“We need to reassess every single thing we are doing as to what we can do to bring an end to this conflict,” added Mr. Beasley, a former governor of South Carolina who was appointed to lead the agency by the Trump administration in March.

By making Riyadh, the Saudi capital, the first stop on his tour, observers say, Mr. Trump has signaled a desire to strengthen ties that were strained under the last administration. To underscore that intent, officials in Washington say the administration is poised to complete more than $100 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.

The deals, which could reportedly total $300 billion over 10 years, have led to criticism that the United States is supporting Saudi military operations that have struck hospitals, schools, markets and mosques and inflicted thousands of civilian casualties.

United Nations and other human rights officials say Houthi rebels and affiliated forces have also shown disregard for civilians with indiscriminate rocket and artillery bombardments of residential areas, sniper fire and land mines.

The State Department and other United States government agencies have tried to limit the effects of the hostilities, with little success. Their interventions have included efforts to protect the western port city of Hudaydah, a crucial lifeline for food and medicine entering the country, from attack, Mr. Beasley said. “I was hopeful two weeks ago that was about to resolve, but evidently that hasn’t happened,” he said.

“This is a colossal failure of international diplomacy and a colossal failure to get out the message of a crisis that is now of biblical proportions,” Jan Egeland, the Norwegian Refugee Council head who visited Yemen this month, said in an interview.

“This is a clear-cut decline into massive famine that is man-made and avoidable,” he said. “There has to be leadership from United States and Britain to get a real peace process going.”

A Yemeni child dies every 10 minutes from malnutrition or related causes, United Nations agencies report. But deliveries of food, medicine and other essential supplies have slowed, Mr. Egeland said, because the coalition’s screening of shipping is delaying arrivals, war damage to the cranes at the Hudaydah port is hindering unloading, and the country’s public and private financial reserves are exhausted.

Hunger and desperation are reaching levels that make public distribution of food relief increasingly risky, he said. Yet on a visit to one of the main hospitals in Sana, he found the emergency feeding center in the process of discharging patients and closing down because staff members had not been paid for eight months.

The World Health Organization has reported that less than 45 percent of the country’s hospitals and clinics are fully functional, and that many lack access to clean drinking water, creating conditions ripe for the spread of disease.

The number of cholera cases has exploded in the past two weeks, overwhelming medical facilities, Marie Claire Feghali, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, reported.

Visiting two of Sana’s main hospitals on Sunday, Dominik Stillhart, the committee’s director of operations in Yemen, saw beds crammed with up to four patients, and others hooked up to intravenous drips in cars parked outside because of the lack of space.

After 40 years dealing with international aid and humanitarian relief operations, Mr. Egeland said, “I’m more worried for Yemen now than for any other place on the planet.”

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The grandiose reception seeks to convince Mr. Trump that his priorities are theirs, too, and that they are indispensable partners in fighting terrorism, in confronting Iran, in bolstering American businesses and perhaps even in pursuing peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

“It is a remarkably buoyant moment for them,” said Stephen A. Seche, a former United States ambassador to Yemen and the executive vice president of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “They want to reinforce the idea that there is a strategic partnership, that their interests and ours are closely aligned.”

The number of events scheduled throughout the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on Saturday and Sunday is staggering, as the Saudis seek to project their country as a dynamic one, a leader in the Arab and Islamic worlds and a close ally of the United States.

The stars and stripes are flying in Riyadh’s streets, intermixed with Saudi flags.

There are three summit meetings planned: between Mr. Trump and King Salman, the Saudi monarch; between Mr. Trump and the leaders of Persian Gulf states; and between Mr. Trump and more than 50 leaders and representatives from across the Muslim world.

Mr. Trump and King Salman will also inaugurate the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology, where Mr. Trump is to give a speech about Islam. The American president, a prolific — and often contentious — user of Twitter, will also deliver the keynote address at a conference about social media, under the auspices of Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the king’s powerful son.

Elsewhere in the city, there is to be an international counterterrorism conference, a forum for chief executives and an art exhibition inside the Royal Court.

“Historic Summit. Brighter Future,” declares an official website for Mr. Trump’s visit, counting down the seconds until it all starts.

The exuberant reception for Mr. Trump reflects how differently Persian Gulf leaders see him compared with how they saw Mr. Obama.

Many of Mr. Obama’s Middle East policies angered the Saudis, including what they saw as his giving up on President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, a longtime American ally, during the Arab Spring protests; his hesitation to intervene directly in the Syria conflict; and his pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran, the Saudis’ regional nemesis.

The distaste for Mr. Obama grew so strong that when he visited the kingdom last year, only a small delegation met him at the airport and state television did not broadcast his arrival.

“Any new president has to be better than President Obama, because no one was worse for us than Obama,” said Salman al-Dossary, a writer for the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat.

In Mr. Trump, however, many Saudis see a decisive, business-focused leader, who they say shares their goals in the region.

They applauded his military strike on a Syrian air base after President Bashar al-Assad’s forces used chemical weapons, and they have noted Mr. Trump’s tough talk on Iran. They hope he will increase support for the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen against rebels — aligned with Iran — who have seized the capital, Sana. And they see a role for American investment in efforts to shift the Saudi economy from its dependence on oil.

“This administration is very clear, not just with Saudi Arabia, but also with Turkey and other traditional allies, that the idea is to double down on existing relationships and to put allies first,” said Mohammed Alyahya, a Saudi political analyst and nonresident fellow at The Atlantic Council, a policy research organization.

The Saudis have also pitched themselves as a Muslim ally against the jihadists of the Islamic State, and Mr. Trump’s desire to moderate his stance on Islam was among the reasons he chose Riyadh as his first foreign destination, according to administration officials.

The Saudis have spent a fortune on American weapons over the years, and a series of new deals that could be worth more than $300 billion over the next decade are close to completion, Reuters reported this month.

Mr. Trump also hopes Arab states like Saudi Arabia can play a role in brokering a deal between Israel and the Palestinians — an idea some Persian Gulf leaders have privately entertained, if Israel were to offer certain concessions.

Some aspects of Mr. Trump’s tenure that have caused criticism in the United States do not seem to bother the Saudis.

His reliance for policy advice on his daughter, Ivanka, and on her husband, Jared Kushner — both of whom will join him in Riyadh — is business as usual in a monarchy where princes run the government and the king has appointed one son as defense minister and another as ambassador to Washington.

And worries that Mr. Trump could use his presidency to benefit Trump hotels and golf courses get little traction in a country that is named after its royal family, and where the line between public and private wealth is vague.

Mr. Trump’s apparent lack of interest in human rights also suggests that he is unlikely to complain about the Saudi justice system or the limited rights of Saudi women.

Also invited to Riyadh is President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes including genocide, although it remains unclear whether he will attend or, if he does, whether he will meet Mr. Trump.

Because of their decades-old alliance, Saudi Arabia relies heavily on the United States for security and other issues. To maintain that alliance under Mr. Trump, Saudi leaders have studiously ignored his negative statements about Islam while emphasizing what their kingdom provides, including intelligence cooperation and billions of dollars in arms purchases.

Trump has not always returned the love.

“I think Islam hates us,” he said in an interview with Anderson Cooper of CNN last year. “There’s a tremendous hatred there.”

Last month, he told Reuters that protecting Saudi Arabia cost too much.

“Frankly, Saudi Arabia has not treated us fairly, because we are losing a tremendous amount of money in defending Saudi Arabia,” he said.

While such comments made some Saudis uncomfortable, they took heart from his ordering of a military strike in Syria — a step that Mr. Obama had declined to take — and they hope his tough talk on Iran will lead to action.

“When it comes to United States foreign policy, we have learned in this region that actions speak louder than words,” said Faisal J. Abbas, editor in chief of Arab News, a Saudi newspaper.

It remains unclear whether Mr. Trump’s visit will result in any concrete initiatives or will remain symbolic.

But some caution that what Mr. Trump will ultimately give Persian Gulf states may fall short of their great expectations.

“You have a Trump administration that has a banner of ‘American First’ and is preparing a counterterrorism strategy that seeks to place the burden more so on the shoulders of our partners,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based research organization, who has recently met with senior Persian Gulf officials. “Therein lies a potential for a mismatch of expectations.”

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A recent poll put Mr. Raisi in second place in the race for the presidency, with 27 percent of the projected vote. The same poll, by the Iranian Students Polling Agency, projected that the incumbent president, Hassan Rouhani, will get around 42 percent, depending on the turnout on Friday.

On Monday, though, the second-most-popular conservative in the race, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the mayor of Tehran, suspended his campaign and threw his support to Mr. Raisi, possibly raising what analysts say are his chances of pulling off an upset.

While Mr. Ghalibaf is nominally a conservative, he bases his appeal on his management skills, not ideology, so it is unclear how much, if at all, he might actually help Mr. Raisi.

In 1979, the impoverished and religious masses from what was then a vast rural population were the driving force behind the revolution. Iran today is far more urban and educated, but the split endures. Mr. Raisi is calculating that by pounding away at the themes of inequality and corruption he can reap enough votes from the declining provincial sector to propel him to victory.

Many of those voters, who strongly believe in the Islamic Republic’s anti-Western ideology or feel strangled by poverty, hail Mr. Raisi as a savior, ready to set Iran back on the right course.

At the same time, Mr. Raisi has refrained from raising any of the social issues his faction usually cares so much about, such as Islamic dress codes and segregation of men and women, as they might put off potential voters.

Here is a look at each of the candidates vying to be the next president of Iran.

His critics see him as a hypocrite, a consummate insider who has suddenly adopted the stance of a populist outsider and corruption fighter. “Mr. Raisi misuses religion and makes empty promises,” said Hossein Ghayyoumi, a reformist cleric who supports Mr. Rouhani. “Why has he not fought corruption within the judiciary, where he has been for the past 38 years?”

He also has a dark episode in his past as a judiciary official, accused of involvement in the mass execution of political opponents in 1988 — something that Mr. Rouhani is not shy about mentioning.

Mr. Raisi and Mr. Rouhani are both Shiite Muslim clerics and staunch defenders of the idea of an Islamic Republic ruled by clerics, with some direct elections. But the similarities end there. To a surprising extent, their differences mirror those in Europe and the United States: the establishment versus populism, globalists versus nationalists.

Mr. Rouhani is the globalist, seeing the way forward in outreach to other countries and foreign investment to reinvigorate the ailing economy. A critical element in that strategy was the completion of the nuclear agreement with the United States and other world powers, which the president sold as an essential first step. It has not worked out that way, however, as existing, unilateral United States sanctions have hindered foreign investment and banking.

