In the months since Canada and the United States accused India of carrying out assassination plots against Sikh separatist leaders on North American soil, a lingering question has hung over the accusations: Why would the Indian government take such a risk?

Inside India, the Sikh cause to carve out a land called Khalistan from the state of Punjab largely fizzled out decades ago. Yet the Indian government still frames the Khalistan movement as a threat to national security — for reasons more mundane but no easier to weed out.

India has repeatedly accused Khalistan-related activists in countries like Pakistan and, more recently, Canada of sponsoring gang warfare, drug trafficking and extortion in India. Proceeds from these crimes, according to India’s government, sustain a campaign of what Indian officials call terrorism in the name of a religious political movement.

“The government of India has sought to project the threat as a wider national security issue, casting a number of domestic political issues in Punjab within the framework of ‘terrorism,’” said Ajai Sahni, the executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi.

But Mr. Sahni and other independent security analysts said that international gangs, guns for hire and other criminals are indeed a problem in Punjab, where the Sikh religious community makes up a majority of the population.

While there are legitimate believers in the cause of a Sikh homeland, criminals have “opportunistically aligned themselves to the Khalistan cause, because in some sense it ennobles them in the eyes of people to be seen as political activists rather than criminals,” he added.

The Indian government defines terrorism broadly, to include any actions it sees as imperiling the country’s security by sowing discord or instability. India has long taken a no-holds-barred approach to stamping out movements it considers a terrorist threat, including the Khalistan cause, as well as left-wing and Indigenous insurgencies.

“The threat of terrorism is used to exploit fear and justify the suppression and silencing of minorities,” said Gunisha Kaur, a medical director of the Weill Cornell Center for Human Rights.

India has long targeted Sikhs with “impunity,” leading some to call for an independent state, said Ms. Kaur, who has written about the subject. But Sikhs, one of India’s religious minorities, hold diverse views on their ties to India, she added, which are often lost in the Indian government’s singular approach to anything it deems anti-national.

In recent years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has led the charge in portraying the Khalistan threat as a national security matter, analysts say. He has done this, analysts say, to burnish his image as a strongman protecting his country — or, more precisely, a Hindu nationalist leader protecting the Hindu majority.

India has forcefully rejected Canada’s accusation that Indian agents killed a Canadian Sikh nationalist leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, on Canadian soil.

But on Tuesday, a top Canadian official said in Parliament that a campaign to intimidate, harass and even kill Sikh separatists in Canada could be traced to the highest levels of the Indian government.

The official said he had confirmed to The Washington Post that the Canadian government believed that the campaign was ordered by Amit Shah, who leads India’s Ministry of Home Affairs and is Mr. Modi’s right-hand man. The official did not say what evidence Canada had.

Last month, Canadian officials said that several Indian diplomats in Canada were agents of India’s foreign intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW, and ran the campaign of intimidation and violence. Canada expelled six diplomats, and India responded in kind.

India’s government has been much quieter as the United States has pursued a similar case involving a foiled assassination attempt against a Sikh separatist named Gurpatwant Singh Pannun. The U.S. government has charged an Indian citizen who it says was a RAW agent, accusing him of directing the plot.

“India’s attempt on my life on U.S. soil represents a brazen act of transnational terrorism,” Mr. Pannun said in a statement. “It’s a stark reminder that while pro-Khalistan Sikhs believe in ballots, India’s government resorts to bullets.”

The Canadian and U.S. cases have provided the push for an independent Khalistan more attention than it would otherwise get, given that it is largely driven by a small part of the Sikh diaspora, Mr. Sahni, the counterterrorism expert, said.

In the past, Sikhs in Punjab have demanded a homeland alongside Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India, calling it a matter of justice.

The separatist cause peaked in the 1980s. In 1984, Sikh militants occupied the Golden Temple in Punjab, one of Sikhism’s holiest sites, prompting a bloody operation by Indian government forces to remove them. Five months later, Sikh bodyguards assassinated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in revenge.

Although Sikh militancy in India was stamped out by the 1990s, a separatist movement remained in pockets around the world. Canada is among the countries where many Khalistan supporters have found a home, and India has angrily accused the Canadian government of allowing Sikh extremists and alleged criminals to operate freely from inside its territory.

On Tuesday, Canada’s ambassador to India, Cameron MacKay, told The New York Times that Canada was “not in a position to arrest people simply because they support a separatist movement in a foreign country,” citing its expansive protections for freedom of speech. “I know that the Indian government sees things very differently and wishes that we that we would do so, but we’re not going to,” Mr. MacKay added. “It’s simply not provided for in Canadian law.”

While it is India’s foreign intelligence agency that has been linked by Canada and the United States to assassination plots, India’s National Investigation Agency — a domestic counterterrorism law enforcement agency — has also long focused on Khalistan figures.

The agency is part of the Ministry of Home Affairs, led by Mr. Shah, Mr. Modi’s close ally. It has described Khalistan separatists as operating within a “terrorist-gangster-drug smuggler nexus.”

The case of Lakhbir Singh Sandhu illustrates India’s anti-Khalistan efforts. Mr. Sandhu, whom the Indian government has labeled a terrorist, is wanted in connection with several Khalistan-allied outfits accused by the National Investigation Agency of conspiring to “wage war against the country.” In January 2023, the agency offered a reward of about $18,000 to anyone providing information on Mr. Sandhu.

