The Israeli authorities are investigating a civilian who has been working over the past year in the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and is suspected of illegally obtaining and leaking classified documents to the news media.

The documents helped support Mr. Netanyahu’s reasoning for adding tough new conditions for a cease-fire deal with Hamas over the summer, amid intense public pressure for a deal to release Israeli hostages and end the fighting in Gaza.

The case has roiled Israel, where critics have accused Mr. Netanyahu of torpedoing a deal to return hostages and of prolonging the war in Gaza for political reasons. Key members of his governing coalition had threatened to quit if he made concessions to Hamas.

On Sunday, an Israeli court partially lifted a gag order to identify Eliezer Feldstein, who was hired last year to work as a spokesman in Mr. Netanyahu’s office, as a suspect in the case. Three other suspects in the case are members of the military and security establishment, according to the court, and have not been publicly named.

The investigation has revolved around the publication and manipulation of real and purported intelligence information in media outlets abroad, according to Israeli news reports and to an Israeli official who was not authorized to discuss sensitive information, including the case. The London-based Jewish Chronicle published — and then retracted — a report claiming Hamas was planning to smuggle Israeli hostages from Gaza to Egypt. A classified document that was leaked to the German newspaper Bild claimed that Hamas was trying to manipulate the Israeli public and wanted to draw out the negotiations.

How did this all get started?

On Sept. 1, the Israeli military announced that six Israeli hostages had been found dead in a tunnel in Gaza after being fatally shot by their captors, prompting a surge of mass protests and a wave of national anger and grief.

About 100 people taken captive by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, remain in Gaza. At least a third of them have been declared dead by the Israeli authorities.

On Sept. 2, in a televised news conference, Mr. Netanyahu presented his arguments for a new condition for a cease-fire deal with Hamas: Israel must maintain a permanent presence in the Philadelphi Corridor, a strip of land along Gaza’s border with Egypt. Without that presence, Mr. Netanyahu said, Hamas could smuggle hostages across the border into Egypt’s Sinai Desert, and from there to Iran or Yemen, where he said they could disappear forever.

He also displayed a handwritten document in Arabic that he said was the work of high-ranking Hamas members, which he said had been found in January by Israeli soldiers in an underground command post in Gaza.

The document contained instructions for increasing the psychological pressure on Israel by issuing videos and images of hostages and casting doubt on the Israeli government’s narrative that its ground operation in Gaza would help release the hostages. Mr. Netanyahu said it showed Hamas’s strategy of sowing internal discord in Israel and suggested that the popular protests against his government played into Hamas’s hands.

When did the leaks happen?

On Sept. 5, soon after Mr. Netanyahu’s news conference, The Jewish Chronicle, a British community newspaper, published a report by a freelance journalist. The journalist, Elon Perry, claimed he had obtained Israeli intelligence showing that the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, was preparing to flee Gaza, via the Philadelphi Corridor, to Iran, and to take Israeli hostages with him.

The report cited intelligence gleaned from a senior Hamas official who was interrogated by Israel and from documents seized on the day the bodies of the six hostages were recovered.

Asked about the report in The Jewish Chronicle, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, said that he was unaware of any such intelligence or plan by Mr. Sinwar.

The Jewish Chronicle later removed that story and others written by Mr. Perry from its website and ended its association with him. The incident cast a cloud on The Chronicle, a 180-year-old newspaper whose ownership has been shrouded in mystery.

On Sept. 6, a day after The Jewish Chronicle article ran, Bild published an article it said was based on a Hamas document laying out its plan for psychological warfare against Israel on the hostage issue, claiming that Hamas was in no rush to reach a deal or end the war. Some of the messaging was similar to points Mr. Netanyahu made in his news conference.

The Israeli military issued a statement on Monday saying it appeared that the document cited in the Bild article was found about five months ago and was “written as a recommendation by middle ranks in Hamas, and not by Sinwar,” as the Bild headline may have suggested. The document contained information similar to that found in earlier documents, the military said, adding, “The leaking of the document constitutes a serious violation.”

Critics say the exposure of the purported intelligence appeared to be part of a disinformation campaign by Mr. Netanyahu or by his supporters, intended to dampen the campaign for the hostages’ release and influence Israeli public opinion in favor of the prime minister’s negotiating positions.