Sensing Mr. Rouhani’s vulnerability, Mr. Raisi as nationalist has criticized the pact, saying on Wednesday, “Where in the world does a government weaken its defensive potentials, missiles for preventing wars?”

He says the solutions for Iran’s problems must be found “inside the country” and asserts that one of the main reasons Iran is stable and secure is its military support for Shiite fighters in Iraq and Syria.

“The only attitude to solve problems is a revolutionary spirit,” Mr. Raisi said in an interview with state television. He has promised to create millions of jobs using what he likes to call “jihadi management,” and to increase monthly cash handouts for the poor.

“He will bring the economists and experts who have been neglected in past years and fix things,” said Hamidreza Taraghi, a hard-line political analyst.

Mr. Raisi’s campaign has been quick to pick up on new opportunities offered by social media, now available in Iran. He regularly posts on Instagram and has channels on Telegram, where his campaign spreads video clips of him speaking or meeting personalities.

However, liberal economists dismiss Mr. Raisi’s ideas as fanciful and dangerous. “His economic and social policies are like those from former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: disastrous,” said Saeed Laylaz, an economist close to President Rouhani. “What foreign company will invest in Iran if he becomes president?”

Mr. Raisi enjoys the support of many in Iran’s security forces, including the powerful Revolutionary Guard Corps and the members of the paramilitary basij forces. He also appears to have the support of Ayatollah Khamenei, who like Mr. Raisi is a staunch guardian of the country’s anti-Western ideology.

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In a recent speech he criticized the government’s signing of a Unesco agreement on education and the equal rights of men and women, which he said was contrary to Iran’s cultural values. “Why have they signed this?” he asked publicly.

Ayatollah Khamenei has also criticized the liberal economic policies of the Rouhani government, stressing that Iran must be self-sufficient and embrace what he calls the “resistance economy,” which presumably is not that different from Mr. Raisi’s “jihadi management.”

Nevertheless, Ayatollah Khamenei is also a pragmatist who has signed off on important decisions — like negotiating directly with the great Satan, the United States, in brokering the nuclear agreement — that contradict some of the Islamic Republic’s longstanding political views. After the deal was completed, Iran opened up further politically by inviting European and Asian leaders long shunned by hard-liners.

Moreover, in Iran presidents typically serve two terms. Mr. Khamenei is generally not one to break with tradition, so while anything can happen in the voting, he may be comfortable with a second term for Mr. Rouhani, especially after a bruising fight that leaves the president weakened.

But Mr. Raisi is not to be lightly dismissed. Believed by adherents to be a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, he is currently the custodian of the Shrine of Imam Reza, the wealthiest religious endowment in the Middle East.

He was born and raised in the eastern city of Mashhad, the son of a cleric, and joined the revolution at a young age. During those turbulent days, the 20-year-old was propelled into a series of sensitive positions, serving as a prosecutor in several cities and trained by Ayatollah Khamenei as a promising young bureaucrat. In 1985, he became the deputy prosecutor of Tehran.

It was in that position that Mr. Raisi was implicated in one of the bloodiest episodes in the history of the Islamic Republic. He and three others, including the current minister of justice, Mustafa Pourmohammadi, sat on a committee that sent thousands of political prisoners to their deaths.

Mr. Raisi has not commented specifically on the event, but has said that as a prosecutor he “never sent anyone to their deaths.”

He is married to the daughter of the hard-line Friday prayer leader of Mashhad, Ahmad Alamolhoda, who recently led a successful fight against pop concerts there, saying they do not befit a holy city.

In a campaign video Mr. Raisi elaborated on the controversy, saying, “I remember when there was such a hype over the concerts, I told my friends, the government should think up a solution for the concerts of poor people, the concerts of slum-dwellers, and the concerts of salaries below 1 million toman,” about $250. The government should listen to the complaints of the poor, Mr. Raisi said, before worrying about pop concerts.

As the head of the Astan Quds Razavi, the religious foundation, Mr. Raisi potentially has access to billions of dollars, a fact that Mr. Rouhani has raised repeatedly in recent attacks.

In his campaign video, however, Mr. Raisi played down the power of the institution.

“Right now I am in charge of a very small foundation,” he intoned. “Just imagine what we could achieve if it was at the national level.”

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By NILO TABRIZY | May. 17, 2017
| 3:37

On May 19, voters in Iran select their next president. Facebook and Twitter have been blocked there since 2009. But the hard-liner Ebrahim Raisi and President Hassan Rouhani, a reformist, are both turning to Instagram to court young voters.

The president’s packed schedule is filled with opportunities for Mr. Trump to slip up, publicly or privately: back-to-back discussions with the leaders of other nations, many of whom are veteran negotiators well versed in issues they care deeply about.

By contrast, it could also serve as a much-needed change of subject for a president besieged at home with an agenda frozen by scandal.

“I’ll meet scores of leaders,” Mr. Trump told Coast Guard cadets on Wednesday as he spoke at their commencement. He pledged that during his global travels he will “strengthen old friendships and will seek new partners.”

Even before heading to Connecticut for that speech, Mr. Trump was brooding in the White House over the latest broadside from the F.B.I. director he fired, James B. Comey. Planning for the foreign trip has proceeded haltingly, with Mr. Trump resisting some of the pageantry that is usually a hallmark of a president’s travels. A visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem, was cut short at his request.

Preparation — a standard part of the weeks before a big foreign trip — has also been hit-or-miss in recent days.

As allegations of obstruction of justice and giving secrets to Russia consumed Mr. Trump’s administration, aides sought to focus the president’s fleeting attention on the vital foreign policy issues he will confront and the nuts-and-bolts difficulty of taking the White House around the globe.

Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, led briefings, including one on European leaders, last week in the Oval Office. The president conferred with the defense secretary about the Middle East and discussed his Saudi Arabia meetings with his secretary of state. Among the touchy issues in Israel: whether to move the United States Embassy to Jerusalem, something the president has decided not to announce during the trip.

But even as he sat with briefing books and stacks of news clippings about global events, Mr. Trump has generally just skimmed through, according to several people familiar with his preparations. Instead, he has focused on the chaos swirling around his White House.

In an attempt to capture his interest, aides threaded Mr. Trump’s own name through the paragraphs of one of the two-page memos they wrote for him.

“You have to be prepared. These things tend to be heavily prepared on both sides so everyone knows what the expectations are,” said James B. Steinberg, a diplomat for former President Barack Obama who traveled extensively around the world. Of Mr. Trump, he said, “The fact that he doesn’t go in for the typical preparations complicates these things.”

Mr. Steinberg said Mr. Trump’s first trip should not be that difficult since he is meeting largely with allies at a time of relative peace and prosperity.

“A trip like this is an easy trip,” he said. “There’s no crisis. It’s a relationship-building trip. It’s hard for it not to be a success unless something goes wrong.”

Still, in private, Mr. Trump’s advisers acknowledge that they are concerned about his off-script eruptions, his tendency to be swayed by flattery and the possibility that foreign leaders may present him with situations he does not know how to handle. They worry he will accidentally commit the United States to something unexpected, and they have tried to caution him about various scenarios.

Mr. Trump’s last major venture overseas — a visit to one of his new golf courses in Scotland while he was campaigning for the presidency last summer — quickly went off script.

Arriving just as Britons voted to leave the European Union, Mr. Trump held a highly anticipated news conference where he bragged about predicting the outcome of the vote and waxed extensively about the beauty of his new golf course.

“This is one of the big votes in the history of Europe and Scotland and everywhere,” he said that day in June. He then spoke at length about the golf course and resort, noting a lighthouse that sits on the course.

“We’ve taken the lighthouse, which is a very, very important building in Florida — I mean, in Scotland — and we’ve taken that building and made it something really special,” he said. “It has incredible suites. Golfers will stop, and they’ll have something to eat.”

Stephen J. Hadley, who was former President George W. Bush’s national security adviser and traveled the world with him, said that White House staff members do everything they can to avoid surprises when a president is out of the country.

“You really hope that he sticks to the script, executes the trip as planned and avoids distractions, because the whole world is watching,” Mr. Hadley said.

Mr. Trump’s first trip is planned with that in mind. His travels will start in Saudi Arabia and Israel, where Mr. Trump’s counterparts are pleased to have him in office. He will have a brief but highly choreographed meeting with the pope. And his interactions with European allies in Belgium and Italy will keep the president away from the country’s most difficult adversaries.

Still, long trips are rarely error-free, and often presidents veer off the carefully constructed narrative for their trip.

President Bush once tried to leave after a news conference in Beijing, only to find the ornate door he was trying to go through locked. “I was trying to escape. Obviously, it didn’t work,” he joked later.

Mr. Bush’s father, President George Bush, threw up during a ceremonial dinner in Japan. And President Bill Clinton was caught during a trip in Senegal banging a bongo drum, strumming a guitar and chomping on a cigar — all in celebration of a judge’s decision throwing out a sexual harassment lawsuit.

Mr. Hadley said the first foreign trip for any president is especially a challenge, and perhaps more so for Mr. Trump, who has had little practice on the world stage and has often proved himself unwilling to stick to his prepared remarks.

But Mr. Hadley said Mr. Trump should not be underestimated.

“Remember, Trump is a nothing if not a showman,” Mr. Hadley said. “He’s been very public for decades and very conscious about how he comes across in the media. This is not a novice on stages.”

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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration signaled on Wednesday that it would not, for now, jettison the Iran nuclear deal, despite the president’s harsh criticisms of the agreement during the campaign.

But while acknowledging that the deal would remain in place, the administration imposed modest new sanctions against several Iranian individuals and four other organizations, including a China-based network that supplied missile-related items to a key Iranian defense entity.

“The U.S. and its partners will continue to apply pressure on Iran to protect the human rights and fundamental freedoms for everyone in Iran,” said Stuart Jones, the acting assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, who will be traveling with President Trump to the Middle East at the end of the week.

The Trump administration has said that it is continuing to study the Iran nuclear deal. But more than three months into the administration, Mr. Trump has softened his criticism.

The announcement came two days before Iranian elections, and just ahead of Mr. Trump’s first overseas trip as president.

And it marked another decision by Mr. Trump to stick with existing arrangements and try to alter them around the edges.

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At the same time, the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, generally seen as hesitant, or even obstructionist, may to Mr. Trump seem the most accommodating.

It is at once a case study in why this region is so unpredictable and a test of whether the new president is in over his head or knows something his many failed predecessors did not.

“We are close allies and share the same worldview,” Shuli Moalem-Refaeli, a member of the Knesset in the Jewish Home party, said of Mr. Trump. But she urged Mr. Netanyahu, whose party is a coalition partner with hers, not to discuss two states even if Mr. Trump pushes that as a solution.