In July of this year, the agency said it had arrested an aide to Mr. Sandhu, accusing him of supplying weapons in Punjab for extortion and other “large-scale terror activities.” The criminal acts, the agency said, were “part of the larger conspiracy of various banned Khalistani terrorist organizations to destabilize India by unleashing violent acts in Punjab and other places.”

The Indian government has also disclosed that Mr. Sandhu is on a list that India provided to the Canadian authorities of people it wants extradited. He remains at large.

Mr. Nijjar, the Sikh leader killed in Canada, who was also on India’s terrorist list, was accused of directing extortion schemes and other gang-related activities.

Another factor that makes Sikh separatism a sensitive issue is its connection to Pakistan, India’s archnemesis. Pakistan has aided the Khalistan movement as a way to seed instability in India, analysts say. Some see the presence of pro-Khalistan groups like Babbar Khalsa International, banned in India but with members in Pakistan, as part of a Pakistani strategy known informally in the counterterrorism community as “death by a thousand cuts.”

“Khalistanis have a very robust relationship with Pakistani terrorism,” said Abhinav Pandya, an expert on counterterrorism policy. Mr. Pandya said that although the drug trade on either side of the India-Pakistan border was long established, “in recent years, it has become deeply integrated with the terror network.”

While the Khalistan cause is largely seen in India as a fringe movement with ties to the drug trade, there is some concern among Indian state and federal officials about so-called radicalization of Punjabi youths.

Punjab was once among India’s most prosperous states. But the remnants of the 1980s conflict, combined with failed economic policies and shrinking job opportunities, have unleashed a slow-burning crisis in the state.

Widespread drug addiction is one of the biggest challenges. Although Punjab is listed as India’s 15th-largest state, it accounts for the third-highest number of drug-related cases, according to government officials.

In such a tinderbox, the Khalistan movement could find more fertile ground among vulnerable and jobless young men, analysts said.

Lakhwinder Singh, a visiting professor of economics at the Institute for Human Development in New Delhi, said that generations of Punjabis had left the state, driven by “distress or hopelessness.”

“If youth is not provided adequate employment opportunities, there is a likely possibility that youth can be engaged in social upheavals,” Mr. Singh said. “During the ’80s, the youth in Punjab picked up arms and, nowadays, are attracted toward using intoxicants.”

Matina Stevis-Gridneff contributed reporting from Toronto.

They came by bus, by tractor or on foot. They waded through mud hoping to help clean up neighborhoods washed away by floodwaters that have killed at least 211 people.

Thousands of Spanish citizens made their way to flood-ravaged Valencia over the weekend after the country’s worst natural disaster in recent history left the nation shocked by images of overturned cars and brick homes torn apart by furious water.

The devastation has become a political flashpoint and brought home fears over the effects of climate change. But for many, the most immediate and important response was to lend a hand.

While the military, the police and civil guard officers searched for survivors and cleared debris, civilians joined in the effort wherever they could, determined to help Valencia and surrounding regions rebuild and to help its citizens recover.

On Saturday, a parade of tractors rolled into urban Valencia, a province on Spain’s eastern shoreline, driven by farmers from around the region who had come to help clear debris. “The countryside is once again showing its solidarity,” Valencia’s agricultural association said on social media.

With major roads in the Valencia province closed to vehicles, many decided to walk, carrying brooms, rakes and buckets, according to footage aired by Spanish broadcasters. A sea of people crossed the bridge to Paiporta, a town where at least 60 people were killed and mud still clogged the streets after a river burst its banks.

In urban Valencia, the city’s celebrated soccer club offered Mestalla Stadium as an emergency center where citizens could drop off bags of food, clothes and bottles of water. City officials and volunteers also set up a food bank, serving food along the stadium’s main entrance.

“The image of Mestalla filled with people coming together, arriving to donate products, and applauding each time a truck leaves full of food and basic necessities, will be unforgettable,” Javier Solís, the club’s corporate director, said.

Alongside star players like José Gayà and Jaume Doménech, fans and volunteers sorted and packed food destined for devastated neighborhoods. Candela Reig Moril, an industrial engineering student who lives in central Valencia, helped coordinate university students who wanted to help, and ended up working with hundreds of people who wanted to do something for their city.

“Many of them come crying because of this huge, unexpected catastrophe,” Ms. Reig Moril, 21, said. “The little children have even come to deliver their toys. It’s very touching to see everybody so willing to show solidarity.”

Volunteers have used social media or message boards set up in response to the disaster to find out how they can help. They have offered beds for displaced families or shelter for pets and have volunteered their professional skills, from logistics management to cooking.

Claudia Orts García, a nursing assistant, used a message board to collect food, medication and feminine hygiene products. On Sunday, she and her partner plan to drive from Dénia, a port town south of Valencia city, to the worst affected areas, where they will deliver the donated supplies. Some friends who also wanted to help have asked to ride along. Ms. Orts García said she will also offer medical assistance where possible.

“We will lend a hand in everything that is necessary,” she said.

Amid the rush to help those in need, there was also a wave of criticism directed at the Spanish government. Parts of Valencia were doused in a year’s worth of rain in just eight hours, and some said government warnings came too late. Other victims said rescue workers and the police took too long to respond to the disaster. Dozens were still missing by Saturday.

For Toni Zamorano, who was trapped on the roof of his car for hours as rain fell, the volunteers have become a lifeline. In the town of Sedaví, houses and businesses were completely flooded. Mr. Zamorano said he has lost everything.