Was Netanyahu involved?

Mr. Netanyahu has not been questioned about the allegations and his office has denied leaking information. Many details of the case remain murky because of the gag order.

In one of its first statements about the affair, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said on Friday that nobody from his office had been questioned or detained. On Saturday, the prime minister’s office offered a different version, saying that the suspect in question — later revealed to be Mr. Feldstein — had never participated in security discussions and had not seen or received classified information.

Mr. Netanyahu’s office also accused the authorities of carrying out a selective investigation, arguing that numerous reports based on leaked information had been published during the war without any consequences. It described the investigation as “aggressive and biased.”

How has the public reacted?

Israel has been in uproar over the revelations that seeped out during the weekend. Prof. Hagai Levine, an Israeli public health expert who is active in the campaign to bring the hostages home, wrote in a social media post on Sunday that “the hostages scam of Netanyahu’s office appears to be more serious than the Watergate affair that led to the resignation of President Nixon.” He described the allegations as a “combination of the abandonment of the abductees, breach of trust and the undermining of state security.”

What are the latest developments?

In the first official acknowledgment of the suspected security breach, a magistrate’s court in central Israel on Friday partially lifted the gag order on the case.

The court ruling stated that several people had been detained as part of a joint investigation by the Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency, the Israeli police and the military.

The judge, Menahem Mizrahi, said they were suspected of “a security breach due to the illegal transfer of classified information,” as well as putting sensitive information and sources at risk, and harming the chances of achieving the war’s objectives in Gaza.

In a subsequent ruling on Sunday allowing the publication of Mr. Feldstein’s name, the judge specified that the war objective he was referring to was the return of the hostages.

Ronen Bergman, Myra Noveck, and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.

One brother chose to flee. His siblings chose to stay. None of them escaped the horrors of one of the deadliest Israeli campaigns in northern Gaza since the yearlong war began.

When Israel started its latest operation in early October to root out Hamas militants in the north of the Gaza Strip, the Nasr family were among some 400,000 people estimated by the United Nations to remain. They faced a near-impossible choice.

Staying put has meant enduring devastating bombardment. Hospitals are filled with the dead and wounded. Bodies have been left for weeks beneath the rubble. And it has meant hunger: Rights groups say Israel has imposed restrictions on aid so harsh they could amount to a starvation tactic.

But leaving has brought its own perils. Many civilians now believe that fleeing on the orders of Israeli forces is just as deadly.

When Ramy Nasr, 44, received an automated voice message from the Israeli army on Oct. 6 declaring most of northern Gaza an evacuation zone, including his hometown, Jabaliya, he took the warning to heart. His 17-year-old daughter, Mira, had already been severely injured by a strike in December, he told The New York Times.

A day after he received the message, Mr. Nasr followed one of the many orders Israel has issued in the past weeks — orders so numerous that its main ally, the United States, warned they risk violating international law.

Yet Mr. Nasr, like many of his neighbors, said he feared using the route Israeli forces had designated. To reach it, he would have had to trek a mile on foot across active combat zones inside the city. On top of that, he said, Israeli tanks and soldiers were positioned along the evacuation road, which made him wary.

Instead of following the army route, Mr. Nasr decided on a shorter one that would allow his family to flee to safety more directly, through an intersection called Abu Sharkh.

The decision was almost fatal.

In a video filmed by a resident who had crossed ahead of Mr. Nasr, and which has been verified by The New York Times, a group of people fleeing rush up the road — among them, Mr. Nasr and his family. Suddenly a volley of gunfire and screaming erupts. Mr. Nasr is later seen being loaded onto a truck, his knee bleeding from a gunshot wound. His 9-year-old daughter, Dana, blinks silently in shock as someone presses a white bandage around her neck to stanch a stream of blood running down her checkered pink T-shirt.

“If we knew we were going to be shot at, we wouldn’t have crossed,” said Mr. Nasr, who confirmed that the video showed him and his family. Residents have taken to calling the Abu Sharkh intersection a “crossing of death.”

The Times spoke to five residents who witnessed gunfire as people tried to cross the intersection, and reviewed more than 80 videos and photographs from Oct. 7 to Oct. 9 showing families, including children and the elderly, hurriedly carrying their belongings amid sporadic shooting. It was not possible to verify the source of the shooting.