“I pray that the process with the U.S. administration will not come to any harm to our close relations,” she added. “I hope we will continue to have good relations, even if we don’t agree.”

Israeli officials are keeping remarkably silent on the intelligence breach with the Russians, so it is difficult to tell whether it has hurt Mr. Trump’s position with Israel. Some experts speculate that the new tension may make Mr. Trump more likely to fulfill an Israeli dream: having the United States move its embassy to Jerusalem, tacitly supporting Israel’s claim that the divided city is its eternal capital.

But at this point, no one expects huge progress in Mr. Trump’s quick trip, which has already been tangled in diplomatic stumbles. In one, a scheduled trip to Masada, where Mr. Trump wanted to deliver a speech at the Roman-era mountaintop retreat that stands as a symbol of Israel’s unwillingness to surrender, was called off during the hubbub on Tuesday.

Feelings here were deeply wounded when American officials declined to allow Israeli leaders, Mr. Netanyahu among them, to accompany Mr. Trump on the first visit of a sitting American president to the Western Wall. (The United States and most other nations have not recognized Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem after the 1967 war, thus it remains, in policy, occupied land.)

All of this, mixed with a slowly building apprehension here that Mr. Trump might not, after all, be in the mood to give the Israeli right everything it wants, has left the distinct appearance that Mr. Netanyahu will be on the defensive as the American president arrives. The two leaders took pains on Tuesday to reassert their working relationship in a phone call, but some chill is likely to last.

On the Palestinian side, meanwhile, there is little to lose in being solicitous to Mr. Trump.

Mr. Abbas’s advisers say that meetings with Mr. Trump’s team here and in Washington have been highly productive, and that Mr. Abbas, 82, wishes to be the Palestinian leader who finally makes a deal. Critics note that he is highly unpopular at home and his survival depends on maintaining power. Thus he has few options other than to restart talks if that is what Mr. Trump and regional Arab leaders want.

“What we want is a state of our own to live side by side with Israel,” said Majdi al-Khalidi, Mr. Abbas’s diplomatic adviser.

David Keyes, Mr. Netanyahu’s spokesman, said that the prime minister has “consistently” called on Mr. Abbas to negotiate but has repeatedly been turned down. “No external pressure is required for him to begin negotiations and no domestic pressure will prevent him from doing so,” Mr. Keyes said in a statement.

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“It requires some chutzpah for President Abbas to say he educates Palestinian children ‘on a culture of peace’ when he names public squares, schools, and sports clubs for mass-murders and pays convicted terrorists hundreds of millions of dollars each year,” he said. “Prime Minister Netanyahu will be the first to welcome a genuine change in these Palestinian policies.”

The Israeli government’s rising tension with Mr. Trump is a departure from the mood here in the days after his election, which the Israeli right celebrated with vigor after eight tumultuous years with President Barack Obama. Mr. Trump had promised to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem, a step other nations have not taken, and he remained silent as the right announced renewed settlement building and even possible annexation in the West Bank.

There is much less fervor now. Mr. Trump decided not to move the embassy immediately, out of fear of backlash among Palestinians and the Arab world. He also publicly asked Mr. Netanyahu to exercise restraint on Jewish settlement in the West Bank, which would mean less land for a possible Palestinian homeland.

While Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, said last week that the president intended to “reaffirm America’s unshakable bond to the Jewish state,” he also said he would “express his desire for dignity and self-determination for the Palestinians.” This has made many of Mr. Netanyahu’s allies nervous.

The embassy move remains an issue. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, who will be traveling with the president here, has said that no final decision has been made, and that the administration is still mulling “what impact such a move would have” on peace talks.

Mr. Trump has until June 1 to decide: United States law calls for such a move, but his predecessors, concerned about reaction in the Arab world, signed waivers delaying the move every six months. (Mr. Tillerson also ruffled feathers here by referring to “Palestine,” a name Israel sees, and rejects, as a recognition of a Palestinian state.)

In what the Israeli media declared on Monday was the “first” disagreement with Mr. Trump about this visit — suggesting more to come, and they did — Mr. Netanyahu quickly answered Mr. Tillerson by saying that moving the embassy would only advance peace “by shattering the Palestinian fantasy according to which Jerusalem isn’t the capital of Israel.”

Though Mr. Abbas has opposed such a move as a de facto recognition of Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem — the Palestinians demand East Jerusalem as their future capital — he has been mostly mum on the issue these days.

Reaction in Israel to Mr. Trump’s information sharing with Russia was uncharacteristically muted, with most outlets sticking to citing foreign media reports. It did not appear that any office-holding politician commented on it, and other analysts did so with the greatest of caution. One paper, Israel Hayom, mentioned the story only on page 7. (The paper is partially owned by Mr. Trump’s patron, the casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson.)

Instead, a juicy subplot has captured the Israeli media: Ronald S. Lauder, the American businessman and president of the World Jewish Congress, has been speaking with Mr. Abbas as well as with his friend Mr. Trump. Mr. Lauder and Mr. Netanyahu, long friends, have fallen out in recent years, and Mr. Netanyahu was quoted in The Jerusalem Post this week as calling Mr. Lauder his “biggest obstacle” in the coming decisions with Mr. Trump. Mr. Lauder’s spokesman declined to comment.

Among the most pressing questions, though, is whether any of the men, Mr. Trump, Mr. Abbas or Mr. Netanyahu, are capable of reaching deals that escaped the likes of Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton, to name but a few.

“Most Palestinians have lost trust in Mahmoud Abbas’s ability to reach a fair and just deal,” said Fadi Quran, a young Palestinian activist and senior campaigner at Avaaz, a liberal advocacy group.

Oded Revivi, the mayor of the Jewish settlement Efrat who attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration and has met with his envoy here, has been one of the most prominent voices in arguing that two states is a failed enterprise. He asked: “Can any of the three deliver? Does any of them have enough support?”

Gilead Sher, a former Israeli negotiator under Prime Minister Ehud Barak and now a senior fellow with the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said an almost incalculable number of variables would have to fall in place.

Mr. Netanyahu, he said, could re-form his government with politicians who support a deal, such as those from the Labor Party. And, he said, Mr. Trump would have to be able to get regional Arab players — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates — on board as well as restart talks directly between Israelis and Palestinians.

And Mr. Trump himself?

“He’s so unpredictable you cannot know what he will do,” he said. “It’s quite odd, but he might be the man to do it.”

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The warning highlights growing tensions over the vote, which is coming down to two candidates with diametrically opposed ideologies. The incumbent, President Hassan Rouhani, is promising greater freedom and more interaction with the world, while his principal rival, Ebrahim Raisi, is a hard-line cleric arguing for self-sufficiency as a way to fix Iran’s ailing economy.

The divisions are playing out in provincial towns as well as in the capital, Tehran. Every night, tens of thousands of people take to the streets around the country, waving the posters of their favorite candidates.

Supporters of Mr. Raisi chant that Mr. Rouhani will be out of a job after Saturday, when the results come in. At the same time, urban Iranians fully expect Mr. Rouhani to win, and they are likely to suspect fraud if he falls short.

In 2009, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election bid took place in a similarly tense atmosphere. When the authorities said he had won, huge protests erupted, leading to months of unrest.

Some analysts say that Mr. Khamenei’s warning shows that there is concern within Iran’s establishment that certain groups might try to alter the outcome of the vote. Others say it might also be aimed at eliciting maximum voter turnout, an important measure of the government’s credibility. That said, many Iranians, particularly in Tehran, say they vote only to prevent a hard-line candidate from taking power.

The supreme leader also criticized some aspects of the election campaign. “In election discussions, sometimes statements were made that did not suit the dignity of the Iranian nation,” he said. “However, the Iranian nation’s high turnout will fix all these problems.”

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Over the years, although the government has remained broadly authoritarian, it has oscillated among degrees of democracy. Those fluctuations, while subtle, have often coincided with elections like Friday’s.

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Islamic Republic: Yes or No?

After throwing off their government in 1979, Iranians chose its replacement with a referendum measure whose wording would prove fatefully vague: Should the old system be replaced with an Islamic republic?

The measure, seen as a vote on the revolution itself rather than whatever would follow, was overwhelmingly approved. A second referendum was scheduled to approve a constitution.

But the revolution was not united. It was led by three factions: nationalists who sought a Western-style republic, Islamists who favored a sort of populist theocracy and communists, the most powerful group.

Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamists’ leader, conspired with nationalists to block the communists, whom they both feared. They agreed on establishing an Islamic republic, which theoretically would satisfy both Islamists and nationalists.

But reconciling their visions proved difficult. The nationalists modeled their plans on the French and Belgian constitutions. The Islamists built on Mr. Khomeini’s sermons, particularly a radical concept known as Vilayat-e Faqih, which extended religious jurisprudence to allow direct clerical rule of society.

As they drafted the Constitution, Mr. Khomeini sought to strengthen his hand by seizing greater control of the revolutionary movement, in part by initiating the takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran.

His tactics worked. When the Constitution went to a referendum, it described democratic institutions, like a legislature and a president — but they would be overseen by unelected clerical bodies.

The most powerful position of all, that of the supreme leader, went to Mr. Khomeini.

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Consolidation Amid War

An organizational chart of Iran’s institutions looks like two complete systems, one democratic and another theocratic, mashed together.

Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, a professor at Texas A&M University who studies Iranian politics, said that Mr. Khomeini and his allies hoped the two systems would clash.

Professor Tabaar called the theocratic institutions “a complete counter-state” that Mr. Khomeini and his allies “thought eventually would absorb the state.”

Mr. Khomeini seemed to anticipate a gradual takeover. He took office in the holy city of Qom rather than Tehran, the capital, and warned clerical leaders against sullying themselves with day-to-day politics.

But in 1980, just months after the new Constitution was approved, Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, invaded Iran.

The war, which lasted eight years, led Iranians to seek out a strong national leader. It also threatened to break the fractious new government.

Mr. Khomeini consolidated power for himself. His office, conceived of as a distant religious authority to be consulted only on certain matters, came to dominate the political system outright.

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Factions Fighting for Dominance

When Mr. Khomeini died in 1989, a year after the war ended, it threw the system that had consolidated around him into doubt.

His allies feared that the office of supreme leader would be weakened with his death, shifting power to elected officials. They rushed through Ali Khamenei, who was then the president, to become the new supreme leader, an office he still holds.

But Mr. Khamenei lacked the necessary religious qualifications, so his allies pushed through a new Constitution to enable his ascent. This showed how politics were being waged among factions — ideological groups that lack the formal structure of political parties but compete just as fiercely. Ever since, they have struggled to control the country’s unelected institutions, a fight often carried out in the shadows.

Mr. Khamenei’s allies, a faction sometimes known as radicals or hard-liners, seized the supreme leadership to prevent losing it to another group, such as the reformists who favored easing hostilities with the West.