Were it not for the volunteers who work from sunrise to sunset, he would not have clothes, food and water, he said. Not only have the volunteers provided the basic necessities, they have also restored his faith in humanity, he said.

“I feel that humanity is still capable of forgetting its differences. Here, race or economic level don’t matter,” he said. “This solidarity makes you feel great, then you close your eyes when you sleep, you remember everything you have seen and you understand the magnitude of this tragedy.”

When a state-funded Polish radio station canceled a weekly show featuring interviews with theater directors and writers, the host of the program went quietly, resigned to media industry realities of cost-cutting and shifting tastes away from highbrow culture.

But his resignation turned to fury in late October after his former employer, Off Radio Krakow, aired what it billed as a “unique interview” with an icon of Polish culture, Wislawa Szymborska, the winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The terminated radio host, Lukasz Zaleski, said he would have invited Ms. Szymborska on his morning show himself, but never did for a simple reason: She died in 2012.

The station used artificial intelligence to generate the recent interview — a dramatic and, to many, outrageous example of technology replacing humans, even dead ones.

Mr. Zaleski conceded that the computer-generated version of the poet’s distinctive voice was convincing. “It was very, very good,” he said, but “I went to her funeral, so I know for sure that she is dead.”

The technology-enabled resurrection of the dead poet was part of a novel experiment by Off Radio Krakow, an arm of Poland’s public broadcasting system in the southern city of Krakow. The aim was to test whether A.I. could revive a moribund local station that had “close to zero” listeners, according to the head of public radio in Krakow.

The station also planned from-the-grave interviews with other dead people, including Jozef Pilsudski, Poland’s leader when it regained its independence in 1918.

Novelty value — and a storm of public outrage — worked to bolster Off Radio Krakow’s audience, which the head of Radio Krakow said grew to 8,000 overnight from just a handful of people after the introduction of three A.I.-generated Generation Z presenters — Emilia, 20, Jakub, 22, and Alex, 23, each of whom had a computer-generated photograph and biography on the station’s website.

Less welcome than the audience surge, however, has been a barrage of abuse directed at the public broadcasting system and accusations that it was sacrificing humans on the altar of technology.

“I have been turned into a job-killing monster who wants to replace real people with avatars,” said Mariusz Marcin Pulit, the editor in chief of Radio Krakow and of niche stations operating under its umbrella, like Off Radio Krakow.

He insisted that it was never his intention to replace people with machines, and that his only goal was to revive Off Radio Krakow, make it more appealing to younger listeners and stir debate about A.I. as Poland’s Parliament discusses new legislation to regulate its use.

The technology used to generate the fake interview with Ms. Szymborska and other programing, he added, has been widely used: Open AI’s ChatGPT, speech synthesis software developed by ElevenLabs, and the image-generating programs of Leonardo.Ai.

But his assurances have done nothing to calm public anger — and alarm that humans are being written out of the script.

Among those outraged by Mr. Pulit’s experiment was Jaroslaw Juszkiewicz, a radio journalist whose voice was used for more than a decade to guide drivers using the Polish version of Google Maps. His replacement by a metallic computer-generated voice in 2020 stirred fury on social media, prompting Google to restore Mr. Juszkiewicz, at least for a time.

He announced recently that he had been yanked again, lamenting that A.I. was “sweeping through the world of human voice work like a giant steamroller. And I can, in my own human voice, say, probably for the last time: ‘Smile beautifully and head south.’”

In a Facebook post, he said the use of A.I. to fake an interview with the dead Nobel Prize winner had left him speechless. “If that is not a breach of journalistic ethics,” he said, “I don’t know what is.”

The National Radio and Television Council, a regulatory body stacked with supporters of Poland’s previous right-wing government, assailed Mr. Pulit, who was appointed by a new center-left administration formed in December. He was “eliminating the human factor” and forcing media to obey “unethical commands and ideas serving, for example, strictly political interests,” a council member, Marzena Paczuska, wrote in a letter to the culture minister.

A member of the government also expressed alarm. The minister of digitalization, Krzysztof Gawkowski, complained on the social media platform X that “although I am a fan of A.I. development, I believe that certain boundaries are being crossed more and more.” He added: “The widespread use of A.I. must be done for people, not against them!”

Tired of being accused of wanting to make humans redundant, Mr. Pulit, the head of Radio Krakow, recently pulled the plug on his A.I. experiment.

“We are pioneers, and the fate of pioneers can be difficult,” he said in a recent message to staff members announcing an abrupt termination of A.I. presenters and their replacement by music created and performed by humans.

Among the A.I. presenters removed from Off Radio Krakow was Alex Szulc, a nonexistent person who had been presented as a nonbinary progressive “full of social commitment.” A biography on the station’s website was later rewritten to delete any mention of the presenter’s sexual orientation after angry complaints from L.G.B.T.Q. activists that they needed a real person to speak for them, not a computer-generated one.

Also gone is Emilia Nowak, the station’s computer-generated “pop culture expert,” who conducted the “interview” with the dead poet. The station first announced the conversation as if it were a real interview, but later clarified that it had been fabricated by a machine.

Michal Rusinek, the head of a foundation that manages the late Nobel Prize winner’s literary estate, said he had given Off Radio Krakow permission to use Ms. Szymborska’s voice for the segment because the poet “had a sense of humor and would have found it funny.”

