well protected, but also which is so vulnerable,” he said. “That annoys me — that lack of urgency among climate engineers. It would not surprise me if in the next 20 years there will be some kind of disaster. Maybe only then people will respond.”

Mr. Klijmij-van der Laan said residents don’t always appreciate the urgency of the problem because they’ve gotten used to it.

“If you live here, it is just a fact of life,” he said. “You raise your garden, level the street, accept that property taxes are higher than the rest of the Netherlands.”

Evidence of water creep is everywhere in Gouda. On the Turfmarkt, the water rises to just inches from the top of the canal walls. The water lilies, blooming on the lily pads that dot the water, are just about at street level.

Buildings in the old center face frequent flooding, which suffuses the quaint alleyways with sewage water. Cellars regularly become inundated and must be pumped out, while mildew creeps into walls and cracks their plaster surfaces.

Some of the oldest houses have no foundations, and more than 1,000 are built on wood piles, which can rot when there is too much ground moisture, Mr. Klijmij-van der Laan said.

“There are many houses in the oldest part of town that have their feet, so to say, in the water,” said Mr. Erkens, the Utrecht University professor. “A lot of the cellars are filling with water regularly.”

On a sunny afternoon last month, though, few residents seemed concerned about the future. Dutch water engineers are famous for their water management skills because they have built a whole country on marshland, using an intricate system of dams, dikes and canals.

“The houses sink a little every year, but in the end it’s just millimeters, so you don’t notice it,” said Marco van der Horst, owner of the tobacconist D.G. van Vreumingen, a 187-year old shop on the corner of the town square. “We have to take measures, but it’s not like we’re going to drown here in a couple of years. In the Netherlands, we’ve always done water management, and we always will.”

But Mr. Rotmans of Erasmus University said it was unwise to imagine that the water problem can be managed forever. “If you look 50 or 100 years ahead at the sea level and the land, it becomes unbelievably costly to manage the water level,” he said.

Meanwhile, at the cheese market downtown, a brass band was playing, the sky was bright blue and the crowd was cheerful.

Wijtze Visser, dressed in a canary yellow suit and red tie, took the hand of a woman in the crowd to dance with her.

Was he worried about rising waters threatening this way of life?

“I already live seven meters below sea level,” he said. “If the water comes up a little bit, it doesn’t make much difference to me. I also don’t think my kids, the next generation, are going to have a problem.”

And after that? “After that?” he paused. “Yes, absolutely.”

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Unrest at Army Bases Highlights a Long Battle for Israel’s Soul

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.

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