But Mr. Khamenei was far weaker than his predecessor. Unable to control the factions, he sought to manage them and at times swayed to their will.

Ever since, these factions have struggled against one another, at times in ways that alter the system itself.

In 1997, for instance, the reformist Mohammad Khatami won the presidency, despite efforts by Mr. Khamenei to shut down his campaign. Mr. Khatami replaced the heads of powerful security services, traditionally run by hard-liners, allowing him to ease political restrictions.

Hard-liners, concentrated in unelected bodies like the judiciary, fought back in ways that weakened democracy, such as shuttering newspapers or stifling demonstrations.

In 2000, after reformists swept the legislature, the unelected Expediency Council ruled that lawmakers could no longer investigate agencies that reported to the supreme leader.

During elections in 2004, Mr. Khamenei and his allies barred hundreds of reformist candidates, devastating their faction and returning power to his hard-liners.

This represented a period of consolidation for Mr. Khamenei, who also clashed with a powerful ally-turned-rival, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Once a political kingmaker and a former president, Mr. Rafanjani was gradually sidelined as Mr. Khamenei strengthened his control.

Often, simple power politics, not ideological differences, drives these fights. Throughout 2011, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, though a hard-liner, clashed with the supreme leader as he sought to strengthen the presidency.

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Do Iran’s Elections Matter?

The country’s elections may be just another venue in which factions can compete. But they can still give citizens a voice, albeit one much weaker than in full democracies.

“These are real elections with real political actors and real campaigning,” Professor Tabaar said. Their scope, however, is sharply limited by the Guardian Council, which is considered to be aligned with Mr. Khamenei, blocking all candidates who stray too far from the council’s preferences.

The system relies on elections that will be too restrictive to risk substantial change but open enough that Iranians, who expect a say, will accept their government as legitimate.

That would be difficult enough even if it were set out in law. But because it is a matter of tacit understanding, reached between disparate institutions that do not agree on the optimal level of democracy, in practice it can bring severe instability.

Mr. Khatami’s election, for instance, was followed by years of chaotic infighting. In 2009, when Mr. Ahmadinejad won re-election amid accusations of fraud, widespread protests briefly threatened to bring down the government.

Four years later, the system functioned more as intended. Hassan Rouhani, a moderate who was promising change but not so much as to provoke the system’s wrath, won the presidency.

Mr. Rouhani is running for re-election. His most serious challenger, Ebrahim Raisi, is a hard-liner and former attorney general widely thought to be Mr. Khamenei’s preferred candidate.

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Rating Iran’s Democracy

To some, Mr. Rouhani’s election in 2013 was the system at its most democratic. He appeared to enjoy widespread popular support and has brought significant changes, like a diplomatic agreement to curtail Iran’s nuclear program.

Though hard-liners opposed these changes, and Mr. Khamenei also expressed skepticism (as well as appearing to favor another candidate in the race), they bent to public will.

To others, Mr. Rouhani’s tenure has been a reminder that Iran’s democracy is, at best, managed. By barring reformists, Mr. Khamenei funneled public demand for change into a more acceptable candidate.

Mr. Rouhani has been allowed to enact some changes but blocked from others. He often clashes with hard-liners, most recently accusing the Revolutionary Guards of seeking to sabotage the nuclear agreement.

Democracy is difficult to measure, but few metrics rate Iran highly. One, known as Polity IV, uses a number of indicators to rate countries from -10 for full dictatorship to 10 for full democracy. It scores Iran as -7, the same as Cuba and China.

Reformist president elected

Reformist candidates banned

Another, known as V-Dem, sees Iran as more democratic. On a scale of 0 to 1, Iran scores 0.29, slightly less democratic than Ukraine or Tunisia.

Both measures, viewed over time, reveal something unusual: Iran has fluctuated significantly, sometimes ranking among troubled democracies, other times alongside the world’s fiercest dictatorships.

Those changes are driven as much by factional rivalries and Mr. Khamenei’s political instincts as by elections. But votes such as Friday’s, though severely limited, still play a role.

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The Associated Press quoted unidentified Sudanese sources as saying earlier on Tuesday that Mr. Bashir had been invited to the Saudi summit. His invitation was first reported last week in the Sudanese news media.

The official Saudi Press Agency reported on May 1 that a senior Saudi representative had visited Sudan and met with Mr. Bashir, but the Saudis have not announced that he will attend the summit. Mekki Elmograbi, a spokesman at the Sudanese Embassy in Washington, confirmed that Mr. Bashir had been invited but also did not say whether he would attend.

There was no immediate comment from the White House on whether Mr. Trump knew Mr. Bashir had been invited or whether the two might meet.

Rights advocates expressed alarm at the possibility.

“Any interaction by President Trump with al-Bashir in Saudi Arabia, should al-Bashir attend the meeting, would send a terrible signal to the victims of the crimes and raise major questions about U.S. commitment to justice for them,” said Elise Keppler, associate director of the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch. “Al-Bashir belongs in The Hague facing the charges against him, not hobnobbing with officials in Saudi Arabia.”

Sudan has been a stalwart ally of Saudi Arabia, even sending troops to join the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen.

Mr. Bashir has visited numerous countries since his indictments and could be arrested if he visits members of the International Criminal Court.

Most recently, he was at an Arab League meeting in Jordan, which is a member of the court, but the Jordanians took no steps to detain him. Saudi Arabia is not a member and has no such obligation.

Still, Mr. Bashir has had a few close calls. At a 2015 African Union meeting in South Africa, a court member, he was unable to leave while South African judges pondered whether he should be arrested. He left after President Jacob Zuma of South Africa intervened.

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“It’s a huge burden on the American psyche to have a president go abroad when a sword of Damocles is hanging over them at home,” said Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University and an expert on the presidency. “It turns our president, instead of representing the best of America on the road, into a traveling can of worms.”

Mr. Brinkley likened the timing of Mr. Trump’s trip to a visit Mr. Nixon made to the Middle East in 1974 as the Watergate scandal was closing in on him, and Mr. Clinton’s trip to Russia, Britain and Northern Ireland in 1998 during the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

For his part, Mr. Trump, a confirmed homebody, has expressed dread about the trip, asking aides whether it can be shortened to five days from nine. His advisers concede that the intense schedule — dozens of interactions with leaders from the Middle East and Europe, over a range of delicate issues — could produce unscripted, diplomatically perilous moments.

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Even beyond the tempests surrounding the president, Israeli officials expressed alarm about the unwillingness of Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, to publicly affirm that the Western Wall, one of the holiest prayer sites in the Jewish faith, was part of Israel.

General McMaster’s statement came during a White House briefing about the trip that was largely overtaken by the furor over the intelligence disclosure. After going through the details of Mr. Trump’s travel — coffee with King Salman of Saudi Arabia, a wreath-laying in Israel — General McMaster was bombarded with questions like whether allies could trust the United States enough to share sensitive intelligence with it.

“I’m not concerned at all,” he said, asserting that Mr. Trump’s disclosures to Mr. Lavrov and the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kisylak, were “wholly appropriate.”

But General McMaster dodged when asked whether Mr. Trump believed the Western Wall was in Israel. The question arose after a report on Israeli television that an American official involved in planning the visit had rebuffed a request by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to join Mr. Trump on a visit to the wall because, the official said, it was not in Israel.

The White House disavowed that statement on Monday, saying it did not reflect the president’s thinking. But General McMaster confirmed that no Israeli leaders would join Mr. Trump in his visit to the wall — in line with longstanding American practice — and he declined to say whether Mr. Trump viewed the Western Wall as being part of Israel.

“That sounds like a policy decision,” he said.

Current American policy is to treat East Jerusalem, where the wall is, as Israeli-occupied territory. Israeli troops seized the area around the wall in 1967 during the Six-Day War, and it has become a highly visible symbol of the disputed nature of Jerusalem, which Palestinians also claim as their capital.

Mr. Trump’s new ambassador to Israel, David M. Friedman, visited the wall as one of his first acts after arriving in the country. And Mr. Trump promised repeatedly during the 2016 campaign that he would move the American Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.

“He’s in real danger of blowing up Jerusalem as an issue that divides rather than unites two of the Abrahamic religions,” said Martin S. Indyk, an American ambassador to Israel under Mr. Clinton. “That part of the visit needs to be handled with extreme care.”

Mr. Trump’s disclosure of Israeli intelligence raises a separate set of issues. Mr. Netanyahu, who is determined to have a successful visit, is not likely to make an issue of this with the president, analysts said. But he will face intense pressure from his own intelligence services.

“For them, it is a question of how they acquire information and how they perceive threats against Israel,” said Dennis B. Ross, who has advised several presidents on Middle East issues. “This will inevitably produce a discussion about the ground rules.”

Aaron David Miller, another longtime Middle East diplomat, said, “This will likely break crockery, jeopardizing sources and additional information on ISIS operations.” But he added that Mr. Netanyahu “will see no reason to exacerbate the incident, and may well see some political advantage in giving Trump some cover and the benefit of the doubt.”

In Israel, some analysts speculated that Mr. Trump’s disclosure of Israeli intelligence might force his hand on the embassy, since he would need to make a good-will gesture to the Israelis.

“It would show that the president of the United States and his administration understand where lies the truth,” Avi Dichter, a former head of the Shin Bet and current Likud member of Parliament, said in an interview. “And that is what Jerusalem is for the state of Israel. It’s not just a symbolic step. It’s more profound than that.”

In Israel, government officials refused to comment on the report that Mr. Trump’s disclosure of intelligence was supplied by Israel. Some former officials familiar with Israel’s strategic and security relations with the United States said they did not have enough detailed information about the incident to assess what damage was done — or the possible fallout.

“The entire thing hinges on the specifics,” said Eran Lerman, a former deputy director of Israel’s National Security Council, who handled Israel’s strategic dialogue with the United States. “Yes, you try to protect your sources as best you can. But on the other hand, if you have actionable intelligence, you want to talk to people who can take action.”

Mr. Lerman, who teaches at Shalem College in Jerusalem and is a senior researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University, pointed to what he called Mr. Trump’s “lack of serious grounding in intelligence craft.” But he added, “I cannot judge if the president made the right call or the wrong call.”

Israel and the United States have no choice but to share intelligence, he said, though some rewriting of the ground rules might now be necessary. “At the end of the day, the community of like-minded nations cannot afford to tear the fabric of cooperation apart,” he said, “but there may be a need to sew it with more sturdy threads here and there.”

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Mr. Erdogan praised Mr. Trump for the “legendary triumph” he had achieved in the election and declared that his first meeting with the new president would be a “historical turn of tide” in the Turkish-American relationship.