But he said the interview “was horrible” and put words in the poet’s mouth that she would never have used, making her sound “bland,” “naïve” and of “no interest whatsoever.” But that, he added, was heartening because “it shows that A.I. does not yet work” as well as humans. “If the interview had been really good,” he said, “it would be terrifying.”

Felix Simon, the author of a report published in February on the effect of A.I. on journalism, said the Polish experiment had not altered his view that technology “aids news workers rather than replaces them.” For the moment, he added, “there is still reason to believe it will not bring the big jobs wipeout some people fear.”

For the many in Poland who criticize Off Radio Krakow’s flirtation with A.I., the station’s use of computer-generated presenters, though now suspended, has highlighted a grave and immediate danger.

An online petition drafted by Mr. Zaleski, the terminated culture show host, and Mateusz Demski, a fellow presenter who also lost his job, warned that “the case of Off Radio Krakow is an important reminder for the entire industry” and a “dangerous precedent that hits us all.”

The use of A.I.-generated presenters, the petition warned, “is opening the door to a world in which experienced employees associated for years with the media and people employed in creative industries will be replaced by machines.”

Mr. Pulit, the editor in chief, dismissed that as “fake news,” noting that none of the people who had lost their jobs at the radio were full-time employees.

Mr. Zaleski said most of his income had always come from work as a theater director, so he was not particularly upset when he lost his weekly slot on Off Radio Krakow, which paid only $62 per show.

But he said he was appalled at being replaced by a machine-generated substitute. “I was very angry that real, deep talks and real interviews with real people were replaced with something totally fake.”

Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting from Warsaw.

The patrol begins at dusk every night, as the thuds from nearby artillery echo over the distant hills in southern Lebanon. Some scouts settle into hidden perches on the outskirts of town, keeping close watch on the roads leading into it. Others hop on their motorcycles and roam the streets, alerting the police to any suspicious cars or strangers.

The volunteer force describes itself as the first line of defense in Hasbayya, a mostly Druse and Christian town near the Lebanese-Israeli border. But the volunteers are not scanning for only the Israeli troops who invaded southern Lebanon last month as the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel escalated. They are also trying to prevent Hezbollah fighters from entering the town — and dragging it into the wider war.

The Israel-Hezbollah conflict was once contained to the border region, but has since enveloped swaths of southern and eastern Lebanon, a small Mediterranean country half the size of Vermont. Israeli airstrikes have rained down across the region, leveling beige stone homes and pulverizing villages into rubble. Hezbollah fighters have volleyed rockets back toward Israel and clashed with invading Israeli troops.

Israel’s military campaign has left few communities in the south untouched. Villages in the south where there is deep support for Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Shiite Muslim movement, have been flattened. Other mostly Christian, Sunni and Druse Lebanese towns that do not support Hezbollah have also been hit.

Lebanon has long been deeply divided along sectarian lines, mainly among its three dominant groups — Shiite and Sunni Muslims and Christians. Hezbollah is the most powerful political and military group in the country, representing many Shiites.

While Lebanese people are largely united against Israel’s onslaught, some in southern towns where Hezbollah does not hold sway say they feel trapped in the crossfire between Israel’s firepower and Hezbollah’s fighters. Desperate to shield their communities, some are cobbling together informal defenses of their own.

In Hasbayya, residents have established a neighborhood watch group. Some local leaders have negotiated with Hezbollah to keep its fighters from launching rockets from the town.

Officials within Hasbayya have also turned away Shiite Muslim families displaced from nearby villages where Hezbollah is dominant — a move that risks inflaming sectarian tensions that are always simmering. Local officials said they feared that Hezbollah fighters might be among the families, which could make them — and by extension the town — a target of Israeli strikes.

Locals know that Hezbollah, with its overwhelming military might, could go back on their pledge to steer clear of Hasbayya at any time and the town would be largely powerless to stop them. But for now, Hezbollah is treading lightly to maintain some good will with other sects and religious communities — and Hasbayya residents are doing what they can to deter the group.

“We don’t want any strangers or anyone related to Hezbollah here,” said Ghassan Halabi, the deputy mayor of Hasbayya, told visiting New York Times journalists last month. “It took us years to build this town and it could all be destroyed within minutes. We can’t allow that to happen.”

Sprawled across the foothills of Mount Hermon, Hasbayya is only six miles from the Israeli border. Winding roads connect clusters of houses and thickets of olive and pine trees, as well as ancient ruins dating back to the Crusader period. The town is home to about 30,000 people, mostly Druse Lebanese — adherents to a 1,000-year-old religion — as well as Christians and some Sunni Muslims.

These days, Hasbayya is cloaked in the din of war raging around it: The booms of artillery shells, the buzz of drones and the screech of Israeli jets overhead. When airstrikes hit in the distance, plumes of smoke curl into the air along the green slopes of mountains.

When Hezbollah began launching rockets into Israel last year in support of Hamas, prompting months of tit-for-tat strikes, local leaders in Hasbayya and other nearby Christian and Sunni villages approached Hezbollah officials in the area with a request.

We asked them “not to launch rockets from inside the town,” said Wissam Sliqqa, a Druse sheikh and local leader in Hasbayya. “We wanted to preserve the safety of our residents and ensure they could remain in their homes” and not be forced to flee north, he explained.

Hezbollah leaders agreed. But when the war intensified and Israeli airstrikes began pummeling villages on the edge of Hasbayya, panic took hold.

Worried that Hezbollah fighters might fall back to Hasbayya, dozens of residents volunteered with the municipality police to work shifts on a new neighborhood watch. They created a WhatsApp group for people in nearby villages to flag anything suspicious. The mayor, Abu Nassar, imposed an 8 p.m. curfew, after which all residents must remain inside their homes. After midnight, no cars are allowed to enter or drive through Hasbayya.

Those efforts are trying to fill the void left by the Lebanese National Army, which has never been strong enough to defend the country against invaders. Local officials know that their ragtag efforts can do little to protect Hasbayya against Israeli ground troops or airstrikes. But they hope the scouts can prevent Hezbollah fighters from setting up positions within the town. They can also alert residents in time to flee if Israeli troops do move forward.

“We’re worried,” said Kanj Nawfal, a municipal police officer who oversees the volunteer guards. “We are trying to be careful but if something happens,” he added, his voice trailing off. He wrung his hands, searching for the right words.

“This war is bigger than us,” Mr. Nawfal explained.

The town’s fears are rooted in the wreckage of nearby villages, damaged as the wake of destruction in Israel’s fight against Hezbollah has widened. In recent weeks, hundreds of people fleeing nearby villages flooded into Hasbayya looking for refuge.

Mohammad Fares, 34, arrived in late September from Chebaa, a mostly Sunni town wedged between Hasbayya and the Israeli border. The town had mostly been insulated from the strikes until late September when, around 2:30 one morning, an Israeli airstrike crashed into his neighborhood and killed a family of nine, according to residents.

Hours later, another airstrike landed in the town. Mr. Fares and his neighbors clambered into cars — some carrying more than a dozen people — and sped toward Hasbayya.

“It was like nowhere is safe anymore,” Mr. Fares said.

Mr. Fares, who is Sunni, found refuge in Hasbayya’s high school, which was hastily converted into a shelter. In the days that followed, other families fleeing Marjayoun, a Christian city to the east, flocked to the school too. But local officials closed the doors when Shiite Muslim families leaving villages that are known to have deep-seated support for Hezbollah arrived in Hasbayya.

“Families came and we told them, respectfully, there is no more space in our shelters,” said Mr. Halabi, the deputy mayor.

Mr. Halabi’s misgivings reflect the evolving pattern of Israeli airstrikes that have moved from solely Shiite pockets of Lebanon to also include areas home to mostly Christian, Sunni Muslim and Druse Lebanese, which were once considered safe. While many shelters in other towns have offered refuge to people of all religious backgrounds, strikes on houses and apartments hosting displaced families have stirred fears in Hasbayya that Hezbollah fighters are blending in with refugees, prompting Israel to strike them.

The limits of efforts to keep the town safe were made real last month: An Israeli airstrike leveled a guesthouse in the town, killing three journalists from Lebanese news outlets either owned by or seen as sympathetic to Hezbollah. It was the first strike within the town limits since the war escalated — and stoked fears that it was no longer off-limits.

“We don’t have problems with anyone, we don’t have outgoing rockets, we just want stability,” said Nayef el Hassaniyeh, 59, as he stood on his rooftop on the southern edge of the town one recent afternoon.

From his perch overlooking the mountains, Mr. Hassaniyeh patiently scanned the escarpments across from him. Almost every night since the conflict escalated, the spine of the mountains in the distance light up with the flash of airstrikes — a real-time map of the war’s path.

Mr. Hassaniyeh and some of his neighbors fear the strikes in the Sunni and Christian towns in the distance foreshadow Hasbayya’s fate if the war drags on. If cities where Hezbollah does not have support could be hit, they wonder, what is to stop Israeli airstrikes from raining down on theirs as well?

“This war has been imposed on us. Did we choose it as Lebanese? No. They imposed it on us,” Mr. Hassaniyeh said, referring to Hezbollah. “We just want to protect ourselves. We just want peace.”

Iran’s supreme leader on Saturday threatened “a crushing response” to Israeli strikes on his country, as the Pentagon said it would deploy additional resources to the region in the coming months.

Tehran initially appeared to play down the damage caused by Israeli strikes inside Iran late last month, raising hopes that it might de-escalate the situation rather than pursue a new cycle of retaliation. But in recent days, Iranian officials have changed their tone.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has the authority as commander in chief to order strikes on Israel. In a statement posted online, he said on Saturday that Israel and the United States would “definitely receive a crushing response” for actions against Iran.

His remarks echoed two Iranian officials who this past week said that Iran would retaliate, with one telling state news media that a response would be “definite” and a second saying Iran would launch “a fierce, tooth-breaking” response.

After years of avoiding direct military clashes, Iran and Israel have been locked in an escalating monthslong cycle of retaliation that has drawn in their allies and proxies, bringing the region to the brink of an all-out war.

The Pentagon in late September extended the deployment of an aircraft carrier strike group in the Gulf of Oman to deter Iranian attacks and shoot down any ballistic missiles fired into Israel.

To maintain those kinds of capabilities in the region when that carrier, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, returns to its home port, the Pentagon announced late Friday that a new deployment of ships and land-based warplanes would head to the region.

Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had ordered the deployment of fighter aircraft, ballistic missile defense destroyers and B-52 long-range bombers to assist in the defense of Israel and other U.S. interests in the region.

