A large convoy of trucks carrying aid was “violently looted” in the Gaza Strip over the weekend and its drivers forced at gunpoint to unload supplies, the main United Nations agency that helps Palestinians said on Monday, calling it one of the worst such incidents of the war.

The agency, known as UNRWA, said on Monday that the convoy of 109 trucks had been driving from the Kerem Shalom border crossing in southern Gaza when it was looted on Saturday. Nearly 100 of the trucks were lost, members of the convoy suffered unspecified injuries and other vehicles sustained extensive damage, the agency said.

The convoy — carrying food supplies from UNRWA and the U.N. World Food Program — had been scheduled to enter Gaza on Sunday, UNRWA said, but the Israeli military instructed it to leave a day earlier “at short notice via an alternate, unfamiliar route.” The agency said that the incident highlighted the “challenges of bringing aid into southern and central Gaza” despite months of attempts by aid agencies to help it arrive safely.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the episode. It was not clear who was responsible for the looting. In the past, Israel has accused Hamas militants of robbing aid convoys to supply their own forces.

UNRWA said that the frequent looting of humanitarian aid convoys was in part a result of the collapse of law and order in wartime Gaza, the growing desperation among Palestinians there and the policies of the Israeli authorities, who “continue to disregard their legal obligations under international law” to ensure that sufficient aid safely reached Palestinians in the territory.

The humanitarian situation in Gaza has continued to deteriorate in the 14th month of Israel’s military offensive against Hamas, which attacked southern Israel in October 2023.

Official Israeli government figures this month showed that Israel, which controls all the crossings into Gaza, was letting significantly less food and fewer supplies into the territory than in earlier months, even as a 30-day deadline set by the Biden administration passed without a substantial improvement in conditions there.

Israeli officials have denied creating obstacles to aid deliveries. They have blamed aid agencies for failing to deliver the aid that it has allowed into Gaza, and have said that raids on aid trucks by Palestinians have prevented proper distribution.

Adam Rasgon contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

The typically congested streets of Beirut were unusually empty on Monday morning. Schools that had temporarily shuttered earlier this fall when the war first escalated were again closed. Many people who had come back to Lebanon’s capital after fleeing to the northern mountains a month ago had headed north once more.

Since Israeli airstrikes hit two neighborhoods within Beirut on Sunday, a sense of disbelief and frustration has washed over the city. In recent weeks, the initial shock of the intensified war between Hezbollah and Israel had given way to a feeling that relative safety had returned to Beirut, as the pace of strikes slowed and the city center remained largely unscathed.

Now that tenuous sense of security has once again been shattered — and a city already weary from two months of war is coming to grips with yet another escalation of violence.

“There is no security anymore,” said Hussein Zahwi, 49. “There is no security at all.”

On Monday morning, Mr. Zahwi stood across from one of the buildings hit in the Mar Elias neighborhood the day before. Wisps of smoke were still wafting from its shattered store windows. The strikes ignited a large fire that burned through the night and blackened the facade of the building. An acrid smell hung in the air. The strikes on Sunday killed at least six people and injured around two dozen more, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health.

Mr. Zahwi had rented an apartment on the third floor of this building with his wife and three children weeks earlier, after Israeli airstrikes began raining down near his home in the southern suburbs of Beirut. The cramped collection of neighborhoods there, known as the Dahiya, is effectively governed by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group and political party in Lebanon that is at war with Israel.

His three children were shaken but not injured when the strikes tore through the building in Mar Elias on Sunday evening, Mr. Zahwi said. But now, with the Dahiya still too dangerous to return to, he was at a loss for where his family might go, and wondered if anywhere was really safe.

“Before I was in Dahiya. Now I’m here. The question is, where can I go next?” he said.

The strikes on Sunday were the first in Beirut proper in weeks, and came amid a new escalation in the war over the past week. In that time, Israel has unleashed its most intense bombardment yet of the Dahiya, hitting the area both day and night. In the south, Israeli forces appear to be making incursions deeper into Lebanon, moving beyond border villages that have been left in ruins.