The Israeli army did not address detailed questions from The Times about the shooting of civilians at the Abu Sharkh crossing — or how residents could have left the town more safely.

In a briefing for journalists last week, an Israeli official said the army had encouraged and facilitated the safe passage of Palestinians out of Jabaliya. The official, who declined to be named to discuss military details, said that roughly 50,000 people had left Jabaliya during that process, leaving about 10,000 inside.

Israel has accused Hamas of shooting at civilians fleeing northern Gaza, or blocking them from leaving, but Gazans fleeing — among them Mr. Nasr — blame Israeli forces for such shootings. The New York Times could not verify either assertion.

When Mr. Nasr told his three siblings who planned to follow him what had happened, his older brother Ammar, who was partially blind, feared he would not survive a similar ordeal. Ammar and two other Nasr siblings decided they were better off staying in the building where they had long lived with their families.

“Their fear of leaving ended up getting them killed,” Mr. Nasr said.

On Oct. 9, Israeli forces twice called the Nasr residence, ordering the family to evacuate. The Nasrs asked for assurances that they could make the crossing safely, explaining that Ammar had vision problems. The soldiers refused.

So the family decided instead to shelter in a building across the alley. Hours later, the building collapsed in a blast. Ammar, his wife and two children were all killed, along with another of Mr. Nasr’s brothers, Arif, and his sister, Ola.

The story of their final hours was recounted to The Times by the sole survivor of the blast, a neighbor named Mohammed Shouha. He had decided to shelter with the Nasr family after his sister was shot dead while trying to make the same crossing as Ramy Nasr.

The Israeli military declined to offer The Times a specific response to the Nasr family’s story. It said that Hamas had a “documented practice of operating from, nearby, underneath and within densely populated areas,” adding that its own strikes on military targets “are subject to relevant provisions of international law, including the taking of feasible precautions and after an assessment that the expected incidental damage to civilians and civilian property is not excessive in relation to the expected military advantage from the attack.”

In satellite imagery taken on Oct. 11, several buildings near the Nasr family home appear badly damaged and destroyed, including the one where Mr. Shouha said they had taken shelter. The Times mapped the buildings’ exact location, matching them to the ruins seen in a verified video two days later. Mr. Nasr’s home appears in the video, showing extensive destruction, with blackened, glassless windows, although it was still standing.

The family’s tragedy encapsulates the agonizing plight of civilians in northern Gaza. Whatever they choose — fleeing or staying — they face a military campaign so ferocious that Gazans, rights groups and some regional experts have condemned it as an intentional effort to depopulate the north.

“We are facing what could amount to atrocity crimes, including potentially extending to crimes against humanity,” Volker Türk, the United Nations human rights chief, said. “The Israeli government’s policies and practices in northern Gaza risk emptying the area of all Palestinians.”

In the past two weeks, two major strikes have killed dozens of people, many of them young children, according to Gazan health officials. The Israeli military said it was targeting Hamas militants.

Many Gazans in the north say the violence is so pervasive as to feel senseless. Recovering the wounded and the dead is now so perilous, many residents and medics say they are often forced to simply leave bodies in the street.

“Whatever moves in the street is shot,” Fatima Hussein, a local journalist who has remained in Jabaliya, told The Times. “There are so many martyrs that medics haven’t been able to reach — they are lying in the streets. Some decompose, others are eaten by cats and dogs. All of northern Gaza is death now.”

Many Gazans have taken to sheltering in school buildings. But there, too, they run the risk of strikes by the Israeli military, which says that Hamas militants use the schools for their operations. Accounts from some residents in central Gaza suggest that at least some evacuees have blocked armed militias from moving into these shelters.

For Mr. Nasr, escape from his besieged town has not diminished the sense of suffering. He and his family have fled to the relative safety of Gaza City — where they still constantly hear airstrikes, tanks and gunfire as they flee from place to place.

In the past few weeks, he has lost siblings and two nieces — their bodies still trapped beneath the rubble, he said. Three of his daughters have been wounded.

Were it not for his children, Mr. Nasr said, he would not want to go on.

“I wish I had died alongside my siblings,” he said. “Those that die are better off.”

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.

