The crowds gather every evening on a scenic hillside on the outskirts of Beirut. Young men, old couples and local journalists, all drawn by the unobstructed view of the Dahiya, the cluster of neighborhoods south of Beirut that has been pummeled by Israeli airstrikes over the past two months.

As dusk settles, people seated on motorcycles and atop cement barriers anxiously wait for the war to unfold in front of them. When there is a thunderous boom of an Israeli airstrike, they quickly scan the skyline for a plume of white smoke curling into the air — the first clue as to what may have been hit.

“Look, look at the balcony, there. Do you see it?” Osama Assaf, 43, said one recent evening, pointing into the distance.

“Where? By the highway?” a young man standing beside him replied.

As the war between Hezbollah and Israel has escalated, the gathering at the escarpment has become a nightly ritual in Baabda, a mountainous suburb on the southeastern outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon’s capital. In peacetime, the area is a picnic spot, where old friends and young lovers smoke fruit-flavored tobacco through water pipes and watch a deep red sun melt into the Mediterranean Sea. These days, the hillside offers a window into the war that has decimated the enclave south of the city in the Dahiya.

A cramped patch of high-rise apartments, office buildings and narrow one-way roads, the Dahiya is home mostly to Shiite Muslims and is effectively governed by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group and Shiite political movement in Lebanon. Airstrikes that Israeli officials say are targeting Hezbollah military facilities in the Dahiya have transformed the area into a bombed-out ghost town coated in gray ash and littered with rubble.

The hillside overlooking the Dahiya first drew local TV reporters who offered grim updates about the war. Soon, Dahiya residents who had fled the area began converging there as well. Some are desperate to know firsthand if their neighborhood will survive another day. Others are bored, their usually busy lives upended by the war. Occasionally, young Christian men who live nearby come to cheer on the destruction of the mostly Shiite neighborhoods — a glimpse of the sectarian tensions always simmering Lebanon.

But mostly people are drawn by a morbid fascination — an urge to hear the rattling booms and see the billowing smoke, if only to make real the horrors of the war.

“Look, there’s more smoke rising from where it hit,” Hussein Qazem, 56, said one recent evening, pointing to where an Israeli airstrike had landed minutes earlier. Pulling out his phone, he checked the two maps issued with the most recent Israeli evacuation orders warning of imminent airstrikes in two Dahiya neighborhoods. “This must be the al-Hawraa strike,” he muttered.

An hour earlier, Mr. Qazem was eating a late lunch with his family in an apartment they had rented after fleeing the Dahiya when they saw the evacuation warnings flash across their phones. The warnings had become a near daily occurrence since the war escalated, but this time, one of the maps included the apartment he had spent 30 years working in Saudi Arabia running an import-export business to purchase.

His 17-year-old nephew, Wael Wahab, said they should go back quickly — one final visit to say goodbye. The pair jumped on Mr. Wahab’s motorcycle and made a mad dash into the neighborhood, whizzing past the shops they once frequented, the storefront windows now only jagged edges of glass, he said. It was only a few minutes — they didn’t know how long they had until the strikes would hit — but it was something.

From the Dahiya, they came to the hillside as a bluish haze was settling over the city. “A plane’s coming,” Mr. Wahab said, nodding at a commercial flight as it landed on the runway of Beirut’s international airport — a surreal reminder of life carrying on despite the war. A few minutes later, an Israeli warplane roared overhead, followed by the thundering boom of another airstrike.

“That must be the one targeting our street,” Mr. Wahab said.

They paused for a second. “OK, it’s gone,” Mr. Qazem said.

Farther up the escarpment, a gaggle of local television crews had set up shop, lining the curb with their tripods and the thrumming generators that powered satellite dishes. The sidewalk was littered with cigarette butts and empty bottles of water and energy drinks — the fuel of their long nights.

Mohammad Farhat, a 68-year-old resident of the Dahiya, paced behind the reporters, flipping his car keys in his hand. A retired employee of Lebanon’s Education Ministry, he and his wife, Leila Farhat, 65, come here most nights — it’s the best way to get the most up-to-date news on the war, directly from the journalists gathered there, they explained.

“Here we survive on hope — and information,” Mr. Farhat said.

