Despite a U.S. deadline to allow more aid into Gaza, Israel was still letting significantly less food and supplies into the territory than in the months before the warning, according to official Israeli figures.

In an Oct. 13 letter signed by Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, the Biden administration gave Israel 30 days to increase the flow of aid or face a possible cutoff in military assistance. It warned that aid shipments into Gaza in September had reached their lowest level at any time since the early months of the war.

More trucks began to enter Gaza in the past several weeks, and in the days before the American deadline, Israel announced a handful of policy changes. But the total amount of aid and commercial goods into Gaza since Oct. 13 has been substantially lower than what the Biden administration had demanded, and far lower than it was even in September.

Despite that, the Biden administration said on Tuesday it did not plan to follow through on its threat to cut military assistance after the deadline expired.

Vedant Patel, a State Department spokesman, said on Tuesday that Israel had instituted important changes but that “there needs to be more progress.” He added that the administration had not assessed Israel to be in violation of U.S. law.

The sharp decline in the entry of food, medical supplies and other necessities coincided with an Israeli decision in early October to block commerce into the territory, arguing that Hamas was profiting off the trade. Israel recently launched a major offensive against Hamas in North Gaza that has driven tens of thousands from their homes.

Israeli officials say they do not restrict the amount of humanitarian aid that can enter Gaza and argue that aid agencies should be doing more. But the Israeli decision to bar commercial goods was a blow.

According to data made publicly available by the Israeli military, the amount of what it calls “humanitarian goods” entering Gaza — including donated aid and commercial goods sold in markets — fell to 52,000 metric tons from Oct. 1 through Nov. 10 from about 87,000 metric tons in the month of September.

“Things were looking much better,” said Muhannad Hadi, a top United Nations relief official in Jerusalem. “But now, suddenly, everything has collapsed.”

A United Nations-backed panel warned last week that famine was imminent in the northern Gaza Strip, saying that 13 months of war had created “an imminent and substantial likelihood of famine” because of the “rapidly deteriorating situation in the Gaza Strip.” Israel has criticized that report as based on “partial, biased data and superficial sources.”

Before Israel’s latest offensive in the north, Gazans across the enclave had begun to see nearly forgotten luxuries like fresh fruit and frozen chicken appear in local markets, albeit at inflated prices, mostly imported by businessmen in Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Ayed Abu Ramadan, who leads the Gaza Chamber of Commerce, recalled that a pound of apples could cost as little as $1.60 in late September. But when Israel halted the flow of commercial goods, the markets quickly emptied.

“Now, almost nothing is left,” he said. “And anything that remains is mind-bogglingly expensive.”

Israel has not offered a public explanation for the ban on commercial goods. But an Israeli official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity to comply with Israeli policy, said the authorities banned trade with Gaza because Hamas had been making money by extorting Palestinian importers. Hamas has denied those claims in the past.

Israel has decimated Hamas’s rule in Gaza, but Israel’s soldiers do not enforce law and order. As the price of goods has skyrocketed, so has the profit to be made by pillaging aid convoys, with trucks that ferry valuable commodities emerging as a key target for organized gangs, according to Israeli officials, aid organizations and Gazan civilians and businessmen.

Israeli forces sometimes target Hamas militants seeking to divert aid, but they do not conduct military operations against criminal gangs, the Israeli official said.

Izzat Aqel, a Gazan businessman with a trucking company, said his drivers were increasingly unwilling to work the perilous routes. This month, one of his convoys in southern Gaza was attacked by armed men who shot out the wheels of the vehicles, forcing them to grind to a halt, before stripping them of their aid, he said.

With no way forward, what little aid has entered the Gaza Strip is often stuck at crossings into the enclave.

Aid officials and many donor governments, among them the United States, have blamed Israel for putting up obstacles to providing aid, including by blocking essential items and imposing a byzantine assortment of security restrictions at nearly every stage of the process. Delays have also come from Egypt, where some of the aid is collected before being sent on to Gaza.

