Mexico’s states swiftly moved to remake the country’s entire judicial system on Thursday, approving an amendment to the Constitution that would be the most far-reaching judicial overhaul ever attempted by a large democracy.

The measure, which would replace the current, appointment-based system with one in which voters elect judges, would put Mexico onto an untested course whose consequences for the courts and the country are nearly impossible to predict.

Proponents of the plan argue it would reduce corruption and give voters a greater role in a justice system widely regarded as broken. Critics of the overhaul accuse the Mexican government, which proposed and pushed for the changes, of endangering the rule of law by politicizing the courts, giving Mexico’s ruling party greater control over judges and eroding the country’s checks and balances.

The overhaul could see thousands of judges removed from their jobs, from those in local courtrooms to the chief justice of the Supreme Court. And it would drastically restructure a major branch of government responsible for meting out justice across the third-most populous country in the Americas.

The logistics alone are daunting: The country would need to implement new elections for thousands of judges, starting next year.

Mexico’s Senate passed the amendment on Wednesday. And by Thursday morning, a majority of state legislatures had approved the amendment, ensuring that it would reach the desk of the outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He has long championed the measure, which has for weeks brought thousands of people into the streets, both in opposition and support, and drawn warnings from the U.S. and Canadian ambassadors and legal experts.

Once the amendment was approved by a majority of the 32 state legislatures on Thursday (20 have so far approved), Mr. López Obrador said he would publish it on Sunday, the eve of Mexico’s Independence Day. By publishing it in the government’s official gazette, the president makes the amendment law.

“It is a very important reform,” Mr. López Obrador said at a news conference on Thursday. “It’s reaffirming that in Mexico there is an authentic democracy where the people elect their representatives. The people elect public servants from the three branches of government. That’s democracy — not the elites, the so-called political class, not the oligarchy. Everyone. Every citizen.”

The amendment, which would not immediately take effect, would reshuffle the courts at every level.

In June 2025, voters would elect all the members of the Supreme Court, the members of an oversight tribunal and about half of Mexico’s total of 7,000 judges. The remainder would be chosen in an election in 2027.

For weeks, a range of groups including more than 50,000 judges and court workers have staged protests and strikes in opposition to the plan.

This week, some protesters stormed into the Senate, calling on lawmakers to block the overhaul and forcing them to temporarily suspend debate on the amendment. The police eventually dispersed the demonstrations with fire extinguishers, and the Senate resumed in a vitriolic session, with lawmakers calling each other “liars” and “traitors.”

The amendment had passed easily through the lower house of Congress, in which the president’s party, Morena, holds a supermajority.

In the months ahead, after Mr. López Obrador makes the measure law, the Senate will issue a call for candidates and Mexico’s electoral agency will begin to organize judicial elections.

Other countries have voters elect judges to some degree, including Switzerland and the United States, but Mexico’s plan is so sweeping in its scope that it has drawn warnings.

“Democracies can’t function without a strong, independent and noncorrupt judicial branch,” the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, told reporters last month. “Any judicial reform needs to have safeguards that the judicial branch is strengthened, and not the subject to political conditions.”

Mr. Salazar added that the overhaul could pose a “risk” to Mexico’s democracy, and could “help cartels and other bad actors take advantage of inexperienced judges with political motivations.”

Mr. López Obrador said relations with the U.S. Embassy were put “on pause” after the ambassador’s remarks.

Many Mexicans have expressed support for the measure, saying it would give them leverage in a court system that few trust.

According to government surveys, 66 percent of Mexicans perceive judges to be corrupt, and analysts say nepotism remains rife. A recent diagnosis found that about 37 percent of judicial officials have at least one family member working in the judiciary.

The plan would also sever the judiciary and its oversight body, the Federal Judicial Council.

As of now, the head of that council — which, among other duties, appoints federal judges and also disciplines them — is the chief justice of the Supreme Court. A recent investigation found that, over two decades, the council imposed sanctions on about 400 of the 1,500 federal judges and magistrates it oversees, who had been accused of everything from sexual harassment to hiring family members. Only 30 people were fired.

“You can’t be judge and jury,” said Layla Manilla, a politics student who supports the overhaul. “This would imply better surveillance regarding cases of corruption, nepotism and negligence.”

But the overhaul would not affect other parts of the legal system that are also widely regarded as flawed and corrupt, such as state prosecutors’ offices and the local police. Less than 4 percent of criminal investigations are ever solved in Mexico, studies show.

