The Lebanese Army said on Thursday that it had moved troops into Hezbollah strongholds outside Beirut and in the country’s south and east to pave the way for people to return, while Israel’s military said its fighter jets struck a Hezbollah site in the south and warned Lebanese civilians not to come back to villages near the border yet.

Lebanon was on edge as it entered the second day of a fragile cease-fire between Israel and the militant group Hezbollah, and it was not immediately clear what impact the strike would have or whether it violated the agreement. Hezbollah did not immediately comment on the strike.

In the morning, the agreement, which at least temporarily ended Lebanon’s deadliest conflict since the end of its civil war in 1990, appeared to largely be holding. The war forced roughly a quarter of Lebanon’s population to flee their homes, and thousands of them began to make the trek back to their war-ravaged communities, particularly in the south and east, on Wednesday after the U.S.-brokered cease-fire took effect.

The cease-fire agreement calls for a 60-day truce and the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon, but is less clear about when civilians may be allowed to return home.

On Thursday, the Israeli military said it had opened fire toward people who had arrived in several areas of southern Lebanon because they were violating the agreement. The statement referred to them as “suspects” but did not elaborate on who they were and did not immediately respond to a request for more details.

Avichay Adraee, an Arabic language spokesman for the Israeli military, said that residents who had fled towns in the far south should stay away “until further notice,” and that movement within those towns was prohibited. Later, he said the military would impose a nighttime curfew in the area.

“Anyone who moves south of this line — puts himself in danger,” he said.

Lebanon’s military said it was operating “temporary checkpoints” and detonating unexploded ordnance in the areas where it had deployed, and was also working to open roads that had been closed or damaged during the fighting. It said its goal was to help displaced people return to their homes.

One of those who went back home was Taflah Amar, 79. She returned to Baalbek, in Lebanon’s northeast, on Thursday after two months in Beirut. She said she had “been crying all day.”

“I’m an old woman,” said Ms. Amar, who returned home to find much of her neighborhood destroyed. “I’m not affiliated with anyone. What did I do to deserve this?”

Some of the most heavily damaged communities in Lebanon are the towns along its border with Israel. For years they were effectively governed by Hezbollah, the militant group backed by Iran.

Beginning in October 2023, the group used those towns to launch near-daily rocket attacks on northern Israel in solidarity with Hamas, its Iran-backed ally in the Gaza Strip. The attacks forced tens of thousands in Israel to flee their homes. But few in Israel, where the government has provided assistance to people who fled the conflict, appeared eager to rush back when the truce began.

“We have no intention of going back home yet,” said Gal Avraham, 29, a dog trainer from Margaliot, a small village in Israel just 200 yards from the border. Ms. Avraham and her husband took advantage of the cease-fire to visit their home for the first time in over a year. The house, which they had abandoned in haste, reeked of rotted food left behind after the electricity failed, she said.

Several homes in the village were damaged and many henhouses were destroyed. Ms. Avraham expressed doubts that the cease-fire would hold, citing a siren that sounded overnight in a nearby border town as a reminder of the lingering instability. “As far as we know, no one is returning home,” she said.

Israel intensified its military response to Hezbollah’s attacks in mid-September and began a ground invasion on Oct. 1. The war killed about 3,800 Lebanese and 100 Israelis, according to their governments.

Under the cease-fire agreement, both Israel and Hezbollah will observe a 60-day truce. During that time, Israel will gradually withdraw its military from Lebanon, and Hezbollah will move its fighters out of southern Lebanon, creating a sort of buffer zone between Israel’s border and the Litani River.

The area will be policed by a U.N. peacekeeping force and Lebanon’s military, which has not been a party to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. The deal was mediated by the United States and France, and formally accepted by the governments of Israel and Lebanon.

But the timeline for complete implementation of the agreement remains uncertain. Israel has said its actions will depend on how events unfold in Lebanon, and has vowed to strike if it sees Hezbollah resume hostile activity. A similar cease-fire that ended a war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006 was never fully enforced.

Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Euan Ward from Baalbek, Lebanon.

In mid-November, Iran dispatched a top official to Beirut to urge Hezbollah to accept a cease-fire with Israel. Around the same time, Iran’s U.N. ambassador met with Elon Musk, an overture to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inner circle. And on Friday, it will hold talks in Geneva with European countries on a range of issues, including its nuclear program.

All this recent diplomacy marks a sharp change in tone from late October, when Iran was preparing to launch a large retaliatory attack on Israel, with a deputy commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps warning, “We have never left an aggression unanswered in 40 years.”

Iran’s swing from tough talk to a more conciliatory tone in just a few weeks’ time has its roots in developments at home and abroad.

Five Iranian officials, one of them a Revolutionary Guards member, and two former officials said the decision to recalibrate was prompted by Mr. Trump winning the Nov. 5 election, with concerns about an unpredictable leader who, in his first term, pursued a policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran.

But it was also driven by Israel’s decimation in Lebanon of Hezbollah — the closest and most important of Iran’s militant allies — and by economic crises at home, where the currency has dropped steadily against the dollar and an energy shortage looms as winter approaches.

Taken together, these challenges forced Iran to recalibrate its approach, to one of defusing tensions, the current Iranian officials familiar with the planning said. They asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, which could put them in danger.

They said Iran suspended plans to strike Israel following Mr. Trump’s election because it did not want to exacerbate tensions with the incoming administration, which was already lining up cabinet nominees who were hostile to Iran and staunch supporters of Israel. Mr. Trump’s stated plans to end the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, however, appealed to Iran, the officials said.

Before the U.S. election was even held, Iran sent word to the Biden administration that, contrary to claims by some American intelligence officials, it was not plotting to assassinate Mr. Trump.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Wednesday that Iran welcomed the truce between Hezbollah and Israel, adding that “Tehran maintains its right to respond to Israel’s airstrikes on Iran last month, but it will take into consideration regional developments such as the cease-fire in Lebanon.”

In the view of Sanam Vakil, the Middle East director for Chatham House, a British policy research group, it seems clear that Iran is responding to the coming changes in Washington, as well as the changed domestic and regional geopolitical landscape it now faces.

“It all came together, and the shift in tone is about protecting Iran’s interests.” Ms. Vakil said.

Iran’s opaque regime, and a governance rife with factional rivalries, can sometimes lead to mixed messages to external audiences and sharp internal differences, though the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, always has the final word.

The hard-line president Ebrahim Raisi died this year and a moderate, Masoud Pezeshkian, was elected in July to replace him, with a mandate to bring some economic and social reform and engage with the West. Mr. Pezeshkian has a lot of power over domestic policy and some influence in foreign affairs.

Just days after the U.S. election, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Amir Saeid Iravani, met with Mr. Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who has Mr. Trump’s ear, at the ambassador’s residence in New York to discuss reducing tensions with the incoming Trump administration. Two Iranian officials described the meeting as promising.

In Iran, the reformist and centrist factions rejoiced at the news.

But conservatives lashed out, calling the ambassador a traitor, signaling the kind of internal struggle the government faces over engagement with anyone in the orbit of Mr. Trump, who exited the nuclear deal with Iran in 2018, imposed tough sanctions on the country and ordered the killing of a top general, Qassim Suleimani, in 2020.

Facing backlash over the meeting with Mr. Musk, Iran’s foreign ministry issued a denial after three days that it had ever taken place. And last week, after a U.N. agency censured Iran for preventing international monitoring of its nuclear program, Tehran reacted defiantly, saying it was accelerating the program, while also insisting that it “stands ready for productive engagement.”

Several senior Iranian officials have publicly said Iran was open to negotiations with the Trump administration to resolve nuclear and regional issues. This itself is a shift from Iran’s position during the first Trump administration that it would not negotiate with Washington and that its regional policies and weapons development were strictly its own business.