“We are committed to fighting all forms of terrorism, without any discrimination whatsoever, that impose a clear and a present threat upon our future,” Mr. Erdogan said through a translator.

As he has with other strongman leaders, like President Xi Jinping of China and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, Mr. Trump has signaled support for Mr. Erdogan far beyond that afforded him by Mr. Obama, with whom he had an initially productive relationship that deteriorated after the autocratic turn in Mr. Erdogan’s leadership.

Last month, Mr. Trump called Mr. Erdogan to congratulate him on winning a much-disputed referendum that cemented his autocratic rule over Turkey and, many analysts say, eroded its democratic institutions. And Mr. Trump has not pressed Mr. Erdogan on human rights abuses in his country, including a broad crackdown on the news media and strict detention policies.

Amnesty International said the meeting would be “an opportunity to shine a spotlight on the way that President Trump and President Erdogan are contributing to a global climate of toxic and dehumanizing politics.”

“President Trump recently praised President Erdogan for winning a referendum in which dissenting opinions were ruthlessly suppressed, yet President Trump has been silent on Turkey’s alarming crackdown on the media,” said Margaret Huang, the executive director of Amnesty International USA. “The world will be watching, hoping that both presidents will reaffirm their commitments to protecting human rights.”

In March, Rex W. Tillerson, the secretary of state, traveled to Ankara and showered praise on Mr. Erdogan’s government, but the visit — intended to reassure Turkey, a partner in the fight against the Islamic State and a regional bulwark against Iran — was tinged with bitterness over Turkey’s grievances.

At that meeting, Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, called on the United States to cut off aid to the Y.P.G. and said American law enforcement should arrest Mr. Gulen. He accused Preet Bharara, the former United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, who was fired by Mr. Trump, of being a pawn of anti-Turkish forces, and called a federal investigation into businessmen with ties to Mr. Erdogan “political.”

White House officials have said that Mr. Trump has no interest in lecturing foreign leaders about human rights. He would prefer to make deals with them in areas of common interest, these officials said, believing that pressure on human rights generally backfires.

Human rights groups have compiled a long list of abuses by Mr. Erdogan, from the thousands of public officials, academics and others cashiered or jailed for their purported involvement in the coup attempt, to the recent referendum, which granted Mr. Erdogan wide-ranging new powers that critics say could essentially gut Turkey’s parliamentary system.

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In the meeting with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister, Mr. Trump disclosed intelligence about an Islamic State terrorist plot. At least some of the details that the United States has about the plot came from the Israelis, the officials said.

The officials, who were not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Israel previously had urged the United States to be careful about the handling of the intelligence that Mr. Trump discussed.

Mr. Trump said on Tuesday on Twitter that he had an “absolute right” to share information in the interest of fighting terrorism and called it a “very, very successful meeting” in a brief appearance later Tuesday at the White House alongside President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, told reporters that he was not concerned that information sharing among intelligence partners would stop.

“What the president discussed with the foreign minister was wholly appropriate to that conversation and is consistent with the routine sharing of information between the president and any leaders with whom he’s engaged,” General McMaster said at a White House briefing, seeking to play down the sensitivity of the information Mr. Trump disclosed.

General McMaster added that the president, who he said was unaware of the source of the information, made a spur-of-the-moment decision to tell the Russians what he knew.

But General McMaster also appeared to acknowledge that Thomas P. Bossert, the assistant to the president for Homeland Security and counterterrorism, had called the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency after the meeting with the Russian officials. Other officials have said that the spy agencies were contacted to help contain the damage from the leak to the Russians.

General McMaster would not confirm that Mr. Bossert made the calls but suggested that if he did, he was acting “maybe from an overabundance of caution.”

“I have not talked to Mr. Bossert about that, about why he reached out,” General McMaster said.

Former officials said it was not uncommon for presidents to unintentionally say too much in meetings and said that in administrations from both parties, staff members typically established bright lines for their bosses to avoid crossing before such meetings.

Israel’s concerns about the Trump White House’s handling of classified information were foreshadowed in the Israeli news media this year. Newspapers there reported in January that American officials warned their Israeli counterparts to be careful about what they told the Trump administration because it could be leaked to the Russians, given Mr. Trump’s openness toward President Vladimir V. Putin.

“The Russians have the widest intelligence collection mechanism in the world outside of our own. They can put together a good picture with just a few details,” said John Sipher, a 28-year veteran of the C.I.A. who served in Moscow in the 1990s and later ran the C.I.A.’s Russia program for three years. “They can marry President Trump’s comments with their own intelligence, and intelligence from their allies. They can also deploy additional resources to find out details.”

The episode could have far-reaching consequences, Democrats warned. Any country that shares intelligence with American officials “could decide it can’t trust the United States with information, or worse, that it can’t trust the president of the United States with information,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

“I have to hope that someone will counsel the president about just what it means to protect closely held information and why this is so dangerous, ultimately, to our national security,” Mr. Schiff said at a policy conference in Washington sponsored by the Center for American Progress, a liberal group.

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The timing, intensity and public announcement of the accusations suggested that the Trump administration was signaling a tougher political line on Syria, as well as seeking to embarrass Russia and Iran, all in an effort to put pressure on Damascus at the Geneva talks.

Five previous rounds of negotiations in Geneva have yielded little progress. The war is now in its seventh year, in large part because government delegations have refused to discuss the possibility of a political transition from the rule of Mr. Assad.

The Geneva Communiqué, signed by Russia and the United States in 2012, envisioned the establishment of a transitional governing body with full executive powers.

The Syrian government has refused to negotiate about power sharing or a phased transition, an idea that the international powers have been pushing more since the adoption in 2015 of Security Council Resolution 2254 calling for “credible, inclusive and nonsectarian governance.”

The opposition has also carried some degree of responsibility for the impasse, with its delegations disunited and unwilling to reduce their demands in the face of lost leverage on the battlefield.

Before previous rounds of talks, John Kerry, as secretary of state in the Obama administration, and Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special envoy who is acting as mediator, tended to emphasize the search for common ground at the outset, even when there was little hope for progress.

Now, with the release of intelligence photographs of the prison complex, the United States is demonstrating a new willingness to publicly challenge and pressure Russia.

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Up to this point, the United States has not confronted Russia or provided the public with all the evidence it says it has on war crimes, including the use of chemical weapons, by the Syrian government.

The declassified pictures do not appear to definitively prove the existence of a crematory, and rights groups that have investigated the conflict said they had not reached such a conclusion. But it is well established that there are many bodies to dispose of, and there is precedent for the burning of bodies by security forces.

There is ample evidence that the Syrian government has for decades run a vast network of detention and torture facilities and carried out arbitrary forced disappearances, and that such practices have expanded greatly since the uprising broke out in 2011.

In addition to thousands that have been killed outright, tens of thousands more may have died as vast numbers of detainees lived through conditions of neglect and abuse in packed, dirty cells, conditions so severe that a United Nations commission found that they amounted to the crime against humanity of “extermination.”

The New York Times has confirmed that such conditions are widespread through dozens of interviews with survivors and their relatives, and with former officials.

Beginning in 2013, The Times heard multiple accounts from residents in and around Damascus who said they detected the scent of something like burning hair. That led some to suspect that bodies were being burned in nearby security facilities like the Mezze airport, where former detainees have reported seeing bodies burned.

Other witnesses have told of government soldiers and militiamen burning the bodies of those killed in the field. Some cases, like the massacre of civilians in Baniyas and Bayda in 2013, have been documented in multiple videos.

Mr. de Mistura opened the latest round of talks in Geneva by meeting with Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar al-Jaafari, on Tuesday morning, before having lunch with Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Gennady Gatilov, and heading into a series of meetings with Syrian parties, starting with the head of the Syrian opposition delegation, Nasr al-Hariri, and members of the opposition High Negotiations Committee.

To make the most of the few days set aside for this round of discussions, United Nations officials said Mr. Jaafari was likely to return for a second session with the special envoy in the evening.

United Nations officials said on Monday that they had reason to believe the current Geneva talks would be more substantive than previous ones. Mr. de Mistura said that more countries would participate this time — he said all the signatories to the Security Council resolution would attend, which would include Iran as well as Russia — and that the intention was “to go a little bit more deeply and actually be more businesslike.”

“Any type of reduction of violence, in this case de-escalation, cannot be sustained unless there is a political horizon in one direction or the other,” he added. “That is exactly what we are pushing for.”

Mr. de Mistura’s deputy, Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy, said he recently had a two-hour meeting with the Syrian deputy foreign minister, Fayssal Mekdad, in Damascus, that led him to believe the Syrian government was prepared to engage in more substantive discussions.

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Instead, they have been vetted by a Parliament where moderates and reformists achieved a slim majority in 2015 elections, which has opened the floodgates for thousands of candidates in the vote on Friday: lawyers, religious minorities, women’s rights activists, bank managers and sports figures, among others.

“The educated middle class and urbanites are emerging and asserting themselves for the first time,” said Farshad Ghorbanpour, a political analyst close to the moderates. “The City Council is a venue for seeing the real Iranians who want to change the quality of their lives.”

The council wields considerable influence. It elects the mayor to a four-year term and oversees municipal budgets. Council members have the right to put social, economic and other issues on the agenda and develop plans to address them. They also get to name streets, in a city where hard-liners have sought to name every street after a martyr or revolutionary figure.

Dr. Mohebi has spent most of his life fighting for animal rights — or to be more precise, fighting for the right of people to have pets in their houses. In 2002, he started Tehran’s first pet hospital at a time when few people there had dogs and cats. Now, he is planning to open a 10-story clinic in West Tehran that will be one of the largest in the Middle East.

“People said I was crazy, but I saw change coming,” he said in an interview in his clinic, as clerks in the other room sold brushes to a woman who had walked in with a schnauzer and an Afghan hound was being soaped up in a special tub. “Iranians wanted pets.”

Tehran has changed over the past 15 years, Dr. Mohebi said. There is more money, more freedom and more attention to social rights, he said. But that did not stop Parliament three years ago, when it was still dominated by hard-liners, from passing a law that increased the fines for dog owners to the equivalent of $2,500, as well as killing the animal and 60 lashes for the owner.

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“We have one million pets in this city — what are they thinking?” Dr. Mohebi said. “There is a massive gap between our politicians and us.”

If he is elected, Dr. Mohebi said, there will be no more killings. “We should have special parks for dogs instead, like we have special women-only parks for women who want to go running without their Islamic scarves,” he said.

On Telegram, a social media service, thousands of people follow his channel, Supporters of Dr. Mohebi. Some of his followers wrote that they wished him success. “I love Payam, because when he gets elected I can walk safely with my dog,” one supporter, Behnaz Mehdikhani, wrote. Another posted a cartoon of a cat waking up his sleeping owner. “Are you asleep?” a text balloon read. “Wake up and vote for us #DrMohebi.”