In a statement last month, the Israeli military said it “does not restrict the entry of civilian supplies” into Gaza, but requires permits for items that it considers “dual use,” civilian products and supplies that it says can also be used for military purposes, “given Hamas’s deliberate diversion of such goods from civilian to military applications.”

In its Oct. 13 letter, the Biden administration asked Israel to take 16 concrete steps in Gaza, including enabling the entry of at least 350 aid trucks per day. It also called for Israel to remove restrictions, including rules about what kinds of trucks can be used to deliver aid and what items are considered dual use; and to ensure that humanitarian groups have “continuous access” to northern Gaza.

Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin wrote that Israel had managed to facilitate the vaccination of more than 560,000 children in Gaza against polio. Israeli had “recently demonstrated,” it said, “what is possible and necessary to ensure” civilians receive assistance.

Israel had fulfilled some of the American demands, including opening a new border crossing at Kissufim, in central Gaza, on Tuesday for the first time since 2005. It also expanded an Israeli-designated humanitarian zone in central Gaza, another U.S. stipulation meant to allow displaced Gazans sheltering there to move farther inland ahead of the rainy winter.

Israel has also admitted some convoys into northern Gaza, including what the military agency overseeing the aid effort said was hundreds of food and water packages on Tuesday.

But Israel’s military still tightly restricts access to northern Gaza, citing the continuing fighting. The Israeli official also said that Israel would not immediately comply with other requests, such as easing restrictions on what trucks can be used, citing security reasons. According to Israeli military data, 1,789 trucks were let into Gaza in October and 961 in the first 10 days of November.

“Continuous access” to the north has not been permitted, and the areas most affected by the fighting have been off-limits to aid workers for weeks, Louise Wateridge, a spokeswoman for the main U.N. agency that assists Palestinians, UNRWA, said last week.

According to an internal U.N. report compiled last week, meat, fish and fruit are now largely unavailable in Gaza. The vegetables available were on sale for extremely high prices: The price of cucumbers has risen 650 percent since the start of the war, the price of tomatoes by 2,900 percent and the price of onions by 4,900 percent.

In interviews, Gazans said they struggled with a lack of goods, but also with the runaway inflation, for which they blamed unscrupulous businessmen and armed gangs.

“We are sitting here day after day just waiting on those trucks,” said Taghreed al-Barawi, 31, who lives in the southern city of Khan Younis. “People say they are on their way.”

Bilal Shbair contributed reporting from Deir al Balah in Gaza, and Lauren Leatherby from London.

Two days after the deadliest known violent attack in China in a decade, officials were working to make it seem as if nothing had happened.

Outside the sports center in the southern city of Zhuhai where a 62-year-old man had plowed an S.U.V. into a crowd, killing at least 35 people, workers on Wednesday quickly removed bouquets of flowers left by grieving residents. Uniformed police officers and officials in plainclothes shooed away bystanders and warned them not to take photos. At hospitals where patients were taken after the attack — at least 43 more people were injured — local officials sat outside the intensive care units, blocking journalists from speaking with family members.

“I’m here keeping watch,” one man, who identified himself as a local community worker, said when reporters entered the ward. “No interviews.”

On the Chinese internet, censors were mobilized to delete videos, news articles and commentaries about the attack. Almost 24 hours had passed before officials divulged details about the assault, which happened on Monday, including the death toll. Their statement offered limited details, and they have held no news conferences.

The response was a precise enactment of the Chinese government’s usual playbook after mass tragedies: Prevent any nonofficial voices, including eyewitnesses and survivors, from speaking about the event. Spread assurances of stability. Minimize public displays of grief.

The goal is to stifle potential questions and criticism of the authorities, and force the public to move on as quickly as possible. And to a large degree, it appeared to be working.

Though many residents of Zhuhai, the city of 2.4 million where the attack happened, were clearly shaken, they said on Wednesday they had not questioned the delay in information, attributing it to the government’s need to first sort out what had happened. A steady stream of people arrived by foot or taxi to lay flowers at the sports center’s entrance, but when officials took away the flowers and told the people not to linger, they quickly complied.

