Flash floods killed at least 95 people across eastern Spain, the Spanish authorities said on Wednesday, after more than a month’s worth of rain fell in less than 24 hours in some areas. The floods, after heavy rain started Monday, were some of the country’s worst in decades.

The death toll is expected to rise as some people are still missing, and more rain is forecast.

Villages in the region hit hardest, Valencia, were submerged and roads turned into powerful, muddy rivers. Videos shared online by residents and emergency services showed cars piling up as they were swept away by rushing water. In one, a woman and her dog are lifted to safety from neck-high waters by a helicopter crew.

Where are the floods?

The floods were worst in eastern and southern Spain, including in areas that often see autumn rains. But some residents said they were shocked by the amount of rainfall this week.

The vast majority of the people who have been reported killed were in Valencia, a coastal region that includes the city of the same name. The city of Valencia, a popular tourist destination, reported considerable damage, with flooding on major roads and in the subway system.

Other locations that were severely affected were Cheste, a traditional farming village; the mountain village of Barx and the villages of Utiel and Carcaixent.

Did climate change play a role?

Meteorologists said that the rainfall was likely the result of a sudden cold drop, known in Spanish as a “gota fría.” That happens when cold air moves over the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea, allowing the hotter, moister air at the surface to rise quickly and produce robust rain clouds. A storm system pushed the moisture-rich clouds into Spain.

Estimating the influence of climate change on any single flood event requires further scientific analysis, but scientists have said that global warming is making storms in many regions more intense. Warmer air holds, and releases, more water.

The Mediterranean is also getting hotter, hitting its highest ever recorded temperature in August.

Scientists convened by the United Nations have found no consistent trend in the way global warming was affecting extreme rainfall in the Mediterranean region, which includes Southern Europe and North Africa. Climate models indicate, however, that if nations allow global warming to worsen in the coming decades, downpours in the region will most likely become heavier and more frequent.

What damage have the floods caused?

The death toll jumped dramatically throughout the day on Wednesday. More people are still missing, but the authorities in Valencia could not give an exact figure. Residents were urged not to travel in the area.

It is difficult to assess the damage to homes, roads and other infrastructure as rescuers struggle to reach some affected areas, but it is clear that it is extensive.

Videos showed some bridges were washed away, and dozens of roads were left impassable, according to Spain’s traffic authority. Some train tracks were damaged and many homes were completely flooded or destroyed.

About 155,000 customers lost electricity across Valencia, according to an energy provider there. Damage to roads and bridges left rescuers struggling to reach some areas, officials said.

There were also concerns that the disaster could seriously affect agriculture in a region that is a major producer of fruits and vegetables, including Valencia’s famous oranges.

José Bautista and Raymond Zhong contributed reporting.

The Israeli military widened its campaign against the militant group Hezbollah on Wednesday, launching airstrikes around the eastern Lebanese city of Baalbek and forcing large numbers of people to flee.

Israel’s strikes against Hezbollah, initially focused on smaller, border villages in the south, are expanding beyond the country’s periphery to port towns and urban centers where the group has supporters, including Baalbek, Tyre and Sidon. Famed for its towering Roman ruins, Baalbek, which had a population of about 80,000 people, had largely been spared Israeli bombardment until recent days.

“People are panicking,” said Ibrahim Bayan, a mayoral deputy in Baalbek, adding that about a dozen strikes had landed in or around the city since Israel issued its evacuation warnings on Wednesday. The Israeli military said it struck fuel depots belonging to Hezbollah, stocked with fuel supplied by Iran.

Against that backdrop of violence, William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, and two top White House officials are making a renewed diplomatic push to reach temporary cease-fire deals between Israel, Hezbollah and Hezbollah’s ally in Gaza, Hamas. Mr. Burns is expected to be in Cairo on Thursday for talks with Egyptian officials, aimed at refining a proposal to secure the release of hostages held in Gaza, according to a U.S. official and another person briefed on the talks.

Additionally, the White House officials Brett McGurk, who has been deeply involved in cease-fire talks, and Amos Hochstein, who has taken the lead on the Lebanon talks, will visit Israel on Thursday.

Israel is pushing for an arrangement in which Hezbollah would be given several weeks to withdraw its forces from the Israel-Lebanon border, allowing Lebanon’s official army — a weak force with little to no capacity to defend the country’s borders — to fill the void, according to two officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. Israel also wants to be guaranteed the right to invade Lebanon if Hezbollah does not withdraw fast enough, the two officials said.