Over the years, the council has seen fights between the two dominant political factions — reformists and moderates on one side, hard-liners on the other — and corruption by some of its members, who were making millions by using their influence to sell building permits. As a result, Tehran looks like a concrete jungle where high-rises with no provisions for parking spaces soar over small alleyways.

“What is missing are city planners,” said Taraneh Yalda, a prominent architect and a candidate who is expected to garner broad support in the elections. Ms. Yalda, who was educated in Italy and France, said the city was suffering from all the towers being built without regard for aesthetics.

“It became a habit for everybody who inherits their grandmother’s house to sell it to someone who knocks it down and replaces it with something ugly,” she said. “Not only the mayor is to blame. We all are.”

Ms. Yalda had never considered venturing into politics until last March, when a friend of her son urged her to sign up for the council elections. “We opened a Telegram channel,” she said. “After a few days I had 2,500 followers. I was like, ‘OMG, I totally have to do this,’” she said in English.

What Tehran needs is more social spaces, Ms. Yalda said. “Tehran is beautiful, not for its buildings, but for its people.”

For some, signing up as a council candidate is the start of a more ambitious foray into politics. Housang Shahbazi, the manager of Tehran’s sprawling Ekbatan housing complex, is better known as Iran’s “hero pilot” for safely landing an aging Boeing 727 after the landing gear in the nose jammed in 2012.

Running for the City Council was the start of a new way of thinking, he said. Social media changed everything. “If I had been a candidate four years ago, how would I spread my message?” he said. “Nowadays, people know everything. Nothing can be censored.”

This time around, Iranians would be electing people like themselves, he said.

“In Iran, our leaders often say that the one real red line we can never cross is our establishment,” Mr. Shahbazi said. “I say the only red line we cannot cross are our people. We matter most.”

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In one episode from the series, a Yazidi slave is sent to clean an Islamic State fighter’s room, where his bored wife asks if the woman is hungry or would like to watch a movie. The captive woman is outraged.

The stories of women dominate the series, the producers said, because they offered rich dramatic material. A majority of the channel’s viewers are also women.

In another episode, Islamic State commanders indoctrinate children into their ranks.

Like the Islamic State’s recruits, the cast comes from across the Arab world, and the show’s plotlines reflect well-known headlines about the group’s atrocities.

Ramadan, which is to begin around May 27, is a month of the Islamic calendar during which Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. It is also peak television season in the Arab world, where families gather after breaking their fast to binge-watch shows late into the night.

In television terms, “it’s like the Super Bowl for 30 days straight,” said Mazen Hayek, a spokesman for MBC.

Typical programming includes romances, comedies and historical dramas, some of which reflect current events. Though the new MBC production has the trappings of a drama, and some of the costumes and makeup can be cartoonish, the series, set behind the jihadists’ front lines, is not light viewing.

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Another story line involves a journalist whose fiancé became an Islamic State suicide bomber. She goes undercover to report on the group, and pledges to abandon her Christian faith and blow up a church.

The actress, Samar Allam, said in a phone interview that being on set and getting into character depressed her, but that she hoped the show would make people think in a way that news reports about the Islamic State’s violence could not.

“ISIS is a danger to all of humanity,” she said, using an acronym for the group. The show allowed her to “show my hatred and my condemnation of this group, to express it in a concrete way.”

Marwa Mohamed, a Saudi actress, plays a woman who kills her husband for cheating on her and flees to join the Islamic State with her two sons. After one is sexually abused and the other is killed, she struggles to escape.

“It is important to wake people up and show them that Islam is not that,” Ms. Mohamed said.

She said she hoped that despite the dark subject matter, viewers would tune in for the human stories. “It’s not all terrorism and war,” she said. “There are lots of dramatic stories in it as well.”

The series echoes news coverage of the Islamic State, with explosions that leave bodies scattered and gunmen waving black flags, but dramatizes the lives of people forced to live under the group.

Mr. Jaber, who is known in the Arab world for being a judge on the reality competition “Arabs Got Talent,” said the series sought to harness the influence of popular television to undermine the narrative that the Islamic State uses to entice recruits.

“We believe that this is an epidemic, this is a disease that we have to muster the courage to address and fight,” he said.

Still, producing a show about the Islamic State in the region where the group has done the most damage carries risks.

A comedy show on MBC that mocked the group led to death threats against its star. And Mr. Jaber said some sponsors might hesitate to advertise their products on such a violent show about a terrorist group.

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“It will bring eyeballs, it will bring buzz and ratings and reputation, but no money,” he said.

Since the Islamic State stormed through Syria and Iraq, shocking the world with its choreographed beheadings and elaborate executions, governments have struggled to defeat the group and counter its potent, made-for-television propaganda.

Some diplomats have told Mr. Jaber that they like the idea of using television to challenge the jihadists’ message. In March, he was invited to discuss the show with Western and Middle Eastern diplomats at a summit meeting in Washington hosted by Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson.

Other Ramadan series, dramas and comedies, have referred to the Islamic State, but “Black Crows” appears to be the first to be set entirely in the militants’ world, said Rebecca Joubin, an associate professor of Arab studies at Davidson College who studies the region’s television programs.

The most popular Ramadan shows are often escapist love stories, full of beautiful people wearing nice clothes. “A lot of people are like: ‘I don’t want to watch this stuff. I see it on the news every day,’” Ms. Joubin said.

Still, the series’ producers expect it to be widely viewed during Ramadan, when MBC 1 traditionally sees a spike in viewership.

The show will be broadcast in Arabic as “Al Gharabeeb Al Soud,” and the network hopes to produce an English-language version for wider distribution.

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Mr. Short did not say whether the president would invite Mr. Netanyahu to join him at the Western Wall. The two leaders are scheduled to meet while the president is in Jerusalem.

Israel claims Jerusalem as its undivided capital. Israeli troops seized the area around the Western Wall in 1967 during the Six-Day War, and it has become both a sacred site for Jews and a highly visible symbol of the disputed nature of Jerusalem, which Palestinians also claim as their capital. The wall lies underneath the Al Aqsa Mosque, or Temple Mount, which is one of the holiest sites in Islam.

In a related matter, the political sensitivity of Jerusalem flared up after Mr. Netanyahu denied a report that he had privately urged Mr. Trump last February not to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. A Fox News correspondent, Conor Powell, wrote on Twitter that “Everyone I’ve spoken to in D.C. that has been briefed on #Jerusalem embassy move says #Netanyahu told #Trump not to move embassy at this time.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s office denounced the report as a “lie” and went so far as to release what it said were written reports, by an Israeli adviser, of the conversation between the prime minister and the president, when Mr. Netanyahu visited Washington in February. The Israelis said the prime minister told Mr. Trump that he favored moving the embassy.

“The embassy – the P.M. supports moving it,” wrote Yaakov Nagel, who was then the Israeli national security adviser, according to the excerpts released by Mr. Netanyahu’s office.

During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump promised repeatedly to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem. But since he has taken office, he has put the decision on a back burner, in part, officials said, because several Arab leaders, including King Abdullah II of Jordan, have warned the White House that it could cause an eruption of violence in the region.

Officials in Washington and Jerusalem have also suggested that moving the embassy was not a high priority for Mr. Netanyahu, especially compared to issues like the threat from Iran or the Islamic State. But the prime minister, analysts said, is in a coalition government with right-wing partners whom he cannot afford to antagonize on the status of Jerusalem, an issue that has long been a lightning rod in Israeli politics.

White House officials insist the move may still happen; Mr. Trump must decide by June whether to renew the waiver of the congressional vote instructing that the embassy be moved. But on Sunday, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson sowed new doubts about it.

“The president has recently expressed his view that he wants to put a lot of effort into seeing if we cannot advance a peace initiative between Israel and Palestine,” Mr. Tillerson said on the NBC program “Meet the Press.” “And so I think in large measure the president is being very careful to understand how such a decision would impact a peace process.”

Even Mr. Tillerson’s reference to Israel and Palestine — rather than the customary Israel and the Palestinians — caused heartburn in Israel, where some interpreted it as evidence that a senior American official recognized the sovereignty of a Palestinian state, which has not yet been negotiated with the Israelis.

The White House insisted Mr. Tillerson was not sending any message. His use of the term Palestine, a senior official said, was “unintentional and unfortunate.”

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They became the latest casualties of a long war that is leaving children dead or wounded in record numbers.

On Monday, the United Nations said that the violence across Afghanistan in the first four months of the year had killed 283 children and wounded another 704, a 21 percent increase over the same period last year.

“The children were playing outside their home and found the mortar round, likely fired during fighting earlier in the day,” Tadamichi Yamamoto, the special representative for Afghanistan appointed by the secretary-general of the United Nations, said in a statement. “A family destroyed in seconds — this horror is just one of too many incidents documented at the onset of this fighting season.”

The “persistent use of indirect and/or explosive weapons in civilian-populated areas,” as well as the use of “indiscriminate improvised explosive devices,” are the biggest cause of casualties among children, the statement said. Deaths or injuries caused by ordnance that does not explode immediately but blows up later are also on the rise.

The violence in Afghanistan is expected to intensify this year, in the absence of any peace effort or any regional consensus on ways to ease the conflict.

The Taliban, who have gained large areas of territory in the last few years, overran the districts of Qala-i-Zal in Kunduz Province in northern Afghanistan and Zebak in Badakhshan Province in northeastern Afghanistan since beginning an offensive late in April. Zebak has been recaptured by Afghan special forces, but Qala-i-Zal, as well as most of the territory in Kunduz, remain in Taliban control, according to provincial officials.

President Trump, in a broad policy review of the war in Afghanistan, is considering a recommendation by his advisers to send several thousand additional troops there. They would be added to the 13,000 international troops in the country now, about 8,400 of them American, that are assisting the Afghan armed forces.

Laghman Province, where the children were killed, has seen increased Taliban activity in recent months, with fighting reported close to the provincial capital, Mehtarlam.

Nazar Gul, 33, who lost his 7-year-old son, Zaher, said the fighting near their village, Omarzayo, had continued over the last 20 days. They had to rush the burial of their relative, the police officer, while bullets were being fired.

In the explosion, Mr. Gul said, Zaher was thrown yards from where the blast occurred.

“Before he died, Zaher came home to ask for money — 10 afghanis — for an ice cream,” Mr. Gul said, the equivalent of 15 cents. “His mother said she didn’t have money. But she gave him cold water, and he went back to play.”

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WASHINGTON — The State Department released satellite images on Monday that officials said showed that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has built a crematory at a military prison outside Damascus to hide a large number of executions.

