Few signs of life can be seen along the highway in the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon. Nearly every shop lining the road is shuttered and the sidewalks empty. The red-and-white painted barriers of some Lebanese army checkpoints are vacant, abandoned by the soldiers guarding them. Even the road is mostly quiet — save the occasional car racing out of the valley.

Scattered along the way are remnants of the Israeli airstrikes that have pummeled the area in recent days. Where factories, stores and houses once stood, there are piles of cinder blocks, twisted pieces of metal and shards of glass. Emerald green shrubbery is coated in dull gray dust, and power lines — yanked from their metal posts in the blasts — dangle over the road, swaying with the breeze.

“Every strike feels closer and closer and closer. You don’t know where to hide, where to escape,” said Mariam Saleh, 23, who was visiting relatives in the Bekaa Valley village of Britel when the strikes began this week.

The bombardments across the Bekaa Valley are part of the more than 1,000 airstrikes that Israel has launched against Lebanon since Monday in an attempt to weaken Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese military group. The campaign is one of the most intense in contemporary warfare, experts say, and led to the deadliest day in Lebanon in decades.

So far, about 700 people have been killed and over 100,000 others forced to flee their homes because of the strikes.

While the heaviest bombardment has been in the south, Israel has also struck across the Bekaa Valley, a patchwork of farmland, wineries, olive groves and villages nestled between Lebanon’s two mountain ranges. At least 160 people have been killed in Bekaa over the past week, according to the local authorities.

The strikes have decimated pockets of the valley, one of Lebanon’s poorest regions, where Hezbollah holds immense sway and has a significant support base. Thousands of residents have fled the area since the strikes began on Monday, seeking shelter in relatives’ homes in the capital, Beirut, or crowding into hotels on its outskirts. By Wednesday, nearly all of the hotels in Chtoura — a major town on the western edge of Bekaa — were fully booked.

Two New York Times reporters and a photographer visited the Bekaa Valley this week on a two-day trip. The Hezbollah authorities allowed entry to the region on the condition that Hezbollah members could accompany the reporting team and could restrict its movements.

Hezbollah did not listen to interviews with local residents and had no say over what would be published. While the trip revealed the bombardment’s civilian toll, it did little to illuminate how much the strikes had damaged Hezbollah’s military activities, including its fighters and their capabilities, with Hezbollah keeping any such damage from view.

While thousands have fled the region, hundreds have also flooded into the valley’s medical centers, threatening to overwhelm health care workers, hospital administers say.

The Dar Al Amal University Hospital in Douris — two miles southwest of Baalbek, a city that has been frequently targeted in the Israeli airstrikes — received around 100 patients wounded in the strikes between Tuesday and Wednesday night, according to the director of the hospital, Dr. Elie Maubard. Around 40 of those patients were children, he said.

In the pediatric ward of the hospital, Sabrin Sharaf, 46, sat at the foot of one bed where her 9-year-old daughter, Zainab, lay unconscious under a dark green blanket, her long brown hair held back by a surgical hairnet.

When strikes began to rain down on the valley on Monday night, Ms. Sharaf gathered Zainab and her five other children in their kitchen. The room was the farthest in the house from the main road and, she hoped, it would be the safest.

But around 9 p.m. that night, she and her children were suddenly thrown to one side of the room — landing in a pile under shards of tiles and pieces of stone. Choking back dust, Ms. Sharaf took stock of her children: She saw her 11-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son climbing out of the rubble. She spotted her 6-year-old twins, crying for help, alive. But she could not see Zainab.

“Zuzu! Zuzu! Where are you, Zuzu?” she recalled screaming, using her pet name for her daughter. After her 14-year-old son found Zainab under the rubble, they rushed her to the hospital in a neighbor’s car. Zainab has not regained consciousness since.

Standing nearby in the pediatric ward, Ali Rawad Hamzi, 41, said he had lost four of his nieces and nephews when an airstrike leveled their house on Tuesday night. His 16-year-old daughter lost both her eyes in the strike. His 7-year-old son, Hussain, who had been playing with his cousins, survived. He lay in a bed in front of Mr. Hamzi, his right eye swollen shut and jagged lines of blood etched across his face.

“He survived by a miracle,” Mr. Hamzi said in a hushed tone, gazing over at his son.

The sudden onslaught of destruction and mass displacement stunned many across Bekaa, which had been largely spared from the tit-for-tat strikes between Hezbollah and Israel over the past 11 months.

