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      Netanyahu, Ignoring Allies and Defying Critics, Basks in a Rare Triumph

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      Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to assassinate Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, capped an increasingly brazen sequence of escalatory moves that reflected the Israeli prime minister’s renewed confidence in Israel’s military strength as well as in his own ability to navigate and defy foreign criticism, analysts said.Mr. Netanyahu’s authorization of the strike came a day after the United States, Israel’s main benefactor, called for a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah. It occurred on the same afternoon that foreign diplomats walked out of his speech to the United Nations General Assembly, protesting the conduct of Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon. And it came amid growing pressure on judges at the International Criminal Court to order his arrest on war crimes charges.Last October, Mr. Netanyahu canceled a similar attack against Mr. Nasrallah following American pressure to call it off and internal doubts about Israel’s ability to fight on two fronts in Gaza and Lebanon after its failure to prevent Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. His popularity plummeted after the Hamas raid, with polls repeatedly suggesting that he would easily lose power if a snap election was called.Nearly a year later, Mr. Netanyahu appears far less deterred by either foreign pressure or domestic frailty. Fighting in Gaza has slowed, allowing the Israeli military to focus on Hezbollah, while Mr. Netanyahu did not even consult with the United States before authorizing the strike on Friday, according to U.S. officials.“King Bibi is back,” said Nachman Shai, a former cabinet minister, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname. “If you compare Bibi now to Bibi 10 months ago, he’s a different person. He’s full of confidence.”Mourning Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, on Saturday in Palestine Square in Tehran.Arash Khamooshi 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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      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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      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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      For Families of Those Missing After Israeli Strike in Beirut, an Agonizing Wait

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      After a nightlong vigil, with an untold number of hours of waiting still ahead, Najwa Qubaisi pushed away every relative who tried to coax her from the concrete skeleton of the building that had once been home to her grandson and his family.“How can I leave? I can’t,” she said, her eyes puffy from hours of crying. “I want to stay until I get some kind of news.”A day after an Israeli strike razed two buildings in an attack that killed members of its regional foe, Hezbollah, in suburban Beirut, the relatives of those who lived there were anxiously waiting on Saturday to learn the fate of dozens of loved ones still unaccounted for.Desperate, dazed-looking family members huddled in crowds just beyond the remains of sidewalks that had been ripped away and torn apart by the force of the blast. The occasional screeches of ambulance sirens were audible as rescuers brought in heavy equipment to remove tons of concrete in search of the missing.The blasts on Friday were not only a painful military blow to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed group that lost two top commanders and over a dozen members in what Israel described as a strike on a meeting held after a string of Israeli attacks this past week. They were also devastating to the largely Shiite Muslim community of Beirut’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah has long held sway.The toll of the blast has risen to 37, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, with three children among the dead. And sorrow and rage emanated from those still awaiting news.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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      Ukraine Wants Long-Range Weapons. Here’s a Look at What They Are.

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      Much of the public discourse about arming Ukraine has revolved around whether the United States will send “long range” weapons. But that can mean different things.There are roughly 500 miles between Kyiv and Moscow.The United States has weapons that can fly much farther than that, but it is unlikely to supply them to Ukraine for fear that an attack on the Russian capital with American weapons might spark a third world war.So within that 500-mile range the Biden administration has been pushed repeatedly to give Kyiv weapons that can hit targets as far away as possible. Discussion among Ukraine’s supporters often centers on calls for “long range” weapons — a term with no real military definition, but that has an emotional pull Ukrainian leaders have used to pressure the White House for ever more capable munitions.Over two and half years of war, “long range” has evolved in the public forum to describe a host of increasingly advanced U.S. weapons. The trend began soon after Russia’s 2022 invasion, when U.S. government officials first used the term to apply to …ArtillerySeveral 155-millimeter howitzer shells waiting to be fired in Ukraine’s Donetsk region in March.Nicole Tung for The New York TimesThe United States has sent Ukraine the longest-range artillery pieces in its arsenal: 155-millimeter howitzers, which can fire 100-pound shells at targets about 20 miles away. Each shell contains about 24 pounds of explosives.Since the beginning of the war, the United States has shipped three million M795 artillery shells to Ukraine for the weapon to fire. That model can be fitted with a guidance kit that steers the projectile to its target, though there is no evidence to suggest the Pentagon has sent those devices to Kyiv.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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      U.N. Body Demands Israel End Its ‘Unlawful Presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory’

