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      Humberto Ortega, Former Military Chief in Nicaragua, Dies at 77

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      Mr. Ortega, the estranged brother of President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, had been under house arrest for months after making statements that infuriated his sibling.Humberto Ortega Saavedra, the former chief of the armed forces of Nicaragua and younger brother of the current president, who publicly questioned his sibling’s “dictatorial” rule only to wind up under house arrest, died on Monday, the Nicaraguan government announced. He was 77.Mr. Ortega had been in ill health for several months with severe heart problems, the Nicaraguan military said in a statement. He died at a military hospital in the country’s capital, Managua.Mr. Ortega was a key member of the leftist Sandinista Front that in 1979 toppled the right-wing dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.Along with his brother, Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s current president, he was a member of the nine-man directorate that ruled Nicaragua during a civil war against the U.S.-backed rebels known as the contras that lasted throughout the 1980s.In announcing his death, the government acknowledged his “strategic contribution” as a Sandinista, a movement he joined as an adolescent.“He was known as one of the most important military strategists during the insurrection,” said Mateo Jarquín, a Nicaragua historian at Chapman University in California.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War

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      The United States’ ability to influence events in the Mideast has waned, and other major nations have essentially been onlookers.Over almost a year of war in the Middle East, major powers have proved incapable of stopping or even significantly influencing the fighting, a failure that reflects a turbulent world of decentralized authority that seems likely to endure.Stop-and-start negotiations between Israel and Hamas to end the fighting in Gaza, pushed by the United States, have repeatedly been described by the Biden administration as on the verge of a breakthrough, only to fail. The current Western-led attempt to avert a full-scale Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon amounts to a scramble to avert disaster. Its chances of success seem deeply uncertain after the Israeli killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah on Friday.“There’s more capability in more hands in a world where centrifugal forces are far stronger than centralizing ones,” said Richard Haass, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Middle East is the primary case study of this dangerous fragmentation.”The killing of Mr. Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah over more than three decades and the man who built the Shiite organization into one of the most powerful nonstate armed forces in the world, leaves a vacuum that Hezbollah will most likely take a long time to fill. It is a major blow to Iran, the chief backer of Hezbollah, that may even destabilize the Islamic Republic. Whether full-scale war will come to Lebanon remains unclear.“Nasrallah represented everything for Hezbollah, and Hezbollah was the advance arm of Iran,” said Gilles Kepel, a leading French expert on the Middle East and the author of a book on the world’s upheaval since Oct. 7. “Now the Islamic Republic is weakened, perhaps mortally, and one wonders who can even give an order for Hezbollah today.”For many years, the United States was the only country that could bring constructive pressure to bear on both Israel and Arab states. It engineered the 1978 Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt, and the Israel-Jordan peace of 1994. Just over three decades ago, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, shook hands on the White House lawn in the name of peace, only for the fragile hope of that embrace to erode steadily.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Israeli Military Video Shows Nasrallah Likely Killed by 2,000-Pound Bomb

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      A video published by the Israeli military showed that planes it said were used in the attack that killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on Friday night carried 2,000-pound bombs, according to munitions experts and a New York Times analysis.The video showed eight planes fitted with at least 15 2,000-pound bombs, including the American-manufactured BLU-109 with a JDAM kit, a precision guidance system that attaches to bombs, according to Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician. These bombs, a type of munition known as bunker busters, can penetrate underground before detonating.Wes Bryant, a former U.S. Air Force targeting specialist who also reviewed the video, agreed with the analysis. In text messages with The Times, he said the bombs were “exactly what I would expect” to be used in what Israel has said was an attack on Mr. Nasrallah in Hezbollah’s underground headquarters.In May, the Biden administration announced it had paused a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel because of concerns over civilian safety in Gaza.The video, published Saturday on the Israeli military’s official Telegram channel with the caption “Israeli Air Force Fighter Jets Involved in the Elimination of Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah’s Central Headquarters in Lebanon,” shows at least eight planes in a row armed with 2,000-pound bombs. Some are too far away to clearly identify the exact model, but the closer planes are seen armed with BLU-109 bombs. That model of bomb is also identifiable when the video shows two planes taking off, with one plane carrying six of those munitions. Then the video shows a plane returning at dusk to the Israeli air base without any bombs.Israel Defense Forces via Telegram More

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      Israel Likely to Have Enough Weapons for Multiple Conflicts