Critics of the plan say it would eliminate long lists of requirements to become a judge, especially at the federal level, opening the way for people who have a law degree and a few years of legal experience to run.

“It undoubtedly affects judicial independence and is seriously against the legal profession,” said Víctor Oléa, the president of Mexico’s national bar association, who called the amendment “an erosion of the separation of powers.”

Simply holding the new slate of elections could be an expensive and significant challenge, experts say.

“Judicial geography is not the same as electoral geography; ballots never have so many names,” said Carla Humphrey, a member of the National Electoral Institute’s governing council.

Some from both sides say the debate has at least raised the justice system — often regarded as a distant force — as a topic of discussion for many Mexicans.

“Justice is being talked about in this country,” said Juan Jesús Garza Onofre, a constitutional law researcher. “That’s a very important and good thing.”

And these conversations, in the view of some experts, give the country the chance to at least ask the right questions.

“How do we get better referees of democracy? How do we get them to be more independent? How do we make them more solid? How do we get them to resolve conflicts sooner?” said Javier Martín Reyes, a law professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

President Biden appears on the verge of clearing the way for Ukraine to launch long-range Western weapons deep inside Russian territory, as long as it doesn’t use arms provided by the United States, European officials say.

The issue, which has long been debated in the administration, is coming to a head on Friday with the first official visit to the White House by Britain’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer.

Britain has already signaled to the United States that it is eager to let Ukraine use its “Storm Shadow” long-range missiles to strike at Russian military targets far from the Ukrainian border. But it wants explicit permission from Mr. Biden in order to demonstrate a coordinated strategy with the United States and France, which makes a similar missile. American officials say Mr. Biden has not made a decision, but will hear from Mr. Starmer on Friday.

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Condemnation mounted on Thursday of a deadly Israeli strike on a school turned shelter in central Gaza, but Israel said that the compound, crowded with people driven from their homes, had become a command center for militant fighters.

The site, Al-Jaouni School, had been home to around 12,000 displaced people from the Gaza Strip, mainly women and children, according to the United Nations agency that operated the school. Israel has struck the compound five separate times since the war began last October, the agency said.

The Palestinian authorities said the Israeli strike on Wednesday killed 18 Gazans, including women and children, and injured a similar number. The primary U.N. relief agency for Palestinians, known as UNRWA, said six of its employees, including the shelter’s manager, were among the dead — the most UNRWA employees to die in a single strike in a war that has killed more than 200 of them.

Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, on Thursday added his voice to the criticism from the United Nations and others, calling the deaths of the U.N. workers “appalling” and reiterating calls for a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. The government of Qatar, a key mediator in talks over a cease-fire, called the strike a “horrifying massacre.”

The Israeli military defended the strike, which it said killed nine members of Hamas’s military wing. It said the compound in Nuseirat was being used as a Hamas “command and control center,” a claim it has made repeatedly to justify increasingly frequent strikes on schools serving as shelters.

Israel issued a list of nine names of people it said were Hamas militants who had been killed in the attack, including three who it said were employees of UNRWA.

Addressing the claim that some of the U.N. workers killed were also Hamas fighters, Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, said, “We are not in a position to confirm it, deny it,” so an independent investigation is called for.

As for whether Hamas used the school compound as an operations center, Mr. Dujarric told reporters at a news briefing, “if people were visibly misusing it, we would know,” and that there had been no such obvious signs.

U.N. officials, without naming Hamas, said it would violate international law for an armed combatant group to embed itself among civilians, using them to “shield a military objective from attack,” as Hamas routinely does. But they criticized Israel more directly, saying that 16 times in August alone the Israeli military had attacked a school compound, many of which now serve as shelters for those who have fled their homes during the war.

The bombing in Nuseirat “emphasizes the Israeli military’s systematic failure to comply with international humanitarian law,” the Palestine office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a statement.

During more than 11 months of war, Israel has said it has targeted and killed thousands of Hamas militants. But the relentless bombardment and ground operations have come at a cost in civilian lives and physical destruction that even many of Israel’s allies have condemned. More than 40,000 people in Gaza have been killed, according to the health ministry there, which does not differentiate between combatants and civilians.

“The pattern of attacks,” the U.N. human rights office said, “suggests a complete disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians and raises grave concerns about the systematic commission of disproportionate attacks or attacks directed at civilians, which are war crimes.”