“Secretary Austin continues to make clear that should Iran, its partners, or its proxies use this moment to target American personnel or interests in the region, the United States will take every measure necessary to defend our people,” General Ryder said in a statement.

The United States has already bolstered its military presence in the region as tensions rise. It sent an advanced missile defense system, called the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, and the 100 American troops needed to operate it, to Israel.

Their arrival less than two weeks ago was the first time that U.S. troops had been deployed to Israel for such a mission since the start of the war last October.

The Biden administration sent key envoys, including the C.I.A. director, to the Middle East this week in hopes of generating some momentum in talks to end Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and its spiraling conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Both groups are Iranian proxies. But those efforts have floundered, and the fighting has continued unabated.

On Saturday, Lebanon’s health ministry said that one person had been killed and 15 others had been wounded by an Israeli airstrike in the Dahiya, a densely populated area south of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway. The previous day, heavy Israeli strikes killed at least 52 people in the central part of the country, the Lebanese authorities said, and seven people in northern Israel were killed by Hezbollah rocket attacks.

The Israeli military said on Saturday that its forces had struck more than 120 sites in both Lebanon and Gaza since the day before, including an airstrike in the Lebanese city of Tyre that it claimed killed two Hezbollah commanders. It also said troops were conducting ground operations in northern, central and southern Gaza.

In central Israel early on Saturday, a rocket strike hit Tira, an Arab-majority town in central Israel, and injured several people. The Israeli military said that three rocket launches had been detected overnight from Lebanon, including at the region that includes Tira. Another 30 launches from Lebanon were detected on Saturday afternoon, the military said.

Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency medical service, said 11 people were wounded in Tira, with most of the injuries minor to moderate. A photograph and a video posted by the emergency service showed the top floor of a building with its walls blown out.

Hezbollah started striking Israel in solidarity with Hamas, its ally in Gaza, after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks last year prompted Israel to launch a war against the group in Gaza.

After nearly a year of cross-border attacks that primarily landed in the border region, Hezbollah in recent months has taken aim deeper inside Israel. The militant group launched missiles at the densely populated Tel Aviv area in September and October. Those were intercepted with no reported injuries or damages.

Victoria Kim, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and John Ismay contributed reporting.

Israeli naval commandos, ferried by speedboats, captured a man Israel called a senior Hezbollah operative in a sea-and-land operation on Friday that marked the deepest known incursion yet by Israeli forces into Lebanese territory during this war.

An Israeli military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in line with military protocol, said the forces brought the man back to Israel for interrogation. The operation was carried out by an elite Israeli naval commando unit, Shayetet 13, which is akin to the U.S. Navy SEALs, the official added.

Most of Israel’s campaign has been limited to aerial bombardment of southern and eastern Lebanon, along with the area just south of Beirut, all strongholds of support for Iran-backed Hezbollah. Israeli ground troops, so far, have been known to operate only in the south.

The commandos landed early Friday along the Mediterranean coastline in Batroun, a city about 20 miles north of the capital, Beirut, according to Lebanon’s state-run news agency. They abducted the man, identified by Lebanese officials as a ship captain named Imad Ahmaz, from a nearby residential building before leaving by speedboats, the agency reported.

Lebanese media circulated CCTV footage on Saturday showing an individual being led away by more than a dozen armed men.

Hussen Dilbani and his wife, Rania, who lived next door in the building, said they had decided to leave the apartment after the raid, having already been displaced twice before, from southern Lebanon and then Beirut. They said they did not know whether their neighbor was a member of Hezbollah.

“I did not see their faces, just shadows and voices. They said they were from state security,” said Mr. Dilbani, recounting how the Israeli commandos had claimed to be Lebanese security forces as they broke down his neighbor’s door at around 2:30 a.m. on Friday. “I thought they came to arrest someone involved in something.”

Other residents in the building reported also being told by the Israeli commandos that they were Lebanese security officers, and said they had been ordered to stay inside their homes.

“Wherever you go, you are not safe,” Ms. Dilbani said.

Hezbollah called the incident a “Zionist aggression in the Batroun area,” but did not confirm that one of its members had been captured.

Batroun, a predominantly Christian city, is not a support base for Hezbollah, but it has been swamped in recent weeks by residents of nearby Beirut who have fled Israel’s bombing campaign.

Israel began an intensified military campaign against Hezbollah in September, nearly a year after the group began firing rockets into Israel in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza. The Israeli offensive has displaced more than a fifth of Lebanon’s population.

In previous conflicts, the Israeli military carried out commando operations deep inside Lebanon to kidnap and kill members of Hezbollah or Palestinian factions.

Ali Hamieh, Lebanon’s minister of public works and transport, said in an interview that the abducted man was a civilian ship captain taking a course at a maritime institute in Batroun, where he rented a nearby chalet.

Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, said he had ordered the government to file a complaint to the U.N. Security Council over the abduction.

Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad, Dayana Iwaza and Liam Stack.

Germany’s three-party coalition government, wracked by infighting and policy paralysis over a stagnant economy, is teetering on the brink of collapse.

It does not look likely to last until the next scheduled elections in September 2025 and could fall imminently over a nasty budget debate that comes to a head this month, analysts say. The main political parties are already laying out their campaign positions, and coalition leaders are barely talking.

The growing rift became more evident Friday evening, when a leaked position paper by the leader of one coalition party called for a fundamental economic overhaul that contradicts government policies, and is meant to cut costs.