As he spoke, Ms. Farhat rummaged around in the trunk of their car until she found a plastic bag of mixed nuts and liter of 7-Up. She handed him the nuts, poured the soda into clear plastic cups and passed them to others who had gathered there. “It’s like the new Corniche here,” she said jokingly, referring to the city’s popular seaside promenade.

The pair have been married for nearly 50 years, since Ms. Farhat fled her hometown in the south during the country’s bloody civil war and went to the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, where she met Mr. Farhat. “I saved her the drive back to her village,” Mr. Fahat joked.

They moved to the Dahiya two decades ago and saw it destroyed once before during the monthlong war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006. Hezbollah rebuilt it then with millions of dollars in aid from Iran and Qatar. The group emerged from that war with an aura of invincibility that helped assure people that the Dahiya would never be destroyed again. Mr. Farhat said he was confident that once the war ends, Hezbollah would rebuild the area again. But that would most likely be a long and arduous process — and his resolve to weather yet more hardship in a country plagued by crises was waning.

“We’re retired now, we’re supposed to be relaxing. It’s our time to rest,” Mr. Farhat said. “I’ve been to Germany, to the Netherlands, I saw retired people like us there, how they go on vacations. They aren’t thinking about these drones,” he added, nodding up to the sky at the incessant hum overhead.

“The drone never stops, it never gets tired,” Ms. Farhat interjected wryly. “It stays in the sky for 30 hours straight.”

As the sun sank below the skyline and darkness fell, the outlines of the Dahiya became clear: The cluster of neighborhoods turned into a swath of darkness, its buildings mostly empty and its electrical lines damaged in the strikes. The Dahiya’s de facto borders were illuminated by the lights of Beirut proper. Behind it were the fluorescent white lines of the airport’s runway and the warm yellow specks of apartment buildings in the city, which has remained mostly untouched.

Down the road from the pack of reporters, Iman Assaf, 46, unloaded a foam mattress from the back of her family’s car onto the sidewalk, where she planned to spend the night with her husband and son.

They were among the tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims who fled the Dahiya as the strikes intensified and spilled into other parts of Beirut. The influx transformed the demographic map of a city often defined along sectarian lines, where neighborhoods are synonymous with a religion and sect.

Ms. Assaf said she had felt welcome for the most part in Baabda, a mostly Christian town. Though, occasionally, young men on motorcycles with Christian crosses around their necks and alcoholic drinks in their hands will stop at the outlook and yell, as if encouraging the strikes on the mostly Shiite Muslim neighborhoods.

“Yalla, yalla, yalla!” — “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” — they yell, offering a crude reminder of the sectarian tensions. Ms. Assaf brushed those tensions aside, as if describing them as fleeting might help bury them for good.

“The people are united — it’s war on all of us,” Ms. Assaf said.

Then she took her seat on the dusty mattress. She placed a kettle on her small, portable stove and looked out over the view of the Dahiya, watching the war and praying for its end.

Hwaida Saad and Jacob Roubai contributed reporting.

Israel and Hezbollah continued their heavy exchange of fire on Monday, causing many schools to close on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border, even as officials signaled that the two sides appeared to be nearing the first cease-fire since their conflict began last year.

The Israeli military said it had struck several command centers belonging to Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia, south of Beirut on Monday morning. At the same time, in parts of northern Israel, residents scrambled to shelters as a new round of sirens announced at least 20 incoming projectiles from Lebanon. Israeli officials said at least some had been intercepted by Israeli missiles.

At least seven people in Lebanon were injured in Israeli strikes on Monday, according to Lebanese state news media. In northern Israel, officials said that a 60-year-old man had been hurt in an attack from Lebanon.

The latest strikes came a day after some of the heaviest aerial attacks in months in both countries.

Israeli officials said Hezbollah had fired at least 250 projectiles, a term it often uses for rockets, into Israel on Sunday, including many toward Tel Aviv, causing at least 13 injuries. In Lebanon, Israeli forces issued a series of sweeping evacuation orders for the area south of Beirut on Sunday night before striking what they said were a dozen Hezbollah command centers. There were no immediate reports of casualties in those strikes.