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      The United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a nonbinding resolution on Wednesday demanding that Israel end its “unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory” within a year, a significant but symbolic move that highlighted growing international condemnation of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people.The Assembly’s chamber in New York broke into applause after the resolution was approved by a vote of 124 to 14, with Israel and the United States in opposition and 43 other nations abstaining. The decision followed a landmark opinion issued in July by the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, which said that Israel’s occupation violated international law and should end “as rapidly as possible.”The resolution was the first to be put forth by Palestine, a U.N. nonmember observer state, since it was granted new diplomatic privileges by the Assembly in May. The Assembly granted those privileges after the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have recognized full membership for a Palestinian state in April.In addition to demanding that Israel withdraw all military forces and evacuate settlers from the occupied territory, the resolution urges nations to halt the transfer of weapons to Israel if there are reasonable grounds to believe they may be used there. It also urges nations to move toward halting the imports of “any products originating in the Israeli settlements.”The resolution was approved by a vote of 124 to 14, with Israel and the United States in opposition and 43 other nations abstaining.Bryan Smith/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAll resolutions adopted by the General Assembly are nonbinding, reflecting the political consensus of its 193 members. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority are both expected to address the Assembly next week, according to Reuters.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 House Republicans Are Targeting China Weeks Before the Election

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      The G.O.P. pushed through an array of legislation to get tough on China, seeking to persuade voters that they are the party that will protect Americans from economic and military threats from Beijing.The House this week tackled a long-promised package of bills to get tough on China, but few if any have a chance of becoming law after Republicans opted to prioritize a handful of politically divisive measures that Democrats oppose.For months, House leaders had promised a bipartisan show of force against the United States’ biggest economic and military adversary, including curtailing investments in sensitive Chinese industries, clamping down on data theft and espionage, and ensuring more Chinese imports were subject to taxes and forced labor standards.But only some of those proposals made it to the floor this week. Instead, Republican leaders added a handful of partisan measures that appear to be aimed at portraying their party as stronger on countering China and Democrats, including the Biden administration, as weak.It comes weeks before the elections in which the White House and control of Congress are up for grabs.“Because the White House has chosen not to confront China and protect America’s interests, House Republicans will,” Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, told reporters on Tuesday.Here’s a look at what the House did, and why.Subjecting international pandemic agreements to Senate treaty approval.Republicans, who have castigated the World Health Organization for its response to the coronavirus pandemic, pushed through a bill that would require Senate ratification of any W.H.O. agreement on pandemic preparedness. The organization is exploring ways to streamline the international response to the next pandemic.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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      Debate Puts Trump’s Affinity for Putin Back in the Spotlight

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      The former president’s refusal to back Ukraine’s war effort showed the likely limits of U.S. support for Kyiv if he returns to the White House.Donald J. Trump’s refusal to say that he hopes Ukraine will win its war against Russia has cast a spotlight on what promises to be an abrupt U.S. policy shift toward the conflict — and Washington’s relations with Moscow — if Mr. Trump returns to the White House.Twice Mr. Trump was asked directly at the debate on Tuesday night whether he hoped for Ukraine’s victory, and both times he insisted that his main goal was for the war to end quickly. “I think it’s in the U.S.’s best interest to get this war finished and just get it done, negotiate a deal, because we have to stop all of these human lives from being destroyed,” he said.The former president went on to suggest that he would leverage his friendly relationship with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, underscoring clear signs that he intends to reverse President Biden’s confrontational relationship with Russia.Mr. Trump’s answers “should tell people all they need to know — which is that if Trump gets elected and gets involved, Ukraine’s going to be the loser and Russia’s going to be the winner,” said John R. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser. Mr. Bolton has become a vocal critic of the former president, who fired him after repeated policy disagreements.Mr. Trump offered little detail on how he would negotiate a rapid end to the Ukraine war, saying only that he would speak to both Mr. Putin and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to strike a deal even before he was inaugurated in January.That is a seemingly impossible goal. Mr. Zelensky has ruled out any settlement with Russia that does not restore his country’s original borders, while Mr. Putin seems determined to conquer even more of Ukraine than the roughly one-fifth of its territory that his army now occupies.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