Hezbollah said on Monday that it had repeatedly attacked Israeli forces near Khiam, a large town in southern Lebanon that Israeli troops have been pushing toward in recent days. Lebanon’s state-run news agency reported heavy airstrikes on the town and the wider province.

Israel’s intensified push on the battlefield appears aimed at pressuring Hezbollah to accept the terms of a cease-fire for Lebanon devised by Israeli and American officials, analysts say. But within Lebanon, it has stoked concerns that Israel may have been emboldened by the incoming administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, whose nominees for the top diplomatic envoys to the Middle East have signaled fervent support for Israel.

Euan Ward contributed reporting from Beirut.

Ukraine on Monday welcomed a decision by the Biden administration to allow long-range strikes inside Russia with American-provided missiles, with President Volodymyr Zelensky suggesting that the first launches would come soon and without warning.

Ukrainian officials have long argued that firing at targets deeper inside Russia would unshackle the country’s military from restraints that have prevented it from effectively taking the fight to Russia.

American officials said the missiles were likely to be deployed, at least initially, against combined Russian and North Korean troops in territory Ukraine has captured in the Kursk region of southern Russia. The addition of up to 10,000 North Korean troops to Moscow’s war effort this fall has alarmed the United States and European nations, who view it as widening the war by drawing Russian allies directly into the ground combat.

The North Korean presence appeared to be what persuaded the White House to shift its stance on long-range missiles after months of resistance.

Mr. Zelensky, in his nightly address to the nation on Sunday, suggested there would be no warning of the first launches.

“Blows are not inflicted with words,” he said. “Such things are not announced. The rockets will speak for themselves.”

The shift by the Biden administration may clear the way for Britain and France to provide similar weapons for Ukraine to use for strikes into Russia.

In Moscow on Monday, the Kremlin said the Biden administration’s decision to allow Ukrainian forces to strike targets in Russia was a major step toward a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO.

“This escalates tensions to a qualitatively new level,” the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters. He accused the Biden Administration of “continuing to add oil to the fire and provoking the buildup of tensions around this conflict.”

The shift in the White House stance will allow Ukraine to use a ballistic missile system called ATACMS (pronounced “attack ’ems”), an abbreviation for Army Tactical Missile System. With a range of 190 miles, these missiles would allow Ukraine to strike military targets that it says would degrade Russia’s military, such as garrisons, logistical hubs and munitions depots that are beyond the reach of its artillery and shorter-range rockets.

The policy shift comes on the heels of months of bleak military setbacks for Ukraine along the front line. Short of troops, Ukraine has resorted to shifting soldiers to reinforce hot spots, leaving the areas they vacated vulnerable. Russia has advanced as much as a mile a day in the southern Donetsk region, its fastest pace since early in the war.

Away from the front, Russia has pummeled Ukrainian military and civilian targets with near nightly drone and missile barrages. In a daylight attack on Monday afternoon, a Russian ballistic missile hit a residential building in Odesa, setting it alight and killing at least eight people, local authorities said.

An attack Sunday night on the northeastern city of Sumy killed 11 people, including two children, and injured nearly 90 others, Ukrainian officials said.

The Biden administration agreed last year to supply several hundred ATACMS to the Ukrainians for use on Ukraine’s own territory, including the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula. The Ukrainian military has since used many of these missiles in a campaign of strikes on military targets in Crimea and it is unclear how many remain in Ukraine’s arsenal.

But Ukraine remained frustrated for months by the White House’s refusal to grant permission for longer-range strikes into Russian territory.

American officials and military analysts have said that firing a limited number of ballistic missiles at targets in Russia would not significantly impact the dynamics of the war but could quickly help troops facing the offensive in the Kursk region.

The Ukrainians could use the missiles to hit North Korean troops as a way of discouraging Pyongyang from sending more; that appeared to be one of the main reasons for the White House’s shifting position.