“Iran is now applying restraint to give Trump a chance to see whether he can end the Gaza war and contain Netanyahu,” said Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian diplomat and nuclear negotiator who is now a Middle East and nuclear researcher at Princeton University, referring to Israel’s prime minister. “If this happens, it will open the path for more comprehensive negotiations between Tehran and Washington.”

For more than 13 months after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel, Iran and allied forces in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq insisted that they would not cease attacks on Israel as long as Israel was at war in Gaza.

But Hezbollah’s devastating losses concerned Iran, which exerts considerable influence over the Lebanese group. Iranian media also reported resentment rising among the more than one million displaced Shia Lebanese, who looked to Iran as their protector and patron.

In an unusually brazen assessment, Mehdi Afraz, the conservative director of a research center at Baqir al-Olum University, an Islamic institution, said Iran underestimated Israel’s military power and that war with Israel was not “a game on PlayStation.”

“Our friends from Syria called and said the Lebanese Shia refugees who support Hezbollah are cursing us up and down, first Iran, then others,” he said during a panel discussion at the university. “We are treating war as a joke.”

Mr. Khamenei, who has demonstrated a degree of pragmatism when survival of the Iranian regime seemed at risk, sent a senior adviser, Ali Larijani, a veteran centrist politician, to Beirut in mid-November. Mr. Larijani delivered a message from the ayatollah to Hezbollah leaders, according to two Iranian officials: It was time to accept the cease-fire and end the war, and Iran would help Hezbollah rebuild and rearm.

Less than 48 hours later, Lebanon announced a breakthrough in negotiations: that Hezbollah had agreed to keep its forces away from the Israeli border, a condition it had previously rejected as unacceptable.

At the same time, Iranian officials faced mounting domestic economic and energy crises. The government announced two-hour daily power cuts, inciting public anger and accusations from critics that its regional conflicts were too costly for average Iranians.

Mr. Pezeshkian, the president, who has promised to engage with the world to lift sanctions and improve the economy, said in a meeting with officials in the energy sector last week that he needed to “honestly tell the public about the energy situation.” Iran’s energy infrastructure, he said, cannot meet its energy needs.

Tehran has said it will send an experienced diplomat and former nuclear negotiator, Majid Takht-Ravanchi, to meet on Friday with officials of Britain, France and Germany, the countries that, along with the United States, sponsored the censure over Iran’s nuclear program.

“Without doubt in Iran, among senior officials and ordinary people, there is a real desire to end the tensions with the West and to get along,” Naser Imani, an analyst close to the government, said in a telephone interview from Tehran. “Cooperation with the West is not viewed as defeat, it is seen as transactional diplomacy and can be done from a position of strength.”

Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting.

For 22 years, John Burt has cut and trimmed steaks, chops and roasts in a butcher shop across the street from Smithfield, the oldest meat market in London. In that time, he said, he has watched the market’s slow decline, from a carnivore’s bustling bazaar to a hulking relic of an earlier London.

Still, the news this week that Smithfield will close — its owner, the City of London Corporation, killed a plan to move the market to a new site in East London — came as something of a jolt to him.

“I’m sad about it,” said Mr. Burt, 64, whose shop is separate from the market and will stay in business. “You wouldn’t have thought that Smithfield Market would ever shut down because it’s been around since the time of Henry VIII.”

Even longer, actually: Smithfield has been the site of a market since at least 1174, when medieval traders brought horses, cows, oxen and pigs to be sold there. In 1327, King Edward III gave the governing body of the City of London the right to operate Smithfield and other food markets. The current market, completed in 1868, is a marvel of Victorian engineering, with a cavernous roof and train tracks running underneath it (to transport the livestock).

It is, however, “totally out of date,” said Simon Jenkins, a journalist and the author of “A Short History of London.”

In an era of supermarket chains, which buy produce directly from far-flung food-processing plants, a wholesale meat market in the heart of London makes little sense. The fruit and vegetable market at Covent Garden was moved out of the city center in the 1970s; the fish market migrated to Canary Wharf in 1982.

Mr. Burt said he thought the local authorities had been itching to remove rattling delivery trucks from the warren of streets around Smithfield, which is ringed by upmarket pubs and restaurants. The property, in any case, is more valuable as a site for offices, apartments or retail businesses.

The City of London, an ancient governing body, said that the traders would be allowed to keep operating at Smithfield until at least 2028, and said that they would be compensated for the cost of relocating their business.

Mr. Jenkins, who has campaigned to conserve London’s architectural heritage, said he was hopeful that the market would be turned into a cultural and shopping mecca that would rival the redeveloped Covent Garden. An adjacent building, which housed a poultry market, is being converted into a new home for the Museum of London, though Mr. Jenkins said it was a “scandal” that the meat market hung on long enough to prevent the museum from taking over the entire site.

For the City of London, the sunset of Smithfield is a rare disappointment, given its ambitions and resourcefulness in developing what it refers to as the Square Mile, the oldest part of London. Thrusting skyscrapers have transformed the district into a kind of Chicago-on-Thames. The corporation’s original plan was to move the Smithfield market and the Billingsgate fish market to a vast new site on the Dagenham Docks, in East London.

But the corporation said inflation and rising construction costs had made the project unaffordable. Some critics have argued that the decision was flawed because it failed to account for the impact of the loss of the market on food security in the British capital.

In a glass-is-half-full statement, Chris Hayward, the policy chairman of the City of London Corporation, called it a “positive new chapter for the Smithfield and Billingsgate Markets in that it empowers traders to build a sustainable future in premises that align with their long-term business goals.”

It is not the first time the City of London has had to shelve an ambitious project. In 2021, it pulled the plug on a dramatic new concert hall — estimated to cost 288 million pounds, or $365 million — which would have been a new home for the London Symphony Orchestra. It blamed the coronavirus pandemic, though the departure of Simon Rattle, the orchestra’s conductor and a vocal champion of the project, may have also played a role.

“What this proves again is that while they’re still capable of doing things they’ve been doing for centuries, there’s a limit even to what they can do in terms of development,” said Tony Travers, a professor of politics and an authority on city planning at the London School of Economics.

The decision, he said, also underlines the unsentimental nature of many Londoners toward their history. The City of London, he noted, had long resisted allowing skyscrapers. But after Canary Wharf put up a forest of towers and threatened the city’s status as a financial center, the corporation abruptly reversed course. Nearly a dozen new towers are scheduled to go up there by 2030.

“Intriguingly, for a country as old and interested in its history as the U.K., people are surprisingly willing to move on,” Professor Travers said.

Already, Smithfield has the faintly nostalgic air of a museum. Placards tell passers-by about the history of the market, which is even more blood-soaked than one might imagine. In 1305, the Scottish independence leader, William Wallace, was hanged, drawn and quartered on the site. During the reign of Queen Mary I, in the 16th century, Protestants were burned to death as heretics there.

Smithfield’s next chapter is being written in more bloodless language. The City of London said it would work with the traders to help them “transition seamlessly and successfully to new locations.” But they are under no obligation to stay in business, and Mr. Burt said he expected many would retire.

“Most of them are older than me,” he said, noting that he will soon turn 65. “Do they really want to go off and start another business? I don’t think so. There aren’t many meat markets left around the country; it’s a dying trade.”

When Sabrina Wang, a Chinese university student, saw an online post that claimed that manufacturers of sanitary pads had been cheating women, selling them pads that were significantly shorter than advertised, she decided to measure her own. She was shocked to find that all three brands she had at home were shorter than labeled, by as much as 17 percent.

