Darja Stefancic, a painter in Slovenia known for technicolor landscapes, thought it strange when an obscure online art gallery run by a woman from Argentina contacted her out of the blue and asked her to join its thin roster of artists.

The painter suspected a scam, and she worried that the gallery, which virtually nobody in Slovenia’s tiny, tight-knit art scene had heard of, “just wanted to cheat people.”

It did — but in ways that far surpassed even her darkest suspicions.

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Anti-immigration rioters attacked a hotel in the town of Rotherham in northern England on Sunday, breaking windows and appearing to set fires at a hotel that has housed asylum seekers, as riots continued in Britain.

The police in cities across the country have braced for continued far-right and anti-immigration protests spurred by a deadly stabbing attack last week in the northern English town of Southport. Disinformation spread rapidly that erroneously claimed the suspect in the knife attack was an immigrant. On Saturday, dozens of people were arrested as demonstrations from Liverpool to Belfast descended into violence.

Sunday saw a new wave of clashes, with groups gathering in Rotherham, Bolton, Hull, Southport, Middlesbrough and other towns and cities scattered across the country that devolved into varying degrees of violence.

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The 17-story hotel, a giant and graceless gem of socialist modernist architecture cherished by aficionados of concrete, took four years to build in the 1970s and became a proud symbol of the Soviet Union’s embrace of modernity.

Reduced to a ruin in the more than 30 years since Moldova gained independence, the National Hotel in Chisinau, the capital, is today a study in the post-Soviet dysfunctions of one of Europe’s poorest countries.

Wealthy tycoons have wrangled over it, shuffling ownership between opaque offshore companies, while competing groups of graffiti artists have turned its facade into a huge tableau displaying their rival loyalties. One group daubed it with the colors of the Ukrainian flag, then a group opposed to Ukraine painted a Russian military symbol. In June, a new group painted the exterior with the colors of Moldova’s flag.

Prosecutors and preservationists have struggled to understand how what was once a prize piece of real estate has fallen on such hard times.

“It is a monument to corruption in Moldova,” said Valeriu Pasa, the head of WatchDog, a Chisinau research and anti-corruption activist group.

“It moved from one oligarch to another, but our justice system has for years failed to hold those responsible for the mess accountable,” he added.

Opened in 1978 as a four-star hotel whose size and modern design were intended to wow foreign visitors, the National is now a dystopian dive, its wiring, plumbing, windows and marble tiles all stripped by thieves, its lobby a dark cavern strewed with empty bottles and mattresses used by homeless people.

What to do with the formerly state-owned hotel, privatized nearly two decades ago in a series of murky deals, has been argued over for years without result.

“It seems that nobody can figure out how to clean up our system,” said Sergiu Tofilat, a former presidential adviser who has pushed in vain for prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into what went wrong.

Businessmen with a stake in the property, several of whom are now on the run outside Moldova to escape arrest, want it demolished to make way for office blocks or luxury housing, while preservationists and fans of modernist architecture want it preserved.

On a recent afternoon, the only person inside the ruin was an apparently intoxicated young man roaming the empty floors. He shouted that he was “looking for my girl” before wandering off past an open elevator shaft and then vanishing. Even the elevator call buttons on the wall have been stolen.

Anetta Dabija, a city councilor and a member of Save Chisinau, a group lobbying to protect old buildings from demolition by developers, said she would never enter the hotel alone out of safety concerns. Its entrances have been boarded up, and the police occasionally expel squatters and chase away graffiti artists.

But, easily accessible through a broken garage door, the building provides a safe space for amorous couples unbothered by the stench of urine and a lure for fans of urban exploration, which often involves visiting and taking photographs of derelict, creepy places.

Ms. Dabija said she had not been a fan of socialist architecture but decided the National was worth saving after a visit to Berlin, where iconic structures of the Communist era, like the Berlin Congress Center and Kino International, have been restored.

“People often hate modernist buildings, but that is not an excuse for demolition,” Ms. Dabija said.

Also dead set against demolition are the graffiti artists.

Dmitri Potapov, who with friends painted the Ukrainian flag on the facade to protest Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, said the hotel should be turned into a public art space.

Since it “gained its private status through dubious means in the 1990s,” he said, it must be returned to the state or turned over to squatters. “Our main concern should be to prevent its demolition,” he added.

In the Soviet era, the National was run by Intourist, a state company that operated a chain of mostly shabby hotels catering to foreigners across Moscow’s empire. The National, then called The Intourist, was one of its jewels.