A delivery driver on a motorcycle unloaded five bouquets of flowers, which he said he was doing on behalf of people who had ordered them from a nearby flower shop. He had agreed to spend the entire day delivering for that shop, he said, because many other drivers were unwilling to go, worrying about police interference. As he spoke, an officer told him to move on.

Workers took the flowers to a nearby building, which was shielded by temporary red barriers. “We’re organizing them,” a man in plainclothes told reporters when asked why the flowers were being removed. “You can see our workers are treating these flowers very solemnly.”

The sports center — a sprawling complex that includes a swimming pool, badminton courts and two fields with running tracks — is normally lively, residents said. Parents take their children for walks, retirees dance in large groups and others march in walking teams that have become popular among older Chinese.

On Monday, just before 8 p.m., the loud music that many groups put on was suddenly interrupted by screams. The police said the driver plowed through the gate of the sports center before barreling into a crowd exercising near one of the tracks.

It was unclear how fast he was driving, or how long the attack lasted. Videos posted on X that were verified by The New York Times showed dozens of people lying motionless on the ground. Many wore the brightly colored uniforms of the walking teams. Shoes, bags and other personal belongings were scattered around them.

On Wednesday, most of the sports complex remained accessible but was virtually deserted, with stores inside closed. The area where the attack occurred had been blocked off by metal barriers, with only police cars allowed to enter.

The manager of a basketball training center next to the sports complex said that he and his colleagues had decided to close the center for several days, in part because some of their coaches had witnessed the attack on Monday and were still traumatized. On Wednesday, he led about 20 of the center’s employees in laying flowers at the sports center’s entrance.

“I’ve just been really depressed this past few days,” said the manager, who gave only his surname, Tang. (He himself had not been present on Monday.) “So many people, gone just like that.”

He added of the flowers: “I guess it’s the simplest tribute we can give.”

The owner of a nearby liquor store, who also gave just her surname, Ye, said she had been so shaken on Monday that she hadn’t dared leave her store that night.

The last known violent incident with so many deaths in China was in 2014, in an attack on a market in Xinjiang that left 39 dead.

In the Zhuhai assault, the authorities said that their preliminary investigation had suggested that the attacker, whom they identified by the surname Fan, was angry because of the outcome of a divorce settlement. The police said that they had not been able to interview Mr. Fan, because he was in a coma after stabbing himself.

Officials said they were stepping up security to ensure public safety. On Tuesday night, officials from Guangdong Province, which includes Zhuhai, pledged to pay closer attention to legal, family and neighborhood disputes, to “prevent and control risks at the source.”

Local governments have also vowed in recent months to spend more time screening for people who have experienced “failures,” after a spate of violent attacks, including several cases in which schoolchildren were stabbed.

But officials were also clearly on the lookout for any deeper scrutiny of the Zhuhai killings. Videos and photos of the scene of the attack showed only as grayed-out squares on Weibo, a social media platform. Blog posts urging people not to treat violent attacks as isolated incidents, but rather to look deeper for potential social causes, disappeared.

Essays calling on the government to be more transparent were also deleted, such as one by Chu Chaoxin, a veteran journalist. “We really need to know more information, and we have a right to know more,” he wrote. “Social stability and peace of mind have never been achieved by creating an information vacuum.”

Still, those types of voices were most likely in the minority, said Rose Luqiu Luwei, a journalism professor at Hong Kong Baptist University who studies Chinese propaganda and censorship. Most Chinese who do not have access to the uncensored internet are unlikely to have noticed the information vacuum.

“For those who are able to access information, it will lead to continued disappointment and even anger,” she said. “However, for the majority who do not have timely access to information or sufficient information, the impact is minimal.”

Even Zhuhai residents who had already heard about the incident through social media on Monday before videos were removed said that they were accustomed to the gap in information.

A landscaping worker at the sports center, who said he had gone home before the attack occurred, said that he thought many people had probably self-censored in sharing posts.

