An Israeli reservist left Brazil in a hurry this week after a Brazilian judge ordered an investigation into whether he committed war crimes in Gaza.

Israeli consular officials helped the soldier, Yuval Vagdani, fly out of the country on Sunday after the order became public. It was prompted by a criminal complaint filed by a Belgium-based non-profit group, the Hind Rajab Foundation, which “focuses on offensive legal action against perpetrators, accomplices, and inciters of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine.”

On Wednesday, the Israeli military announced that it would no longer identify soldiers by name in the media, “fearing the arrest of soldiers abroad.”

Mr. Vagdani was deployed in Gaza after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas, which triggered Israel’s invasion of the territory in a campaign aimed at defeating and destroying Hamas.

According to the Hind Rajab Foundation complaint, Mr. Vagdani posted videos and photos to social media from Gaza showing that he had destroyed civilian homes and other buildings. The group claims those actions were a systematic attempt to impose unbearable living conditions on the civilian population, in violation of international law. (The Times has not independently verified that evidence.)

A Brazilian judge determined that the allegations should be investigated, and referred the matter to the federal police. Several similar criminal complaints have been filed against vacationing Israeli soldiers in recent months, including in Cyprus, Sri Lanka, Argentina and Chile.

Mr. Vagdani, whom the Times was unable to reach for comment, arrived in Israel on Wednesday.

In an interview with Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster, he acknowledged posting the video of a building being blown up. “That’s what they saw and wanted to investigate me about,” he said. “They turned it from one house into 500 pages, they thought I’d murdered thousands of children and who knows what.”

Mr. Vagdani also told Kan he was at the Nova music festival near the Gaza border on Oct. 7, 2023 and escaped the massacre there.

Israeli officials downplayed the seriousness of the cases, noting that none of the criminal complaints had led to arrests. “We understand that part of this phenomenon is driven by pro-Palestinian activists and based on open source intelligence,” said Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, a spokesman for the Israeli military.

The open source methods in question are social media posts, which pro-Palestinian groups are now using as evidence to request criminal charges against the soldiers when they travel abroad.

Universal jurisdiction

The combination of social media and international tourism — plus a very old body of law — could open up a new arena in international criminal law.

Universal jurisdiction, one of the oldest principles of international law, holds that certain crimes are so serious that any country in the world can bring a criminal case against the perpetrators. In the 18th century, that rule was used for crimes like piracy; in recent times, it has been used to prosecute genocide and war crimes.

Israel relied on universal jurisdiction to prosecute Adolf Eichmann, a senior Nazi official, for crimes against humanity committed during the Holocaust. Spain relied on it to demand the extradition of Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, to face charges of torture and other crimes. And in more recent examples, several European countries have relied on the principle to try Syrian officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Belgium has prosecuted Rwandans accused of involvement in the 1994 genocide in its courts.

For decades, those cases have been relatively rare, and tended to target senior officials. “There has been this tendency to focus on the higher levels in order to maximize impact, and also because at the higher levels sometimes actually the conduct is better documented than the lower levels,” said Yuval Shany, a professor of international law at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

It was once difficult for a local prosecutor to obtain evidence of a war crime allegedly committed in another country. That changed with social media. “Technology comes to bridge the gap, because once you have filmed, documented yourself committing a war crime, it’s much easier to prosecute you, even in a court which is half the world away,” Mr. Shany said.

Experts say Israeli soldiers have uploaded videos and other images of themselves in Gaza saying and doing things that could be interpreted as evidence of serious crimes, including destroying civilian homes and property, and calling for the expulsion or extermination of Palestinians.

While social media clips can be taken out of context or misinterpreted — and Israel has accused Hamas of using civilian infrastructure for military purposes — “some of them do look very bad,” Mr. Shany said. “There is this potential degree of accountability that we have not seen before in wars, simply because it was too difficult to generate evidence.”

However, while social media evidence is compelling, it is unlikely to be enough on its own to secure a successful prosecution, said Rebecca Hamilton, a law professor at American University and former lawyer in the office of the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court: “A social media post doesn’t make a war crimes case.”

A new legal strategy

The Hind Rajab Foundation claims to have compiled evidence against about a thousand Israeli soldiers. It also tracks their foreign travels on social media as they post about their vacations, and then promptly files criminal complaints with the countries they are visiting.

Dyab Abou Jahjah, the chairman of the Hind Rajab Foundation, said that soldiers who uphold international law have nothing to fear from his organization. “We are not organizing a witch hunt against Israeli soldiers,” he said. “We file cases against soldiers against whom we have evidence that they are individually responsible for war crimes.”

Unlike more senior leaders, lower-level soldiers do not usually have diplomatic immunity, or the resources to research which jurisdictions may leave them vulnerable to war crimes complaints.