Vladimir Paladi, 82, who lives in a nearby apartment block, said the hotel was mostly restricted to foreigners at that time but had a restaurant open to locals.

He said he could never afford to eat there, but had a friend working as a waiter who showed him around what he remembers as a place of unimaginable splendor, at least for Soviet Moldova.

All that remains of that is a collection of black-and-white photographs of the hotel kept by Moldova’s national archive. “It was so beautiful,” said Lucia Myrza, an archivist responsible for the collection, peering at fading images of a well-lit but hardly luxurious lobby and the hotel’s imposing spotless exterior.

“It was the proud symbol of our city,” she said.

Intourist pulled out of Chisinau after the collapse of Communism, when the Soviet Republic of Moldavia became the new state of Moldova. Ownership of the hotel passed to MoldovaTur, a Soviet tourism company taken over by the new nation. The Intourist became The National.

For a few years, the National continued receiving guests, but they became increasingly rare after a brief war broke out in 1992 in the mainly Russian-speaking Moldovan region of Transnistria.

As stability slowly returned and newly minted millionaires looked for investments — usually a euphemism for state-owned assets that could be grabbed for a pittance — Alfa Engineering, a company controlled by Vlad Plahotniuc, later the country’s most powerful oligarch, in 2006 bought a controlling share of MoldovaTur.

It paid around $2 million and promised to put more than $30 million into renovating and upgrading what was by then already a derelict concrete shell.

“Of course, they invested nothing,” recalled Victor Chironda, a former deputy mayor responsible for urban development. “Their plan from the start,” he said, “was to demolish everything and take the land for a new development.”

Mr. Tofilat, the former presidential adviser, said the hotel later ended up in the hands of Ilhan Shor, another tycoon.

Convicted of fraud in 2017 in connection with the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars from Moldova’s banking system between 2010 and 2014, Mr. Shor initially fled to Israel and recently moved to Moscow.

Mr. Shor then sold the hotel through a series of convoluted offshore transactions that, according to Mr. Tofilat, ended up giving control of the property to Vladimir Andronachi, a former legislator close to Mr. Plahotniuc. In 2022, Mr. Andronachi was arrested during a visit to Ukraine and sent back to Moldova to face criminal charges in connection with that bank fraud and other crimes.

A year before his arrest, long-stalled secret plans to demolish the hotel had become public. Developers working with Mr. Andronachi in 2021 asked for permission to tear the building down and replace it with high-end office towers.

Mr. Chironda, who was still a deputy mayor at the time, rejected the idea, arguing that it was illegal because the hotel had been left to rot in violation of the original privatization deal.

Suffering from Covid-19, he took sick leave. When he returned, he discovered that another official had approved the demolition plan.

The city’s mayor, Ion Ceban, then fired Mr. Chironda but relented to public pressure and canceled the demolition plan. He declined to be interviewed.

With the demolition plan halted and no sign that anyone is ready to invest the tens of millions needed for restoration, the hotel is stuck in limbo. Its ownership has been frozen by a court order pending the outcome of the criminal cases against Mr. Andronachi.

“We have been waiting, waiting and waiting for someone to rescue this place,” said Mr. Paladi, the nearby resident, “but it just keeps falling apart.”

Ruxanda Spatari contributed reporting.

Venezuela is in another dark moment.

President Nicolás Maduro, the authoritarian leader who has been in power since 2013, has declared himself the winner of another election that international observers have called undemocratic. His security forces have arrested hundreds of political opponents. And new protests against him appear to be losing steam.

Is all hope for democracy in Venezuela lost? Opposition leaders are trying to push forward, and the United States has recognized their candidate as the winner of Sunday’s vote. But Mr. Maduro does not appear close to giving up power. What, exactly, would that take?

The answer — according to analysts, political scientists and a review of history — largely depends on government security forces.

The Threat From Within

In a true democracy, politicians must win support from a majority of voters to keep power. In authoritarian regimes, dictators are often propped up by a small circle of influential figures.

“The less democratic a political system becomes, the more reliant you are on just a very small number of people to maintain power,” said Marcel Dirsus, a political scientist and author of “How Tyrants Fall.”

That means security forces — not the furious protesters on the street — pose the most serious and immediate danger to his tenure, researchers said. “The biggest threat are the men with guns,” Mr. Dirsus said.