“The national news departments post. How can people like us dare to post?” the worker, who gave his surname, Yao, said, noting that all social media profiles were linked to I.P. addresses that can reveal users’ locations. Sharing would only lead to trouble, he said.

Mr. Yao was sitting on the outskirts of the complex, watching a video on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, showing flowers that had been laid at the site the night before.

Several hours later, a search for the Zhuhai sports center on Douyin yielded only 14 results, none of which showed flowers.

Siyi Zhao contributed research from Zhuhai, and Zixu Wang from Hong Kong.

Ukrainian officials have said for months that they would not cede territory occupied by Russia in any peace settlement. Now, as Ukraine contemplates an accelerated timetable for negotiations pushed by President-elect Donald J. Trump, it is putting at least as much importance on obtaining security guarantees as on where an eventual cease-fire line might fall.

With Ukrainian forces steadily losing ground in the east, two senior officials said that defending Ukraine’s interests in potential talks would hinge not on territorial boundaries, which are likely to be determined by the fighting, but on what assurances are in place to make a cease-fire hold.

“Talks should be based on guarantees,” said Roman Kostenko, the chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament’s Defense and Intelligence Committee. “For Ukraine, nothing is more important.”

A senior Ukrainian official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations, was more direct. “The territorial question is extremely important, but it’s still the second question,” the official said, “The first question is security guarantees.”

Ukraine sets its borders based on its 1991 declaration of independence. Russia has since gained control of about 20 percent of Ukrainian land, but Kyiv would not formally renounce its claim over any territory under Russian occupation, Mr. Kostenko said.

That appears to be the approach Ukraine is taking to justify any possible deal in which Russia would retain control of Ukrainian land. In October, President Volodymyr Zelensky, discussing a cease-fire, said “Everyone understands that no matter what path we take, legally no one will recognize the occupied territories as belonging to other countries.”

Skepticism about Russian commitment to a settlement runs deep in Ukraine, which had a bitter experience with cease-fires in 2014 and 2015 after sparring with Russian-backed forces along the eastern border. The cease-fires did not prevent more fighting, which simmered for eight years until Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

Officials in Kyiv have been seeking membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a guarantee against renewed attacks from Russia. Western officials have signaled they want Ukraine to join NATO, but not on any kind of accelerated timetable.

Officials in Kyiv have also said that a robust arsenal of conventional weapons — to be provided by the West — would enable Ukraine to quickly strike back, serving as a deterrent to a resumption of hostilities.

Security guarantees, and not land, figure to be the thorniest issue in any peace deal. When Ukraine and Russia held peace talks in 2022, Russia eventually balked at the proposed deal’s critical component: an arrangement binding other countries to come to Ukraine’s defense if it were ever attacked again.

Russia has long said that it considers Ukrainian entry into NATO unacceptable. It has signaled that such a move would be a deal breaker for any cease-fire agreement, while also indicating it will want to keep control of the territory it has captured in Ukraine.

Discussions over a potential settlement have heated up since the election last week of Mr. Trump, who has vowed to press for immediate talks. That’s a shift from the Biden administration’s longtime position that the timing and terms of any settlement should be left to Ukraine. Mr. Trump has been openly skeptical about continuing American aid to Ukraine, and has said he can bring about an end to the war in one day — without saying how.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has repeatedly tried to portray Ukraine as the intransigent party when it comes to peace talks, while hinting at settlement terms that are only favorable to him. Ukrainian and Western officials view his stance as a demand for capitulation.

An immediate issue for any cease-fire along the front is Ukraine’s occupation of parts of Kursk, in southwest Russia, which the Ukrainian military invaded in August. Kyiv sees the territory as a potential bargaining chip during talks, but in Moscow, Ukraine’s departure is widely seen as a prerequisite for beginning negotiations. American officials say that some 50,000 Russian and North Korean troops have massed in Kursk in preparation for a counteroffensive to drive Ukraine from Russian land.