Hezbollah’s new leader, Naim Qassem, suggested on Wednesday he was open to finding terms for a truce, but was far from agreeing to Israel’s demands. “If the Israelis decide to stop the aggression, we say we accept, but with the conditions that we see as appropriate and suitable,” he said in a prerecorded speech, his first as the group’s leader.

His warnings that Hezbollah would keep fighting came alongside Israel’s to Lebanese civilians. In a statement posted online on Wednesday, Avichay Adraee, an Israeli military spokesman, posted a map showing Baalbek and two neighboring towns as part of a danger zone marked in red, with three authorized evacuation routes.

“The I.D.F. will act forcefully against Hezbollah interests within your city and villages and does not intend to harm you,” Mr. Adraee said. “For your safety, you must evacuate your homes immediately and move outside the city and villages.”

Two days earlier, Israeli airstrikes killed at least 60 people in the Bekaa district, which includes the city and its rural hinterland, Lebanese officials said. Lebanon’s health ministry said at least 58 others were injured in the attacks.

The farmland and villages around the city of Baalbek have been hit by airstrikes repeatedly in recent weeks, leaving many small towns largely deserted. Mr. Bayan, the mayoral deputy, said this month that about two-thirds of the residents in the city itself had left their homes out of fear.

Mr. Bayan said that in the wake of Israel’s warnings, residents filled the roads, throwing their valuables into plastic bags, locking their houses and shuttering their shop doors. As people crammed into cars, they shouted to each other to determine the safest way to leave the city.

Others opted to remain in the city, unsure where they would go or how they would get there.

“Gas stations are closed, but even if they were open, people don’t have money to fill up their cars’ tanks,” said Mahmoud Zikra, a resident of Baalbek who remained home. “There are no vans or taxis — even if they were available no one can afford to hire them.”

The warning from Israel’s military included a village in Baalbek’s southern suburbs that connects the city to the region’s main highway, cutting off a standard route for residents trying to leave the valley.

Fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah continued elsewhere in Lebanon. On Wednesday, the Israeli military said it had struck more than 100 sites across the country in the previous 24 hours, including a rocket launch site used in a deadly strike on the Israeli town of Ma’alot-Tarshiha on Tuesday. It also said it had killed a large number of Hezbollah fighters in what it called “limited, localized, targeted raids.”

Mr. Adraee said one of the fighters killed by Israeli forces was Mustafa Ahmed Shehadi, whom he called a prominent commander in the group’s elite Radwan Force. Hezbollah did not comment on the claim.

On Tuesday night, an Israeli airstrike killed at least 10 people in the coastal city of Sidon in southern Lebanon, according to a report by the country’s national news agency. It said the strike injured at least 36 others. Until recently, attacks on Sidon, one of Lebanon’s largest cities, and the areas around it, had been rare.

Hezbollah said its forces had battled Israeli troops recently near the border town of Kfar Kila and the mountain town of Khiam, the former site of a prison camp run by allies of Israel during its two-decade occupation of southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s claims could not be independently verified. The national news agency reported that Israeli soldiers near Khiam were “attempting to infiltrate the town under heavy fire” on Wednesday and that Israel’s air force had conducted multiple raids on the area.

Andrea Tenenti, the spokesman for U.N. peacekeepers in Lebanon, told reporters on Wednesday that the conflict areas in southern Lebanon “are becoming much more dangerous” as shelling and airstrikes increase. He said the peacekeeping force, known as UNIFIL, was trying to help residents but that thousands of people were “stuck in villages without access to the basic needs.”

Eager to avert even more destruction in Gaza, as well, the international negotiators are trying to work on a smaller, simpler proposal that could prod both Israel and Hamas to soften their positions and resume bargaining in earnest.

But many officials in Washington remain pessimistic that either Hamas or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel would accept any terms in the near future, each for their own reasons.

Some Hamas leaders believe that the war is on the cusp of expanding further, fulfilling the hopes of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, according to U.S. officials. And Mr. Netanyahu, others say, is unlikely to make key concessions until after the U.S. presidential election, convinced that a Trump administration might revise the American approach to the conflict.

Jacob Roubai, Hwaida Saad, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Farnaz Fassihi and Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting.

U.S. airstrikes hit several Islamic State camps in the Syrian desert on Monday, killing up to 35 of the group’s operatives, the United States Central Command said in a statement on Wednesday.