Between 1950 and 2012, nearly two-thirds of the 473 authoritarian leaders who lost power were removed by government insiders, according to an analysis by Erica Frantz, a political science professor at Michigan State University who studies authoritarianism.

To combat that threat, autocrats frequently try what political scientists call “coup-proofing”: They divide security forces into various fragmented units. That can keep any one branch from amassing too much power — and also cause forces to spy on one another.

That, analysts said, describes Venezuela.

Propping Up a Regime

Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, created a tangled web of military, police and intelligence agencies.

Venezuela’s armed forces, with approximately 150,000 members, are split between the army, navy, air force and national guard.

There is a national police force and a national militia — partly made up of Maduro supporters with little to no training — that can be called in to take up arms in an emergency.

There are so-called colectivos, or groups of civilians who attack protesters and, according to researchers, are armed by the government.

And there are three separate intelligence agencies, as well as intelligence units within other forces, which surveil the opposition and one another.

For years these forces have quelled protests, hounded the opposition and helped preserve Mr. Maduro’s increasingly authoritarian time in power, which has outlasted many analysts’ expectations.

“It checks all the boxes for a regime that should be vulnerable to overthrow: major economic problems, difficulties with the successor establishing legitimacy, and a narrowing of the support base,” said Ms. Frantz, who studies Venezuela and co-wrote “The Origins of Elected Strongmen.”

“The critical player in ensuring the regime stays afloat has been the security apparatus,” she said.

In turn, the government has purchased loyalty by giving senior military officers high-paying jobs or control of state industries.

Why Switch Sides?

The question then is: What would make the security forces flip?

“People need to believe there’s an actual possibility that he could fall,” Mr. Dirsus said. “Only then will the men with guns either stand aside or change sides altogether.”

In other nations, when signs have emerged that a dictator is losing power, military officers have quickly betrayed the dictator to protect themselves. Sometimes that has meant attempting a coup. Other times it has meant aligning with the opposition.

In Brazil, the military dictatorship in power from 1964 to 1985 acquiesced to a peaceful transition to democracy in part because it had secured amnesty for officers who committed abuses. As a result, few people have ever faced legal consequences for a government that killed more than 400 people.

A few years earlier in Argentina, the military dictatorship effectively collapsed after losing the Falklands War. Courts have since convicted more than 1,100 military officials for abuses during the dictatorship, which human rights groups say killed as many as 30,000 people.

Researchers said Venezuelan forces were probably considering two such possibilities. They can stick with Mr. Maduro, potentially keeping power but also risking a collapse of the government and potential jail time. Or they can participate in a transition to democracy and negotiate immunity for any crimes.

Venezuela’s Current Moment

Given those stakes, what is happening behind the scenes in the Venezuelan government is unclear.

The opposition has made direct appeals to security forces, asking for their support to ensure the election results are respected.

“Members of the armed forces, the nation needs you,” María Corina Machado, an opposition leader, said in a video to the military before the election. “The Constitution must be your North Star and guide.”

On election night, as exit polls suggested that the opposition candidate Edmundo González had won in a landslide, three top leaders of Venezuela’s security forces struck a balanced tone in a public address.

“The people of Venezuela have gone to the streets, to their voting centers, to exercise their human right,” said Gen. Vladimir Padrino López, Mr. Maduro’s longtime defense minister, “voting for the option that each conscience dictates.”

He then said the government would release vote tallies from every polling station. It has since refused to do so.

For General Padrino López and the other officers, “it was actually a very calm narrative compared to what we’re used to,” said Andrei Serbin Pont, a Latin America security analyst who has studied Venezuela’s security forces for years.

The next day, the security forces’ response to mass protests was relatively less forceful than in the past. Fewer soldiers and police officers were on the street, and they were generally less combative with demonstrators, Mr. Serbin Pont said.

It was unclear whether that was because of an order from Mr. Maduro, a decision by the forces themselves or a general deterioration in their personnel, weapons and morale. Many had left the country. “They migrate just like anyone else,” he said.

Then, on Tuesday night, as protests raged, the military leaders held another news conference and made clear they were publicly siding with Mr. Maduro. “We are in the presence of a coup d’état forged once again by these fascist factors of the extremist right,” General Padrino López said.

If any security forces are talking to the opposition, they will desperately try to guard that secret. Venezuela’s intelligence agencies “are really good at seizing opportunities like this to weed out possible dissidents,” Mr. Serbin Pont said.