Israel says its strikes “are conducted in accordance with international law” and that Hamas has exploited schools, hospitals and shelters, using them as bases and civilians as human shields. With nearly each strike on a school or hospital compound, it has said that it took steps to reduce the chance of harming civilians.

Israel’s increasing strikes on school grounds appear to reflect a shift in its efforts to root out Hamas in Gaza. Some military analysts say that as Israel has destroyed Hamas fighting units and part of the group’s network of tunnels, it has forced more fighters above ground.

With the first anniversary of the war just weeks away, the military announced Thursday that a top Israeli intelligence commander, Brig. Gen. Yossi Sariel, had announced his resignation. General Sariel led Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, which was long seen as a pillar of a vaunted Israeli intelligence apparatus.

But he drew criticism after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack caught Israel by surprise, because his unit had stopped monitoring Palestinian radio traffic that might have given away the plan. In April, Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, the head of military intelligence, resigned saying he wanted to “take responsibility.”

In January, Israel accused a dozen United Nations workers of participating in the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel or its aftermath, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and 250 taken hostage.

The United Nations fired 10 of the 12 employees Israel had accused. An internal U.N. investigation later found that Israel had not provided evidence to back up its separate allegation that many UNRWA workers had ties to Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups.

Liam Stack reported from Tel Aviv and Thomas Fuller from San Francisco. Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Johnatan Reiss and Anushka Patil contributed reporting.

For three decades, a fierce-looking Winston Churchill, a hand on his hip, stared down guests in a lounge at the Fairmont Château Laurier hotel in Ottawa.

It was a legacy of Yousuf Karsh, the portrait photographer of royalty, politicians, artists, actors and authors who long lived in the hotel and operated his studio there.

Just over two years ago, however, a maintenance worker noticed something wrong. The frame on the portrait didn’t match those of other photos Mr. Karsh had permanently lent the hotel when he and his wife moved out in 1997.

The photo was a decoy, a poor inkjet copy of the print with an ineptly forged signature of Mr. Karsh that had been left behind by a thief.

Now, Churchill’s portrait may end up back in its rightful place.

The Ottawa Police Service said on Wednesday that an international investigation had tracked down the stolen photo in Italy and that it would soon send an officer there to retrieve it.

The police disclosed that a man from a small northern Ontario town was arrested in April and charged with the theft and various other crimes, including forgery.

“I thought this would never be recovered,” said Jerry Fielder, the director of Mr. Karsh’s estate. “There didn’t seem to be many leads.” (Mr. Karsh died in 2002).

The theft, he added, was “really devastating” to Mr. Karsh’s widow, Estrellita Karsh, who is 94. She declined, through Mr. Fielder, to be interviewed.

“She’s been following all of the progress of the investigation,” Mr. Fielder said. “She was just thrilled that it’s now official that it’s coming home.”

The Ottawa hotel told reporters on Wednesday that it would display the portrait again — this time with better security. The area where it hung, along with Mr. Karsh’s portraits of Albert Einstein, Georgia O’Keeffe, Pablo Casals and other notables, is closed for renovation.

Mr. Fielder, who identified the replacement photo as a forgery, attributed the photograph’s recovery to the persistence of Acting Detective Sgt. Akiva Geller of the Ottawa Police.

“It was complicated because we were dealing internationally,” Mr. Fielder said. “Now it’s been solved. I don’t quite know all the answers — and I’m not even sure they do.”

Detective Sergeant Geller, at the news conference, offered few details about the case, citing a trial that is likely to take place. The police said that the name of the 43-year-old man facing charges was under a publication ban.

Exactly when the forgery replaced the genuine print is not known. After soliciting snapshots from the public, the hotel narrowed down the disappearance to between Dec. 25, 2021, and Jan. 6, 2022. Pandemic restrictions at the time meant that guests were scarce in the hotel.

A photograph of the forgery taken by a New York Times reporter in April 2022 — four months before the theft was discovered and while the reporter was on a different assignment — shows that it was dangling from a piece of cord on a crooked wall hook.

Mr. Fielder said that the actual print and its frame had been secured to the wall using a hidden locking mount that would have made it difficult to remove.

The genuine 20-by-24 inch, gold-toned print was sold in an online auction in May 2022 by Sotheby’s in London for 5,292 British pounds, or about $6,900.