“If I had issues when using them, I’d wonder if it was that I had gone too long without changing them,” Ms. Wang, 22, said. “It was only after everyone pointed it out that I realized it was a manufacturing problem.”

She wrote her own post, urging other women to lobby for stricter oversight of pad makers. “Manufacturers think we can’t go without their products because of our everyday physiological needs, so they dare to be so arrogant,” she said in an interview. “It’s a lack of respect.”

Ms. Wang was joining a chorus of voices in China that in recent weeks have demanded greater accountability from sanitary pad manufacturers and government regulators — and, more broadly, greater consideration of women. Criticism of the lengths of pads quickly expanded to scrutiny of their quality and price. From there, the conversation branched out to topics like inadequate sex education, body shaming and the lack of female corporate leaders.

Women have called for boycotts of brands they deem to be of subpar quality, and shared guides to making reusable pads at home. Dozens of hashtags about the topic, such as “black-hearted pads” and “Is it so hard for sanitary pad producers to meet women’s needs?” have trended online.

The backlash prompted one major manufacturer to pull all its products from the e-commerce platform Taobao, promising to improve them. State media outlets have denounced “deep-seated problems” in the industry. And a government-backed trade association promised to take public comments into account when formulating new regulations for sanitary products.

The uproar is the latest example of how discussions of gender inequality have become increasingly common in China, even as the ruling Communist Party has worked to silence civil society and independent speech. Though the police have targeted high-profile feminist activists and organizations, a more nascent and general awareness of gender discrimination, often spread online by young women, has proved harder to stamp out.

Menstruation, in particular, has become a popular rallying topic. During the Covid pandemic, many women criticized the lack of sanitary pads for medical staff. China’s high-speed rail agency did not sell pads on trains until an online pressure campaign in 2022 prompted some routes to begin stocking them.

The latest campaign began this month, when people on Xiaohongshu, an Instagram-like platform popular with female users, posted videos showing themselves measuring their sanitary pads. They urged other women to follow suit.

When women complained to the manufacturers’ customer service representatives about their findings, some initial responses were dismissive, fueling further outrage. A representative for ABC, a popular brand, told one woman that she didn’t have to buy the products if she was dissatisfied.

Other brands noted that Chinese regulations permit labeling discrepancies within a certain range.

Soon, many women began scrutinizing other details about their pads, such as their chemical content, or advertisements they perceived as sexist. They shared stories about being embarrassed by leaky pads. Others said the government should reimburse the cost of sanitary products through medical insurance.

Some women encouraged others to submit feedback to an industry federation in charge of drafting regulations for sanitary pads, even drafting suggestions to copy and paste, such as increasing random inspections on manufacturers and further restricting formaldehyde as a component.

“The more I read, the angrier I got,” said Liu Ye, a 20-year-old student who joined the feedback campaign. “If many people submit opinions, there should be an effect.”

Major pad manufacturers soon began issuing apologies. The founder of ABC shared a video in which he bowed to the camera and promised exact adherence to industry standards.

Still, despite the apparent success of the women’s protests, there were signs of official wariness toward mass mobilization and feminism. Even as state media outlets chided manufacturers for making low-quality products, they did so mostly from the perspective of protecting consumer rights generally, not women’s rights.

Ms. Wang, the university student who shared tips for lobbying regulators on Xiaohongshu, said her post appeared to have been partly censored; others could not see her replies to their comments, and the post’s viewership rate suddenly plunged overnight.

Other companies that have adopted advertising campaigns seen as appealing to feminists have backtracked after storms of online criticism from men.

For some women, even if the companies did change, it was too little, too late. Zhang Yanchi, a 23-year-old writer in central China, said she wanted to see female entrepreneurs building their own companies that respected and empowered women.

“I am waiting for their pads,” she said.

Siyi Zhao contributed research from Beijing, and Joy Dong from Hong Kong.

Australia has imposed a sweeping ban on social media for children under 16, one of the world’s most comprehensive measures aimed at safeguarding young people from potential hazards online. But many details were still unclear, such as how it will be enforced and what platforms will be covered.

After sailing through Parliament’s lower house on Wednesday, the bill passed the Senate on Thursday with bipartisan support. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said that it puts Australia at the vanguard of efforts to protect the mental health and well-being of children from detrimental effects of social media, such as online hate or bullying.

The law, he has said, puts the onus on social media platforms to take “reasonable steps” to prevent anyone under 16 from having an account. Corporations could be fined up to 49.5 million Australian dollars (about $32 million) for “systemic” failures to implement age requirements.

Neither underage users nor their parents will face punishment for violations. And whether children find ways to get past the restrictions is beside the point, Mr. Albanese said.

“We know some kids will find workarounds, but we’re sending a message to social media companies to clean up their act,” he said in a statement this month.

As with many countries’ regulations on alcohol or tobacco, the law will create a new category of “age-restricted social media platforms” accessible only to those 16 and older. How that digital carding will happen, though, is a tricky question.

The law specifies that users will not be forced to provide government identification as part of the verification process, a measure that the conservative opposition said was included after they raised concerns about privacy rights.

It is also not clear exactly which platforms will be covered by the ban. The prime minister has said that Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram and X will be included, but YouTube and messaging apps including WhatsApp are expected to be exempt.

France last year passed a law requiring parental consent for social media users under 15, and it has been pushing for similar measures across the European Union. Florida this year imposed a ban for users under 14 and required parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds, but that law could face constitutional challenges.

Leo Puglisi, a 17-year-old Australian teenager who runs a news site, 6 News, that is staffed mostly by teens, said he had full confidence that his 14-year-old brother would easily find a way to circumvent any restriction.

He described social media as an integral part of growing up today. He and his contemporaries are aware that it can cause harm, but they rely on it to find communities of people with similar interests, he said.

A blanket ban would do little to counteract the dangers of the platforms, he said.

“None of the harmful content would be removed. It just kicks the can down the road and throws you into the deep end at 16,” he said. “It might sound good on paper, but in reality it’s not practical.”

But Dany Elachi, who has five children between the ages of 7 and 15, said the law would help to change the norms around social media usage. Many parents concerned about its harmful effects feel they have no choice but to let their children use it so they don’t feel left out.

“When you think your child might be isolated, that’s what puts parents under a lot of pressure,” said Mr. Elachi, co-founder of the Heads Up Alliance, a network of parents who are trying to delay their children’s use of social media and smartphones. “If everybody misses out, no one misses out.”

Kylea Tink, an independent lawmaker representing North Sydney, criticized the bill in the debate in the lower house on Tuesday as a “blunt instrument.” She said the law would stop short of holding social media companies accountable for the safety of the product they are providing.

“They are not fixing the potholes; they are just telling our kids there won’t be any cars,” she said.

During the same debate, Stephen Bates of the Australian Greens party cited his experience as a 13-year-old addicted to the video game “The Sims.” His father installed a program so his computer would automatically shut down after an hour, he recalled.

“It took me 10 minutes to figure out how to get around that,” said Mr. Bates, now a 32-year-old lawmaker. “As the youngest person in this chamber and one of very, very few people in this place who grew up with this technology and with social media, I can say that change is needed but this bill is not it.”

Now that the law has passed, social media companies have a 12-month period to meet the requirements. The task of sorting out the details of its implementation will fall to Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner.

She said the technologies behind age verification were rapidly advancing, arising from past efforts to limit underage exposure to pornography or gambling sites. A trial commissioned by the Australian government is underway to test them.

In an interview, she said she had no doubt that tech giants would find a way to comply.

“They’ve got financial resources, technologies and some of the best brainpower,” she said. “If they can target you for advertising, they can use the same technology and know-how to identify and verify the age of a child.”