A brigade commander fighting in Kursk said Monday that he thought the ATACMS could help Ukraine strike logistical hubs, ammunition depots, key pieces of equipment and supply lines supporting the attack.

“The question is how many of them we have and what the supply of these munitions will look like,” the commander said by telephone, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to publicly discuss military operations. Much would depend, he said, on the Ukrainian military intelligence agency’s ability to find North Korean troop concentrations and other targets on Russian territory.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research organization, released an interactive map this summer plotting 225 military installations within the range of ATACMS, including missile brigades, storage facilities, radar installations, airfields used to stage attack helicopters, repair depots, ammunition warehouses and logistics hubs.

A Ukrainian official familiar with the negotiations between Kyiv and Washington said Ukraine had been waiting and fighting for this decision for over a year. “We’ve always simply said that the greater our long-range capabilities, the faster we will defend Ukraine and end this war,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations.

In his comments to reporters on Monday, Mr. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, referred to statements made by President Vladimir V. Putin in September, saying that permission for longer-range strikes would constitute evidence that the West was escalating its showdown with Russia.

Ukraine could only use such long-range systems, he said, with the help of NATO personnel and satellite guidance. In effect, he argued, that would turn those countries into participants in the war.

“This will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia,” he said during a government meeting in St. Petersburg.

On Sunday, pro-Kremlin commentators interpreted the ATACMS policy change as an attempt by the outgoing Biden administration to reduce negotiating options for President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has pledged to bring about a quick end to the war, without saying how.

“The Biden administration must surely understand that it is leaving Trump’s team not only the problem of solving the Ukrainian conflict, but an even bigger one: prevention of a global standoff,” said Leonid Slutsky, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the lower chamber of the Russian Parliament.

Throughout the war, Russia has been able to strike every corner of Ukraine. Ukraine’s military has estimated that Russia has fired more than 25,000 long-range munitions such as missiles and exploding drones over the course of the war. The Kremlin has bolstered its vast arsenal with drones and missiles provided by Iran and North Korea.

The Pentagon had previously given three reasons for withholding permission to use ATACMS to strike inside Russia: a concern that Russia would escalate hostilities by increasing its covert campaign against Ukraine’s Western allies; a lack of sufficient stockpiles of the missiles; and the contention that the Russians had moved their most valuable military assets out of range.

On the last point, the Ukrainians and military analysts said that even if Russia had moved some of its most valuable bombers and fighter jets, there were still strategically important targets ATACMS could hit.

As Ukraine pressed Washington to allow it to provide and use Western weapons to strike back, it has been busily working to expand its own arms industry.

Ukraine has gradually built up its long-range strike capabilities, and now regularly employs drones capable of hitting targets more than 600 miles beyond the Russian border.

The most dramatic demonstration of the impact this type of campaign can have came when Ukraine struck two large ammunition depots in Russian towns about 200 miles from the border with its own drones, setting ablaze over 30,000 tons of ammunition, according to Western military officials and military analysts who studied video and satellite footage in the aftermath of the strikes.

At long last, something to celebrate: People were saying that the Chef Warif restaurant, whose Syrian-style shawarma sandwiches were famous in Gaza City before the war, had reopened. Not in the city itself, which the war had reduced largely to rubble. And not the same quality of meat, which the restaurant’s owner now had to buy frozen and at steep prices from traders importing it to the Gaza Strip.

But it was shawarma, shawarma from home. Long lines formed this July as workers sawed the first slices of roasting beef or chicken off the spit and bundled it in flatbread with the restaurant’s signature garlic sauce.

Many of those in line were longtime customers who had fled Gaza City, in the north, for Deir al Balah, the city in central Gaza where Chef Warif had reopened. Living in tents or crammed shelters under smoky skies, their ears painfully accustomed to the thunder of Israeli airstrikes, they had been desperate for this — a normal moment.