Of course, an NGO filing a criminal complaint is not the same thing as a prosecutor actually pressing charges, much less an arrest or conviction.

The Israeli government has taken actions that suggest it is concerned about the criminal complaints. The government, which insists that its forces in Gaza have acted in accordance with international law, has formed an interagency team to assess legal risk for soldiers and reservists abroad. And the ministry of foreign affairs recently issued a public warning to Israelis that their posts on social media could be used to bring legal actions against them in other countries.

These cases may not need to see a courtroom, or even result in arrests, to have an impact. The prospect that soldiers might be unable to travel abroad without risking prison is one that the public may find difficult to tolerate.

Traveling abroad is tremendously important to Israelis, said Mr. Shany. “So I think there is this idea that this is actually an unacceptable risk, and that the government-slash-military has to make it go away.”

Isabel Kershner and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Israel, Ephrat Livni contributed reporting from Washington, D.C., and Jack Nicas contributed reporting from Brazil.

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For years, France’s main far-right party tried to distance itself from the long trail of inflammatory and derogatory comments made by Jean-Marie Le Pen, its founding president.

His daughter, who took the party reins in 2011, kicked him out. It changed its name, from National Front to National Rally. And the party — long run by Mr. Le Pen, who called Hitler’s gas chambers “a detail” of history — has made a point of decrying antisemitism.

But when Mr. Le Pen died on Tuesday at 96, the party nuzzled him deeply in its fold, its leaders celebrating him as a visionary, an “immense patriot” and a “courageous and talented politician.”

“He will remain the one who, in the storms, held in his hands the small flickering flame of the French Nation,” the National Rally said in a statement, adding that his “will and unwavering tenacity” had shaped the party into an “autonomous, powerful and free” force.

There was nothing in the statement to indicate disagreement with Mr. Le Pen’s views or his caustic remarks. At most, it said he had been “unruly and sometimes turbulent,” often fond of controversy.

Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, said that the strategy of Marine Le Pen, Mr. Le Pen’s daughter and successor, “was always to set herself apart without taking full stock” of her father’s unsavory legacy. It was too early to tell whether she might yet do so now, he said.

“A venerable age had taken the warrior but given us back our father” Ms. Le Pen, who is no longer party president but still a top lawmaker and leading force in the party, said in a short tribute on Wednesday. “Death has taken him back.”

So far, the party does not appear to be headed down a path of deep introspection. Instead, Mr. Camus said, it seems to be trying to “re-inject” a new version of Mr. Le Pen into France’s collective memory, safe in the knowledge that there will be no more racist or antisemitic outbursts from him.

But Renaud Labaye, the National Rally’s general secretary in the lower house of Parliament, said the party had already weighed in on Mr. Le Pen’s past.

“It was precisely his expulsion — an act made all the stronger by the fact that it was initiated by his daughter and that he was the party’s founder — that underlined the fact that his excesses and reprehensible positions were firmly condemned by the party,” Mr. Labaye said.

For decades, Mr. Le Pen was a pariah of French politics, considered so odious that many opponents refused to debate him. That had much to do with the party’s history: Its founders in 1972 included former Nazi soldiers, collaborators with the wartime Vichy regime and onetime members of a group that carried out deadly attacks meant to thwart Algeria’s struggle to free itself from French colonial rule.

Mr. Le Pen’s openly racist, antisemitic and anti-gay comments cemented the public’s perception of the party.

Mr. Le Pen, who was in paratrooper units in two colonial wars to suppress the independence movements in Vietnam and Algeria, once said that races “do not have the same abilities, nor the same level of historical evolution,” and he was repeatedly convicted of making antisemitic comments and publicly downplaying the Holocaust. He once compared homosexuality to pedophilia.

In 2002, after Mr. Le Pen surprised many by making it to the second round of the presidential election, left-wing parties called on their members to vote for his conservative opponent, Jacques Chirac. This was the most famous use of a strategy known in French politics as a “republican front,” which has since been used multiple times to stop the far right from taking power.

In that 2002 election, Mr. Le Pen won less than 18 percent of the vote. But when his daughter took over, she began what became known as an “undemonization” strategy, to cleanse the party’s image and broaden its appeal.

She distanced herself from her father’s antisemitic statements, declaring concentration camps “the height of barbarity.” She ousted her father from the party in 2015, when he was its honorary president, and said his repeated Holocaust denial showed that “his goal is to cause harm” to the party. Three years later, she renamed it.

Now the National Rally — after riding successive waves of fear and anger over unchecked immigration, rising inflation and deadly terrorism — is no longer on the fringes of French politics, with some of its policies more widely accepted.

Last summer, during a snap election, another republican front between left-wing and centrist parties prevented a far-right victory. Still, a record 124 National Rally lawmakers now sit in the powerful lower house of Parliament, making it the largest single opposition party.