The 18-page economic paper was written by Christian Lindner, the leader of the pro-market liberal Free Democratic Party.

Mr. Lindner wants to cut some social service payments, drop a special “solidarity tax” intended to help fund German reunification, and follow European Union climate regulations rather than more ambitious national ones — all demands that his coalition partners are highly unlikely to accept.

After coalition parties lost votes in three state elections in September, Mr. Lindner warned that the coming months would become the “autumn of decisions.” And he has suggested that if the coalition did not work in his favor, his party could quit the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

“The way in which the government is currently presenting itself and also the unclear basic direction — neither corresponds to my expectations of government conduct,” Mr. Lindner said Thursday in an online interview. “The situation as it is now cannot continue.”

The German economy shrank last year and barely escaped recession this year. Consumer and business confidence is low, and the German export model has been severely challenged by China’s own slowdown and by sanctions on Russia.

What may keep the coalition together is the American presidential election.

If former President Donald J. Trump is re-elected, he is likely to pose formidable challenges for European security and trade. It would be a bad time for Germany, a central player in Europe, to be run by a caretaker government with little ability to make major decisions and preoccupied with its domestic politics, analysts warned.

Elected in 2021, the coalition was immediately confronted with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

It managed the initial crisis well, but is increasingly split over policy. Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats have been trying to preserve the country’s generous welfare state even as the economy slowed; the Greens are pressing to fight climate change despite the financial costs; and the Free Democrats are demanding adherence to Germany’s strict constitutional limits on budget deficits and debt.

The three key leaders of the coalition, Mr. Scholz; Robert Habeck of the Greens, the economic minister; and Mr. Lindner, the finance minister, are barely speaking to one another, according to local media reports.

“Lindner wants out of the coalition, he just doesn’t know how yet,” read a headline on Friday in Bild, the country’s hugely popular tabloid.

At the same time, an opposition legislator, Norbert Röttgen of the Christian Democrats, and others have argued that the shock of a Trump victory, and what it could entail for Ukraine, NATO and European security, means that “you would need a German government that is willing and able to lead from popular consensus and a new mandate.”

Germany’s financial and military support for Ukraine has been crucial for Kyiv, second only to the American contribution. Mr. Trump often criticizes Germany for its supposed deficit in overall military spending, and as president he tried to pull thousands of American troops out of the country.

If Mr. Trump is elected and decides to reduce or stop aid to Ukraine or undermines credibility in NATO, a functioning German government is considered vital to any coordinated European response.

For a long time, the assumption was that the government would stay together until the next federal election, especially given the weak performance of the coalition partners in opinion polls. The opposition Christian Democrats are well ahead in the polls and the party’s leader, Friedrich Merz, would most likely become chancellor if a vote were held now.

But Mr. Lindner’s liberal Free Democratic Party, which won nearly 12 percent of the vote in 2021, has sunk in recent polls below the 5 percent threshold necessary to have seats in the next Bundestag, or Parliament. He has been hinting strongly that if he broke from the government over the budget, he could run a new campaign on a platform of defending taxpayers against the big-spending coalition parties.

If he does break away later this month, there could be new elections as early as March.

But Mr. Lindner could also be trying to press for advantage in the budget talks. His own party is divided, and coalition collapses are rare in Germany.

The gap in the budget is under 10 billion euros, or almost $11 billion, hardly a large sum. Still, Mr. Lindner’s choice to reopen an agreement on pension reform has infuriated Mr. Scholz, and both sides have taken strong public positions on the issue that will be hard to pull back. Mr. Lindner objects to the cost, given an aging population and slower economic growth.

Even if the government survives until next September, it could remain essentially paralyzed on key issues, especially on how to produce sustained economic growth.

The government’s inability to agree on central policies is damaging all the coalition parties, said Christian Mölling of the German Council on Foreign Relations. The arguments about policy, “are no longer rational political arguments but look more and more like an emotional, personal thing,” he said.

With Mr. Scholz and President Emmanuel Macron of France so weak, “Europe is completely without a leader, there is no one,” he said. “The most stable government is possibly Italy.”

Germans have reasons to be concerned about their slowing economy, whether it is the crisis over Volkswagen’s plans to shut factories, the break with Russia over energy after Moscow invaded Ukraine, or China’s declining imports. So even if Germany’s economy is in reasonable shape compared to neighboring France or even Japan, that may be little consolation.

According to the latest poll by the public broadcaster ARD, only 14 percent said they were satisfied with the work of the coalition, and 54 percent wanted early elections.

Britain’s Conservative Party announced on Saturday that it had selected Kemi Badenoch as its leader, putting a charismatic, often combative, right-wing firebrand at the helm of a party that suffered a crushing election defeat in July.

Ms. Badenoch, 44, whose parents were immigrants from Nigeria, becomes the first Black woman to head a party that has had three other female leaders — Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and Liz Truss. She succeeds Rishi Sunak, who became the first nonwhite British prime minister after taking over the Tories, Britain’s oldest party, in 2022.

“It is the most enormous honor to be elected to this role, to lead the party that I love, the party that has given me so much,” a smiling Ms. Badenoch said to a group of Conservative Party members after being announced the winner. “I hope that I will be able to repay that debt.”

There is no guarantee, despite her swift ascent, that Ms. Badenoch will ever get to 10 Downing Street. The Labour Party’s landslide victory gave it a huge majority in Parliament and the Tories face at least four years in opposition before the next election is due.

While the Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, has gotten off to a shaky start, his party remains more popular than the Tories, who left voters frustrated and exhausted after 14 turbulent years in government.

In a lively, occasionally bitter, leadership contest, Ms. Badenoch defeated Robert Jenrick, another former cabinet minister, by a vote of 53,806 to 41,388 among the party’s 130,000 or so dues-paying members (about 73 percent voted). She and Mr. Jenrick emerged as the two finalists in a multiple-round contest that left the members with an unexpectedly narrow choice of two candidates from the party’s right.

Ms. Badenoch has vowed to rebuild the Tory Party on more authentically conservative foundations, saying her training as a computer engineer had taught her how to fix problems. She speaks often of “first principles” like freedom and individual responsibility. And she has not hesitated to wade into thorny issues like transgender rights or Britain’s colonial legacy, deploring “woke” ideology and “nasty identity politics.”

In her brief speech, Ms. Badenoch vowed to “reset our politics and our thinking” and to be “honest about the fact that we made mistakes.” But she did not lay out any new policy positions, in keeping with her refusal during the contest to be pinned down on specific policies.

“It’s quite unusual to go into a leadership contest eschewing the idea that you need to put together policies for the party,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics and an expert on the Conservative Party at Queen Mary University of London.

Ms. Badenoch, he said, was also distinguished by her outspoken style and willingness to get into fierce debates over issues. He has described her as a “thinking man’s Thatcherite cultural warrior.”

That suggests the Conservatives could be in for an unpredictable, even bumpy, stretch as the main opposition party. Her predecessor, Mr. Sunak, was a more technocratic, if also occasionally querulous, figure.

And it is not clear, given the size of Labour’s majority, how much Ms. Badenoch can hope to achieve as leader of the opposition, a post that is sometimes described as the worst in British politics because of the dearth of power and shrunken media attention.

Like Mr. Sunak, whose parents are of Indian heritage, Ms. Badenoch’s story captures a slice of Britain’s varied immigrant experience. Born in London to a mother who was a physiology professor and a father who was a doctor, she spent her formative years in Lagos, Nigeria, where her family lived a comfortable life.

After political and economic upheaval swept Nigeria, her family’s fortunes abruptly declined. Years later, she recalled doing homework by candlelight during power outages and fetching water from a nearby well because the taps had run dry. She moved back to Britain at 16, taking a part-time job at a McDonald’s while she studied.

In a recent BBC interview, Ms. Badenoch described her early years back in Britain as a time of little money and low expectations. When she spoke of her ambition to become a doctor, she recalled, people asked her why she wouldn’t be content to be a nurse. Instead, she became a software engineer.

“To all intents and purposes, I am a first-generation immigrant,” Ms. Badenoch said after being elected to Parliament in 2017. In her well-received first speech, she quoted both Edmund Burke and Woody Allen.

Ms. Badenoch presents her British nationality as a stroke of good fortune — one that has instilled deep patriotism in someone who was raised “somewhere where the lights didn’t come on, where we ran out of fuel.”

She has joined calls for Britain to cut back the recent influx of immigrants, though she has avoided the kinds of strict, numeric targets embraced by Mr. Jenrick. And she has rejected his demand that Britain commit to withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, a post-World War II treaty, because he says it obstructs efforts to control Britain’s borders.

Ms. Badenoch’s views on immigration have evolved along with those of the rest of her party. In comments from 2018 that recently resurfaced, she welcomed the Conservative government’s proposal to relax restrictions on visas for skilled migrants. She said she has since changed her mind.

On immigration policy, Ms. Badenoch now says, “numbers matter but culture matters more.” The most important criteria, she said, are “who is coming into our country and what do they want to do here?”

A confirmed Brexiteer, Ms. Badenoch rose rapidly in the governments of Boris Johnson, Ms. Truss and Mr. Sunak. She worked first as minister of state for equalities in the Johnson government. Ms. Truss then appointed her secretary of state for international trade, and Mr. Sunak later named her to head a newly created Department for Business and Trade.

Along the way, Ms. Badenoch has sparred with journalists, opposition figures, members of her own party, and even allies like Michael Gove, a former Tory minister who spoke warmly about her leadership bid.

Ms. Badenoch met her husband, Hamish Badenoch, a managing director at Deutsche Bank, through the Conservative Party when they were both activists and he was on the list of candidates approved to run for Parliament. They have two daughters and a son.

“One day he said to me ‘I think you are a lot better at this than I ever would be, and I think you should go for it, and I will support you all the way,’” Ms. Badenoch told the BBC in the recent interview.

Her ascent troubles some in Britain, who believe that, despite her status as the first Black leader of the Tories, she could set back the cause of racial justice and equality because of her right-wing views.

“The question on the left is: Is this a cynical performative device by the right to champion an anti-woke, Black, right-wing politician to challenge antiracist policies, and therefore will it have regressive consequences?” said Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a research institute.

Mr. Katwala said he preferred to think of Ms. Badenoch as representing a kind of “migrant patriotism” — the idea that “migrants choose the country and the rest of you are born in it and don’t know how lucky you are.”

Ms. Badenoch’s political views, he said, “are very authentic,” and understandable in the context of a life that took her from privilege and comfort in Nigeria to a tough new start and hard-won success in Britain.

“It’s just that her life experience is quite an unusual Black British story,” Mr. Katwala said.

Megan Specia contributed reporting.