“When I heard about Chef Warif, I jumped for joy,” said Naela al-Danaf, 40, a secretary at a local clinic who escaped Gaza City early in the war. It was a relief to see the owner standing there, she said, dishing out lunch like everything was fine.

In parts of Deir al Balah, once known for its restful olive and date palm groves, the trees are gone or have turned gray with ash and dirt, and the ground is slick with sewage. People look away from the rotting carcasses of horses and dogs. Once familiar buildings are piles of debris. Bombing can shatter the calm in a second. Though municipal trash pickup has started again in places, it often smells like a dumpster.

But in the center of town, people relax under shady trees, chatting with friends over coffee, freshly squeezed mango juice or avocado smoothies. Families crowd around Zain’s dessert stand or wait for juices from Karameesh, where fresh fruit dangles from the ceiling. Others head to the beach, a chance to watch the waves and get their children out of cramped shelters.

An olive press has been turning this season’s harvest — far smaller than usual, and picked as drones buzzed overhead — into golden-green oil. On Deir al Balah’s outskirts, a farmer has been planting his field with cabbage and winter greens. The grumbling of his tractor is a strange echo of what life was like before the war; strange, but welcome.

Every conflict has its pockets of ordinariness, places where life ticks on away from the bombs and the headlines. Israeli officials have been quick to highlight such scenes, posting photographs of well-stocked markets to suggest reports of shortages were overblown.

But not many wars are squeezed into a Las Vegas-size strip of land that has been bombed almost everywhere yet is almost impossible to flee. In a Gaza starving under a near-total Israeli siege, which has blocked all but a dribble of aid and commercial supplies, residents and aid workers say the little food for sale is hopelessly expensive.

Everyone seems to know someone who has been killed. Most of the survivors are living in miserable squalor. It is hard to imagine any escape.

And there isn’t, not in any sure sense. An airstrike could rip things apart at any time, or Israel’s military could order families to evacuate yet again before it starts another operation against Hamas, as it did in Deir al Balah in August.

But compared to the rest of Gaza, Deir al Balah has gone relatively unscathed, allowing the United Nations and aid groups to set up central offices there. A cautious rhythm has returned to the streets. Lunch, coffee, a stop for dessert: the more mundane, Gazans say, the more precious it seems.

Martyrs’ Street, the city’s longest thoroughfare, is lined with cafes, ice cream shops and eateries. Many are familiar to residents displaced from Gaza City, where the same business names once meant pleasure, a weekend treat or just a stop after work.

Their reappearance has been bittersweet. The more Gaza City stores open in Deir al Balah, the more permanent the displacement seems.

One of them is Shawarma Moaz, a Gaza City spot that reopened on Martyrs’ Street in March. Its manager, Aaed Abu Karsh, 35, said that customers have been joking to him, “Since you’re here, seems like all of us will be away from home even longer.”

Few can afford to go out. Most Gazans have no savings and little, if any, income. On Martyrs’ Street, a smoothie can cost $4 (twice the prewar price), a shawarma sandwich about $11 (nearly three times what it used to). A customer protest over the high price of meat shut down some restaurants for two days this month.

But some without the means to buy come by just to say hello, happy to see the street abuzz, business owners say.

At one cafe, Ayah Jweifel, 19, a second-year multimedia major at Al Aqsa University, was laughing and gossiping one recent afternoon with her sister, Shahd, 17. They were talking about plans, talking about anything but the fighting.

“I just have one goal, to forget that there are things like war, bombing and killing,” Ayah Jweifel said. “Seeing people around me who are laughing, smiling and having fun — it gives me hope that we can get our lives before Oct. 7 back.”

That day last year, Hamas, the armed group that controls Gaza, led raids on Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli authorities. Israel counterattacked, killing more than 40,000 people, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

The war seemed distant at the cafe. The inside was spick-and-span, with a counter and floor of faux marble and a glass display case for pastries; outside, waiters served cappuccinos, dessert and water pipes to customers sitting around wooden tables. Lights were twirled around the trunks of olive and palm trees.