Sotheby’s declined to comment. But Detective Sergeant Geller said that because the theft had yet to be reported, neither the auction house nor the buyer, who lives in Genoa, Italy, had any reason to know that it has been stolen.

He added that the cooperation of Sotheby’s and the buyer had been important to solving the theft, as were efforts by the police in Britain and Italy. The buyer, he said, had received a refund.

The photograph, which came to be known as “Roaring Lion,” transformed Mr. Karsh from a local portraitist into an internationally known photographer of the famous. It was widely reproduced and appears today on Britain’s five-pound bank notes. Visitors to the Karsh studio in the hotel, which was closed in 1992, were greeted by an oversize print of the Churchill portrait.

In 1941, William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime minister, asked Mr. Karsh to photograph Churchill after he spoke to Canada’s Parliament.

Both nations were embroiled in World War II, and the speech took place weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor also brought the United States, which Churchill visited on the same trip, into battle.

Mr. Karsh wrote that Churchill would not get rid of his cigar for the photo despite offers of an ashtray. So “without premeditation,” he plucked it out of the British leader’s mouth.

The unintended result was the defiant expression that came to symbolize Britain’s resistance against Nazi Germany.

“By the time I got back to my camera, he looked so belligerent he could have devoured me,” Mr. Karsh wrote. “It was at that instant that I took the photograph.”

A landmark shift unfolded in Mexico on Thursday as a majority of its 32 states approved an overhaul of the country’s judicial system. In a monumental change, thousands of judges would be elected instead of appointed, from local courtrooms to the Supreme Court.

The measure could produce one of the most far-reaching judicial overhauls of any major democracy and has already provoked deep division in Mexico.

Nevertheless, the legislation’s passage into law was practically a foregone conclusion by Thursday as President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced his intent to publish the bill on Sunday, on the eve of Mexico’s Independence Day.

“It is a very important reform,” Mr. López Obrador, whose six-year tenure ends at the end of the month, said during his daily news conference. “It’s reaffirming that in Mexico there is an authentic democracy where the people elect their representatives.”

The departing president and his Morena party have championed remaking the court system as a way to curtail graft, influence-peddling and nepotism and to give Mexicans a greater voice. Mr. López Obrador’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, will take office on Oct. 1 and has fully backed the plan.

But court workers, judges, legal scholars and opposition leaders argue that it would inadequately address issues such as corruption and instead bolster Mr. López Obrador’s political movement.

Here’s what to know about the sweeping measure.

Why do some Mexicans support the election of judges?

Mexico’s justice system, like other branches of government, has long been plagued by graft and other problems. According to government surveys, 66 percent of Mexicans perceive judges to be corrupt — though official data on how many of them have been punished for corruption is scarce.

In the United States, where voters elect judges in many states, some judges say that judicial appointments can be easily controlled by political whims and that elections can even help increase diversity in the judiciaries. Research suggests, however, that inadequate diversity is an issue both when judges are elected and when they are appointed.

Proponents of the plan say it would reduce corruption and give voters a greater role in a justice system widely regarded as broken. Mr. López Obrador has said that elections would prevent judges from ruling in favor of powerful people to secure favors from them.

“The judge will have a different behavior,” he told reporters this week. “He will be there in that position by the will of the citizens, and will feel free to impart justice — he will have no commitments to anyone.”

There is also the issue of nepotism, which both supporters and opponents of the overhaul agree is a major problem in the court system. A recent assessment found that about 37 percent of judicial officials had at least one family member working in the judiciary (a drop of about 12 percentage points from 2021).

A system in which judges are elected, proponents say, would make it harder for judges to obtain positions in the judiciary through relatives. Instead, they would have to demonstrate their qualifications to voters. Most of the family relationships within the judiciary, however, involve court workers, not judges, who would not be elected.

Finally, the overhaul would sever the judiciary from its oversight body, the Federal Judicial Council. As of now, the head of that council — which, among other duties, appoints federal judges and penalizes them — is also the chief justice of the Supreme Court. That makes the workload impossible, experts say, and it also introduces bias.

“When you have someone who does both roles, inevitably there’s a conflict of interest,” said Sergio López Ayllón, a law professor who has advised institutions such as the Mexican Senate and the Supreme Court.

As an example, Mr. López Ayllón offered Arturo Zaldívar, a former chief of justice and president of the Judicial Council, who earlier this year was accused of using his position to remove and intimidate judges who did not rule the way he wanted. Mr. Zaldívar, who is being investigated by the Supreme Court, has denied the accusations.

Why do others in Mexico oppose the election of judges?

The biggest fears among experts and some citizens is that in the overhaul, judicial independence would be lost and the courts would become highly politicized. Since the measure eliminates the many requirements to become a judge, critics fear that it will open the way for people with only a law degree and a few years of legal experience to run for office.

This is particularly relevant in the district courts, for example, where under the current system prospective judges are appointed after undergoing a series of “very difficult” tests required for a spot, said Adriana García, an expert adviser to Stanford Law School’s Rule of Law Impact lab.

“We’re going from one moment where we’re choosing them based on their merits and abilities to one where we’re choosing based on popularity,” she said.

If one political party controls key branches of government, as Morena does now, the choices of judicial candidates might skew in favor of the party’s interests, critics say. Nominees for top judicial positions could emerge as little more than loyal allies, compromising the impartiality of the courts.

Opponents to the overhaul have also expressed alarm that political parties and illicit funds, including from organized crime groups, would influence the elections.

While the plan prohibits public or private financing of judicial campaigns and bars political parties and public officials from stumping for candidates, Ms. García said this would be difficult to enforce and worried that those with “the most money and most power will put forth their judge.”

Voters would also have the daunting task of getting to know all the candidates. The changes would apply to the 11 justices currently on the Supreme Court, to 1,635 federal judges and magistrates and to more than 5,700 judges at the state and local levels. An average voter might have to sift through anywhere from hundreds to thousands of candidates.

Experts and citizens alike are concerned that the sheer volume of candidates would overwhelm voters who often have limited information about the candidates on the ballot. There’s also growing worry that voting participation could plummet, with citizens either too confused or too disengaged to make an informed choice.

What happens next?

Now that most state legislatures have passed the bill, the lower house of Congress will send it to Mr. López Obrador, and he is expected to publish it in the government’s official gazette. He said he intended to do so on Sunday, a day before Mexico’s Independence Day.

Congress can then make adjustments to federal laws as required by the overhaul, such as eliminating funds for the retirement of justices. The Senate would then issue a call for candidates for the thousands of judgeships nationwide. And Mexico’s electoral agency would have to start organizing the judicial elections. At some point, state legislatures would modify their local constitutions.

The plan is for voters next June to elect all the Supreme Court justices, whose number would be reduced to nine; members of the newly created Disciplinary Tribunal; and about half of the country’s 7,000 judges, with the rest elected in 2027. It is an undertaking that already has been called unrealistic.

“Judicial geography is not the same as electoral geography; ballots have never had so many names before,” said Carla Humphrey, a member of the National Electoral Institute’s governing council.

Some critics of the overhaul had hoped that when Ms. Sheinbaum, who won the presidency in a landslide in June, would replace Mr. López Obrador next month, she would moderate or slow the sweeping changes to the court system. But she has so far shown no intention to do so.

“There is no possibility of reversing the reform,” Ms. Sheinbaum told reporters this month. “That was the decision of the people of Mexico.”

Miriam Castillo contributed reporting from Mexico City.

Three Red Cross workers were killed and two wounded on Thursday when artillery fire struck a frontline aid distribution site in Ukraine on Thursday, the organization said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross workers were preparing to distribute wood and coal briquettes in the village of Viroliubivka, in the Donetsk region, when they were hit, the group said in a statement.

The aid distribution had not yet started and no residents were harmed, the Red Cross said. The supplies were intended to prepare residents for the cold winter nights that are soon to come.

The Red Cross said that its teams worked in the region regularly and that its vehicles were clearly marked.

Images from after the attack show a white truck with a large red cross centered on the side engulfed in flames, its cab on fire and plumes of black smoke billowing upward in an arch.

The wounded staff members were taken to receive medical attention, and one was in serious condition, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine said in a statement.

The attack took place amid increasing Russian bombardment around the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, roughly 35 miles away, as Russian troops pressed ahead with an offensive aimed at capturing the strategic city. Conditions in the city have deteriorated, and residents who remain are largely without water or electricity.

The Red Cross denounced the shelling without assigning specific blame.

“I condemn attacks on Red Cross personnel in the strongest terms,” the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mirjana Spoljaric, said in the statement. “It’s unconscionable that shelling would hit an aid distribution site. Our hearts are broken today as we mourn the loss of our colleagues and care for the injured.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine blamed Moscow for the deaths and called the attacks “another Russian war crime” in a statement paired with a photo of the Red Cross vehicle ablaze.