It has also brought the deep sectarian and tribal divides in the region to the forefront. Bekaa has long served as one of Hezbollah’s most fertile recruiting grounds as young men with few job prospects have joined the Shia movement to take part in its fight against Israel and in turn have received access to its extensive social welfare system of schools, hospitals and clinics.

But it is also home to many Lebanese Christians and Sunni Muslims who are less likely to have benefited from Hezbollah’s social safety net or to support its cause — and have now found themselves trapped in the group’s escalating conflict.

“Of course, I don’t want this war, I have children,” said Abdo Akiki, 55, a Christian who lives in Douris Village in Bekaa and whose 3-year-old daughter, Tala, had been seriously wounded after his house was struck on Monday night. “But what can we do, it’s up to them to decide,” he added, referring to Hezbollah.

On Tuesday evening, Mr. Akiki sat next to his daughter in Rayak Hospital in the valley, gently stroking her hair between the beep-beep-beep of a heart-rate monitor. When she seemed to drift off to sleep, he lifted his palm — only for her to cry out and reach her small hand toward him. He leaned forward, placing his forehead against her and cradling her head in his hand. As he comforted her, he could hear the thundering roars of airstrikes in the distance.

Tala was always his most boisterous child, her father said, who played rough with the boys next door and loved sitting on his lap whenever he drove around the village. Looking at her in the hospital bed, the decisions he made the night his house was struck played over and over in his head.

When he first heard the airstrikes, he tried convincing his wife, Souad, that they should leave, but she was sitting on the floor with their 1-year-old daughter, paralyzed with fear. He tried telling her to try standing on the count of three: One. Two. Three. But she would not move.

As the night wore on, the sounds of the thuds grew louder, closer. Mr. Akiki stopped trying to coax his wife into the car. Even if they did leave now, he thought, he wouldn’t know where to go. “How do you escape when there’s bombing behind you and bombing in front of you?” he said.

Around 10 p.m., the back wall of his house came crashing down — burying Tala under a pile of rubble, only a corner of the red blanket she slept with peeking out. She suffered a head injury and two days later — though she was alert and able to be carried by her father — was still struggling to fully recover, her doctors said.

“I was about to lose my daughter, I was about to lose my whole family,” Mr. Akiki said. “What are we getting from this war?”

When the South Korean spy met with Kim Jong-il, he declined the late North Korean leader’s offer of a toast, citing a promise to his mother that he would never drink.

But the undercover agent, masquerading as a businessman, vowed to break his abstinence when the two Koreas reunified, until recently an overriding policy goal of the leaders of both countries.

Park Chae-so, the spy, amused Mr. Kim when the North Korean dictator gave him a bottle of blueberry wine as a parting gift. He asked for another.

“Mr. Chairman, don’t we Koreans say one is one too few?” he said.

Mr. Park’s 1997 meeting with Mr. Kim, the father of the current leader, Kim Jong-un, lasted only 35 minutes. But it was a​ coup for South Korea’s intelligence community: He was its only known undercover agent to penetrate the security cloaking the world’s most secretive regime and finagle an audience with its enigmatic leader.

Until then, Mr. Kim was so reclusive that even his own people had heard his voice only once, in 1992, when he shouted one sentence into the microphone while inspecting a military parade: “Glory to the heroic soldiers of the People’s Army.”

But Mr. Park was impressed with Mr. Kim’s speaking style.

“There was a flow — and not a single repetition,” Mr. Park, 70, said of his conversation with the supreme leader.

Mr. Park’s identity and his meeting with Mr. Kim, who ruled North Korea from 1994 to 2011, were exposed in a political scandal in 1998, turning him into a celebrated — but former — spy in the South.

These days, the ex-spy is a cautious but vivid storyteller, and this account is based on his version of events, which have inspired a book about his life and a movie, “The Spy Gone North.” While parts of his story have been corroborated by officials and associates, neither North Korea nor his former spy agency has officially commented on his work.

Mr. Park visited North Korea more than a dozen times, convincing North Korean officials that he could get them badly needed cash, including by helping them sell porcelain and other ancient North Korean artifacts abroad.

He said that whenever he was there, he folded his clothes — and left a couple strands of hair in his bag — in such a way that he would know whether his belongings were searched while he was away from his hotel. When the searching stopped, he knew he had gained the trust of his minders.