Analysts have said the intense attacks suggest that both Israel and Hezbollah are trying to maximize their leverage as diplomats conduct what they hope is a final round of cease-fire talks. Amos Hochstein, a top American envoy, traveled to Lebanon and Israel last week to move talks ahead. Over the weekend, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III spoke with his Israeli counterpart, Israel Katz, to push for a resolution that allows Israeli and Lebanese residents near the border to return to homes they fled because of the strikes.

Both Israeli and Hezbollah officials have suggested that a deal to pause the fighting may be as close as it has been since Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel 13 months ago in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza.

The two sides have said little publicly about the details of the proposed agreement. The New York Times reported on Friday that the terms included a 60-day truce during which Israeli forces and Hezbollah fighters pull back from border areas and the Lebanese Army and a United Nations peacekeeping force increase their presence in a buffer zone.

But officials have also warned that the two sides may not be able to finalize a deal, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has faced pressure from right-wing allies not to end the military campaign. Israel’s hard-line national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, said in a social media post on Monday that the proposed deal would be a “historic missed opportunity to eradicate Hezbollah.”

“As I warned before in Gaza, I warn now as well: Mr. Prime Minister, it is not too late to stop this agreement!” he added. “We must continue until absolute victory!”

On Monday, Lebanon suspended school in Beirut and surrounding areas, citing the threat of Israeli strikes, while schools in several northern Israel communities switched to remote classes because of Hezbollah rocket fire.

Here are other developments:

• Rabbi killing: The authorities in the United Arab Emirates named the three men they arrested in the killing of an Israeli rabbi last week, saying they were Uzbek nationals aged 28 to 33. Israeli officials have called the killing an antisemitic act of terrorism. The Emirati government has referred to the rabbi, Zvi Kogan, who held dual Israeli and Moldovan citizenship, as a Moldovan national.

• Gaza hostage: Israel said it was investigating images released by Hamas over the weekend that the group said showed the body of a woman taken hostage during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. About 100 hostages, including some who Israel believes have died, remain unaccounted for in Gaza.

Romania, a NATO member and host to a missile defense facility built by the United States, has been thrown into political disarray by the surprise victory of a little-known ultranationalist in the first round of a presidential election held this weekend.

With nearly all ballots counted, official results released early Monday gave the most votes to Calin Georgescu, a dark-horse candidate without a party who had been widely dismissed as a fringe extremist. Mr. Georgescu has denounced Ukraine, NATO and the European Union, and has often sided with Russia, and he has praised Romania’s fascist leader during World War II.

Despite leading, however, Mr. Georgescu took only 22.9 percent of the vote on Sunday, which is far short of the majority needed to win outright. He will therefore compete in a runoff on Dec. 8 against the second-place finisher — likely to be Elena Lasconi, a liberal.

The results have roiled Romanian politics just a week before a parliamentary election that will set the shape of the next government.

Romania’s president has limited powers, but they include a big say in military spending and foreign policy. Romania has been a firm supporter of Ukraine and has played a major role in strengthening NATO’s eastern flank. A new alliance air base near Mihai Kogalniceaunu, a village near the Black Sea, will be one of NATO’s biggest in Europe.

The departing president, Klaus Iohannis, a multilingual ethnic German who has been in office since 2014, played down nationalist themes and pursued a strongly pro-Western foreign policy during his tenure. His popularity slumped amid widespread discontent over Romania’s strong but uneven economic development, high inflation and other problems.

Mr. Georgescu’s win stunned not only Romania’s establishment parties but also George Simion, a right-wing populist and outspoken admirer of Donald J. Trump who had been expected to finish at least second. He came in fourth.

Mr. Georgescu, who campaigned mainly on social media and often spoke of his Christian faith, was largely ignored by mainstream media outlets. He cast himself as an avenger sent by God to serve Romanians, particularly those struggling to survive in rural areas. Many of those people feel betrayed by political elites since the collapse of communism in a bloody 1989 revolution that ousted the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

Romania has flirted periodically with extreme nationalism, most notably in 2000, when Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a regime poet under Mr. Ceausescu who was known for virulent attacks on Hungarians, Jews and Roma, won the first round of a presidential election. He lost the runoff to a veteran former communist, Ion Iliescu, a senior official under Mr. Ceausescu.

Casting his ballot on Sunday, Mr. Georgescu declared the election a “prayer for the nation” that would give a voice to “the humiliated” and to “those who feel they do not matter and actually matter the most.”