The contrast with the rest of Gaza, even with other parts of the city, could be called surreal. But what people really found surreal was the war itself. Meeting friends, drinking coffee — that was real life, they said, or what real life was supposed to be.

“We have to adapt to the situation,” Shahd Jweifel said. It had been her idea to get her sister and friends to meet up there once a week. “Here we feel like we’re just like everyone else in the rest of the world.”

Except they weren’t. In one corner of the cafe’s garden hung a whiteboard that aid workers had been using to train people to avoid the unexploded ordnance littering Gaza.

The Jweifel sisters had promised their family that they would leave for home before sunset, they said, since public order broke down months ago and it was safer not to move in the dark.

Carving out minutes of normalcy also means willfully forgetting what is happening elsewhere in Gaza.

“It’s like we’re lying to ourselves,” said Ms. al-Danaf, the clinic secretary from Gaza City. “We’re in a good place, but our hearts and minds are following the bad news from the north.”

Whenever she called Dareen, her daughter in northern Gaza, Ms. al-Danaf said, Dareen would ask, “What are you having for lunch today?” It was a lacerating, if unintended, reminder: While Ms. al-Danaf could get shawarma, she said, Dareen had almost nothing. Amid a new attack on northern Gaza beginning last month, Israel had restricted supplies there even further.

Feeling guilty, Ms. al-Danaf said that she sometimes lied, telling her daughter she was having potatoes or lentils.

After Shawarma Moaz’s team fled Gaza City, it took months to accept that they would not be returning anytime soon, and months more to scrape together enough to start over, the manager, Mr. Abu Karsh, said.

Nothing was easy. Equipment and a storefront took some creativity to find; they bought some items from people they thought had probably stolen things from destroyed restaurants, he said. A nearby airstrike damaged the solar panels they used for power.

For every business on Martyrs’ Street, covering costs is a struggle.

Chef Warif recently announced it was closing temporarily because frozen meat prices were so exorbitant.

But at least, Mr. Abu Karsh said, they had gotten part of their lives back.

“We’re not sitting in our tents,” he said, “mourning everything we lost.”

President Biden began what is likely to be his last summit with global leaders as commander in chief on Monday, pushing for even stronger support of Ukraine despite the looming uncertainty of how President-elect Donald J. Trump might undo his efforts.

Just before the Group of 20 summit began in Rio de Janeiro, Mr. Biden authorized the first use of U.S.-supplied long-range missiles by Ukraine for strikes inside Russia, U.S. officials said.

The decision, a major change in U.S. policy, was made in part to help shore up Ukraine’s defenses after Russia recruited North Korean troops to assist its fighters. It also came on a day when Russia bombarded Ukraine’s power grid in one of the largest attacks of the war.

For two years, Mr. Biden sent billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine to help repel Russia, but repeatedly hesitated when it came to offensive weapons, worried about provoking President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia into a wider war.

Mr. Putin, like Mr. Trump, will not be at the summit. But unlike Mr. Biden, both men are sure to be at the center of conversations about a future they will both dominate.

President Emmanuel Macron of France, who is in Rio for the meeting, told reporters that the Russian bombardment of Ukraine on Sunday shows that Mr. Putin “does not want peace and is not ready to negotiate.”

Mr. Biden and his aides are in a desperate race against time as they seek to bolster Ukraine before Mr. Trump takes power. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, said last week that the Biden administration is trying to “surge military equipment, to allocate all of the resources that Congress has given us” in the remaining days that Mr. Biden has left in office.

That rush, and the weekend decision to allow long-range strikes inside Russia, stands in contrast to the more cautious approach Mr. Biden took for many months on whether to expand the use of the advanced weapons. Several Republican lawmakers and some Democrats had been calling on Mr. Biden to give Ukraine broader latitude to use them.

Jon Finer, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, declined to confirm the authorization of the long-range missiles, but noted that the United States had said it would respond to Russia’s decision to escalate attacks on Ukraine with North Korean reinforcements.