The Importance of Protests

While security forces are key to Mr. Maduro’s fate, researchers said, they can be heavily influenced by protests and international pressure.

Some foreign allies’ refusal to recognize Mr. Maduro’s self-declared victory and the U.S. recognition of his challenger as the winner could weaken his standing with the security forces. Large protests could, too.

“If they look out into the streets and see a sea of ordinary Venezuelans opposing the regime, that’s going to change their expectations about the future,” Mr. Dirsus said.

But if Venezuela wants to transition to a full democracy, nonviolent protest may also be critical.

A study by Harvard’s Erica Chenoweth showed that over the past several decades, 57 percent of nonviolent resistance campaigns around the world had led to democracy, while violent campaigns led to democracy in less than 6 percent of cases.

“The key factor for democracy in Venezuela is that — should regime change happen — things go down peacefully,” Ms. Frantz said. “When there is violence and bloodshed, the chances of a new dictatorship taking control increase substantially.”

Lucía Cholakian Herrera contributed reporting from Caracas, Venezuela.

At least 70 people were killed in clashes between security forces and protesters on Sunday in Bangladesh, as the country’s leaders imposed a new curfew and internet restrictions to try to quell a growing antigovernment movement.

The revival of student protests after a deadly government crackdown late last month, as well as a call by the governing party for its own supporters to take to the streets, has plunged the country of over 170 million into a particularly dangerous phase.

The exact number of deaths on Sunday was unclear, but it appeared to be the deadliest day since the protests began in July. A diplomatic official in Dhaka, the capital, said the toll across Bangladesh was at least 72, while tallies by local news media and the protest coordinators put the count at anywhere from 70 to 93. At least 13 of the dead were police officers, the country’s Police Headquarters said in a statement.

Sunday’s toll added to the more than 200 people killed in the crackdown on protesters last month by security forces under Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s increasingly authoritarian leader. In a sign of the risk of further violence, the protest coordinators said they would march on Monday toward the official residence of Ms. Hasina, whose resignation they are demanding.

During a meeting with her top security officials on Sunday, Ms. Hasina called those behind the violence “terrorists” and called on the country’s people “to curb anarchists with iron hands,” Bangladesh’s state news agency reported.

Over the weekend, the tensions flared into the kind of localized clashes across the country that appeared difficult to contain. With the public already angry at the police forces, seeing them as an overzealous extension of Ms. Hasina’s entrenched authority, attention focused on Bangladesh’s powerful military.

Ms. Hasina has worked to bring the military to heel. But it has a history of staging coups and was being watched for how it positions itself in the escalating crisis.

What began as a peaceful student protest last month over a preferential quota system for public-sector jobs has morphed into unprecedented anger at Ms. Hasina’s growing autocracy and her management of the economy.

While the crackdown, which included the arrests of more than 10,000 people and the lodging of police cases against tens of thousands more, temporarily dispersed the protesters, the demonstrations have been back in full force since Friday.

The protesters’ anger over the large numbers of deaths has solidified their demands to a single point: On Saturday, at a rally of tens of thousands, they called for the resignation of Ms. Hasina, who has been in power for the past 15 years.

In response to the resignation call, her Awami League party called on its supporters to join counterprotests — setting up the tense situation that unfolded on Sunday.

In a statement sent to the news media on Sunday, as internet restrictions went into effect, leaders of the student movement called for the protests to continue uninterrupted.

“If there is an internet crackdown, if we are disappeared, arrested, or killed, and if there is no one left to make announcements, everyone should continue to occupy the streets and maintain peaceful noncooperation until the government falls in response to our one demand,” Nahid Islam, one of the movement’s leaders, said in the statement.

As the chaos escalates, with both the protesters and Ms. Hasina’s governing party digging in their heels, and as opposition parties take the opportunity to pile on, the country’s military may help determine what happens next.

The army and other security forces were deployed during the crackdown in July. On Sunday, however, the army’s chief, Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman, gathered senior officers for a meeting that was seen as an attempt to allay concerns over the army’s position in the crisis and reinforce its neutrality.

In a statement issued after the meeting, the army said its chief had reiterated that “the Bangladesh Army will always stand by the people in the interest of the public and in any need of the state.”

Reports from student protesters and diplomatic officials about the army’s conduct on Sunday were mixed. While in some parts of the country the army cracked down on the protesters, in other places, it was seen protecting the protesters against attacks by the governing party’s youth wing.

In announcing the reinstatement of the curfew, the army said it would “carry out its pledged duties in accordance with the Constitution and the country’s prevailing laws.”

While the army was long prone to staging coups, it has grown more disciplined in recent years, exercising its influence from behind the scenes.

Analysts attribute that to a combination of factors: Ms. Hasina’s stacking of the top ranks with loyalists, and the lucrative business of United Nations peacekeeping, to which Bangladesh’s army is a major contributor. Human rights abuses like those attributed to other forces under Ms. Hasina, or involvement in a coup, would have international ramifications.

In an indication of the growing pressure on the army to stick to a neutral position, dozens of former officers — including a former army chief — held a news conference on Sunday in Dhaka and called on the military to withdraw its forces from the streets.

“We are deeply concerned, troubled and saddened by all the egregious killings, tortures, disappearances and mass arrests that have been tormenting Bangladesh over the past three weeks,” Iqbal Karim Bhuiyan, who served as army chief from 2012 to 2015, said in a statement on behalf of the former officers. “In no way our armed forces should come forward to rescue those who have created this current situation.”

Shayeza Walid contributed reporting from Dhaka.

Follow our latest updates on the Middle East crisis here.

First came the death of its top leader abroad, Ismail Haniyeh, by a bomb planted in Tehran. Then came Israel’s announcement that, only weeks earlier, it had killed Hamas’s most elusive and revered military leader. All of this as Israel continues to wage the deadliest war Palestinians in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip have ever faced.

At first tally, the latest score in the 30-year struggle between Israel and Hamas looks like a devastating one for the Islamist movement, one that throws its future into question. Yet the history of Hamas, the evolution of Palestinian militant groups over the decades and the logic of insurgencies more broadly suggest that not only will Hamas survive, it may even stand to emerge politically stronger.

Analysts and regional observers in contact with Hamas leaders see the latest blows it has suffered — including Mr. Haniyeh’s assassination, widely believed to be at Israel’s hand — as offering Israeli forces a short-term victory at the cost of long-term strategic success.

“Instead of creating the disconnect they’d hoped for, one that would make people fearful or completely defeated, this will have the opposite effect,” said Tahani Mustafa, a senior Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group, which provides policy analysis on ending conflicts. “Israel just dealt them a winning hand.”

The military campaign Israel has waged in retaliation for Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks has displaced some 90 percent of Gaza’s two million residents, razed swaths of the enclave’s cities and killed 39,000 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Despite that, Hamas not only remains operational, but is recruiting new fighters both in Gaza and beyond, local residents and analysts say. Militants have also begun to re-emerge in areas that Israel had driven them out of months before.

For Hamas, the logic of insurgency means that simply surviving in the face of a far more powerful military provides a symbolic victory. With that comes a chance at staying power that outlasts any pain Israel has inflicted.

On Wednesday, Israel’s military said that a strike it conducted on July 13 had killed Muhammad Deif, the head of Hamas’s military wing, who is seen as an architect of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Hamas has yet to confirm the killing. Mr. Deif’s death, however, would represent the end of a yearslong Israeli effort to kill the man who is effectively the second-most senior leader after Israel’s most-wanted man, Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza.

Israel’s announcement of Mr. Deif’s killing came on the day that mourners were gathering to bid farewell to Mr. Haniyeh, who was killed while on a visit to attend the inauguration of Iran’s new president. Both Iran and Hamas have accused Israel, with a long history of assassinating its foes, of being behind his death.

His loss, too, will be difficult for Hamas. Mr. Haniyeh was seen by regional analysts as a more moderate figure within the Islamist movement, acting as a bridge between its rival factions. He was also seen as a leader willing to push for mediation — including the continuing, if faltering, cease-fire talks with Israel.

“You take him out and the message is: Negotiations don’t matter,” said Khaled Elgindy, an expert on Palestinian affairs at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

“I don’t see a reason to conclude Hamas could become irrelevant,” he said. “The question is: How does Hamas change after this? And I think there is a very strong argument to be made that the leadership becomes more hard-line.”

Mr. Deif himself replaced Ahmed al-Jabari, the military leader Israel killed in 2012 with a targeted strike on his car. At the time, he was leading Hamas’s side in a mediation effort to reach a long-term cease-fire with Israel.

Israel’s decades-long targeted killing campaigns against its Palestinian and regional rivals have a contested record: Critics have long argued the tactic has simply created room for new parties or leaders to emerge as Israel’s main foes — often with ever more radical forces replacing them.

In the 1970s, Israel killed Wadi Haddad, the military leader of the communist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which led to that group’s collapse. A decade later, a new Palestinian foe had replaced it: Yasir Arafat’s nationalist force, Fatah. Israel killed its popular military leader, Khalil al-Wazir, but failed to cripple the group.

Hamas, founded in 1987, has intently studied the history of Palestinian militant groups in the hopes of avoiding their fates.

Since the early 2000s, Hamas has become the group seen by Palestinians as taking up the mantle of armed resistance to Israeli occupation while other groups’ military abilities have faded — or, in the case of Fatah, abandoned militancy as its primary strategy in favor of negotiations.

As peace talks broke down in the early 2000s, Hamas’s potency grew. Several Israeli assassinations of its leaders, including its co-founders, failed to derail the group.

Mr. Haniyeh’s life story provides a different lesson in the unintended consequences of some of Israel’s attempts to incapacitate Hamas. He was among 400 Palestinians expelled by Israel from Gaza to southern Lebanon, then under Israeli military occupation. Instead of being sidelined, figures like Mr. Haniyeh gained further popularity — and a broader regional reach.

Perhaps the most important principle for Hamas’s survival, Ms. Mustafa, the analyst, said, is not being overly reliant on material support from its foreign backers — a dependency that allowed Israel to deplete the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1970s and 1980s, she said.

Hamas so far appears to have maintained that self-reliance even amid Israel’s tightened siege on Gaza. Iran is a major source of Hamas’s money and weapons — its attack drones were used by Hamas on Oct. 7. But now Iran is also struggling to keep itself from being dragged into a regional war.

Hamas militants have their own engineers who know how to make use of whatever they can find on the ground — from supplies looted from Israeli bases or ambushes on Israeli vehicles, or from extracting materials from unexploded ordnance and fallen drones.

“They got a lot of external support in terms of finance and training, but in terms of their logistics, a lot of that is homemade,” Ms. Mustafa said. “Which is why, even now, almost 10 months in, you haven’t seen the resistance wane.”

Not all Hamas observers believe that Hamas can survive the current pressures. Some analysts, like Michael Stephens at the London-based research group the Royal United Services Institute, believes the strikes will cause enough temporary damage to force Hamas into more concessions.

Akram Atallah, a Gazan political analyst at the Arabic newspaper Al-Ayyam, said Hamas would emerge from this war badly damaged — not only militarily, but in terms of support in Gaza, the region that “has always been its center of gravity.”

Much of the popularity Hamas is perceived to have gained, he said, has come from outside Gaza — such as from fellow Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

“That is understandable for one obvious reason: It’s the residents of Gaza who are paying the price,” he said.

Hamas, he said, will never be able to lead the Gaza Strip after Israel’s offensive ends. Not only Israel and its main backers in Washington would reject this, he said, but Gazans themselves as well.

Yet even with that resolve, Hamas’s opponents have done little to ensure that anyone could replace Hamas, Mr. Stephens said.

“No one wants to go there, because no one wants to own that problem. Who is going to own the Palestinian question?” he said. “It looks bad for Hamas right now — but then, what exactly are the alternatives?”

Ms. Mustafa predicts an extended period in which Gaza is trapped in a power vacuum, with Israel entering and withdrawing from pockets where Hamas militants re-emerge and disappear.

Even if Israel were to ultimately deal a decisive blow against Hamas, Mr. Atallah said, the only question would be who emerged next.

“As long as there is an occupation, Palestinians will keep fighting,” he said, “whether there is still a Hamas, or there isn’t.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Sunday that his military had received a first batch of F-16 fighter jets. The long-awaited arrival of the Western-supplied jets should bolster the country’s defenses, although Kyiv appears to have received too few of them so far to have an immediate impact on the battlefield.

“F-16s are in Ukraine. We did it,” Mr. Zelensky said in a video posted on social media networks showing him at an air base addressing and meeting Ukrainian pilots. He was standing in front of two F-16s, and two more flew overhead as he spoke.

At the very least, the arrival of the jets will bolster Ukrainians’ morale, which has been dampened by months of slow, but steady Russian advances on the battlefield and devastating attacks on the country’s power grid.

Mr. Zelensky said Ukrainian pilots “have already started using them for our country,” but he did not say whether they had already flown combat missions in Ukraine. Nor did he say how many jets had arrived in the country.

A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters, said about a half-dozen pilots were conducting test flights on as many jets in “uncontested” Ukrainian airspace. He said the Ukrainian pilots were getting acclimated to operations on a small scale and had not yet engaged the Russians.

Ukraine hopes the F-16s, highly versatile aircraft equipped with advanced radar systems and a variety of weapons, will help its fortunes on the battlefield, where Russia has held the upper hand for much of the past year.

The Ukrainians will use the jets to try to deter Russian pilots from entering Ukrainian airspace to attack troops on the front line and in cities. The F-16s could also improve Ukraine’s ability to shoot down Russian missiles, easing the pressure on its weakened air defense systems.

But Ukrainian officials have warned that delays in deliveries of the F-16s could diminish the jets’ effect on the battlefield, giving Russia time to adapt its tactics. In recent weeks, Russia has targeted Ukrainian air bases in an apparent effort to limit the use of the F-16s ahead of their arrival.

The United States has agreed to arm the F-16s with missiles and other advanced weapons, which should help Ukraine conduct more long-range strikes behind Russian lines, said Nico Lange, a military expert and former German defense official.

Still, a shortage of trained pilots and the limited number of jets will constrain their immediate battlefield impact, experts say.

Western officials said this year that as few as six jets might arrive in Ukraine by the summer. About 20 Ukrainian pilots are expected to be capable of flying the jets this year, according to U.S. officials. That would allow Ukraine to deploy only about 10 F-16s in combat, given that each aircraft requires at least two pilots.

John F. Kirby, the White House national security spokesman, told the Ukrainian edition of Voice of America last week that the planes would be “ready to fly by the end of the summer,” adding, “There’s no reason to doubt that.”

The deployment of the first F-16s caps more than two years of intense lobbying by Ukraine to acquire the American-made jets, which represent a significant upgrade over the Soviet-era aircraft that the Ukrainian Air Force has been using.

Initially, the Biden administration resisted the request for the F-16s over fears of escalating the conflict. But it reversed its stance about a year ago, allowing Western allies to transfer the jets to Ukraine. Since then, Western countries have pledged about 80 jets to Kyiv, though the vast majority of them will arrive over the coming years.

“We often heard the words that this is impossible,” Mr. Zelensky said on Sunday. “But we have made possible what was our ambition, our defense need.”

“Now it is a reality,” he said of the jets’ arrival. “Reality is in our skies.”

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

At least four people were dead and 23 others were missing on Sunday, a day after a flash flood and landslide struck the city of Kangding in a mountainous part of Sichuan Province in southwestern China. It was the latest in a recent series of deadly events in China involving extreme weather.

State media reported early Sunday morning that at least 939 people had been relocated from the area because of the flooding. The majority of people in the region are Tibetans.

Among the missing were some people who had been on an expressway bridge near the city, between two mountain tunnels. The bridge collapsed amid heavy rain early Saturday, and three vehicles and five people were still unaccounted for as of Sunday.

A torrent of mud and water rushed into the area with force from a high elevation, according to state media. A photograph released by the official Xinhua news agency showed mud and broken pieces of roadway cascading down a steep slope where a vehicle lay on its side.

The Ministry of Emergency Management sent officials to the area to oversee a rescue effort that involved more than 1,400 people, 215 vehicles, search and rescue dogs and a helicopter.

Extreme weather has hit several parts of the country in recent weeks, taking a toll on lives and property.

At least 30 people were killed late last month when heavy rain from Typhoon Gaemi lashed Hunan Province in southern China, causing widespread flooding. According to state media, 35 people remained missing as of Thursday. Close to 100,000 people had to evacuate. By the weekend, power, transportation and communication had largely been restored to eight villages that had been cut off by flash floods and landslides.

About two weeks ago, 38 people died when part of a highway bridge collapsed during a period of heavy rain in western China. As of Friday, 24 people remained missing, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

In June, at least 47 people died as a result of flooding and landslides in southern China’s Guangdong Province. More than 100,000 people were evacuated after the city of Meizhou experienced “once-in-a-century” rainfall, according to state media.

Adding to the suffering, July was the hottest month recorded in China since the country began collecting data in 1961. Higher than average temperatures were reported in every province in China.

The Chinese government has allocated more than $1.6 billion in disaster relief funds to local governments so far this year.

The landslide on Saturday severed two of the area’s main transportation routes during the summer tourist season. Feng Fagui, a local official, said that a working group had been set up to serve tourists and truck drivers in the area who were stranded by the road closings.