A fervent champion of national sovereignty, he has frequently criticized the European Union and NATO, including an American missile defense facility at a base controlled by the alliance in the southern Romanian village of Deveselu, west of the capital, Bucharest.

That facility, along with a second missile defense system that recently started operations in Poland, has long been a major source of tension between Russia and the West.

Mr. Georgescu has denounced Romania’s agreement to host the Deveselu base as a “diplomatic shame.”

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia says that the Romanian and Polish facilities, both fitted with ballistic missiles, were built to intercept Russian rockets and, before launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he demanded that they be shut down. The Pentagon says that the facilities were built to intercept missiles fired by rogue states like Iran.

President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. of the Philippines said on Monday that he was taking seriously “deeply concerning” threats that had been made against him, days after his vice president said she had arranged for an assassin to kill Mr. Marcos if she were murdered.

In a video address, Mr. Marcos said that “there have been a slew of reckless profanities and threats, including plans to kill some of us.” He did not directly mention Vice President Sara Duterte.

“If it is so easy to threaten the life of a president, how much more for ordinary citizens?” he said. “Such criminal intent should never be tolerated. I will not take this sitting down.”

On Monday, the president’s security was tightened, two days after Ms. Duterte said in a virtual briefing that she had made arrangements for Mr. Marcos, his wife, Liza, and House Speaker Martin Romualdez, who is the president’s cousin, to be murdered if she were killed. Ms. Duterte said on Monday that her remarks had been “maliciously taken out of logical context.”

The Department of Justice said it would issue a subpoena against Ms. Duterte, saying on Monday it will give her five days to explain herself before investigators.

“The premeditated plot to assassinate the president as declared by the self-confessed mastermind will now face legal consequences,” Jesse Andres, the under secretary for the Justice Department, told reporters.

The Philippines is now bracing for a showdown between the Marcoses and the Dutertes. Ms. Duterte’s father, Rodrigo Duterte, was Mr. Marcos’s predecessor as president, and the Dutertes have been complaining publicly about the Marcoses for more than a year.

For a long time, Mr. Marcos remained largely silent about their remarks, including Ms. Duterte’s threat last month to behead him. Analysts say the president’s address on Monday was the clearest sign yet that he intends to confront the threats from the Dutertes directly.

Ms. Duterte made her latest remarks after her chief of staff was detained for contempt of the House of Representatives. The aide, Zuleika Lopez, said she had signed a letter asking state auditors not to comply with a subpoena from the House appropriations panel concerning the alleged misuse of funds by Ms. Duterte. The vice president was particularly incensed that Ms. Lopez was sent to prison.

“This country is going to hell because we are led by a person who doesn’t know how to be a president and who is a liar,” Ms. Duterte said. Then, using a Filipino vulgarity, she mentioned “Martin Romualdez, Liza Marcos, Bongbong Marcos.”

“I’ve already spoken to someone, so don’t worry about my security,” she said. “I told that person to kill B.B.M., Liza Araneta and Martin Romualdez if I were to be slain,” she added, referring to Mr. Marcos by the initials of his nickname. She said she had told a hit man: “After I die, don’t stop until you’ve killed them all.”

When Mr. Marcos and Ms. Duterte were elected in 2022, the two promised national unity. The alliance of their powerful political dynasties was supposed to be formidable: The Dutertes’ stronghold is in the south of the Philippines, and the Marcoses hold sway in the north.

But the marriage of convenience did not last long.

After Ms. Duterte’s speech, the National Security Council said it considered all threats to Mr. Marcos a matter of national security. And the presidential security group said “any threat to the life of the president and the first family, regardless of its origin — and especially one made so brazenly in public — is treated with the utmost seriousness.”

The chief of staff of the Philippine military, Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr., said the military would remain neutral, but he reminded soldiers that they should not be shaken by recent political events and should remain loyal to the Constitution.

Russian forces in the country’s Kursk region have captured a British man who volunteered for the Ukrainian Army, Russia’s state news agencies reported, in what would likely be the first case of a Westerner detained on Russian soil while fighting for Ukraine.