“If there are circumstances that evolve and change, you know, we will evolve and change to meet them and to allow the Ukrainians to continue to defend their territory and their sovereignty,” Mr. Finer said during a news briefing with reporters on Monday morning.

Writing in sand

It is clear at the G20 summit that Mr. Biden’s strategy in Ukraine, like his broader foreign and domestic policy vision, could soon be a thing of the past.

The move to empower Ukraine to attack deeper within Russia came in Mr. Biden’s final months in office, and was made with full awareness that U.S. foreign policy could soon be overhauled with Mr. Trump’s return to the White House.

While Mr. Biden has centered his foreign policy strategy — and more broadly his presidency — on working to confront climate change and defending U.S. allies, Mr. Trump campaigned on an “America First” isolationist approach and has accused other nations of not contributing enough to security alliances.

Josh Lipsky, the senior director for the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center, acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s return to the White House would be hanging over the meeting in Rio.

“Even before the election, for the past year this outcome was on every leader’s mind,” Mr. Lipsky said. “The primary focus for the U.S. is to show the rest of the world that this forum matters and the U.S. will remain engaged.”

World leaders are moving on

Mr. Biden’s Latin America trip, which included a summit in Peru and a tour of the Amazon, amounted to one last diplomatic push of his foreign policy agenda — even as many of the participants shifted focus. Some of the world leaders who met with Mr. Biden during his diplomatic swan song seemed to already be looking to the next chapter.

“China is ready to work with the new U.S. administration to maintain communication, expand cooperation and manage differences,” China’s leader, Xi Jinping said at the beginning of his meeting with Mr. Biden in Peru.

Other world leaders participating in the summit also appeared to have moved on.

Argentina’s Javier Milei has already worked to forge close ties with Mr. Trump. Earlier this month, Mr. Milei met with the president-elect and Elon Musk on the sidelines of the Conservative Political Action Conference at Mr. Trump’s private club, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla.

The G20 summit also comes at a time when some U.S. allies, including Brazil itself, appear to be strengthening other global partnerships to offer a counterweight to the West, including the BRICS alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which recently added Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates as members.

Mr. Biden’s allies will likely use the summit to lock in partnerships on climate and other common goals, even if only as symbolic gestures that may be wiped out once Mr. Trump returns to power. Mr. Finer added that Mr. Biden would focus on developing pandemic resilience plans with other nations, as well as pushing the World Bank and companies to help poorer nations.

Latin American leaders will also be looking to discuss their concerns over Mr. Trump’s forthcoming immigration proposals.

Mr. Trump is targeting a decades-old program providing temporary legal status to about one million immigrants from dangerous and deeply troubled countries such as Haiti and Venezuela. He also has pledged sweeping immigration restrictions and mass deportations that would likely increase pressure on Mexico and Central America.

Mr. Biden is also expected to participate in an event that will launch a new global alliance against hunger and poverty. It is not clear if Mr. Trump will continue to support the program once he enters the White House.

Mr. Biden acknowledged his lame-duck status during brief remarks in the Amazon rainforest on Sunday as he traveled from Lima, Peru to the G20 summit.

“It’s no secret, that I’m leaving office in January,” Mr. Biden said, declining to mention Mr. Trump by name. “I will leave my successor and my country a strong foundation to build on, if they choose to do so.”

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro, and Ana Ionova from Manaus, Brazil.

Intruders broke into the grounds of Windsor Castle last month and stole two vehicles, the police confirmed on Monday, a significant security breach at the sprawling royal estate west of London that is the primary residence of Prince William, his wife Catherine, and their three children.

William, the heir to the throne, and his family are believed to have been at home at the time of the burglary, according to The Sun, a London tabloid, which first reported the incident on Sunday. King Charles III and Queen Camilla also stay often at Windsor Castle, but were not there at the time.