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      Over the last week alone, Israel launched more than 2,000 airstrikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon and continued its near-daily bombings against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Its air defenses also fended off attacks, in one instance intercepting a ballistic missile headed for Tel Aviv.And there are no signs of the onslaught slowing. “We’re not stopping, while simultaneously preparing plans for the next phases,” the Israeli military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said on Wednesday.But how long can Israel keep it up?Military and weapons experts say that is not clear. Israel, like many countries, is highly secretive about the weapons in its stockpile, and government spokespeople who vigorously safeguard that information did not respond to requests for comment.Yet there are several reasons why experts believe Israel could outlast its adversaries in its two-front offensive, even while defending itself from approaching strikes. Israel’s defense industry churned out so many weapons last year that it was able to export some, even despite the war in Gaza beginning in October. The United States has sent Israel at least tens of thousands of missiles, bombs and artillery rounds in recent years.And given the threats it has faced, Israel has almost certainly built up its stockpiles to sustain multiple conflicts at once — especially if Iran rallies its allied groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen to strike at the same time.“It will not run out, because in the Middle East, you cannot run out of weapons,” said Yehoshua Kalisky, a military technology expert at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “The leaders know how to calculate the amount of weapons that are needed, and what they would have to have in the stockpile, because in this jungle you have to be strong.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Russian Military Plane Breaches Japan’s Airspace

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      The infringements were the first by Russia in five years, according to the Japanese defense ministry. A fighter fired a warning flare in response.A Russian military patrol plane breached Japanese airspace off the country’s northwestern coast three times on Monday, prompting Japan’s military to dispatch a fighter jet to issue radio warnings and, for the first time, to use a signal flare to deter the Russian aircraft.According to Yoshimasa Hayashi, the chief cabinet secretary to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, the Russian plane flew above Rebun Island, which is northwest of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost prefecture, between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. on Monday afternoon.“This violation of our airspace is extremely regrettable,” said Mr. Hayashi, in remarks to reporters on Monday afternoon. “We have lodged an extremely strong protest with the Russian government through diplomatic channels and have strongly urged them to prevent a recurrence.”This was not the first time that a Russian military plane had violated Japanese airspace but it was the first time that Japan’s military had responded with a flare to warn the plane to leave. Last month, a Chinese military aircraft flew into Japan’s territorial airspace and the government said it was the first known incursion by the Chinese military.Minoru Kihara, Japan’s defense minister, said Japan’s military had dispatched F-15 and F-35 fighter jets but that there had been “no particularly dangerous acts by the Russian aircraft.”According to Japan’s defense ministry, the flights on Monday represented the 44th known incursion by a Russian plane — or an aircraft suspected to be Russian — since 1967, but it was the first time that a Russian military plane had breached Japanese territorial airspace since June 2019.Mr. Kihara noted that both Chinese and Russian naval vessels had passed this week through the Soya Strait between Hokkaido and Sakhalin, a Russian island about 25 miles north of Hokkaido. Mr. Kihara said it was possible that the movement of the ships and the Russian aircraft were related.Mr. Hayashi said the Japanese government did not know the “intentions and goals” of the Russian military aircraft. He said Japan would “take all possible measures to ensure vigilance and surveillance.”The prime minister is in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly, and Mr. Hayashi said he had advised Mr. Kishida to “respond calmly and resolutely” and to cooperate closely with the United States.Russia’s embassy in Tokyo referred requests for comment to the defense ministry, which did not immediately respond.Anton Troianovski More

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      An Escape from the Front Line in Ukraine

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      An excerpt from one of the most ambitious stories in The Times Magazine’s history.Today, The New York Times Magazine published one of the most ambitious stories in its long history — an account of a Russian military officer’s desertion and escape. Sarah Topol spent over a year and a half investigating the Russian military and reporting in eight countries across four continents.In the story, the officer — identified by a pseudonym, Ivan — feigns a serious back injury to escape the front in Ukraine and eventually defect. He uses a cane to make that story convincing. Now, he must retrieve his passport, which is locked with other officers’ passports in the H.R. office of his base in Russia. Each passport has a paper slip in it, logging various personal details. He buys a fake version of the passport online: good enough to fool the military, but not to fool anyone at the borders he needs to cross.So Ivan devises a plan to get his hands on the real one — and swap it with the fake. Here’s how he does it.Ivan knew the office from years of worthless paperwork and reports. The H.R. manager sat at a desk on the right side of the room. Next to him was a six-foot-high metal safe with three drawers. They were unlocked with a key. The passports were kept in folders inside the drawers.To complicate matters, Ivan could use only one arm — the other would be holding the cane as part of his act. So he had to walk in, with his cane in his left hand, take the passport out of his pocket and somehow swap it for the fake. He would also need to remove the paper slip from the original and place it into the duplicate before returning it. How could he do all that with just one hand?The H.R. manager’s desk faced the room. Ivan would have to find a way to reach into his pocket while holding both the cane and the passport. No, that wouldn’t work. He would need to find a way to sit down, put down his cane so he could have two free hands and then reach into his pocket — but that motion could be seen from the side or the back.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Israeli Attacks in Lebanon Mark a Sharp Strategic Shift