A Russian state news agency identified the detained individual on Monday as James Scott Rhys Anderson. The agency, Tass, reported that he was part of a battalion of up to 500 Ukrainian servicemen sent to the sliver of land in the Kursk region that has been occupied by Ukraine since August. Mr. Anderson said he was deployed there against his will, according to Tass.

When asked about Mr. Anderson being captured in Russia, the British Foreign Office said only that it was “supporting the family of a British man following reports of his detention.”

Before being dispatched to the Kursk region, Mr. Anderson, a former signalman in the British Army, was training Ukrainian soldiers at a military range near the village of Inhulets in central Ukraine, according to Tass.

Tass also referred to an unverified video, posted by a pro-Russian military blog on Telegram, a popular messaging app, in which Mr. Anderson, said in the video to be 22, said that he had served in the British Army for four years, starting in 2019, but then “got fired” from his job. He then decided to join the international legion in Ukraine.

“That was a stupid idea,” Mr. Anderson said in the video.

Yuri Podolyaka, one the most popular pro-Kremlin military bloggers on Telegram, said in a post that Mr. Anderson was captured in the village of Plyokhovo, about a mile north of the border between Russia and Ukraine. Plyokhovo has been the scene of some of the most intense fighting in the area.

Over the past few weeks, Russia has been trying to drive Ukrainian forces out of the Kursk region. So far, at least a third of the captured territory has been retaken by Russia in bloody assaults against some of the best Ukrainian units.

After more than two and a half years of heavy fighting, both Russia and Ukraine are suffering from troop shortages. But with a much smaller population, the difficulty has been more acute for Kyiv.

Russian investigators are now likely to charge Mr. Anderson with being a mercenary in a foreign conflict. If convicted, he could face up to 15 years in prison.

In June 2022, a court in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine sentenced to death two British men who had been fighting for Ukraine. They were released in a prisoner exchange that September.

Megan Specia contributed reporting from London.

Hours before a river of mud descended on towns around Valencia, trapping and killing hundreds of people, water started gushing through the small Spanish municipality of Utiel.

A quiet winemaking town on the upper reaches of the Magro River, inland from Valencia, Utiel sits about an hour’s drive from the sprawling, densely populated eastern coast of Spain that was inundated last month in some of Europe’s worst flooding in decades.

Heavy rains began in Utiel on the morning of Oct. 29. By about 1 p.m., the town’s narrow cobblestone streets were already filled with several inches of water. By 2 p.m., a muddy tide nearly reached the windows of the town’s low homes as the Magro spilled over its banks. Trash cans and cars drifted about like toy boats. By 3 p.m., the mayor said that he had alerted the firefighters and the military emergency unit.

“Everyone knew that we were drowning,” said the mayor, Ricardo Gabaldón.

Yet the regional authorities failed to alert towns and villages a few dozen miles lower down the Magro that the river was raging and coming their way, mayors said. Hours later, it hit those places, too.

“I don’t know why they didn’t warn us,” said José Javier Sanchis Bretones, the mayor of Algemesí, which was flooded in the evening, killing at least three people there.

The exact reasons for the delay are unclear. Some officials suggest the severity of the downpour and the potential ramifications were difficult to foresee. But among residents, anger is seething as they ask whether such a calamity had to be so deadly and why they were not alerted in time.

More than two weeks later, residents are still clearing mud that covered anything below eye level in several towns around Valencia. They are mourning the at least 221 people who died in the flooding. Seven are still missing. Many streets remain impassable, clogged with debris. Thousands of businesses and homeowners have lost everything.

The flooding was no doubt the kind of extraordinary weather event that climate change is making both less extraordinary and more unpredictable. Yet the disaster exposed glaring delays by the authorities in alerting the population.

Weather and river-monitoring agencies issued repeated warnings starting early in the day to the regional authorities about torrential rains and dangerously high water levels in usually empty or low rivers and ravines.

While those warnings did not anticipate the full extent of the threat, the downpour’s disastrous scope quickly became clear. By midday, an official with the national weather agency said on Spanish television that in one area, the rains amounted to five gallons of water per square foot.

The torrent presented a danger to people living downstream, the official warned, because floods could inundate them even though it was not raining in their area, creating a false sense of security.

Still, the Valencia regional authorities, who are in charge of managing such emergencies, say they did not have enough information to realize the magnitude of the threat.