Though Ms. Le Pen has softened some of the party’s initial hard-line stances, its bedrock focus on identity and its eagerness to change the French Constitution to restrict the rights of foreigners mark it in France as a far-right party, according to experts. Party members argue, for instance, that French people should have priority over even legal migrants in areas like certain social benefits and subsidized housing. That runs counter to the French constitution and Republican ideals, set during the revolution of 1789, which make all people equal, Mr. Camus said.

Many experts have characterized Ms. Le Pen’s “undemonization” campaign as mere marketing, and in the election last summer, many National Rally candidates were castigated for past racist or antisemitic remarks.

Some analysts said the party had no choice but to recognize Mr. Le Pen’s integral role in building its long-lasting, stable and successful movement, which is still dominated by his family.

But the party’s glowing remembrance of Mr. Le Pen was also a way to recast his image — and its own, some experts said.

“Paying tribute to Le Pen ‘undemonizes’ the party even further” by portraying him as an excessive but prescient politician, unfairly condemned for warning about the dangers of immigration, said Nicolas Lebourg, a historian who specializes in the far right.

“People who voted for the first time last year have almost no memory of him,” Mr. Lebourg said.

The tributes, from the party and others, are also evidence that Mr. Le Pen’s ideas — like drastically stemming immigration — are increasingly part of the mainstream.

“The importance that Jean-Marie Le Pen has had in our political life is the consequence of long years of denial and powerlessness on the migration issue,” wrote François-Xavier Bellamy, the leader in the European Parliament of the mainstream conservative Republican party, which historically despised Mr. Le Pen and was thrown into turmoil last year when its then-leader advocated an alliance with the National Rally.

“Those who insult him even in death refuse to first look at their failures,” Mr. Bellamy said.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2018, Mr. Le Pen assessed his own influence: “My ideas have made progress, even in the programs of my opponents,” he said. “That’s why my struggle was not without value.”

Even in death, however, he retains many political enemies, especially on the left. Crowds of hundreds gathered in several cities across France to celebrate his death Tuesday night.

“No, he was not a ‘great servant of France,’” wrote Manuel Bompard, national coordinator for the far-left party France Unbowed. “He was an enemy of the Republic.”

And Mélanie Vogel, a Green party senator, said on X: “His ideas, the danger they represent for our democracies are very much alive. Let us finally defeat his heirs.”

Mr. Le Pen’s long life and political career encompassed the sweep of postwar French history. Even the Élysée Palace, home and office of the French president, who has fought to keep the far right out of power, acknowledged as much, noting in a statement Mr. Le Pen’s five runs for president, his seven terms as a lawmaker in the European Parliament and his roles as a municipal and regional councilor.

“A historic figure of the extreme right,” the statement said, “he played a role in the public life of our country for almost 70 years, which is now a matter for history to judge.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.

An Israeli drone strike killed three cousins, including two children, in the West Bank on Wednesday, according to the local Palestinian governor and a relative, as growing violence threatens to further destabilize the Israeli-occupied territory.

The attack struck the courtyard of the cousins’ home in the town of Tamoun, said Ahmed Asad, the Palestinian governor of the Tubas region. He identified the dead as two young children, Rida Basharat and Hamza Basharat, and Adham Basharat, a young adult.

Mr. Asad said that Israeli officials later informed their Palestinian counterparts that all three were dead.

The Israeli military said it launched a drone strike in Tamoun against a “terrorist cell,” but did not immediately comment on reports in Palestinian media that two children were killed. It later released a statement saying that “due to various reports regarding the results of the strike, the incident is under review.”

Their immediate families could not immediately be reached, but Mamun Abu Muhsin, a member of their extended family, confirmed their deaths in a phone interview on Wednesday night after he said their bodies were returned by Israeli forces.

Violence has spiraled in the West Bank for the past year and a half, as Israel has fought wars with armed groups like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israeli forces have escalated raids in Palestinian cities in the West Bank — operations that can last for days at a time — bulldozing roads and engaging in shootouts with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants.

Wednesday’s aerial bombardment came in the wake of a Palestinian shooting attack two days earlier that killed three Israelis, including two women in their 70s. Israeli officials quickly vowed retribituion for the deadly attack.

“We are witnessing accelerating attempts to advance Palestinian terrorism in Judea and Samaria,” said Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, on Wednesday, using the biblical names for the West Bank, which the Israeli government considers disputed, not occupied, territory. He said that Israel would “respond accordingly” to protect its citizens, roughly 500,000 of whom live in settlements in the West Bank.

More than 800 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank since October 2023, in the wake of the Hamas-led attack that prompted the war in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Authority Health Ministry. It is unclear how many were combatants, but the numbers include some civilians, including women and children killed by Israeli security forces.