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      The events of this week seem to indicate that Israel’s leaders have decided they can no longer live with the threat of Hezbollah on their northern border, analysts say.The death toll from a devastating Israeli airstrike on central Beirut rose to at least 37 on Saturday, with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah confirming that two of its senior commanders were among those killed. Dozens more were wounded in the strikes, which leveled two apartment buildings and plunged Lebanon into further chaos days after pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members exploded en masse.The attacks have left Hezbollah, Lebanon’s most sophisticated political and military force, in deep disarray and appeared to hail a stark shift in the calculations that had long governed the decades-old conflict between Israel and the militant group.After a hugely destructive war in 2006, Hezbollah’s leaders spent years building military capacity they thought could counter and perhaps deter Israeli attacks. And until last week, Israel had refrained from launching the kind of attacks that its leaders had previously feared could provoke retaliatory strikes on critical infrastructure or incursions by Hezbollah commandos. However, events of the past few days have suggested that Hezbollah grossly underestimated its adversary, as Israel dashed across what had been unofficially considered red lines.The region was on edge Saturday in anticipation of a Hezbollah counterattack, with President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, telling reporters that the fighting posed an “acute” risk of escalation. Hezbollah issued calls for vengeance on Saturday and fired rocket salvos into northern Israel, but those reactions are routine. Meanwhile, Israeli fighter jets continued to pummel Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, including, its military said, hundreds of Hezbollah rocket launchers.“Eighteen years of mutual deterrence has now given way to a new phase of one-sided superiority on the part of Israel,” said Lina Khatib, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a London-based research organization. “The facade that Hezbollah had been presenting to the world of it being an impenetrable organization is shattered, and Israel has displayed with flair how much of an upper hand it has in this equation vis-à-vis Hezbollah.”People in Beirut mourning Hezbollah fighters on Thursday.Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Who Was Ahmed Wahbi, One of the Hezbollah Commanders Killed by an Israeli Airstrike?

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      Hezbollah said Saturday that Ahmed Wahbi, a Hezbollah commander it described as a leader and trainer in the group’s elite Radwan force, had been killed in an airstrike along with the force’s founding commander, Ibrahim Aqeel, and other Hezbollah members.As is common for Hezbollah military operatives, Mr. Wahbi had little public profile while he was alive, but an obituary distributed by Hezbollah-linked media said he played a leading role in Hezbollah’s support for Hamas after the latter’s assault on Israel on Oct. 7. Hezbollah has launched attacks on northern Israel through the war in Gaza to support Hamas.Both are backed by Iran and are members of a regional militia network known as the “axis of resistance,” which also includes the Houthis of Yemen, the government of Syria and other fighting groups there and in Iraq.Mr. Wahbi, 59, was a longtime member of Hezbollah, joining at its inception, during Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s to fight the Israeli occupation of the country’s south. The origins and makeup of the Radwan unit are murky, but its fighters have played key roles in operations like the abduction of Israeli soldiers in 2006, which led to a destructive monthlong war with Israel in 2006. The unit also fought against the jihadists of the Islamic State in Syria.As a young fighter, Mr. Wahbi participated in Hezbollah’s early operations against Israel, Hezbollah said. He was captured by the Israeli army in 1984, though the group did not say why or how long he was held.In 1997, he was a leader of a Hezbollah ambush targeting Israeli naval commandos near the town of Ansariya, in southern Lebanon, according to Hezbollah’s obituary. Hezbollah fighters killed about a dozen Israeli officers in that operation.He was a longtime leader and trainer with the Radwan force, in what Hezbollah called “developing human capabilities.” He also trained other formations within the group.He headed the Radwan force until the beginning of this year, then returned to training, Hezbollah said.The Israeli military said in a statement that it had struck “the masterminds” of a plan to attack northern Israel as Hamas attacked near Gaza on Oct. 7. The military did not mention Mr. Wahbi specifically, and did not respond to a request for comment. More