Stuart E. Jones, the acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, said officials believed that the crematory had been constructed so that little evidence exists of the thousands of people who are executed every year at the Sednaya Prison complex.

The evidence presented by the United States remains circumstantial. Satellite photographs of the complex show that while nearby buildings were covered in snow, the roof of the building suspected to be a crematory was free of snow, suggesting a significant internal heat source.

Mr. Jones said that prisoners had in the past been buried in mass graves, but that a crematory could dispose of the bodies without leaving evidence behind.

Amnesty International recently reported that since 2011, thousands of civilians had been executed in mass hangings at the prison, some carried out at night in an attempt to maintain secrecy.

The prison complex is about 45 minutes north of Damascus.

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Mr. Qalibaf had been under pressure from fellow hard-liners to fall in behind Mr. Raisi. Two other minor candidates are expected to withdraw before Friday, making the race a showdown between Mr. Raisi and Mr. Rouhani, clerics who hold strongly opposing views of Iran’s future.

Mr. Rouhani said on Monday that he needed a strong victory to gain the mandate to carry out changes leading to more personal freedoms, something he promised in his first campaign but was never able to deliver.

“The leverage of my power does not possess some things, but some things will be possible with a vote of more than 51 percent,” he said during a campaign stop in western Iran.

By contrast, Mr. Raisi has promised that, if elected, he will ensure that the nation becomes more self-sufficient and establishes relations with other countries only “when in the interests of Iran.”

His supporters often call Mr. Rouhani’s political team “traitors” for making the nuclear agreement with the United States and other world powers. Mr. Raisi himself has taken the president to task for saying the nuclear deal has prevented war, calling it “a disgraceful sign of weakness.”

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In November, Mr. Sadeghi gave a speech in Parliament accusing the head of the judiciary, Sadegh Amoli-Larijani, of maintaining a secret bank account to collect diverted public funds. After the speech, representatives of the judiciary tried to arrest him, but were stopped when dozens of people gathered in front of his house to protect him.

Nevertheless, change for Mr. Sadeghi and many within Iran’s establishment means altering existing law, not overhauling Iran’s political system and establishment.

And that change is halting. For instance, in 2016, Parliament passed a measure that would have made women eligible for top political positions, only to have it blocked by the 12-member Guardian Council — now led by a 90-year-old hard-liner, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati — which reviews all new laws to ensure they are properly “Islamic.”

Parliament’s attempts to make it easier for women to obtain a divorce and more difficult for men to take a second wife were similarly rejected by the council, which also vets candidates for elections.

This, too, has consequences for the economy, as obscure laws enacted after the revolution in 1979 remain on the books, often used by ideologues or unscrupulous officials to undermine business ventures that in most other countries would be brilliant successes.

Take, for example, Sohrab Mostaghim, 28, and some of his friends, all graduates of Tehran’s best universities, who designed a treasure hunt set in the city’s most popular park. Soon, hundreds of people were happily paying the equivalent of $11 each to play the game, based on riddles and questions embedded in an app on their mobile phones.

But when they told a manager of the park what was going on, they were blindsided by his reaction.

“Instead of welcoming the extra visitors and this fun game, he pressured us, claiming our promotional video was against Islam, since at the end the brother and sister hug,” Mr. Mostaghim said. Physical contact between men and women in public is officially forbidden in Iran, but the rules are widely flouted in the larger cities.

Ultimately, the partners felt they had to shut the game down, whereupon the manager changed his tune.

“Now, he is asking us for bribes to allow us to use the park,” Mr. Mostaghim said. “We are not even sure if he will really allow us if we pay.”

The whole idea of a start-up is to embrace freedom to think and create, he said, “but we don’t have that here.”

Even established businesses that suffered during the years of sanctions are finding it difficult to recapture lost customers. For Bahram Shahriyari, 58, the prospect of lifting international sanctions after the nuclear deal was a faint light at the end of what had become a dark tunnel.

Until the sanctions were imposed, he had owned a business providing parts and components for new and used vehicles made by Peugeot-Citroën of France, one of the most prominent foreign brands in the country. At its peak just four years ago, his company had 400 employees and even exported parts to France.

“But the sanctions and mismanagement of our leaders was neck-breaking,” Mr. Shahriyari said. His principal customer, an Iranian state-owned automotive company, Iran Khodro, stopped placing orders because it was having trouble selling cars. Before long, his checks started bouncing, he said, and he told employees that he could no longer pay their wages.

Peugeot-Citroën has now re-entered the market, restarting an existing joint venture but dealing only with Iran Khodro. For Mr. Shahriyari, who lost his most valuable employees and customers and still cannot obtain financing, it is far too late.

“A contact, an ambassador for Iran, once told me, ‘You have to pay the price for the nuclear advancement of our country,’” he said. “Believe me, I did.”

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Archaeological workers in Egypt unearthed an ancient human burial site with at least 17 intact mummies near the Nile Valley city of Minya, according to news agency reports.

The mummies, discovered at a depth of about 25 feet, are believed to be the bodies of priests and officials, The Associated Press reported.

The burial ground included sarcophagi made of limestone and clay, animal coffins, and papyrus with Demotic script, not the hieroglyphs found in earlier Egyptian tombs.

The site was discovered near the village of Tuna al-Gabal, the site of a previously excavated necropolis for thousands of mummified animals.

It was found last year by some Cairo University students using radar, Reuters reported.

The mummies are believed to be more than 1,500 years old, and date to Egypt’s Greco-Roman period, a 600-year epoch that began in 332 B.C. after the region was conquered by Alexander the Great, said Mohamed Hamza, the dean of archaeology at Cairo University, who helped lead the excavations.

The burial site may hold as many as 32 mummies. It is “the first human necropolis found in central Egypt with so many mummies,” Salah al-Kholi, an Egyptologist, said, according to The Telegraph.

The country’s antiquities minister, Khaled Al-Anani, called 2017 a “historic year” for archaeological discoveries. “It’s as if it’s a message from our ancestors who are lending us a hand to help bring tourists back,” he said at a news conference on Saturday.

Egypt’s tourism industry has struggled in recent years. About 5.4 million visitors came to the country in 2016, down from 14.7 million in 2010.

The country has had some significant finds this year, including a large statue of an Egyptian ruler found in Cairo in March.

But conservatives have targeted Mr. Rouhani for what they regard as his softness toward the United States and tolerance of Western culture. They also have sharply criticized him for what they call his misleading prediction that the nuclear agreement would herald an economic boom in Iran, where joblessness remains pervasive and the economy is the most pressing campaign issue. Still, Mr. Rouhani is considered the front-runner.

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Ebrahim Raisi, 56

Widely believed to have the backing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mr. Raisi is known as a hard-line cleric who has spent most of his political career as a prosecutor and judicial official, starting at age 20, two years after the revolution. Last year he was appointed by Mr. Khamenei as the custodian of Astan Quds Razavi, a well-endowed Islamic charity in charge of Imam Reza Shrine, one of the holiest sites in the Shia branch of Islam that prevails in Iran.

Mr. Raisi also is a member of the Assembly of Experts, the clerical body that supervises the work of the supreme leader, and is regarded as a possible successor to Mr. Khamenei. Mr. Raisi wears a black turban identifying him as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad.

Critics contend that Mr. Raisi, with his strict anti-Western views, would lead Iran back into isolation like President Rouhani’s unpopular predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Rights advocates say he was among the judicial authorities responsible for mass executions of leftists and dissidents during political turmoil in 1988, when roughly 4,500 people were believed to have been killed. Mr. Raisi is not known to have spoken in the campaign about that era.

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Eshaq Jahangiri, 60

Mr. Rouhani’s vice president, Mr. Jahangiri is a reformist who joined the race in a politically strategic move to help Mr. Rouhani counter their conservative critics and defend the nuclear accord, which many Iranians regard as an exemplary achievement even if it has yet to yield major economic benefits. He is widely expected to drop out and endorse Mr. Rouhani. “Our government has started along a good path — the nuclear issue was settled, we have stabilized the economy, hope has returned,” Mr. Jahangiri said in a recent interview with Agence France-Presse. “I am confident Iranians will vote for this government to continue its work.”

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Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, 55

Like Mr. Ahmadinejad, Mr. Qalibaf established his political trajectory as Tehran’s mayor. A onetime airline pilot who still has his flying license, he boasts of his hard-line credentials as a former Revolutionary Guard commander and police chief, and has resisted calls by other conservatives to step aside and endorse Mr. Raisi.

Mr. Qalibaf has assailed President Rouhani over a failure to create jobs and has predicted that “an unemployment tsunami will wash away the government.” Rights advocates have accused him of having bragged about crushing protests and beating demonstrators during his police career. Mr. Qalibaf also has faced criticism over the collapse of a prominent high-rise building in Tehran last January that killed at least 20 firefighters.

Mostafa Agha Mirsalim, 69

An engineer and former minister of culture and Islamic guidance, Mr. Mirsalim was an adviser to Ayatollah Khamenei when he was president in the 1980s. He is considered a pious hard-liner known for closing reformist newspapers and denouncing what he considers a Western cultural onslaught subverting Iran’s youth.

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Mostafa Hashemi-Taba, 70

A former top official of Iran’s physical education organization and National Olympic Committee, Mr. Hashemi-Taba is closely associated with Mohammad Khatami, the former reformist president who preceded Mr. Ahmadinejad. He has been a strong defender of the nuclear accord and may drop out to support Mr. Rouhani.

Mr. Hashemi-Taba has been outspoken in his ridicule of hard-line conservatives over what he calls their denial of the destructive effects of nuclear sanctions during Mr. Ahmadinejad’s tenure.

“These were the ones who buried their heads in the sand and said sanctions had no impact,” he said. “They emptied the Treasury.”

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The scene at the Rouhani campaign rally in Tehran on Tuesday has been replicated in other cities in recent days. In what appeared to be a warning that they not get out of hand, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Wednesday that anyone who disrupted the elections would get a “slap in the face.”

Mr. Rouhani’s supporters did not care much for the narrow playing field in which their candidate must operate, maneuvering between rigid ideological rules and hard-liners thirsty for the political blood of any candidate deemed to be “Western.”

First, they referred constantly to the ghosts of the recent political past — leaders who have been under house arrest since 2011 but who still haunt Iran’s establishment.

Locked up without a trial, former Prime Minister Mir Hussein Moussavi, along with his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, and the former speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Mehdi Karroubi, are officially labeled “the leaders of the sedition.”

Both men were 2009 presidential candidates who fell out of grace with Iran’s more conservative leaders after the disputed victory of the widely criticized incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Mr. Moussavi and Mr. Karroubi called the result a fraud and were blamed for the outpouring of antigovernment protests that followed, often referred to as the Green Revolution.