Last year was the deadliest on record for humanitarian aid workers, according to the United Nations, which reported 280 aid workers killed in 33 countries in 2023, a 137 percent increase over the year before.

For 2023 and the first half of 2024, the I.C.R.C. reported six staff members killed and 14 injured. That figure did not include Thursday’s casualties.

Pat Griffiths, a Red Cross spokesman in Ukraine, was at a conference in Kyiv when he received news of his colleagues’ deaths. Mr. Griffiths said he had recently traveled to the eastern Ukraine with the team whose members were killed.

“The feeling right now is grief,” he said. “And then because of our neutrality, all we can do is repeat the call, this urgent call, for all countries around the world, all parties to a conflict, to respect international humanitarian law, which is crystal clear that humanitarian workers and those who help, and ambulance drivers or first aid responders, are not targets.”

Asked if the group would cease operations in that area of Ukraine, another spokesman, Jason Straziuso, said the Red Cross monitors the security situation carefully and planned to do an analysis of the attack.

“We know that our work helping people close to the front lines of conflict is inherently dangerous,” Mr. Straziuso said. “We know we cannot avoid all risks. When people think about the risk humanitarian workers face, we hope they also think about the risk residents who live close to the front lines of conflict face.”

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Thursday that a Russian missile struck a cargo ship in the Black Sea that was carrying wheat to Egypt in an attack off the coast of Romania.

If confirmed, it would be the first attack on a grain ship in open water since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and it would mark an escalation of conflict in the Black Sea. Mr. Zelensky said on social media that there were no casualties in the attack, which Ukraine’s military said was conducted by cruise missiles launched from strategic bombers.

Ukraine is one of the world’s largest exporters of grain and is a particularly important supplier to countries in the Middle East and Africa. The exports are also important drivers of the country’s economy, and any interruption of the trade could be devastating.

At the outset of the war, Russia blockaded Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, shutting down all commerce. In July 2022, the United Nations brokered a compromise establishing a shipping corridor, but Russia backed out of the deal a year later.

Ukraine fought back with seaborne drones and long-range missiles, driving the Russian fleet out of eastern Black Sea and allowing trade to resume in a corridor along the coast. The volume of shipments soon bounced back to prewar levels, but that progress is now threatened.

The ship, the Aya, which sails under the flag of Saint Kitts and Nevis, left the Ukrainian port of Chornomorsk around dawn on Thursday, according to Tomas Alexa, a lead analyst for Ambrey Intelligence, a maritime risk management company. He said in an interview that it was traveling in a convoy when it was hit on its port side.

“The ship suffered damage to the cargo hold,” he said, adding that it had been able to proceed. The website MarineTraffic, which tracks global shipping using satellite data, said the Aya is currently located off the coast of Romania near the port of Constanta. Mr. Alexa said the ship was not at risk of sinking.

The Caribbean nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis is frequently used by shippers for so-called flags of convenience, which are typically unrelated to the place of business of the owner.

An attack on a ship is considered an act of war, but the nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, which includes two islands and has a population of less than 50,000, would be unable to respond militarily. The Ukrainian Navy released a statement saying that Russia continues to demonstrate “complete disregard” for maritime law.

A Kremlin spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Captain Dmytro Pletenchuk, the spokesman for Ukraine’s southern command, said in a telephone interview that the ship had been hit by a missile from a Russian military jet while it was in “the exclusive economic zone waters of Romania. It was not in the grain corridor of Ukraine.”

That is an important distinction. Under the Law of the Sea Treaty, Romania claims a sovereign territorial zone of 12 miles and an exclusive economic zone of 200 miles. Had the attack occurred in the sovereign zone it would have carried far more serious implications than in the exclusive economic zone, which is considered to be international waters.

There was no immediate comment from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Ukraine exports around five percent of the world’s wheat and 10 percent of its corn, according to Sal Gilbertie, the president of Teucrium, a U.S.-based investment advisory firm. He said that the wheat markets had not moved as a result of the attack but that it was nevertheless a “big deal” that could make it harder for Ukraine to ship its commodities.

“This is not just an attack on wheat markets. It’s an attack on corn markets and an attack on food. It’s a rare thing,” he said.