“If we did not have the information, we could not act,” said Salomé Pradas, the regional official in charge of managing emergencies.

Yet Ms. Pradas acknowledged that she was made aware of the existence of an emergency text-messaging system to alert the population only at 8 p.m. that evening, even though the regional government had put the system in place in 2023. The president of the Valencia region dismissed Ms. Pradas this past week.

Only at 8:11 p.m. did a general alert go out urging people to find shelter. By then, many residents were up to their chins in water.

“When the alert came, my grandpa had already drowned,” said Carlos Cervera, 37, a resident of the town of Paiporta, close to the coast, where more than 50 people died.

‘Already Looking Bad’

A lawyer, Mr. Gabaldón, the mayor of Utiel, woke up at 6 a.m. that Tuesday in October and saw violent rain pounding his window. He consulted with the mayors of neighboring towns, and quickly ordered local schools to be closed.

Ten minutes later, the national weather agency issued a red alert, the highest warning, to the regional authorities about heavy rains in the Valencia area. But in Utiel, Mr. Gabaldón said, “Things were already looking bad.”

They kept getting worse. While the water level of the Magro often rises near Utiel, this time the river was on the brink of breaching its banks. And the rain kept pouring down.

At midday, the Valencian regional authorities, responding to the alerts, posted a warning on social media to the affected towns that people should “avoid access to rivers” because of increasing flows and to monitor the situation.

By then, Mr. Gabaldón was already facing the threat of water flooding homes.

Soon after, it did.

At 1 p.m., Rosalía Arenas, a resident of Utiel, saw a few inches of water cover her street and started taking videos with her phone. By 1:49 p.m., her road was submerged. Half an hour later, several feet of water nearly reached the window of the house she shared with her toddler.

About 2 p.m., Mr. Gabaldón alerted national and regional authorities and asked for emergency services to be deployed. He did not alert other mayors downstream, he said, because the regional and national authorities already knew that his town was underwater.

“What do I do? Do I not help my neighbors? Do I let them die and start looking for the other mayors’ phone number, who I don’t even know who they are?” the mayor said.

“I already had enough to do taking care of my citizens,” he added.

Despite his efforts, rescuers could not save everyone in his town.

A few yards from Ms. Arenas, a wave of water reached the window of a neighbor, Ángel Miota, 83, a retired truck driver. He had lived for more than 57 years in a two-story house with a pergola on Río Magro Avenue.

The surge came so fast that Mr. Miota and his wife, María Sanz Gómez, 83, could not make it to the outdoor staircase that led up to where their daughter, Fernanda Miota Sanz, lived.

Instead, Ms. Miota Sanz explained, she tried to pull her parents up through a skylight, but her mother, who had recently undergone hip surgery, had trouble moving.

Her parents, who had known each other since they were 8, held onto each other for hours as water filled the room. By 5:50 p.m., her mother died of hypothermia in her father’s arms.

“Leave me here, leave me,” her father cried, she recalled. She finally managed to extract him through a bathroom window. He came out with broken ribs and a wounded leg.

As bad as things were in Utiel, the heavy rains inland from the coast were not limited to the Magro.

The extraordinary downpours also fell around the source of another watercourse, the Rambla del Poyo, an arroyo or gorge that originates inland and passes the sprawling, densely populated suburbs of Valencia.

But in the towns lower down, the sky was clear. Life was going on mostly as usual.

‘People Are Going to Die’

In commuter towns just outside Valencia, like Paiporta, construction workers were laboring on buildings by the riverbed, which was empty. A few residents were returning from the hairdresser. Older people were sitting in their traditional ground-floor apartments, which have internal courtyards, decorated with arches, columns and colorful tiles.

Paiporta is downstream on the Rambla del Poyo. The water level had risen before, and nothing made anyone think that this time would be exceptional, the mayor, María Isabel Albalat, said. It had not even rained there that day.

She was alerted to the threat, she said, only about 6 p.m., after a town employee drove past the channel in Paiporta and told her that the water was running high.

She returned to her home on the central street of San Roque by 6:30 p.m., she recalled. The floods had already arrived. Quickly, the ground floor of her home was filled with nearly six and a half feet of water.

She picked up the phone, she said, and called Pilar Bernabé, the Spanish government’s representative in Valencia.