About 50 Israelis were killed by Palestinians in militant attacks in the West Bank over the same time, according to the United Nations. Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, has said that it thwarted more than a thousand attacks in 2024, including hundreds of shooting attacks.

The Palestinian Authority, which administers some parts of the territory under Israeli occupation, also launched its own operation against Palestinian militants in Jenin in December. Several Palestinian officers have been killed, as well as some civilians, including a young woman and a teenage bystander.

The image of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau receiving a vaccine against the coronavirus, like those of other world leaders, was meant to convey a reassuring public health message. It also put prim and buttoned-up politicians in the rare, if sometimes awkward, position of showing more skin.

When Mr. Trudeau rolled up his sleeve, it exposed his tattoo: an image of a globe inside a Haida raven, an Indigenous symbol.

Mr. Trudeau was Canada’s second-youngest leader when he took power in 2015. The heir to the political legacy left by his father, who served as prime minister for about 15 years, Mr. Trudeau burst onto the world stage and captured Canada’s imagination, with a head of flowing hair and signature cool socks.

He was a magnet for the cameras and, at times, appeared in the society pages nearly as often as in the news sections. Being so heavily photographed also, of course, had its down sides. His tattoo, initially praised by Indigenous people in British Columbia, later became a source of scorn after the government approved a natural oil and gas project near their traditional fishing grounds.

On Monday, after almost a decade in office, Mr. Trudeau, who became deeply unpopular among many voters unhappy over pocketbook issues, stepped down as leader of the Liberal Party and his role as prime minister will soon end. Here are some of the images that defined his career.

Vjosa Isai contributed reporting from Toronto.

Cecilia Sala, an Italian journalist who was detained last month in Iran while on a reporting trip, was released and on her way back to Italy on Wednesday, the Italian government said in a statement.

Ms. Sala, who had a journalist visa, was arrested on Dec. 19 on charges of violating the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran, but officials there have not provided any further details.

“The plane that is taking journalist Cecilia Sala home took off a few minutes ago from Tehran,” the Italian government announced Wednesday morning, adding that “thanks to intense work on diplomatic and intelligence channels, our compatriot has been released by the Iranian authorities.”

Ms. Sala, 29, had been held for 20 days and told her family that she was kept in an isolation cell, with only two blankets and constant light, her family has said.

Fars, a news agency affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, also reported the news of Ms. Sala’s release, citing Italy’s prime minister.

On Wednesday Ms. Sala’s partner, Daniele Raineri, said she had called him and told him, “I am free.”

“I am so happy,” Mr. Raineri said as he prepared to go to the airport to greet Ms. Sala. He said the wait was “excruciating” but that Italy had done “exceptional work.”

It was unclear how Italy obtained the release of Ms. Sala.

She was taken into custody three days after the police in Milan arrested Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, a 38-year-old Iranian, on behalf of the United States. Mr. Abedini was accused by the United States of providing drone components to the Revolutionary Guards — the country’s primary military force.

The Iranian authorities said on Dec. 25 they expected “the Italian government to prevent the violation of the human rights of the Iranian citizen who has been unjustly accused by the United States.”

Iran has often jailed foreigners and dual nationals to extract concessions from their countries, including prisoner swaps, but Iranian officials said on Monday that there had been no connection between Mr. Abedini’s arrest and Ms. Sala’s.

On Wednesday, Mr. Abedini’s lawyer in Italy, Alfredo De Francesco, did not respond to questions about developments on Mr. Abedini’s case. He said he was happy about Ms. Sala’s release and now needed to focus on his client’s case.

Ms. Sala’s visit to Iran was her first since 2021, and since then, much had changed in the country. A new president had been elected, its shadow war with Israel had moved into the open, and Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria and a longtime ally, had recently been ousted.

Ms. Sala, 29, a writer and podcaster, set out to document the shifting atmosphere. She interviewed a standup comedian, and she photographed women in cafes and on the streets who were not wearing head scarves, posting a selection of images on Instagram last month and describing them as “Tehran’s new faces and new streets.”

On Dec. 19, as she prepared to leave her hotel for a meeting at about midday, her phone was disconnected from the internet, a person close to the family said. For 24 hours, her family did not hear from her, until after the plane on which Ms. Sala was supposed to depart took off without her. Then, they received a phone call. “I was arrested,” Ms. Sala told her family. “I am not wounded.”

The news of Ms. Sala’s detention became public about a week later, on Dec. 27, after she received a visit from Italy’s ambassador to Iran. The detention of Ms. Sala dominated media coverage in Italy, and President Sergio Mattarella mentioned her case in his end of year message.

Mr. Raineri said that Ms. Sala’s plane was scheduled to land in Rome on Wednesday.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy called Ms. Sala’s parents on Wednesday to tell them that she was returning, according to the government statement.

Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting.