Iran has sent short-range ballistic missiles to Russia, according to U.S. and European officials, despite sharp warnings from Washington and its allies not to provide those armaments to Moscow to use against targets in Ukraine.

The new missiles are expected to help Russia further its efforts to destroy Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, which President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said this week now involved 4,000 bombs a month across the country.

The U.S. and European officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, confirmed that after months of warnings about sanctions, Iran has shipped several hundred short-range ballistic missiles to Russia. The delivery was reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Iran denied providing the weapons in a statement released Friday by its permanent mission to the United Nations, saying its position on the war was unchanged.

“Iran considers the provision of military assistance to the parties engaged in the conflict — which leads to increased human casualties, destruction of infrastructure, and a distancing from cease-fire negotiations — to be inhumane,” the statement said. “Thus, not only does Iran abstain from engaging in such actions itself, but it also calls upon other countries to cease the supply of weapons to the sides involved in the conflict.”

The Group of 7 nations warned in March that they would impose coordinated sanctions on Iran if it carried out the missile transfer, a warning repeated at a NATO summit meeting in Washington in July.

In a statement on Saturday, Sean Savett, a spokesman for the National Security Council, declined to confirm the missile transfers explicitly but hinted at growing cooperation between Tehran and Moscow.

“We have been warning of the deepening security partnership between Russia and Iran since the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and are alarmed by these reports,” he said. He said the United States and its key allies had made clear previously that they “are prepared to deliver significant consequences.”

“Any transfer of Iranian ballistic missiles to Russia would represent a dramatic escalation in Iran’s support for Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and lead to the killing of more Ukrainian civilians,” he added. “This partnership threatens European security and illustrates how Iran’s destabilizing influence reaches beyond the Middle East and around the world.”

But despite the threats, and bitter relations between Washington and Tehran, President Biden has many reasons for restraint.

One is that the Biden administration has been conducting elaborate diplomacy with Iran for months, seeking to prevent the war in Gaza from escalating into a regional conflict. Through intermediaries, Biden officials have urged Iran not to launch military strikes on Israel or to order a major attack by its ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah.

With the American presidential campaign in full swing and President Biden a lame duck, a senior European official said, it was not clear how strong Washington’s response would be.

Mr. Biden has refused Mr. Zelensky’s repeated requests to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of longer-range missiles to attack airfields deep inside Russia. From those sites, Russia can attack Ukraine with heavy bombs equipped with fins to glide and GPS packs. Ukraine currently does not have missiles with enough range to reach those airfields.

Mr. Zelensky on Friday went to the Ukraine Contact Group meeting in Ramstein, Germany, to ask for the restrictions to be lifted, and later in the evening, he repeated his plea at a major conference on Europe in Cernobbio, Italy. In those remarks, he pleaded for “air defenses to defend ourselves.” He said Ukraine would not use any missiles provided by allies against civilian targets.

“We want to use them just on military airfields,” he said.

“People are afraid we will attack the Kremlin,” he added. “It’s a pity we can’t.” But even the missiles he has requested could never reach that far, he said.

The supply of Iranian missiles to Moscow could prompt Mr. Biden to approve longer-range missiles to Ukraine, the officials suggested on Saturday. But the European official noted that Mr. Biden has been wary of pushing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia too far, fearing an escalation of the war and a direct conflict with NATO.

“I think the real question is why Iran made this belated decision to transfer the missiles, given clear signals from Europe about increased sanctions that will inevitably result,” said Andrew S. Weiss, a Russia expert and former senior U.S. official now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Mr. Weiss said that Iran has been especially concerned about the potential for punitive action by Europe — which does not already have as many sanctions on Tehran as does the United States — over any missile transfers to Russia.

There is also concern among Western officials not to corner Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who is thought to be something of a moderate in the country’s ruling establishment.

Elected in July, Mr. Pezeshkian has said he hopes to improve the domestic economy by securing sanctions relief from Europe and the United States. Western officials also hope that he will help efforts to restrain Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.

Farnaz Fassihi and Erika Solomon contributed reporting.

The Israeli military said on Saturday that it had struck two school compounds in northern Gaza that Hamas was using as a military base, while the family of a young Turkish American woman released an angry statement blaming Israel for her killing in a West Bank protest on Friday.

According to Gazan rescue services, an overnight Israeli strike on the Halimah al-Saadiyah school in the town of Jabaliya killed four people who had been sheltering in tents that displaced Palestinians have set up around the facility. A second strike on Saturday hit the Amr Ibn al-As school in Gaza City, which medics said had killed three people and wounded 20 more.

Israel’s military said in statements for each attack that it had carried out a “precise strike” targeting Hamas militants who were using the former school compounds as a base, but did not add whether anyone had been killed. In both statements, the military said that “numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians,” and blamed Hamas fighters for intermingling with Gaza’s civilian population.

Schools closed down in Gaza after Israel’s invasion, but many have been turned into makeshift shelters that now house tens of thousands trying to flee Israeli bombardment. Despite the risks, Gazans continue to crowd into the buildings, which provide toilets and running water that are in short supply elsewhere in the enclave.

The deaths from the latest strikes add to the more than 40,000 Palestinians who have been killed in 11 months of war, according to the Gazan health authorities. Their figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

U.N. officials and aid groups have said that no place in Gaza was truly safe for its nearly two million civilians, a vast majority of them having been displaced by the fighting,

Over recent months, Israel has ordered round after round of civilian evacuations and has repeatedly shrunk the size of the enclave’s designated “humanitarian zone” in central Gaza. The action has forced an increasing number of Palestinians to squeeze into ever tighter areas, or to seek shelter around places they hope to be somewhat safer, such as hospitals and schools.

The Israeli military is also investigating the killing of the Turkish American woman, 26-year-old Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, on Friday. Her family released a statement Saturday blaming her death on Israeli soldiers and calling for an independent investigation.

“Her presence in our lives was taken needlessly, unlawfully and violently by the Israeli military,” the family said. “A U.S. citizen, Aysenur was peacefully standing for justice when she was killed by a bullet that video shows came from an Israeli military shooter.”

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has called Ms. Eygi’s death “a tragic loss,” adding that “the most important thing to do is to gather the facts.”

Even as northern Gaza continues to face bombardment, Israel and Hamas have largely stood by their pledge to pause hostilities in areas where health care workers are conducting a polio vaccine campaign for children. Gaza’s Ministry of Health says that the vaccination drive that is taking place in the southern part of the enclave is now in its “final days,” and will then move to the north of the enclave.

The vaccine campaign reached around 350,000 children in Gaza as of Friday, which is about half of the children the drive aims to inoculate, according to the United Nation’s Children Agency, UNICEF.

Yet even as the effort to halt the spread of the disease appears to be succeeding, critics have argued that it does little to protect Gaza’s children from the deadly conditions civilians face daily in the enclave, which has been under bombardment since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.

In the southern city of Khan Younis, Palestinian news media outlets reported that a baby, Yaqeen al-Astal, had died of malnutrition. It added that the child was the 37th to die of hunger in Gaza since Israel imposed a stricter siege on the enclave in response to the Oct. 7 attacks. Although Gaza had already been under an Israeli blockade before the war, its current restrictions are so tight that even the entry of humanitarian aid has been severely limited. Officials from the Gaza Health Ministry were unable to immediately confirm reports of the child’s death from malnutrition.

Earlier this week, Victor Aguayo, the development director of UNICEF, said the agency had estimated that more than 50,000 children in Gaza were suffering from malnutrition. “There is no doubt in my mind that the risk of famine and a large-scale, severe nutrition crisis in Gaza is real,” he said.

Tony Blair is out with a new book, “On Leadership,” which he says offers all the tips he wished he’d been told when he entered 10 Downing Street in 1997.

Given the timing, one can’t help but think of it as a user’s guide for Keir Starmer, the first Labour leader to win a British general election since he did.

Mr. Blair said the book is “absolutely not” aimed at Mr. Starmer, whom he insisted he is “really not” advising, though the two did appear onstage together last year, as Mr. Starmer was gearing up for a campaign. In this global year of elections, Mr. Blair is offering lessons to any rookie leader who will listen — about geopolitical upheaval, surging populism and how to deal with a politically unstable United States.

“I think you’d have to say American politics in some ways has become bitterly divided and at a certain level, dysfunctional,” Mr. Blair said in an interview. “But it’s happened at the same time as America itself has re-emerged as, in my view, easily the strongest country in the world.”

Affable, expansive and only fleetingly defensive, Mr. Blair, now 71, offered a reminder of why, 17 years after he left Downing Street, he remains an enduring presence but also something of a riddle.

He spoke proudly of his government’s achievements in overhauling education and strengthening Britain’s public health service. Yet in his lucrative post-government career, which has included advisory roles for banks, Middle East diplomacy and his own consulting business, he has drawn criticism for mixing too readily with autocrats and billionaires. He defended engaging with Saudi Arabia and extolled the transformative potential of A.I. in government — only to become reticent on the subject of Elon Musk, whose inventions he celebrates.

Mr. Blair’s nonprofit organization, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, works with Mr. Musk’s satellite network, Starlink, which may explain why he deflected questions about Mr. Musk’s emergence as a political influencer and purveyor of conspiracy theories through his social media platform, X.

“I don’t get into the politics of the people,” Mr. Blair said of Mr. Musk, whom he credited with pioneering two industries: electric vehicles and commercial space travel. “It’s their inventions I’m interested in, not their politics.”

For Mr. Blair, the return of a Labour government marks another step in his own political rehabilitation. Although he is still reviled by many in Britain for his decision to join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq — Queen Elizabeth II’s conferral of a knighthood on him in 2022 drew angry protests — Mr. Blair has cultivated ties with Mr. Starmer and quietly assumed the status of an elder statesman.

Within the Labour Party, Mr. Blair is credited with being a masterful communicator — a talent that seems even more striking in comparison with Mr. Starmer, who is by all accounts a less charismatic figure. After Mr. Starmer’s drumbeat of warnings that the economic legacy left by his Conservative predecessors will mean hard choices, some critics yearn for a bit of Mr. Blair’s bounce.

In his book, Mr. Blair emphasized the need for leaders to project optimism. “No one wants to get on a plane with a depressed pilot,” he wrote. But he was careful not to apply that to Mr. Starmer, whom he said had inherited a far worse economy than he did. Mr. Starmer also came into office after the upheaval of Brexit.

“He’s our sixth prime minister in eight years,” Mr. Blair said, raising his eyebrows. “This is Britain. When I left office, I’d been the third prime minister in almost 30 years.”

Having emphasized the scale of the challenge, Mr. Blair said he expected that Mr. Starmer would be “balancing that out” in coming speeches with more upbeat plans to recharge the economy and improve life in Britain.

In the sleek Fitzrovia offices of Mr. Blair’s institute, there are relics of his time as prime minister, as well as of his diplomacy afterward: A photograph of him posing with Irish leaders after they sealed the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, ending decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. A signed photo of him with John Kerry, in which Mr. Kerry, a former secretary of state, thanked him for his work as a special envoy for Middle East peace.

These days, Mr. Blair said he was fully occupied by his institute, which works with governments in 40 countries. Some of those clients are autocrats, for which Mr. Blair makes no apology. He defended his dealings with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, for example, despite evidence that he was responsible for the killing of the dissident journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

“I don’t think any of us who believe we should engage with Saudi Arabia has ever dialed back our disapproval of that,” Mr. Blair said. “But I do think that what is happening in Saudi Arabia is a social revolution which has immense and positive implications for our security, and for the Middle East.”

Mr. Blair pointed to American efforts to broker a three-way deal between Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States as proof of the upside of such engagement, although the war in Gaza has raised hurdles to that negotiation.

On the most contentious issue of his premiership, the Iraq War and the futile search for weapons of mass destruction, Mr. Blair has little new to say. “I’ve dealt with it so many times,” he said, citing his 2010 memoir and multiple public inquiries. “I’ve come to the conclusion, you’re not going to convince anyone who’s not convinced.”

To the extent that Iraq figures in Mr. Blair’s thinking, it is as a lesson for how leaders should tend to their legacies so they are not defined by a single issue. “I didn’t do enough, frankly,” he said, adding, “It’s ultimately going to be determined in years to come by people you’ve never met.”

For Mr. Blair, perhaps the thorniest diplomatic dilemma today is navigating between China, with which many countries have trade ties, and the United States, on which many rely for security. This is becoming almost a binary choice, he said. Under pressure from the United States, for example, Britain banned the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from its high-speed wireless network.

“If you’re a developing country that’s already got a strong relationship with Huawei, you’ve got to think, ‘How do I manage that?’” Mr. Blair said. If a leader decides to defy Washington and align with Beijing, he said, “Then there’s certain companies that won’t be doing business in your country.”

As for the United States, Mr. Blair proclaimed himself an optimist, despite the upheaval of the last several years. He steered clear of questions about the presidential election, instead noting that America was the world’s leading military power, largest exporter of oil and gas and No. 1 technology innovator.

“My view,” Mr. Blair said, “is that America will go through this period and return to functionality, and the question is, how it does that.”

Still, he concluded, the radical swings in American politics provided an argument for preserving Britain’s constitutional monarchy. The queen and now King Charles III, he said, have acted as a stabilizing force against the gyrations of post-Brexit Britain — an anchor that does not exist in its former colonies.

“If you guys change your mind,” Mr. Blair said with a twinkle, “we’ll let you back.”

In the Pacific island nation of Papua New Guinea, hundreds of people may soon have to abandon their homes, pushed inland by the rising sea. Hundreds more were buried in a devastating landslide this year. Around the country, intensive logging is shrinking the island’s lush rainforests, and mine tailings have polluted its rivers.

On Friday, Pope Francis, who has long begged the world to preserve nature, started his visit to a place that is a stark example of how human action can harm the environment. Locals hoped his presence would make a difference.

“Your holiness, climate change is real,” Bob Dadae, the governor general of Papua New Guinea, told Francis at a meeting on Saturday. “The rise in the sea level is affecting the livelihoods of our people,” he added, asking for the pope’s support for “global action and advocacy.”

Francis did not immediately speak of climate change, but at the meeting in Port Moresby at APEC Haus, a conference center, he said that the country’s environmental “treasures” should be developed in a sustainable way, and for the benefit of all people, not just a few.

When Francis landed in Port Moresby, the nation’s capital, on Friday evening, thousands stood along the road from the airport to welcome him. Some had walked for days from inland mountainous areas for a glimpse of the pope. He arrived after four days in Indonesia, part of an 11-day, four-nation trip to the region.

The pope addressed the issue of climate change on Thursday during a meeting in Jakarta, one of the world’s most polluted cities and among those most at risk from climate change. He said that the climate crisis “has become an obstacle to the growth and the cohabitation of people.”

Cardinal Michael Czerny, in charge of a Vatican department responsible for promoting human development, said that the pope’s trip to the Asia Pacific region underlined the urgency of caring for the environment. “It’s shouting out that we have to take our human and environmental responsibilities seriously,” he said.

Papua New Guinea, which includes the eastern side of the island of New Guinea and hundreds of smaller islands, is rich in mineral deposits like copper, gold and oil, as well as timber, resources that for decades have been extracted and exported by foreign companies.

Its government has faced criticism that many of these activities degrade the environment, and that profits have not trickled down to the population, which still largely lives in poverty. Pope Francis emphasized this point on Saturday.

“It is only right that the needs of local people are given due consideration when distributing the proceeds,” the pope said, adding that the living conditions of workers should also be improved.

Mining and logging are not the only threat to Papua New Guinea. It is among the places in the world most vulnerable to climate change, according to the World Bank.

In the country’s interior highlands, the El Niño weather phenomenon has brought more intense drought and floods. Its coastal regions and islands are exposed to inundation from rising sea levels.

Much of the country lacks modern development, making residents particularly vulnerable to natural hazards. Pope Francis’ visit comes after a devastating landslide there last May. Earthquakes and volcanic activity are also frequent.

Emmanuel Peni said that in March he lost his house in the village of Korogu, in the province of East Sepik, because its structure had been so weakened by flooding that when an earthquake came, “it just fell into the water.”

“The world is changing,” he said. “And we are feeling it.”

Mr. Peni has been fighting a plan for a large copper and gold mine in the area, whose tailings, Indigenous people fear, would harm the Sepik River and their livelihoods. On the river’s delta, three villages have already had to move repeatedly because of rising sea levels, Mr. Peni said.

Over two decades ago, two of the country’s largest rivers, the Ok Tedi River and the Fly River, in the Western province on the border with Indonesia, were severely polluted with waste from a copper and gold mine largely owned by the Australian mining conglomerate BHP.

As he waited for Pope Francis at the Port Moresby airport on Friday, Bishop Rozario Menezes of Lae said that rising sea levels threatened many of his parishioners, and that on the island of Mandok it had become necessary to build sea walls.

“All our island communities are very worried,” he said.

In 2015, Pope Francis wrote “Laudato Si,” the first papal encyclical solely focused on the environment, which aimed to reframe care of nature as a moral and spiritual imperative. Since then, he has repeatedly urged world leaders to try to stave off the most dangerous effects of global warming.

John Rosso, Papua New Guinea’s deputy prime minister, said he hoped the pope would address climate change while visiting.

“It would make a strong message, especially for first world countries,” Mr. Rosso said as he waited to greet Francis at the airport. “We bear the brunt of their emissions.”

As Ukrainian troops began to push the Russians back from the outskirts of the city of Kharkiv in May 2022, Gamlet Zinkivskyi, a street artist who knows how to shoot as well as paint, was eager to fight for his hometown.

So Mr. Zinkivskyi, who had frequented firing ranges before the war, joined a volunteer unit defending the city, in Ukraine’s east. But the battalion’s leader had other plans for his skills.

“Gamlet, just pick up your paintbrush, and go paint in the street,” Vsevolod Kozhemiako, the commander of the volunteer Khartiia battalion, recalled telling him. “Because the power of his art is much stronger than him taking a machine gun and assaulting or defending trenches. His art could empower the people defending the city.”

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On an Indonesian island about 500 miles east of Bali, an open-air truck traversed up winding roads one recent Sunday. It was taking dozens of jovial men, some already in white robes, and their songbooks and guitars to the church on top of the hill.

The men are training to become Catholic priests. While probably only a fraction of them will go on to be ordained, Indonesia — the world’s largest Muslim-majority country — is producing so many priests now that many of them head overseas to serve the faithful.

For centuries, this traffic flowed in the opposite direction, with Catholic missionaries from Europe heading to the islands of Indonesia.

The Roman Catholic Church knows how significant Indonesia and many countries in the Global South are to its future. Two years ago, Pope Francis declared that to find vocations “we will go to some island of Indonesia.” He did not specify the destination, but he almost certainly meant the island of Flores, where 70 percent of the roughly two million residents are Catholic.

This is where, on a remote hilltop called Ledalero, the St. Paul Major Seminary was established in 1937. This year, it expects to ordain nearly 50 priests of the Society of the Divine Word, a Catholic order that focuses on missionary work. Over the years, it has sent more than 500 of its graduates to different parts of the world, including the United States, Australia and Latin America.

Pope Francis landed in Jakarta, the capital, on Tuesday as part of his Asia-Pacific tour, but he did not travel to Flores because of his frail health. Part of his agenda was to promote interfaith dialogue in Indonesia, where Muslim-Christian harmony is under strain.

First-year seminarians in the four-year track started arriving last month. One of them was Inocentius Besu, 20, who was wearing a Los Angeles Lakers cap backward and cheering on his peers as they played soccer.

The scar on his nose, from being bashed by a barbell, was proof of a naughty childhood, he said. Yet growing up, he hung out with many priests and eventually felt a yearning to become one himself. But to do so he had to leave the woman he had been dating.

“I told her I am very busy with our programs in the seminary,” said Mr. Besu, adding that he eventually “ghosted” her.

The freshmen get their own bedroom in dormitories in or near the campus, which is surrounded by a forest and was rebuilt after a large earthquake in 1992 destroyed many of the buildings. Some said life here wasn’t as stifling as it was at their minor seminary, where they had to give up their cellphones for at least two years.

Those who enroll in Ledalero come with two years’ experience as novices and are still under probation for admission into priesthood. They study philosophy for four years, followed by theology for two years, and serve about one to two years of pastoral duty before they are ordained. At any point, they can drop out and obtain a bachelor’s degree from the Ledalero Catholic School of Philosophy, which is considered by many in Flores to be prestigious. Laypeople enroll in the school, too.

Conradus Sola Lele Madja, 35, has found community while studying at St. Paul’s. At his previous seminary in Chile, he was one of only two men. At Ledalero, he has found friends to play sports with, confide in and pray alongside.

Catholicism first arrived in Flores in the 16th century, when the Portuguese, in search of spices, sailed east, bringing traders and missionaries. Roughly 200 years later, the Dutch colonized large parts of the archipelago, which came to be known as the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch were Protestants and forbade Catholicism, but adopted a hands-off policy in places like Flores because of its distance from the main island of Java.

The Society of the Divine Word, an order founded by a German priest in the Netherlands, arrived in 1912 with missionaries. The head of the congregation and its representative in the Vatican is a Flores native and a graduate of Ledalero, Father Paulus Budi Kleden.

The island is dotted with Catholic iconography — including a gold statue of Jesus on a white pedestal and a 92-foot-high monument of Mary. Schoolchildren walk around with rosaries around their necks.

Flores is also one of Indonesia’s poorest provinces. But poverty is not the sole reason driving men to the priesthood, said Father Yosef Keladu, the head of the seminary, explaining that Catholicism is part of the fabric here. Parish priests are feted and services are packed. Lay Catholics teach catechism, volunteer in the choir or help the sick. There is immense pride in the family if a son becomes a priest.

Yoseph Liliweri, 27, who is going to Bangladesh, said his parents were supportive but surprised when he told them he was joining the seminary.

“All they knew was that I was praying the Novena to get a scholarship to go to medical school,” he says, “and then suddenly I told them I wanted to be a priest.”

The priests from Ledalero bring with them a sense of mission to fight injustice and a broad understanding of religious tolerance. This includes discussing a sinister period in Indonesian history: the state-sponsored slaughter in the 1960s of an estimated half million people or more under the guise of a Communist purge.

The Ledalero Catholic School of Philosophy has also organized seminars on L.G.B.T.Q. issues, inviting several transgender people to speak, and shares Pope Francis’ view that gay people should not be judged, according to Johanes Manehitu, the head of the rectorate office.

Aurelio Morghan, 32, is one of the 48 seminarians at Ledalero scheduled to be ordained in October. He has at least 16 relatives who are priests or nuns.

Part of his induction process involved living in an Islamic boarding school and teaching the students about the Quran as part of interfaith training. At one point, he said, he wanted to leave the seminary after meeting a woman he thought he could marry. Mr. Morghan is learning Spanish as he prepares for his first assignment in Paraguay. He also helps with parish work in Flores, spending the rest of his time on Catholic hip-hop and taking care of his seven dogs.

On a recent Sunday evening, the aspiring priests got together on a dusty field on campus for two hours of soccer. Curious onlookers, including a group of nuns, paused to watch, cheering the teams on. The loudest cries of support were for Team Mikhel, the first-year seminarians.

As he watched his new friends play, Mr. Besu said: “I wish there will be more young people out there who would want to join the seminary because, in here, they can feel happy.” He added: “I realize that the world really needs priests now.”

As the evening light faded, the men wrapped up their practice session. They were dirty, happy and sweaty. They passed a group of their friends playing volleyball with the staff, who were on their break. It was time to go back, back to their lives of prayer and study.

Caroline Darian and her two brothers were frantically moving their mother out of the family house that had effectively become a crime scene when she was interrupted by a call from the police saying they had something to tell her in person. It could not wait.

She was already shattered by the news that the father she always believed was loving and supportive had been arrested on suspicion that he drugged and raped her mother, and that he allegedly brought other men to join him in violating her for almost 10 years.

What, she wondered that day in November 2020, could there be left to learn?

What came next was a new shock, Ms. Darian testified on Friday in her father’s trial. Besides the thousands of photos and videos the police said her father kept of her unconscious mother being abused, the officers had discovered two photos of another woman asleep in bed, with the covers off and the lights on. It took Ms. Darian, who goes by a pen name she created after the accusations, a while to register that the woman was her.

“I realized right away I was drugged in that photo,” Ms. Darian, 45, testified before the criminal court in Avignon, France.

The question that still haunts her: “To do what?”

Prosecutors have not charged her father with drugging or sexually abusing her, which she suspects he did and which his lawyer says he denies. But he is accused of violating her privacy by “taking, recording or transmitting” a sexual image of her without her knowledge.

While it is clear that the undisputed victim at the center of this devastating family drama is Ms. Darian’s mother, Gisèle Pelicot, the entire family remains badly wounded and dogged by questions that perhaps will never be answered.

Some 51 men went on trial this week in Avignon, most of them accused of raping Ms. Pelicot while she was drugged. Her husband, Dominique Pelicot, has admitted to mixing sleeping pills in her food and drink for almost a decade and bringing dozens of men he met online into their bedroom to join him in raping her.

Three family members testified on Friday: Ms. Darian, her sister-in-law and her former sister-in-law.

Until the revelations by the police, the family members say, they all believed that Mr. and Ms. Pelicot, who had been together for about 50 years, had a strong, loving marriage. The couple’s three children loved them so much, they often lived with them as adults, vacationed with them and brought their children down to their home in southern France for long summer vacations.

“It was a bit the ideal family,” said Aurore, Mr. Pelicot’s former daughter-in-law, who was married to his younger son and asked that her last name not be used.

Céline Pelicot, who is married to Mr. Pelicot’s older son and has three children with him, described Mr. Pelicot as caring with the children. And although she said he had grown more ill-tempered in recent years, she had never heard even a foul word about women emerge from his mouth.

“I loved him,” she said of the elder Mr. Pelicot, who is now in jail. “I spent magnificent times with him.”

Now, she said, the family is left to wonder about what was really happening when they were together. “We are all asking our children, whom we left with their grandparents, things we normally don’t ask them — what did he do to you?” she said.

Mr. Pelicot is also charged with violating the privacy of both Aurore and Céline on suspicion of taking sexual photos of them without their permission. Some of the photos were taken from inside bathrooms, where the women were naked. Both women testified that they felt degraded.

Céline worried that he might have disseminated the photos and said she now rarely slept more than two or three hours a night and had been losing her hair.

Aurore told the court that she once thought she heard Mr. Pelicot say something to her nephew about the child’s apparent refusal to play doctor with him. But she didn’t tell anyone, for fear she had imagined it. She was the victim of abuse in her family, she said, which made her worry she was prone to seeing abuse everywhere.

“Obviously, I ask myself now, if I had said something,” she added, after a long pause to compose herself. “We all carry a kind of guilt about what we could have done, and this is mine.”

They have all struggled in their own ways to make sense of it all and to rebuild their lives. Ms. Darian tried to turn her family trauma into action, forming a nonprofit association, Don’t Put Me to Sleep, to publicize the dangers of drug-facilitated crimes.

She also wrote a book called “And I Stopped Calling You Papa,” detailing the emotional fallout of the day in November 2020 when the police told her mother, and then her, what they had discovered. She now often refers to him as her “genitor.”

She lives with the conviction that her father drugged her, no matter what he says, she testified. And she worries what else he did when she was in that state.

“What can you do for a person like me to heal?” she asked in court. “To have a normal life of a woman, a normal sex life.”

Calling her father the “greatest sexual predator of the last 20 years,” she asked, “How do you rebuild from the ashes?