Eight people went on trial in Paris on Monday in connection with the murder of Samuel Paty, a history teacher whose beheading by an Islamist terrorist in 2020 shocked France and put the nation on edge.

Mr. Paty was stabbed and decapitated in October 2020 near his school northwest of Paris by Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old Russian of Chechen descent angered by the teacher’s display of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to illustrate free speech in a civics class.

Mr. Anzorov, who was shot and killed by the police shortly after the violent assault, had learned about Mr. Paty through an online smear campaign. Most of the defendants in the trial that began on Monday are accused of driving that campaign, of encouraging Mr. Anzorov’s attack or of glorifying it on social media. They are charged with participating in a criminal terrorist conspiracy and could face up to 30 years in prison.

Two of the defendants — Nabil Boudaoud, 22, and Azim Epsirkhanov, 23 — were friends of Mr. Anzorov and are accused of helping him procure a knife and two pellet guns for the attack. They could face life in prison if convicted on charges of complicity in the murder.

France was hit by Islamist terror attacks in 2015 and 2016 that killed over 200 people. Mr. Paty’s murder heaped more trauma on the country, where secularism and freedom of speech are considered fundamental values, best taught and defended by its public-school teachers.

“A professor was murdered because he was teaching freedom of expression,” Francis Szpiner, a lawyer for some of Mr. Paty’s relatives, told reporters at the packed courthouse on Monday, calling the attack “a defiance of the Republic.”

Mr. Paty had shown the students caricatures published by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo — itself the target of a massacre in 2015 — to illustrate the right to free speech. He became a national hero after his death, while the attack amplified concerns in France about the threat of Islamist extremism.

After the murder, France launched a broad crackdown against what Gérald Darmanin, then the interior minister, called “the enemy within” of Islamist extremism, and in 2021, the government adopted a law to combat that threat. The legislation included a provision inspired by Mr. Paty’s death that criminalizes the act of publishing someone’s private information online if there is clear intent to put them in harm’s way.

The government also promised to reinforce security in schools. But nearly three years to the day after Mr. Paty’s death, another teacher was murdered in an eerily similar attack. That teacher, Dominique Bernard, who gave French literature classes at a school in northern France, was killed by a former student of Russian origin who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and who had expressed hatred of France’s secular values.

The court proceedings on Monday are the second trial in connection with the murder of Mr. Paty, who was 47 at the time of his death. Six former students at his school were convicted last year for playing a role in the killing. Five were found guilty of helping Mr. Anzorov identify and track Mr. Paty in exchange for money, though they were not thought to have known that Mr. Anzorov intended to kill.

The sixth, a girl, was convicted of making false allegations about the teacher. She had not attended Mr. Paty’s class but had falsely told her parents that he had ordered Muslim students to leave the room when he displayed the caricatures.

Officials did not name those former students, who were minors at the time of the attack. But the girl’s father, Brahim Chnina, 52, is one of the main defendants in the trial that opened on Monday.

He and another defendant, Abdelhakim Sefrioui, 65, an Islamist activist, are accused of spreading false claims and personal information about Mr. Paty online, feeding an online frenzy that ultimately caught the attention of Mr. Anzorov, who lived about 50 miles away.

Lawyers for some of the defendants accused of fueling the online smear campaign against Mr. Paty have argued that their clients had never called for his death and had no knowledge of Mr. Anzorov’s murderous plot.

Vincent Brengarth, a lawyer for Mr. Sefrioui, told reporters on Monday that the charges against his client were tied to “political and moral considerations that are unrelated to any actual participation in a terrorist organization.”

“If you are going to apply the law, an acquittal is necessary,” he said.

But prosecutors say that the context at the time of the attack was key. A month before Mr. Paty was killed, Charlie Hebdo had republished caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. That led to new terrorist threats against France and a knife attack occurred that month near the satirical newspaper’s offices — making it clear to the defendants, prosecutors argued, that targeting Mr. Paty online could put the teacher’s life in danger.

Excited chatter filled the classroom as the lesson began. Every desk had a paper nameplate on it with the occupant’s name written in the Korean alphabet, called Hangul. Soon, the students were following their instructor’s lead and etching the distinctive circles and lines of the script in their notebooks.