A spokesman for the Thames Valley Police said it had received a report of a burglary on Crown Estate land shortly before midnight on Oct. 13. The intruders reportedly scaled a fence at Shaw Farm, a working farm on the estate.

“Offenders entered a farm building and made off with a black Isuzu pickup and a red quad bike,” the police spokesman said. “No arrests have been made at this stage and an investigation is ongoing.”

The Sun reported that after climbing over the six-foot fence to enter the grounds, the intruders used the truck, which had been stored in the barn, along with the bike, to crash through a farm gate on their way out. The gate is five minutes from Adelaide Cottage, where William and Catherine live with their children, Prince George, 11, Prince Charlotte, 9, and Prince Louis, 6.

Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace, where William and Catherine have their offices, declined to comment on the incident, in keeping with their policy of not commenting on security issues.

There is no suggestion that the prince or his family were in direct danger. They have their own security at Adelaide Cottage, one of several residences on the Windsor estate used by members of the royal family.

She galvanized a nation to oust Venezuela’s autocrat at the ballot box, spending months surrounded by people and filling avenues with supporters who risked beatings and arrest just to hear her speak.

Now, with President Nicolás Maduro accused of stealing the election and his government threatening her capture, María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s wildly popular opposition leader, has gone into hiding — alone.

In a series of rare, in-depth virtual interviews since she mobilized millions to vote against Mr. Maduro in July, Ms. Machado said she was holed up in a secret location somewhere inside her country. Because anyone who helps her could be detained — or might lead government agents to her — she said she has not had a visitor in months.

Nicknamed the country’s “Iron Lady” for her conservative politics and steely resolve, Ms. Machado is, she admitted, “longing for a hug.”

Her mother has urged her to meditate. She has not.

Instead, the former lawmaker is working around the clock, taking virtual meetings with foreign ministers and human rights organizations, urging them to remember that a broad coalition of nations acknowledge that her chosen candidate, Edmundo González, won the July vote by a wide margin and should be taking office in January.

Just hours after the election, Mr. Maduro declared victory, but he released no evidence to back up his claim. In response, the Machado team collected and published vote-tally receipts from more than 80 percent of polling stations.

The tallies, they said, showed that Mr. González had garnered almost 70 percent of the vote. (Fearing for his freedom, Mr. González, 75, fled to Spain in September.)

Ms. Machado argued that Venezuela now offers something extremely tempting to President-elect Donald J. Trump: “an enormous foreign policy victory in the very, very short term.”

In her view, Mr. Maduro is now so weak — rejected by his own people, suffering fractures within his party — that a renewed pressure campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies could in fact push the Venezuelan autocrat to negotiate his own exit.

This pressure campaign, she said, could include reversing the sanctions relief put in place by Mr. Biden and the pursuit of new criminal charges against Mr. Maduro’s allies.

She praised Mr. Trump’s selection of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida for secretary of state, and Representative Mike Waltz of Florida for national security adviser, positions that will be key in defining U.S. policy toward Venezuela.

Mr. Rubio, whom Ms. Machado has known for more than a decade, has staked his political career in part on a no-compromises approach to leftist authoritarians in Latin America.

He was an architect of Mr. Trump’s previous policy toward Venezuela, a so-called maximum pressure campaign that involved broad sanctions on the country’s vital oil industry and support for a young legislator, Juan Guaidó, who claimed to be the country’s interim president.

The approach failed to oust Mr. Maduro, who labeled Mr. Guaidó a U.S. puppet, and some analysts argue that it even strengthened the autocrat, showing that he could withstand an all-out offensive from the world’s most powerful nation.

But Ms. Machado believes this moment is different. Mr. Maduro is financially broken, she said, has alienated key allies like President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and has lost so much public support that he has been forced to launch his most brutal repression campaign yet to stay in power.

Perhaps even more relevant, the Venezuelan people, she said, were now largely united behind a democratically elected president, Mr. González.

Ms. Machado has yet to speak to either Mr. Rubio or Mr. Waltz after their nominations, but said that their teams and hers were in “permanent contact.”