If Ukrainians are driven from Kursk, Russia could accept a cease-fire along the front line by next spring, Konstantin Zatulin, a lawmaker in Mr. Putin’s political party, said in an interview on Monday. “Everything will be based on facts,” he said. “Everything we have is ours; everything Ukraine has is Ukraine’s.”

To some of Moscow’s hard-liners, the points of dispute, including territorial claims, make a settlement by next spring unlikely.

“It will be difficult for us to come to an agreement precisely because even our softest position involves additional territorial concessions from Ukraine,” said Konstantin Malofeev, a conservative businessman allied with the Kremlin.

The senior Ukrainian official said Kyiv would want to ensure any cease-fire line would not hurt the country’s economic recovery after the war by, for example, leaving industrial areas too insecure for investment. The width of a demilitarized zone — a buffer area between the two armies — would also be a key consideration, the officials said.

There are competing factions in Mr. Trump’s orbit who have expressed a range of views on Ukraine. A position voiced by JD Vance, the American vice president-elect, largely aligns with Kremlin talking points. His former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has advocated more robust military support than the Biden administration has been willing to offer.

Perhaps the most detailed clue of Mr. Trump’s views came in a July interview with Fox News.

“I would tell Zelensky, no more — you got to make a deal,” Mr. Trump said of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. “I would tell Putin, If you don’t make a deal, we’re going to give him a lot.”

Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky spoke last week, but neither side made public what was discussed.

Mr. Zelensky has been appealing for support in the United States and European nations for what he calls a “peace through strength” strategy that would shore up Ukraine’s army and potentially improve its position on the battlefield before talks commence.

But Ukraine’s plan is only one of several approaches, including a proposal by China and Brazil and another by Turkey that would address security for Black Sea shipping but could be expanded to include other issues.

For now, Ukraine is losing ground as quickly as at almost any time since the first days of the invasion. Russia has honed an effective if costly tactic of grinding forward through small infantry assaults, trading personnel for land. With too few soldiers, Ukraine has resorted to shuffling troops between hot spots on the front to prevent a collapse of the lines.

In its own plan, called the Peace Formula — widely seen as its starting point for negotiations — Ukraine has laid out 10 demands, including a full withdrawal, prosecution of war crimes and payment of reparations. At a summit in June, at which Russia was not present, those demands were not addressed.

But about 80 countries endorsed three other points in Ukraine’s plan: an exchange of prisoners of war and Russia’s release of civilian hostages; safeguarding nuclear sites such as the occupied Zaporizhzhia power plant; and guaranteeing free commercial shipping on the Black Sea.

Since then, Mr. Zelensky has softened Ukraine’s position, sending the foreign minister to China to welcome a Chinese role in talks and saying Russia could be invited to a future negotiating session on the Peace Formula.

Support for ceding territory in exchange for peace is rising among Ukrainians. A poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in October showed 32 percent of Ukrainians would support such an agreement, up from 19 percent last year.

But securing a favorable settlement for Ukraine while Russia is advancing would be extremely difficult, said Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a Ukrainian former minister of defense. Russian negotiators would be unlikely to settle only for territory their army had already taken.

“Whoever is in a winning position sets the terms,” he said. “It is true for governments or businesses.”

Reporting was contributed by Anton Troianovski from Baku, Azerbaijan; Valerie Hopkins from Moscow; and Maria Varenikova and Marc Santora from Kyiv, Ukraine.

An Israeli court on Wednesday rejected a new request by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to delay testifying at his corruption trial, ruling that he must take the stand next month even as the country is at war in Gaza and Lebanon.

The spectacle of a sitting prime minister defending himself against graft charges is likely to further polarize Israelis, and Mr. Netanyahu’s legal troubles have long split the country. His supporters claim that a liberal deep state is trying to oust him by judicial means after failing to do so at the ballot box, and his opponents have called on him to resign, with some accusing him of prolonging the fighting and the case to keep himself in power and out of jail.

Mr. Netanyahu is battling charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate but interrelated cases being heard in parallel at the Jerusalem District Court. He has denied any wrongdoing in the cases, which center on accusations that he arranged favors for tycoons in exchange for gifts and sympathetic media coverage for himself and his family.