A senior North Korean official once put a gun to his head when he refused to cooperate with a plan to have him sleep with a North Korean woman and have a baby in the North, he said during an interview in Cheongju, where he lives, one of a few conversations he had in Cheongju and in Seoul with The New York Times. Mr. Park was told that Mr. Kim had already named the prospective baby: Tongil, or “Unification.”

“Whenever I visited the North, I knew my life was on the line,” Mr. Park said. “When the plane took off from Pyongyang and was up in the air, I could breathe again, relieved that I had survived another trip.”

A son of a farming family in Cheongju, south of Seoul, Mr. Park was an army major in 1990 when he was recruited by the Defense Intelligence Command. He began creating a new reputation as part of a carefully choreographed plan to eventually have him infiltrate North Korea. He borrowed money, squandering it in real estate deals gone wrong, and often got into trouble with superiors. He added a few criminal records to his file.

Three years later, in 1993, he was tapped by the country’s top intelligence service, the Agency for National Security Planning, just as North Korea’s clandestine nuclear program ​had turned into an international crisis.

By this time, he was known among his friends and former military colleagues — and hopefully among the North Korean spies in the South who would check up on his background — as a disgruntled former military intelligence officer, heavily indebted and dabbling in various private business enterprises.

For agents spying on North Korea, the famine there in the 1990s created rare opportunities. The North’s elites traveled to China to trade and earn badly needed cash. There, they met South Korean businessmen, some of them undercover agents who piggybacked on business deals to meet North Korean officials and establish an intelligence-gathering foothold.

Mr. Park had his first breakthrough when he learned that one of North Korea’s biggest players in such deals was a nephew of Jang Song-thaek, Mr. Kim’s brother-in-law and at the time one of the country’s most powerful figures.

To get the nephew in trouble with his Chinese creditors, Mr. Park arranged for a shipment of walnuts and pine nuts to be confiscated at a South Korean port. He then gave the nephew $160,000 to pay off his debt, and the grateful Jang family began pulling strings for Mr. Park and doors started to open.

One of his new contacts, Ri Chol, a North Korean Workers’ Party trade official, later introduced him in turn to a senior official from the Ministry of State Security, the North’s secret police, in Beijing. After learning that the security official had a son and daughter about to get married, Mr. Park delighted him with a pair of expensive watches as a wedding gift.

Such episodes convinced him that money talked among the elites of the impoverished North.

“My mission was to penetrate as deep inside the Pyongyang leadership as possible to learn what they were thinking,” Mr. Park said. “If I had any success, it was because I figured out their taste for money.”

As his contacts expanded up the hierarchy, the scrutiny increased. No matter how good his cover story, Mr. Park’s North Korean contacts would have known that anyone doing business with them was at least being watched by South Korean intelligence.

North Korean officials once showed him photos of his mother working at a garden and his two daughters going to school in South Korea. The message: Don’t betray us or else.

By the time Mr. Park met Mr. Kim, he had already crafted a lucrative business deal for North Korea that involved bringing a film crew to the North to shoot South Korean TV commercials. Mr. Park said Mr. Kim personally had blessed this proposal.

Surprisingly, the leader also asked Mr. Park to “read his face,” having heard from his aides that Mr. Park practiced the Asian art of fortunetelling based on facial features.

But Mr. Kim also had a more serious plan for Mr. Park.

North Korea wanted him to help with its scheme to block Kim Dae-jung, the longtime opposition leader in the South, from winning its 1997 presidential election. Pyongyang instead wanted the South led by a less-experienced conservative leader.

At home, Mr. Park’s spy agency also did not want Kim Dae-jung, a former dissident whom it once attempted to assassinate, to win the election either. His agency and North Korea, sworn enemies of each other, both plotted separate smear campaigns designed to depict Kim Dae-jung as an untrustworthy communist.

Mr. Park personally opposed such interference. He tipped off aides to Kim Dae-jung so they could prepare against such plots, while urging North Koreans to embrace an opposition victory.

After the opposition leader won the presidency, Mr. Park’s bosses at the spy agency went to prison for illegally meddling in the election. Before they did, they leaked classified intelligence reports that mentioned an undercover agent code-named “Black Venus” who had met Mr. Kim in Pyongyang. There was enough detail for journalists to figure out who Black Venus was.

Mr. Park was preparing for a trip to North Korea in 1998 when South Korean media identified him as Black Venus. His agency discharged him with a $224,000 bonus.