Mr. Zelensky emphasized Thursday the importance of Ukrainian food deliveries to African and Middle Eastern countries, many of which are suffering food shortages. “We will continue to make every effort to safeguard our ports, the Black Sea and food exports to global markets. This is Ukraine’s true priority, to protect life, and it should be the priority of all countries,” he said.

The Black Sea has been a crucial theater in the war, with Ukraine mounting a series of attacks on Moscow’s navy, including sinking the flagship of the Black Sea fleet in April 2022. In August last year, Russia’s navy boarded a freighter in the Black Sea to enforce a blockade, firing warning shots. But until now, both sides had refrained from attacking commercial shipping.

The secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Sergei K. Shoigu, said on Tuesday that Russia had considered a Turkish proposal for both militaries to refrain from strikes on civilian ships in the Black Sea and energy infrastructure within each country. But the talks ended last month after Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region in Russia.

Russian forces have stepped up their assault on the strategic Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, cutting off water supplies and destroying a key overpass in a grim urban enclave already short on natural gas and electricity, Ukrainian officials said on Thursday.

Warning that Russian troops are now on the city’s doorstep, about five miles away, officials renewed calls for all residents to evacuate. The city’s population has dwindled from about 62,000 at the beginning of August to 18,000 people by Wednesday, local and regional authorities said.

At the same time, Moscow’s forces are now pressing a counterattack toward Ukrainian positions in the Kursk region of Russia, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Thursday. That statement came after posts on social media by Russian military bloggers and commentary by analysts that Ukraine had lost control of several villages in recent fighting.

In the incursion that began on Aug. 6, Ukraine had swiftly seized about 500 square miles of Russian territory, breaking through thinly manned border defenses and overrunning about 100 towns and villages, according to Ukrainian officials.

Their hold had not been seriously tested until now. The Russian counterattack appeared to target the western rim of the Ukrainian-held area. Russian military bloggers reported the reclaiming of 10 villages. The accounts could not be independently verified.

“Russia began counteroffensive activities,” Mr. Zelensky said, according to the Interfax-Ukraine media outlet.

Inside Ukraine, Pokrovsk looks set for a similar grim fate experienced by other cities in the eastern Donbas region, like Sievierodonetsk and Bakhmut, as they came within range of Russian artillery or rockets that hit key infrastructure.

In those cities, the lights blinked out, water taps ran dry and most people of means fled, leaving a small number of citizens, many of them older people who took shelter in basements as frequent shelling reduced buildings around them to ruins.

Those who remain in Pokrovsk now must rely on water from wells dug near apartment blocks, according to residents. Already, much of the city is without natural gas or electricity.

“The situation is dire and won’t improve anytime soon,” Vadym Filashkin, the head of the Ukrainian military administration for the Donetsk region, said in a post on the Telegram messaging app of the loss of water in Pokrovsk. “Leaving is the only smart option,” he added.

The city is the focus of a monthslong Russian offensive that has not let up despite a risky move by Ukraine in August to divert enemy forces by invading Russia’s Kursk region.

Over the summer, the Russian Air Force began hitting Pokrovsk with glide bombs, which are far more destructive than ground-based artillery since they can carry far higher loads of explosives.

In an interview last month, the city’s military administrator, Serhiy Dobryak, said he expected bombing to target infrastructure first and then residential areas as the Russian army closed in on the city.

The Ukrainian military has prepared for urban combat in Pokrovsk, setting up concrete pillboxes on some roadsides. Russia’s offensive over the past 10 or so days had concentrated on rural areas south of the city, but Pokrovsk remains at risk.

Ukraine has halted daily evacuation trains from the city, in a further sign of unraveling security there.

A bombardment overnight led to the collapse of an overpass. Civilians are still able to evacuate by car or bus using side roads, but the loss of water and destruction of bridges heralded a new phase of worsening conditions in Pokrovsk, Ukrainian officials said.

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting.

In mid-January, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, was handed a piece of paper that threatened to doom his organization. It was already in deep crisis. Three months had passed since Hamas militants burst through the barrier between Gaza and Israel, killing about 1,200 people and dragging 250 back as hostages. In retaliation, Israel rained bombs on Gazan cities, killing tens of thousands as it vowed to eradicate Hamas.