The trial has stretched on since 2020 as the court has made its way through a list of more than 300 witnesses.

The court ruled that Mr. Netanyahu must take the stand on Dec. 2, after having already delayed his testimony once. On Wednesday, it quickly rejected another request, filed by Mr. Netanyahu late Sunday, asking to push his testimony back by a further 10 weeks.

Mr. Netanyahu argued that he was too busy during wartime to prepare a defense, though he has long said that he can be prime minister and on trial at the same time.

The court found that its previous ruling, setting the testimony date for early December, had taken the war and other considerations into account. The state prosecution and the attorney general had argued that any further delay was against the public interest for the trial to end as soon as possible, citing the principle of equality before the law.

“We have not been convinced of any significant change in circumstances that would justify changing the date,” the judges wrote in their decision on Wednesday.

Mr. Netanyahu’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu declined to comment.

Soon after the court ruling, the prime minister’s office distributed a photograph of Mr. Netanyahu meeting in the Parliament building with the partners of reserve soldiers.

The court decision comes as investigators were looking into whether Mr. Netanyahu’s aides leaked sensitive intelligence material and doctored the official records of phone conversations, according to officials.

Mr. Netanyahu has responded harshly to the claims, complaining of selective investigations after months of leaks from closed forums to the news media without any consequences.

“We know exactly what is going on here,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a video statement over the weekend. “This is an organized hunt meant to damage the country’s leadership and weaken us in the midst of a war.”

Russia ramped up its deep strikes into Ukraine on Wednesday with a volley of missiles aimed at Kyiv and a northeastern border area, ending a more than two-month pause in such attacks on the capital, the Ukrainian air force said.

The missile bombardment came as Russian forces sought to press their advantage in both soldiers and firepower across the eastern front. Ukraine’s military on Wednesday reported a wave of aerial bombing targeting its troops holding a pocket of Russian territory near the northern border that was captured last summer.

As air raid alerts wailed in Kyiv around 6 a.m. and civilians headed for hallways or basements for safety, the Ukrainian air force said it was tracking 96 aerial targets entering the country’s airspace. That included missiles, ending an unusual 73-day pause in Russia’s use of the weapons to strike civilian and military targets in the capital.

The air force said four missiles were aimed at Kyiv and two were short-range missiles fired into the northeastern border area.

The city has in that period come under numerous drone attacks. Scores of drones were also used in the attack on Wednesday, the air force said.

Across Ukraine, the past few months have also seen a longer than usual break from large-scale missile attacks. The last major missile attack came on Sept. 3, with a strike on a military academy in the eastern Ukrainian city of Poltava that killed more than 50 people.

Military analysts had speculated that Russia was stockpiling missiles for use after the onset of freezing weather, which can wreak additional havoc in a city after a strike if heating is knocked out and water pipes freeze. The season’s first snowstorm swept over central Ukraine on Wednesday.

Also Wednesday, Russia said that a senior Russian naval officer was killed in the city of Sevastopol in Russian-occupied Crimea after a bomb planted under his car exploded.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, which is responsible for investigating serious crimes, said it was considering the death as an act of terrorism. It did not name the officer.

An official at Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, the S.B.U., speaking about clandestine operations on the condition of anonymity, said the killed officer had been in charge of cruise missile launches from the Black Sea, identifying him as Valeriy Trankovsky.

In Kyiv, explosions rang out early Wednesday and the authorities said air defense systems were firing at incoming missiles and drones.

In the attack, Russia synchronized the arrival in the capital of fast-flying ballistic missiles and slower-moving cruise missiles, a common tactic. The Kyiv city military administration initially said North Korean-made Hwasong ballistic missiles, which Pyongyang has provided to Russia, may have been used. But Ukraine’s air force later reported that two Russian-made Iskander-M ballistic missiles were shot down.

In Kyiv on Wednesday, falling debris started fires in the city’s suburbs and wounded one person, local authorities reported. Two short-range S-300 air defense missiles that had been repurposed by Russia for ground attack were also fired over Ukraine’s northeastern border, the air force said. It provided no details on what they targeted.