For more than a week, a Chinese commercial ship has apparently been forced to anchor in the Baltic Sea, surrounded and monitored by naval and coast guard vessels from European countries as the authorities attempt to unravel a maritime mystery.

The development arose after two undersea fiber-optic cables were severed under the sea, and investigators from a task force that includes Finland, Sweden and Lithuania are trying to determine if the ship’s crew intentionally cut the cables by dragging the ship’s anchor along the sea floor.

On Wednesday, the Swedish police announced that the inquiry into the episode had concluded but that an investigation was ongoing. Sweden did not release any initial findings.

American intelligence officials had assessed that the cables were not cut deliberately, though the authorities in Europe say they have not been able to rule out sabotage.

“The preliminary investigation was initiated because it cannot be ruled out that the cables were deliberately damaged,” Per Engström, the superintendent of the Swedish police, said in a statement on Wednesday. “The current classification of the crime is sabotage, though this may change.”

Denmark has said it is in “ongoing dialogue” with various countries, including China.

The mystery of the severed cable and who is to blame comes as Europe is increasingly on edge after a number of apparent sabotage operations, including arson attacks, vandalism and physical assaults. Many of these have been attributed to Russian intelligence operatives, including a plot that emerged last month, Western officials say, to put incendiary devices on cargo planes.

The case surrounding the commercial ship in the Baltic Sea is somewhat different. That ship — a bulk carrier called the Yi Peng 3 — travels under a Chinese flag. The ship, owned by Ningbo Yipeng Shipping Co. Ltd., set off from the Russian port of Ust-Luga in the Baltic Sea on Nov. 15, according to Marine Traffic, a commercial ship tracking agency. From there, it traveled nearly the full length of the Baltic Sea.

The first cable connecting Lithuania and Sweden was cut on the morning of Nov. 17. The second one, connecting Finland and Germany, was cut the following morning. The damage disrupted some data transfers but did not cut internet connections in any of the countries, the authorities said.

Now, investigators are sifting through analyses as ships from nearby countries are patrolling near the Chinese ship.

On Nov. 19, a Danish Navy patrol ship followed and later stopped Yi Peng 3, ship tracking data show. Since then, the Chinese ship has been anchored at that position, in the Kattegat Strait, which connects the Baltic and the North Seas, with a Danish patrol vessel nearby.

In the week since, tracking data show, German Coast Guard vessels and warships, as well as more Danish naval vessels, have sailed to the vicinity. Most stayed for one or two days, then left and were replaced by other ships.

On Wednesday, satellite imagery and tracking data showed that the Chinese ship was flanked by a German Coast Guard and a Danish naval patrol ship, which were both about one mile away. In the evening, two German warships also sailed past the Yi Peng 3.

At one point on Wednesday morning, ship-tracking data show, a Danish naval vessel sailed past the Yi Peng 3 within about 100 feet of the ship.

According to a vessel database, a company called Win Enterprise Ship Management (Ningbo) Co., Ltd. manages Yi Peng 3’s safety protocols. Ningbo Yipeng is registered as the ship’s owner and manager. Attempts to reach Ningbo Yipeng were not successful late Wednesday.

This is not the first time that a Chinese-flagged ship has been suspected of involvement in an episode of this sort in the Baltic Sea. Last year, a ship called the Newnew Polar Bear dropped its anchor and cut through a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia. In that instance, the authorities allowed the ship to enter international waters and avoid capture, a mistake that officials said they tried to avoid with the Yi Peng 3.

“It’s totally without question that if critical infrastructure of some countries has been destroyed or seriously damaged, and we have to find out who did it, there cannot be a situation in which one simply walks away from the scene,” Finland’s defense minister, Antti Häkkänen, said after the fiber-optic cables were cut this month.

Reporting was contributed by Julian E. Barnes, Chris Buckley, Melissa Eddy, Christina Anderson, Courtney Brooks and Johanna Lemola.