But these fourth graders were not studying the Korean language. They were using Hangul to write and learn theirs: Cia-Cia, an indigenous language that has no script. It has survived orally for centuries in Indonesia, and is now spoken by about 93,000 people in the Cia-Cia tribe on Buton Island, southeast of the peninsula of Sulawesi Island in Indonesia’s vast archipelago.

“Say, ‘ph.’ Hold a piece of paper in front of your mouth and make sure the paper moves when you pronounce it,” Deuk-young Jung, who has been teaching the alphabet here for more than a decade, told his 40 or so students at Hendea Elementary School, south of the town of Baubau.

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As families along Spain’s Mediterranean coast took to the country’s airwaves to plead for help finding lost loved ones in the aftermath of last week’s devastating floods, the government on Monday deployed hundreds more troops to help with the search for victims, according to the emergency authorities.

Thousands of soldiers and police officers deployed to the region to help with rescue and recovery efforts were stymied by up to a foot more of rain in some places on Monday. Spain’s meteorological agency had recorded about six inches of rain by 11 a.m. in Barcelona and warned that the city could get another five inches later in the day.

The agency also predicted heavy rains in the coastal provinces of Castellón, Tarragona, and Barcelona.

Spain’s Interior Ministry said on Monday that the death toll had risen to 215 people from the floods spurred by downpours that began last week. The disaster has sparked an angry debate in Spain over accountability, with some people accusing government officials of waiting too long to send warnings.

Dozens of flights were canceled and 18 were diverted from the international airport in Barcelona, according to the airport operator. News agencies shared videos of flooding in the terminals.

Rain was also falling in Valencia, the region hit hardest by last week’s flash floods. That could complicate search and rescue efforts still underway there on Monday.

Several main roads remained cut off in the region, and some people were without power or drinkable water.

As a clearer picture of the scale of the catastrophe has emerged, Spaniards have questioned why so many people were seemingly unprepared for the destruction or the violence of the storms.

Spain’s meteorological agency started issuing weather warnings days before the storm intensified and issued a flurry of them last Tuesday morning, when rains were heaviest.

But the regional government in Valencia, which controls the formal alert system, did not send out a text message with an alert until after 8 p.m. that day, when the floodwaters were already rising.

That has led to anger and frustration with the authorities — sentiments that spilled over on Sunday in Valencia, when a delegation of leaders came to visit the town of Paiporta, where at least 60 people died.

Protesters screamed insults and flung mud at King Felipe VI, Queen Letizia, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Carlos Mazón, the leader of the Valencia region.

Some people have accused Mr. Mazón and other regional officials of not acting quickly enough, questioning why he spent Tuesday morning chairing meetings and speaking with unions instead of aggressively preparing for the floods.

Others — including Mr. Mazón — have blamed Mr. Sánchez and the national government for not responding more quickly to the emergency.

The images of the king and queen dotted with mud have shocked many Spaniards. The king cannot give operational orders and has only symbolic power, but he is the face of the nation and has personal influence over Spain’s elected leaders.

Still, the royal family’s popularity has wavered in recent years.

Juan Carlos, the former king, abdicated in 2014 and moved to Abu Dhabi in 2020 to escape corruption investigations. Prosecutors have since dropped the fraud charges, but the scandals that dogged his reign, which include love affairs, have tainted the view of King Felipe, his son, despite his efforts to project a more sober and responsible image.

In this case, some saw King Felipe’s visit to hard-hit areas as more of a distraction than a comfort, even though he stayed to speak with frustrated people after political leaders, like Mr. Sánchez, left the scene because of security concerns.

Some also criticized how resources were allocated: The king and his entourage were able to get to Paiporta even as rescuers and emergency workers struggled to navigate the area.

King Felipe acknowledged the “anger and frustration” in a speech after the incident on Sunday, with mud still splattered on his boots. Óscar Puente, Spain’s transport minister, told the TV channel La Sexta on Sunday night that the visit was well-intentioned, but acknowledged that “maybe it wasn’t the best time.”

The last time Donald J. Trump was in office, the consequences for the Islamic Republic of Iran were disastrous.

As president, Mr. Trump pulled out of a nuclear deal that had begun to reduce sanctions in exchange for Tehran limiting its nuclear capacity. He added 1,500 sanctions, including on Iran’s oil sales and banking sectors, debilitating the Iranian economy. And he ordered the assassination of a revered Iranian military leader, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, who had been designated as a terrorist by the United States.

Regardless, as Mr. Trump runs for a second term, some Iranians say he might be a better option for them than Kamala Harris — or at least no worse.

“Since he wants to be the one to ‘Make American Great Again’ and he sees himself as a man of negotiation,” said Farhad, 34, an English tutor for college students, “maybe he will negotiate.” Like several other people interviewed for this article, Farhad asked that only his first name be used.

In more than 20 conversations with people in Tehran over the past week, the U.S. election and its outcome loomed large for the majority, with many speculating about what the differences between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump might mean for Iran. The conversations were held in the presence of a government interpreter.

Most saw Ms. Harris as someone who would continue the policies of the Biden administration, and Mr. Trump as someone who would make changes and might be the better of two bad choices, even though he has been an enthusiastic backer of Israel, Iran’s self-declared enemy.

They pointed to what they see as Mr. Trump’s dislike of foreign wars, noting that his administration negotiated the framework for the withdrawal from Afghanistan, his recent pledge to “end the suffering in Lebanon,” and his relative openness to Russia, an Iranian ally.

“Iranian people want Trump to win because he will stop the war in Israel and Gaza, maybe not right away, but soon,” said Farzin, 24, who sells cellphones from a shop in central Tehran across from a massive mural depicting an Israeli soldier being handed guns by men in western suits. “He will end the war in Ukraine and Russia and he does what he says,” he added.

Among the chief U.S. criticisms of Iran in addition to its nuclear ambitions has been Tehran’s support for armed groups across the Middle East, including in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Gaza. The focus most recently has been on Hamas and Hezbollah, with which Israel has been waging war following the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7 last year.

Until this year, almost all the attacks on Israel were carried out by the Iranian-backed groups rather than Iran itself and in turn, Israel attacked those groups. That changed last spring when Iran struck Israel. Since then the two countries have been in a tit-for-tat series of attacks that have put the region on a knife edge. Iran last week said it would retaliate for Israel’s latest attack, risking another cycle of escalation.

When asked in a “60 Minutes” interview last month which foreign country was “our greatest adversary,” Ms. Harris said Iran is “the obvious one.” Mr. Trump has said that Israel should “hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later,” referring to Tehran’s nuclear sites after it launched missiles at Israel.

The most politically conservative of the Iranians interviewed in Tehran largely dismissed any difference between the two candidates and the parties they represent.

Ebrahim Rezaie, a conservative legislator from Bushehr and a member of the Iranian Parliament’s committee on foreign policy and security, said: “It is not important who is elected,” and added: “In our political calculations we do not take into consideration who is the president of the United States.”

The editor of Javan, a conservative newspaper, Mohammad Javad Akhavan, voiced a similar view.

But the others interviewed said they believed that whoever came to power in Washington, their policies — whether new ones or a continuation of existing ones — would leave a lasting imprint on daily life in Iran.

“The American election has more impact on Iran than our own presidential election,” said Nazanin, 23, a graduate student in English, who was drinking cappuccino with a friend at a coffee shop near Tehran University, with jazz playing in the background.

“We have seen Donald Trump and we know he will change many policies that will affect us,” she said.

She said that during Mr. Trump’s last term, the sanctions and opprobrium Mr. Trump directed at Iran left young Iranians especially feeling cut off, unable to travel to the West for study or business or even to access many websites. She held up her cellphone and said: “This is all that connects me now to the rest of the world.”

The Shargh newspaper, which is the main reformist newspaper in Iran, has been avidly covering the U.S. election. The newspaper’s Persian site includes a video explaining the electoral college system and significance of swing states, as well as stories on the respective policy positions of Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris.

“If someone here says the American elections aren’t important either he doesn’t understand the American elections or he’s lying,” said Mahdi Rahmanian, the newspaper’s editor in chief. “Look at the differences,” he said, noting that during the Obama administration, Iran signed the nuclear deal that would have led to a substantial lifting of sanctions against Iran. “Under Trump we exited it,” he said.

While Mr. Trump clearly cuts a large figure in the minds of the Iranians interviewed in Tehran, they are less clear on what Ms. Harris represents — apart from the continuation of the policies of the current administration.

“If Kamala Harris wins her policy will be similar to Biden and so Russia and China will join more with Iran and form a triangle of power,” said Saman Taghavi, a business coach who works on marketing for local beauty salons and small businesses.

But, he added, reflecting a widely held view here that Democrats remain more open to Iran than Republicans, “There will be more interaction between our countries if she becomes president; with Trump there will be confrontation.”

Hassan Ahmadian, an assistant professor of Middle Eastern studies at Tehran University, said he was doubtful that Iranians who say they think Iran would be better off under Trump have taken the full measure of what a Trump presidency would likely mean.

“With Trump there are many different layers,” he said. While Iranians may be aware of one or another aspect of Trump’s personality, they are less likely to understand the important but less visible influence of the former president’s advisers, he added.

And, even if Mr. Trump was inclined to negotiate with Iran, as some Iranians hope when they hear the former president describe himself as a dealmaker, it is unlikely he would find a partner in Tehran, said Mr. Ahmadian.

Mr. Trump might want “only a photo with a leader, but there would be no guaranteed outcome,” said Mr. Ahmadian, adding that the Iranian leadership is “risk averse,” given its past experience with Mr. Trump.

Israeli bombardment damaged an already crippled major hospital in the northern Gaza Strip on Monday, injuring medical staff and patients, local officials said, a week after Israeli forces withdrew from the complex and detained dozens of people, including medical workers.

The Israelis “continue to bomb and destroy Kamal Adwan Hospital” in Jabaliya, a densely populated city just north of Gaza City, the Gazan health ministry said on Monday, in a statement it titled “a distress call that may be the last.” The bombardment affected all the hospital facilities, caused “many” injuries among medical staff and patients and prevented medical staff from moving between departments to treat their injured colleagues, it said.

The director of Kamal Adwan, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiyeh, said in an interview with the Al Jazeera that the hospital had come under continuous shelling for at least three hours on Monday. “I can’t leave the floor I am in,” he said. “I was told a few of our medical teams have been injured on other floors but no one can reach them,” he added.

Both he and the health ministry said the hospital was targeted directly. It was not clear what kinds of munitions were used.

The Israeli military said it was looking into the reports coming from the hospital, but could not immediately comment. In a statement on Monday, the military said that it had facilitated the evacuation of patients and staff from Kamal Adwan and Al-Awda Hospital, in Nuseirat, to other hospitals in northern Gaza on Sunday, and provided the hospitals with humanitarian aid. The statement did not say why the hospitals were evacuated.

In the past, Israeli officials have said that hospitals were damaged in strikes on targets nearby, or in attacks aimed at Hamas fighters operating from within hospital grounds or tunnels beneath them, allegations that hospital administrators have denied. Gazans and human rights groups have accused Israel of deliberately destroying the enclave’s vital infrastructure, including health care facilities, which Israeli officials have denied.

Kamal Adwan is one of the few hospitals in northern Gaza that is still functioning, but at a bare-bones level; Dr. Abu Safiyeh said only three doctors remain there. More than a year of missile, bomb and artillery strikes and raids by ground forces have forced evacuations and badly damaged the territory’s hospitals, leaving many nonfunctioning and others with only minimal operations.

Gaza’s health ministry said on Sunday that Israeli forces had attacked the hospital’s third floor, where its remaining medical supplies were stored, causing great damage.

The Israeli military said that an explosive device was detonated on Sunday near Kamal Adwan as a United Nations convoy passed by, hitting it with shrapnel and wounding six children who were inside the hospital and damaging the building.

The Israeli military withdrew last week from Kamal Adwan after a three-day raid during which Palestinian health officials said nearly all the medical workers at the complex were detained and two children died. The military said that it detained nearly 100 people from the hospital who they said were suspected of being militants.

The hospital raid came after weeks of an intense Israeli offensive into three areas of northern Gaza, including Jabaliya. Israel said it renewed its military offensive in the northern part of the enclave to target what it said was a regrouped Hamas presence in the area.

Palestinians who have remained in those areas, as well as the United Nations, aid groups and Gazan health authorities, have said that the Israeli raid was causing widespread devastation and killing hundreds of civilians.

Dr. Abu Safiyeh said Kamal Adwan’s staff had moved all of its child patients and premature babies to the ground floor, which was not equipped to receive such cases. Nearly 90 wounded patients remain at the hospital, he said.