Russia also launched 90 drones, including Iranian-designed Shahed one-way attack drones.

The pause in missile strikes had left residents of the capital on edge, as they anxiously waited for them to resume. The last significant damage from missiles in Kyiv came in July, when they hit a children’s hospital and a maternity clinic.

On the country’s northeastern border with Russia, Ukraine has been bracing for a combined North Korean and Russian ground offensive after at least 11,000 North Korean soldiers arrived in the area in recent weeks, joining Russian infantry units to create a combined force of about 50,000 soldiers, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, who was in Brussels on Wednesday for meetings with NATO and European officials to discuss Ukraine’s war against Russia, addressed the issue of the North Korean troops. They had been “injected into the battle,” he said, “which demands and will get a firm response.”

The troops assembled by Russia are expected to try to dislodge the Ukrainians from a pocket of Russian turf captured last summer. Ground assaults and aerial bombardments against Ukrainian positions have begun. On Tuesday, Russia dropped 50 guided bombs on the Ukrainian-controlled area, Col. Vadym Mysnyk, a military spokesman, told Ukrainian media.

The missile bombardment of the capital also came as Russia presses attacks in eastern Ukraine, with much of the most ferocious fighting concentrated in the Donetsk region.

Russian troops are now threatening to encircle the Ukrainian garrison in the industrial town of Kurakhove, having reached the eastern edge of the city, according to soldiers, volunteers and combat footage.

On Monday, the Russians tried an amphibious assault on the town across the freezing waters of a reservoir, using small inflatable boats, but were repulsed, according to the 46th Airmobile Brigade. The attack coincided with a mechanized assault. The brigade released video showing the destruction of three tanks and six infantry fighting vehicles. The extent of the fighting and reported damage could not be independently verified.

The Russians are close to cutting off the main road supplying Ukraine forces in the area, threatening large groups of soldiers who are defending the town. The approach to Kurakhove is lined with burned-out cars and the town itself has been steadily blasted into oblivion.

The blowing up of a dam on the northwestern edge of the reservoir, which Ukraine blamed on Russian forces, is now complicating efforts to evacuate the civilians in villages downstream, as floodwaters steadily rose this week.

But even without rising waters, the drones that saturate the skies increasingly made all movement in and around the town deadly, people in the area said.

“They strike anywhere,” said Yaroslav Chernyshov, a 20-year-old volunteer with the charity Children New Generation, who was helping to evacuate civilians in the area. “Civilian cars are just as shattered as military ones.”

He said he recently lost a colleague in a drone attack during a mission to pick up a woman with a 2-month-old baby.

A colleague in a second car was hit by a drone and died, he said. “We tried to resuscitate him and managed to get him to a stabilization point alive, but sadly, he didn’t make it.”

In an unusual move, Italy’s president sharply rebuked Elon Musk for weighing in on Italy’s immigration debate in a series of posts on Mr. Musk’s X platform.

In one of a flurry of posts, Mr. Musk wrote on Tuesday, “These judges need to go.” He was referring to the Roman judges who on Monday put on hold the government’s request to place a group of migrants in Albania as part of a new plan to outsource asylum requests to the Balkan country.

In a related post on Wednesday, Mr. Musk wrote: “This is unacceptable. Do the people of Italy live in a democracy or does an unelected autocracy make the decisions?”

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India’s Supreme Court on Wednesday outlawed a practice widely called bulldozer justice, in which state governments raze the homes and businesses of people — most often Muslims — as rapid retribution after communal conflicts or acts of political dissent.

The demolitions have steadily increased for years in India, and are especially common in states controlled by the Hindu-nationalist party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They are carried out even before the law can take its course after accusations of a crime.

The authorities often cite illegal construction as justification for razing the businesses or homes of political opponents or members of minority communities. In its ruling, the court said that meting out such punishment without due process “reminds one of a lawless state of affairs, where ‘might was right.’”

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