“My town is flooding, and many people are going to die,” Ms. Albalat said she told her.

It was just after 7 p.m., and Ms. Bernabé was in an emergency committee meeting with the regional and local authorities.

About the same time, Juan Mandingorra, 93, a resident of Paiporta, called his son to say that water was gushing inside his house. His son tried to go to him, but the water was already too high, another relative said. Cars were floating in the streets, residents recalled, some with people screaming inside.

Around 7:30 p.m., Mr. Mandingorra drowned in his living room, said Mr. Cervera, his grandson.

Still, the emergency committee continued its meeting for nearly another hour, discussing issues concerning the region’s rivers and dams, said a Spanish government official who requested anonymity to speak about the gathering.

Finally, at 8:11 p.m., the committee issued a general alert. Everyone’s phone rang. “Any type of movement in the province of Valencia should be avoided,” the alert said.

By that time, Concesión Tarazona Motes, 74, was holding onto a column in her apartment in Paiporta, her son said. There was little more than a foot of air between the waterline and her ceiling.

When she got the alert, Ms. Albalat, the mayor, was trying to save her neighbors from the raging waters.

“I found some alive and some dead,” she said. Five people died on her street alone, including a baby and her mother, Ms. Albalat noted. “I don’t know why they did not warn us,” she added, referring to the authorities.

The Blame Game

It remains unclear why it took the regional government in Valencia until 5 p.m. to convene an emergency coordination meeting, and why it took it another three hours for it to send out a mass alert.

The regional government in Valencia has blamed the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation, the body in charge of monitoring the area’s water basins. The confederation is controlled by the Spanish national government.

Ms. Pradas, the regional emergency management official, said on Spanish television that she learned the Magro had flooded only when the mayor of Utiel told her around 2 p.m. She said that the Júcar confederation had not warned of the “worrisome volumes of water” before then.

The regional authorities also said that they did not learn that the Rambla del Poyo was threatening to overflow until it was already breaching its banks.

The national government has disputed this. Records it shared with The New York Times showed that the Júcar confederation and other monitoring bodies continued to send messages to the authorities about heavy rains and higher-than-usual watercourse levels, including in the Magro and the Rambla del Poyo, repeatedly throughout the day.

A spokesman for Spain’s environment ministry, which oversees the confederation, said that, given the information available, the regional government should have summoned the emergency committee by midday, instead of waiting until 5 p.m.

Even after the committee convened, Carlos Mazón, the president of the Valencia region, arrived more than two hours late, according to the Spanish government official who had knowledge of the meeting.

The regional government did not respond to a request for comment about Mr. Mazón’s absence.

Mud and Wounds

In the towns destroyed by the flooding, few were willing to accept that there was nothing their politicians could have done to warn them.

“It was impossible to stop the water,” said Andreu Salom, the mayor of L’Alcúdia, a town on the Magro where at least two people died. “But warning and alerting would have saved lives,” he added. “I have no doubt about that.”

Since the flooding, tens of thousands have protested in Valencia, some demanding the resignation of Mr. Mazón. But residents have mostly devoted efforts to cleaning up after the devastation and to mourning the dead.

Days after the flooding, people placed plastic bottles, cut in half and holding red or white roses, on the windowsills of the homes where residents had drowned.

Where a child had died, mourners laid candles and toys. Some spray painted “D.E.P.” — Spanish for “R.I.P.” — on broken shutters they left outside victims’ homes.

For weeks, parts of the affected towns had no electricity. Cars were left overturned, smashed and piled up on the streets. Residents moved on foot, walking the muddy streets at night with head lamps and face masks, some in hazmat suits, fearing disease.

Many had lost everything.

Possessions that could be extracted from homes were piled in the streets, forming an obstacle course of overturned tables, grand pianos, highchairs, sofas, refrigerators and washing machines.

Many remained in shock.

Ms. Miota Sanz, who spent hours trying to pull her parents to safety in Utiel, said she could not stop thinking of her father as he told her, “Don’t fool us, don’t fool us, they are not coming,” when, indeed, no rescuers were on the way.

“I will never forget it in my life,” she said.

José Bautista contributed reporting from Madrid, and Roser Toll Pifarré from Barcelona, Spain.