Lazzarini’s organization, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, known as UNRWA, was uniquely equipped to respond to the humanitarian crisis that ensued. More than two-thirds of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are refugees, and providing them with services has given UNRWA an outsize role in the territory. After Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 from the Palestinian Authority, which now functions only in the West Bank, Gazans were left with a highly dysfunctional government and came increasingly to depend on the agency. Before the war, UNRWA maintained more than 300 schools, health centers, warehouses, fuel depots and other facilities in Gaza and had 13,000 employees. Unlike other U.N. agencies, its staff is made up not of international aid workers but almost entirely of local Palestinians. Amid Israel’s ongoing bombardment, there was simply no other organization as deeply integrated in the territory and with the infrastructure necessary to distribute food, provide shelter and meet the basic needs of so many displaced, traumatized people.

Lazzarini, a Swiss-Italian veteran of United Nations aid operations in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, took the helm of UNRWA in 2020. He hoped to put the agency on sure footing. For more than seven decades, it had lurched from one emergency to another, as turmoil in the Middle East buffeted the impoverished Palestinians that UNRWA sought to help. The war put an end to those plans. Repeated evacuation orders and the destruction caused by Israel’s air campaign have displaced about nine in 10 Gazans, some multiple times. At various points, the agency says, more than a million people — nearly half of Gaza’s population — have sought shelter in UNRWA facilities, with large families crowded into its classrooms or into warehouses that once held flour and medicine.

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The United States announced on Thursday it was imposing sanctions on 16 Venezuelan government officials appointed by the country’s autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro, in response to the disputed presidential election on July 28.

The past year saw months of repression leading up to the election, which was followed by a brutal crackdown in response to international and national criticism of the results.

On Election Day Mr. Maduro claimed victory without releasing a breakdown of results. He has yet to do so. The opposition has published thousands of receipts from voting stations, representing over 80 percent of the vote, showing that their candidate Edmundo González won by a wide margin.

A senior U.S. administration official, in a call with journalists on Thursday, said it was clear that Mr. González had won more votes and that Mr. Maduro’s government was denying that fact and trying to cling to power at all costs.

According to the conditions of the call, the official discussing the Biden administration’s actions could not be named in order to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.

Who is being sanctioned?

The list includes officials from the country’s electoral authority and supreme court, justice system, legislature and security forces. They are now added to a list of hundreds of Venezuelan officials who have been sanctioned by the Treasury Department in recent years, including Mr. Maduro.

The individuals include the judge and prosecutor who authorized an arrest warrant for Mr. González, which the senior administration official said was politically motivated and unjustified.

Mr. González fled to Spain last weekend because opposition officials said he had feared for his life.

How do the sanctions work?

Under these sanctions, bank accounts and any other assets owned by the individuals in the United States will be frozen, and any U.S. citizens or people in the United States are prohibited from any financial transactions with the sanctioned individuals. The individuals are also prohibited from traveling to the United States.

When it comes to sanctions on individuals in Venezuela, “their effectiveness at best has been limited,” said Mariano de Alba, a senior adviser for the International Crisis Group.

What other sanctions has the U.S. imposed?

The United States has sanctioned some Venezuelan officials for years, but the Trump administration strengthened the sanctions regime significantly after accusing Mr. Maduro of committing fraud in a presidential election in 2018.

Those sanctions have hobbled the country’s oil industry, a crucial source of income for Mr. Maduro’s government, and the autocratic leader has long sought to lift them.

Last October, after the Venezuelan government pledged to hold free and fair elections, the United States temporarily lifted some of the oil sanctions as a sign of good will.

The U.S. partially reinstated those sanctions in April after the Maduro government took steps to hinder a free election, but said it would allow some oil companies to continue operations in Venezuela.

What have they accomplished?

Some economists say sanctions are partially responsible for Venezuela’s economic contraction since 2012 and are a major factor driving the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans that have arrived at the United States border in the last three years.

But even as they caused economic suffering for many Venezuelans, they have failed at the stated goal of forcing Mr. Maduro from office.

Some companies, including Reliance Industries, an Indian multinational, have already taken advantage of the sanctions relief the Biden administration provided earlier this year and have started importing oil from Venezuela.

The senior administration official pushed back at the notion that sanctioning individuals is ineffective and said that the move could prompt the 16 government officials to reflect on their support for Mr. Maduro.

He also disputed the assertion that efforts at diplomacy have failed, and said that the results that the Maduro administration published on election night were not widely accepted globally thanks to the work of the U.S. and its regional partners.