The strikes targeted multiple senior leaders in the early evening, the statement said, and there were no known civilian casualties. U.S. officials did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the identities of the officials targeted.

The United States has dispatched warships and air defense systems to the region, where Israel is at war with Hezbollah and Hamas, backed by Iran, and Iran and Israel have exchanged blows directly. Syria, allied with Iran and Hezbollah, has also been entangled in the conflict, adding to international unease about the already unstable region.

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When senior Saudi officials took the podium this week at the kingdom’s glitzy annual investment forum, there was barely a mention of the war unsettling the Middle East for more than a year now.

Instead, at the forum nicknamed “Davos of the Desert,” Gulf leaders sought to reassure the gathered foreign investors and policymakers that the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon will not threaten business as usual with the region’s economic powerhouses.

While the Gulf has so far been spared direct involvement in the hostilities, there are fears that a further escalation could seriously impede the region’s plans to diversify its economies. The Gulf states worry that they cannot thrive in a region marked by persistent conflict, especially one that threatens to engulf Iran — the state backing many of the groups now fighting Israel.

Khalid Al-Falih, the Saudi investment minister, only obliquely referred to the war when he addressed the conference on Tuesday, mentioning human suffering and disruptions to shipping in the Red Sea. But “the tailwinds are much stronger than the headwinds,” he said of the Gulf’s economic prospects.

Saudi Arabia, under the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has set out in recent years to diversify its economy away from near-total reliance on oil, knowing that even its vast resources are finite. At the same time, the crown prince has loosened the country’s tight social and cultural strictures.

And a few years before the latest war broke out with the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, the United Arab Emirates normalized relations with Israel — a move that many observers saw as motivated, at least in part, by the desire to remove obstacles from the path toward economic development in the Gulf.

Saudi Arabia appeared to be on course to do the same in the period leading up to the outbreak of war, but the hostilities halted that progress, at least for now.

“Notwithstanding the regional war ensuing, the Gulf political elites, in particular in Saudi Arabia, need to project that they are open for business,” said Aziz Alghashian, director of research at the Observer Research Foundation Middle East, a think tank.

“Restructuring the economy is not a matter of preference or desire, but the Saudis are considering the restructuring of the economy as an existential matter,” he added. “They need to make sure regional turmoil does not hinder these economic ambitions.”

The Gulf nations realize that they cannot pursue their ambitious national development plans without the West, which in turn recognizes them, particularly Saudi Arabia, as vital partners, despite qualms about their human rights records. Two years after vowing to treat the kingdom as a “pariah” following the murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, President Biden paid a cordial visit there in 2022, a tacit concession that Saudi Arabia is too important to shun.

The 3-day Future Investment Initiative (FII) forum, the flagship Saudi economic conference now underway, draws thousands of businesspeople every year who appeal to Saudi investors for start-up capital, advisory work or other sources of funding and employment.

This year, David M. Solomon, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, and Larry Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock, are among the featured speakers.

The attendees gathered at the lavish Ritz Carlton hotel in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, its grand marble lobby adorned with elaborate chandeliers. It is the same hotel that was converted, temporarily, into a 5-star prison in 2017 when more than 200 wealthy Saudis, including members of the royal family, were detained in what the government called an anti-corruption campaign.

The opening ceremony of the forum featured a spectacular light show and performances by opera singers flown in from South Africa.

The conference began on Tuesday with a keynote address from Yasir Al-Rumayyan, who oversees the $925 billion Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The next high-profile Saudi speaker was Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the kingdom’s energy minister. Neither mentioned the regional war nor the Israel-Palestinian conflict directly in their speeches.

Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of the oil-producing countries of OPEC, is trying to manage the market at a difficult time when oil prices have fallen well below the figure needed to balance the government budget.

Some foreign investors in the past were hesitant to do business with Saudi Arabia because laws governing business did not align with international standards. But in August, the kingdom made efforts to address those qualms with legal reforms that put foreign and local investors on equal footing and with changes to labor laws to address dispute resolution procedures.

While Gulf states Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have all worked to improve relations with their longtime rival Iran, they still depend heavily on the United States for security and defense.

Bader Al-Saif, an assistant history professor at Kuwait University, said that the Gulf states have been forced to contend with their limited power and influence despite having shouldered diplomatic and humanitarian efforts regarding the war on Gaza. The tiny, energy-rich Gulf emirate of Qatar, in particular, has been a leading force in diplomacy to try to end the war.

“We know our limits,” Mr. Al-Saif said, referring to Gulf frustration with a White House that hasn’t been able to contain regional strife.

The region’s rulers, said Anna Jacobs, a senior Gulf analyst for the International Crisis Group, aim to present the Gulf to the world as “a bustling hub for business, tourism, technology, innovation, sports, fashion, you name it.”

Could it be a scrap of Alexander the Great’s clothing?

A fragile piece of purple-and-white fabric, frayed over more than two millenniums, that was found in one of a series of tombs in northern Greece decades ago is at the center of a new claim ruffling feathers in the country’s archaeological community.

The debate erupted this month after Antonis Bartsiokas, a paleoanthropologist at Democritus University of Thrace, published a paper arguing that one of the tombs, believed up to now to house the remains and treasures of Alexander’s father, actually held items belonging to Alexander the Great himself and his half brother. That included a purple chiton, or tunic.

The claim challenges the work of one Greece’s most renowned archaeologists, Manolis Andronicos, who led the discovery of the tomb in 1977. Mr. Andronicos, who died in 1992, had asserted that the tomb and artifacts belonged to the father, Philip II of Macedon, whose military victories united ancient Greece and laid the foundation for his son’s conquests from Egypt to India.

Mr. Bartsiokas, who specializes in the microanalysis of fossils, instead believes it was Alexander’s half brother, Arrhidaeus, or Philip III, who was buried in the tomb, along with some of Alexander’s possessions, including the chiton, a piece of purple cotton with a layer of white fabric in between.

If the new claim were confirmed, it could upend long-held beliefs about one of the most important burial sites in Greece. Some Greek archaeologists say, however, that the claim is without substance.

Mr. Bartsiokas said he used new technology and his interpretation of an ancient frieze found in the tomb to make his case.

He also said that a golden scepter and diadem found in the tomb belonged to Phillip III, who wore it after his half brother’s death. Alexander’s remains have never been found, and that centuries-old search makes finding objects linked to him even more significant.

At the center of his argument are the type and color of the fabric — purple cotton — preciously rare in Greece in the fourth century B.C., when Alexander lived. But it was beloved by wealthy Persian royals, whom Alexander subdued when he conquered Persia.

Layers of white, dyed with another ore favored by the Persian elite, is further proof, the paper argued. Mr. Bartsiokas also pointed to a frieze painted on the walls of the tomb that depicts a hunting scene of the Macedonian elite, which he believes features Alexander at the center wearing what appears to be a purple chiton.

The royal tombs, discovered in 1977 outside the town of Vergina, are part of an ancient city complex that was once the capital of one of antiquity’s most expansionist kingdoms, Macedon. Mr. Andronicos, the archaeologist, was widely credited with finding the final resting place of Phillip II.

In a written response to The Times, when asked to comment on the critics of his paper, Mr. Bartsiokas said: “They will have objections without providing any adverse evidence as they have done so far. Stubbornness dies hard.”

Mr. Bartsiokas also accused the late Mr. Andronicos of having suppressed evidence of artifacts that originated from a period a generation later, which he says would debunk the claim that the tomb belonged to Phillip II.

This is not the first time Mr. Bartsiokas’ take on the tombs has riled Greece’s archaeology community.

In 2000, he argued that the remains found in the tomb could not belong to Phillip II, drawing a line between the old king’s known injuries and evidence on the bones. Many Greek archaeologists dismissed him then, and are doing so again.

“There’s fertile ground for speculation, but such discussions are baseless,” Stella Drougou, emeritus professor of classical archaeology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, told the Greek newspaper ProtoThema. Ms. Drougou, who led the excavation of the tombs after Mr. Andronicos’ death, added that Mr. Bartsiokas’ theories ran counter to data collected during excavations. Ms. Drougou did not respond to a request for comment.

Verifying ancient ruins and artifacts can be extremely difficult. For a figure like Alexander, who believed himself to be the son of a god and was wrapped in mythology even during his lifetime, that task is all the more difficult.

James Romm, a professor of classics at Bard College, said he believed that Mr. Bartsiokas’ theories could be legitimate. The resistance to his theories stems from “a combination of reverence for Philip II and reverence for Andronicus,” said Mr. Romm, who is the author of “Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire.”

Mr. Bartsiokas, though, may have undermined his own theory through his reading of the crumbling frieze in the tomb, he said. Some experts don’t think it is Alexander at its center.

“Although he may have very legitimate claims about the garment, he also layers them with other claims, for example, about the frieze that are harder to defend,” Mr. Romm said.