“The military did not call and ask for anything,” Dr. Abu Safiyeh told Al Jazeera. “We don’t know why this shelling is taking place,” he added.

The Palestinian civil defense said in a statement on Monday that its emergency and rescue teams were “forcibly disabled” from all areas of northern Gaza because of the “ongoing targeting and Israeli aggression,” leaving thousands there “without humanitarian and medical care.”

The Gazan health ministry said on Sunday that many wounded people and dead bodies were left in the streets of northern Gaza and under its rubble, with ambulances unable to recover them.

Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting from London.

The State Department confirmed that it was looking into reports that an Iranian-American citizen had been arrested in Iran. The news comes amid renewed tensions between Iran, which has long used Western detainees for leverage, and the United States, Israel’s biggest ally, following Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month.

“We are aware of reports that this dual U.S.-Iranian citizen has been arrested in Iran,” a State Department spokesperson wrote on Sunday in an email in response to questions from The New York Times about Reza Valizadeh, an Iranian-American journalist who rights groups said last month had been arrested and was being held in a Tehran prison without access to a lawyer. The State Department did not respond to a follow-up email asking if Mr. Valizadeh was the dual citizen being detained.

The reports come amid increasingly heated rhetoric from Iranian leaders in the past few days, after the country’s leadership initially tried to minimize the effectiveness of the Israeli strikes on Iranian air-defense systems last month. On Saturday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, threatened a “crushing response” to Israel and the United States.

They also coincide with the 45th anniversary of the hostage crisis, when Iranians stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979, in response to perceived U.S. meddling in the country’s politics, and held more than 50 Americans as hostages for 444 days.

Rights groups said last month that Mr. Valizadeh was arrested around September and was being detained in Evin Prison, one of Iran’s most notorious detention centers.

Mr. Valizadeh once worked for Radio Farda, a Persian-language outlet that is part of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which is funded by the U.S. government. He left the organization in November 2022, RFE/RL said in a text message to The Times on Sunday.

“We have had no official confirmation of the charges against him,” said the media organization, which confirmed his detention.

Iran’s foreign ministry, its permanent mission to the United Nations in New York and its permanent mission to the U.N. in Geneva did not respond to requests for comment on Sunday.

Detained foreigners and dual citizens have long been pawns at the heart of Iran’s foreign policy: The country arrests them on fabricated allegations, often of espionage or other political crimes, and then uses them to extract concessions, like money or the release of imprisoned Iranians, from Western countries.

In June, Sweden and Iran exchanged prisoners, prompting celebrations and also concerns that the swap could validate Iran’s strategy. Last September, Iran allowed five detained Iranian Americans to leave, in exchange for five imprisoned Iranians and the unfreezing of $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue.

“Iran routinely imprisons U.S. citizens and other countries’ citizens unjustly for political purposes,” the State Department said. It called the practice “cruel and contrary to international law.”

The State Department tells American citizens not to travel to Iran “for any reason” because of the risk of “kidnapping, arbitrary arrest of U.S. citizens and wrongful detentions.”

Iranian journalists — even those who are living abroad — are frequent targets of the government’s efforts to intimidate and silence independent news coverage.

Iran ranked 176th out of the 180 countries listed on the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index this year. The group said it was “one of the world’s biggest jailers of journalists.”

Mr. Valizadeh, who had been living in the United States, traveled to Iran in February, where he was detained and questioned at the airport by Iranian intelligence officials and members of the country’s security forces, the Committee to Protect Journalists said last month. He was conditionally released, it added. He was then rearrested, according to the committee and a statement last month from HRANA, an Iranian human rights organization, but charges have not yet been disclosed.

The committee said it had not been able to confirm reports that Mr. Valizadeh faced “charges of collaborating with Persian-language media outlets abroad.” It called on Iran to release him and drop any such charges.

“Iranian journalists working and living abroad should be free to visit their homeland without fear of prosecution for their profession,” Yeganeh Rezaian, the interim Middle East and North Africa program coordinator for the committee, said in a statement last month.

In August, Mr. Valizadeh posted on X that he had returned to Iran in March, according to The Associated Press’s translation, “without any security guarantee, even a verbal one.” He has not posted to X since.

Cassandra Vinograd contributed reporting.