While many analysts say the recent election laid bare Mr. Maduro’s weaknesses, few believe the autocrat, who is being investigated for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court and could face arrest if ousted, has much incentive to leave.

“She says, ‘Maduro has no choice, he has to negotiate,’” said Phil Gunson, an analyst with International Crisis Group who has been based in Venezuela for more than two decades. “I think he does have a choice, and his choice is to remain in power.”

In Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Maduro characterized the U.S. president as imperialist enemy No. 1. But in the days since Mr. Trump won a second term, Mr. Maduro has tried to curry favor, publicly expressing hope that the two could work together.

Mr. Maduro clearly needs the United States to lift sanctions, while Mr. Trump, who has vowed to undertake mass deportations, could use the Venezuelan leader’s help in making good on his promise.

Speaking recently on one of his talk shows, Mr. Maduro called for a new moment of “win-win” relations.

It is unclear if the Maduro government knows Ms. Machado’s location.

“It’s difficult to believe they don’t know,” said Laura Dib, a Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America.

“My read is that they know the political cost of imprisoning her,” Ms. Dib went on, “and instead they are betting on wearing her down.”

Many opposition leaders have come and gone in Venezuela over the years; few have built as broad a coalition as Ms. Machado. The eldest daughter in a prominent steel business family, she has spent roughly two decades trying to remove Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, from power.

In 2002 she founded a voter rights organization, Súmate, which pushed unsuccessfully to oust Mr. Chávez through a recall vote. Súmate received U.S. funding.

It is only recently, after an overwhelming victory in a primary race in 2023, that Ms. Machado emerged as the leader of the Venezuelan opposition. When Mr. Maduro’s government barred her from running in the general election, she managed to get Mr. González on the ballot in her stead.

On the campaign trail, she was received almost as a religious figure, often wearing white, promising to restore democracy and reunite families torn apart by an economic crisis and mass migration.

“María!” her followers shouted, before falling into her arms.

In hiding these days, she wakes up alone, cooks and ponders the future of the country alone. Her three adult children live abroad; it is unclear when she will see them again. When she appears in videos shared online, she uses a blank white background, an effort, perhaps futile, to conceal her location.

Ms. Machado declined to say whether she even could go outside. “It’s a difficult test,” she said of isolation.

Mr. González, now in Spain, has focused on pushing their cause in meetings with European leaders.

In the interviews, Ms. Machado’s voice often quickened to a near-panic pace, and she expressed frustration that some nations were not doing more to isolate Mr. Maduro.

“We Venezuelans did everything the international community asked of us,” she said, a reference to the millions of people who risked retaliation to vote for her movement. “Now it’s time for the international community to do its part.”

Nearly 2,000 people have been imprisoned in a post-election crackdown by the Maduro government, according to the watchdog group Foro Penal. Among them are some of Ms. Machado’s closest advisers. At least two people have died after being taken into custody and another two dozen people were killed amid protests just after the July vote. The youngest, Isaías Fuenmayor, was just 15.

That so many people are suffering after supporting her weighs heavily.

“How many more deaths?” she asked, her voice rising. “How many more disappearances?”

(Over the weekend, the Maduro government released 131 prisoners detained since July’s election, according to Foro Penal.)

In calling on Mr. Trump to help restore her nation’s democracy, Ms. Machado is appealing to a U.S. president-elect who still refuses to recognize the result of an election he lost in his own country in 2020.

But Ms. Machado said she is also emphasizing that pushing out Mr. Maduro is in the U.S.’s interest “in terms of hemispheric security,” she said. Mr. Maduro is a major ally of Russia, Iran and China.

Asked how long she can remain in hiding, Ms. Machado said that she was “working to make it as short as possible,” and hoped that all Venezuelans would soon be “reunited in freedom.”

“But I am willing to do what has to be done,” she said, “for as long as it takes to assert the truth and popular sovereignty.”

Isayen Herrera contributed reporting.