“I had no regrets,” Mr. Park said. “I could not let an enemy country interfere with an election in my country.”

He then made a second fateful decision.

He reconnected with Mr. Ri, the North Korean trade official, and worked as a freelancing agent for inter-Korean projects — a genuine businessman this time. In 2005, he and Mr. Ri arranged the filming of a Samsung cellphone commercial in Shanghai, the first of its kind, that featured two female celebrity entertainers from both Koreas.

After the political mood changed in South Korea with the conservatives taking back power in 2008, his old agency caught up with him. In 2010, agency officials arrested Mr. Park on charges of illegally contacting North Koreans and sharing sensitive military data with them. Mr. Park argued that none of it was secret, but he was sentenced to six years in solitary confinement.

Since he was freed in 2016, he has not had a formal job.

Although Mr. Park has no plans to reconnect with his North Korean contacts, he often wonders if they might reach out to him as he had helped them hide money abroad when he was a spy.

“They need my help to access the money,” he said.

For 85 years, the names of three of English literature’s best-known writers, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, were featured in Poets’ Corner, the Westminster Abbey nook dedicated to great poets, authors and playwrights, but something wasn’t quite right: They were missing the accent mark.

This week, the error was fixed when the diereses — umlaut-like punctuation dots, each just about a third of an inch in diameter — were added above each E of the famous last name.

It’s a small but sizable victory for three sisters who could not publish under their own names nearly 200 years ago, even as their novels “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights” helped change the portrayal of women’s lives in fiction.

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Austria heads to the polls on Sunday for a pivotal parliamentary election that could reshape the nation’s political landscape. The vote is being closely watched because it could lead to a government headed by a far-right chancellor, a first since the end of World War II.

Far-right parties have gained some momentum across Europe, including in Austria, where the Freedom Party is leading in the polls. Here’s what to know about the election.

• Why does this election matter?

• Who is running and who is likely to win?

• What are the main issues?

• How does voting work in Austria?

• When will we know the results?

Why does this election matter?

Austria’s Parliament, or Nationalrat, will be elected on the heels of a European Union parliamentary election that saw far-right parties making gains across the 27-member alliance. Austria’s nationalist, anti-immigration Freedom Party came in first in the country, with 25.4 percent of the votes, and preliminary polling suggests the group may be even more successful in the country’s general election. The Freedom Party has been in government three times since 1990. In 1999, Europeans reacted with horror, swiftly imposing diplomatic sanctions on Austria.

But the reaction from across the continent was more muted in 2017 when Sebastian Kurz, a conservative chancellor, formed a government with the Freedom Party. By that time, all of Europe had shifted more toward the right, with both Hungary and Poland run by leaders from right-wing parties.

Who is running and who is likely to win?

The far-right Freedom Party is leading the polls, followed most closely by the conservative Austrian People’s Party and the center-left Social Democratic Party.

Donatienne Ruy, a Europe, Russia and Eurasia fellow at the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, described the Freedom Party as “far-right, populist, anti-immigration, euroskeptic and pro-Russia.” It was founded by a former Nazi officer and was ejected from government in 2019 following a major corruption scandal. It has since recovered and is running on a slogan of “Fortress Austria, Fortress for Freedom.”

Freedom Party leaders presented a campaign platform that prioritized deportation and decreasing asylum applications.

The Freedom Party may have a ceiling on the number of supporters, said Reinhard Heinisch, a political scientist and professor of Austrian politics at the University of Salzburg in Austria. “It’s a very popular party with a third of the population, and it’s extremely unpopular with the other two-thirds,” he said, adding that many Austrians would refuse to support the far-right party at all costs.

Several other smaller parties, such as the Greens, are lower in the polls but could divide votes among people who do not support the Freedom Party.

What are the main issues?

Though inflation rates have greatly eased over the last several months, cost of living remains a major factor in this election.

“There is a sense of exhaustion around when things are going to change because of inflation,” Ms. Ruy said. “Energy prices are quite high and I think people are looking for something that’s going to feel different regardless of how distasteful some of those parties can be.”

Russia’s war with Ukraine and its effect on Austria’s economy is feeding political discontent within the country. Austria remains dependent on Russian natural gas and oil. Before the war, Russia was an important market for Austrian products; and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 caused inflation to jump to threefold, although it has since dropped below 3 percent.

While other parties have distanced themselves from Moscow, the Freedom Party has done the opposite, said Mr. Heinisch. The party is making the case that severing ties with Russia was a mistake, and that European and American elites are forcing Austrians to support economic sanctions that hurt their country.

Immigration is another central issue in this election. In the 1990s, Austria saw an enormous influx of migrants from the Balkans and Eastern Europe, and far-right groups have continued to champion anti-immigrant stances since.

A series of Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna were canceled after a terrorist plot was foiled in August. One of the suspects was reportedly an 18-year-old Iraqi citizen, the others Austrian, and the cancellation led to national debate about immigration and safety, Mr. Heinisch said.

An anti-establishment mood has permeated much of Europe, including Austria, resulting in the rise of some far-right parties, experts said.

How does voting work in Austria?

Parliament’s 183 members are elected to five-year terms by a popular vote in the electoral districts of Austria’s nine states.

The council is elected by proportional representation, meaning seats are allocated based on the percentage of the vote each party garners. Votes are cast for a specific party, and then voters are able to indicate preference for a particular candidate within that party.

Individual parties must receive at least 4 percent of the votes for representation in Parliament; the leader of the largest party elected to it is typically appointed chancellor.

Austrians will cast paper ballots at schools, churches and other polling places. The results are tallied locally with representatives of the competing parties present; the results are then reported to the interior ministry.

When will we know the results?

Votes are usually tallied quickly on the same day, with exception of mail-in ballots, which can be slightly delayed. The ministry announces official preliminary results after voting ends but the final count will not be certified or announced until after mail-in ballots are counted a day or two later.

But depending on the results, it may could take weeks, if not months, for the new government to form a coalition government with other elected parties.

Melissa Eddy and Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.

The two sides of Libya’s political divide have agreed on a new leader for the country’s central bank — a settlement that officials hope will end months of escalating tensions that had raised fears that Libya could once again be sliding toward armed conflict.

The standoff over control of the Central Bank of Libya, which is key to distributing the country’s vast oil wealth, had led officials on one side to block oil exports for weeks and prompted the bank’s governor to flee the country.

The two sides announced on Thursday that they had agreed to appoint Naji Issa, a senior central bank official, as the bank’s new governor. They also agreed to form a new board of directors, an apparent attempt at preventing a repeat of what critics had said was the previous governor’s tendency to concentrate power in his own hands, with little transparency.

In the wake of the agreement, officials in eastern Libya also committed to lifting the oil blockade, according to the United Nations mission in Libya, which had convened talks to end the crisis.

Yet some bumps may still remain: Hadi al-Saghir, who represented the eastern-based Libyan Parliament in the negotiations, said in an interview on Thursday that it would not move forward with the deal until the ousted governor receives a guarantee that he can return safely to the country.

Libya has been mired in political deadlock, chaos and violence since 2011, when rebels overthrew the country’s longtime dictator, Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi, during the Arab Spring protests. In recent years, the country has been split between rival parallel governments in its east and west, a division that led to an all-out civil war until 2020.

Efforts to hold new elections have been fruitless, with most Libyan officials unwilling to relinquish power or access to Libya’s oil revenues.

Yet the country had experienced several years of relative stasis, with no major eruptions of violence or political conflicts, until August, when western Libyan leaders moved to seize control of the bank by force.

The bank, which funds both governments, maintains the currency, distributes oil revenues and pays salaries to Libya’s many civil servants, had been one of the few institutions that spanned the east-west divide, giving it some protection from political disputes. But tensions over matters like public spending were growing between the longtime governor, Sadik al-Kabir, and the head of the western government, Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeiba.

The clash culminated in armed men showing up at the bank to oust Mr. al-Kabir from his office in August.

The bank quickly lost access to international financial institutions, and experts said the Libyan currency and the country’s access to imports would soon suffer without a resolution. Inflation rose, and oil exports fell sharply amid the blockade, affecting world oil prices and Libyan revenues.

It was such damage, analysts and diplomats said, that eventually pushed the two sides to strike a deal.

The banking system was also frozen for Libyan citizens, many of whom could already only withdraw money from A.T.M.s rarely, and only after waiting in long lines. Most Libyans with jobs work in the public sector, and their salaries would have gone unpaid if the central bank remained incapacitated.

The dispute over the bank’s leadership “has seriously threatened Libya’s financial and economic stability, fragile security and livelihood of all Libyans,” Stephanie Khoury, the United Nations mission’s acting head, said at a signing ceremony for the agreement on Thursday.