Mr. Moussavi, 75, and his wife, 71, live in a house less than a mile from the presidential palace. Mr. Kerroubi, 79, lives in an apartment in a different part of town. They are permitted out only for medical reasons and receive no visitors except immediate family.

“The house arrest must be broken!” the crowds chanted at the rally for Mr. Rouhani, who, when first elected four years ago, indicated that he would seek their release. It is a goal that apparently remains politically impossible because of hard-line conservative objections.

House music was pumping through the Shahid Shiroudi Stadium, a sports complex in downtown Tehran. In addition to green, the color of the opposition, many wore purple, the color Mr. Rouhani had chosen for his campaign.

“I was green, but your baton made me purple!” they yelled, referring to a violent police crackdown on the 2009 uprising.

Smartphones were all around, with people looking either toward the stage with speakers, or at their screens, where they were posting videos of the event to Instagram and the social messaging app Telegram.

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As they huddled up by the thousands, during one of the few times when Iranians can legally organize in large numbers, there was no shortage of daring slogans. Hard-liners, with their tendency to put security before everything, were the target.

“No judge, no commander! Law-abiding government!” they shouted. “No to segregation of men and women!” and, “Shame on you IRIB,” an attack on the hard-line-dominated state television broadcaster, the most powerful propaganda organization in the country.

Some people had made posters. Three young women held up handwritten placards calling for the freedom to travel. In Iran, wives need permission from their husbands for that privilege.

Another held up a poster directed at Mr. Rouhani. “Please have a clear stance, what is your position on the political prisoners?” it read. And a reminder, “Article 23 of the constitution guarantees the freedom of thought.”

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Many said they wished for much more than Mr. Rouhani could promise them, but they insisted they would vote for him nonetheless.

“I want to prevent a return to the days where authoritarians ruled,” the time of Mr. Ahmadinejad, said Omid Zare, a 26-year-old college graduate, who, like many of his age, is unemployed. The two terms of Mr. Ahmadinejad were marred by controversy, and the police were constantly present on all main squares of Tehran. “We need a better future,” Mr. Zare said.

When Mr. Rouhani finally arrived, there were victory signs, but also shouts of support for Mohammad Khatami, a more liberal former president whose portrait is not allowed to be printed or shown on television in Iran.

Mr. Rouhani’s campaign video showed Mr. Khatami sitting with Mr. Rouhani, which led to more cheers. “Long live Khatami!” people screamed.

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Mr. Rouhani skillfully avoided making remarks about the opposition leaders under house arrest, something that could technically get him disqualified by a council overseeing the elections.

Instead, he alluded to the issue, saying that “the whole country had been held under house arrest” before he became president in 2013. “We want freedom of press, freedom of association and freedom of thought,” he said, much to the pleasure of everyone in the stadium. “Whatever you do, go out and vote.”

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But the candidates still provide significant choices compared with elections in many other Middle Eastern countries.

The incumbent president, Hassan Rouhani, promotes economic and social freedoms. His main opponent, Ebrahim Raisi, the head of the country’s wealthiest religious foundation, opposes many such ideas and wants Iran to become more self-sufficient.

Televised debates this year have been held with new restrictions, in contrast to the live debates in 2009 that helped polarize the country. Campaigning is also controlled. Street rallies are not allowed. Instead, the candidates speak to their followers in stadiums and halls.

Ayatollah Khamenei used the speech on Wednesday to reinforce his determination that anyone “wanting to take any measure against the country’s security in the election will certainly receive a hard reaction and slap in the face.”

In accounts of the speech reported by the Tasnim News Agency and other Iranian news outlets, including Ayatollah Khamenei’s own website, he also accused George Soros, the multibillionaire Hungarian-American investor, of having tried to influence the elections of 2009.

That year, millions of Iranians took to the streets in protest, angered by what demonstrators said was fraud in the suspiciously lopsided re-election of the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

After a crackdown, a series of mass trials and the house arrest of leaders of what was known as the Green Revolution, Iran’s establishment concluded that the entire episode had been plotted by foreigners.

“An evil American and rich Zionist said that he managed to turn everything upside down in Georgia with $10 million,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, referring to Mr. Soros and his alleged role in the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia.

“In 2009, he was foolish enough to try to affect the Islamic republic, but he slammed against a strong wall of national will and determination,” Ayatollah Khamenei said. “It is the same today.”

Mr. Soros’s representatives did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

Ayatollah Khamenei is not the only leader who has accused Mr. Soros of interference. Right-wing groups in the United States have also spoken out against him. In April, Hungary’s government sought to close a university founded by Mr. Soros.

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A shake-up of the overarching Israel Broadcasting Authority — widely considered an outdated and wasteful enterprise — has been decades in the making. At one point it was said to have had up to 18 unions for about 1,800 employees. Israeli officials and experts across the political spectrum said that reform was essential.

But the way it is unfolding appears chaotic and uncertain. And many Israelis were outraged by the abrupt termination of Channel 1’s “Mabat,” the grande dame of Israel’s news programs.

Mr. Netanyahu’s office denied responsibility, describing the swift closing in a statement as “undignified and disrespectful.”

“The prime minister heard about this from the media and the matter was not carried out with his knowledge or approval,” the statement added.

Three years ago, Mr. Netanyahu championed the establishment of a corporation to replace the authority. Plans were made, laws were passed and it was named Kann, Hebrew for “here.” But in recent months, Mr. Netanyahu changed his mind and tried to disband the corporation, saying it was preferable to maintain and reform the authority.

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“Netanyahu did not like the independence that the corporation was showing,” said Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, director of the media reform program at the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research center in Jerusalem. “They told him from square one that they would do what they wanted, in accordance with the authorities given to them by the law.”

The law, Mr. Netanyahu found, limits government influence. Mr. Netanyahu threatened to break up his government coalition over the new corporation, after his coalition partners refused to go along with its cancellation. In a compromise, it was decided to take the news division out of Kann and to set up a separate news corporation.

Employees and experts worry that the confusion resulting from the two parallel corporations will weaken public broadcasting in Israel. Days before going live, it was unclear how the operation would function. One radio employee, who asked not to be identified because of the political uncertainty around his job, said he did not even know which city he was supposed to be broadcasting from.

The whole nature of the process has stoked apprehension. In a show of support, President Reuven Rivlin of Israel, an old political rival of Mr. Netanyahu, made a point of coming in person to the studio for an interview on Israel Radio’s midday news program. Thanking the workers, he called it the end of an era.

“Without public broadcasting there is no democracy,” Mr. Rivlin said. “Without public broadcasting, the state of Israel isn’t the state of Israel.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents often describe his dealings with the press as “obsessive.” He frequently attacks by name Israeli journalists who are critical of him. And he is under police investigation after tapes surfaced in which he and a long-hostile Israeli newspaper baron tried to negotiate a deal to benefit the newspaper, at the expense of a competitor, in return for better coverage for the prime minister.

This week, Mr. Netanyahu released a scathing video accusing CNN and The New York Times, among others, of “fake news” for their coverage of a new Hamas document (though questions were raised about his representation of what was reported).

Mr. Netanyahu rebuffs accusations that he is trying to limit freedom of expression or control the local news media market. He says he would like to see more pluralism and diversity, and more commercial television and news channels to compete with the existing ones.

For Israelis, the end of “Mabat” prompted an outpouring of nostalgia. Although its ratings had dropped in recent years to around 3 or 4 percent, as the news programs of two competing commercial channels, 2 and 10, became more popular, it remained a much loved national institution. The journalists and staff were dismayed that they were not given a proper opportunity to part from and thank their viewers.

“My heart is broken,” Haim Yavin, the news program’s first anchor, said by phone during the last broadcast. He retired in 2008, after 40 years in television.

“They not only killed us, but they gave us a donkey’s funeral,” said Yaakov Ahimeir, another veteran journalist who appeared in the studio. “What are we? Criminals?”

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On Wednesday, Mr. Erdogan’s prime minister added another warning: that arming the Kurds could have “consequences” for the United States and a “negative result.” He did not go into detail, promising only that Mr. Erdogan would elaborate when he meets President Trump at the White House next week.

Mr. Erdogan also sharply criticized the Trump administration’s decision in remarks quoted by Turkish news media, and said he hoped it would be “reversed as soon as possible.”

Analysts believe Mr. Erdogan could now seek a quid pro quo in return for swallowing the American decision to work ever more closely with the Kurds in Syria.

In return, Mr. Erdogan could seek an American green light for a newly forceful intervention against Turkey’s Kurdish foes in Iraq, the P.K.K.

Experts said that would mostly consist of Turkey increasing its periodic bombing runs on the militants. But in the most extreme case, the Turks could coordinate a ground operation likely carried out by rival Kurdish forces friendly to Turkey, said Soner Cagaptay, a Turkey expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

For decades, the P.K.K. has fought an on-and-off insurgency inside Turkey, aided by its bases in northern Iraq. The group has been coordinating lately with Iraqi militias that are backed by Iran, another power that Turkey views as a threat.

“I tend to take the Turkish president at his word,” said Aaron Stein, a Turkey specialist at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank. “If he keeps telling everybody that he could do something in Iraq, I tend to think he could do something in Iraq.”

Striking in Iraq would accomplish some Turkish goals, several analysts said. While it would do little to prevent the Kurdish autonomous areas inside northeast Syria from consolidating, it would isolate those cantons from Kurdish areas in Iraq. It could stop the Kurds from expanding their power in the region further and from possibly bolstering the Kurdish nationalist movement inside Turkey — Mr. Erdogan’s ultimate worry.

It would also make it harder for Iran, a rival for power in the region whose proxies are friendly with the P.K.K., to keep a continuous corridor of influence stretching from Tehran through Iraq and northern Syria to the Mediterranean.

Underscoring the complexity of alliances in the region, the P.K.K. is a parent organization of the Americans’ newly official Syrian Kurdish partner. The Syrian group, known as the Y.P.G., has used the chaos of war to carve out de facto semiautonomous zones inside Syria.

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Mr. Erdogan “can live with a Y.P.G. statelet in northern Syria,” said James F. Jeffrey, a former American ambassador to Turkey. “He can’t live with a Y.P.G. statelet that is supported by the U.S. and is linked with Iran.”

Analysts say Turkey could move against the P.K.K. around Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. Turkish officials worry that the group is trying to establish new headquarters there that could give it control of a strategic route between Syria and Iran. (The group’s existing Iraqi headquarters are in the Qandil mountains, in another part of northern Iraq.)

Mr. Erdogan declared just last month that Turkey was obliged to keep attacking the P.K.K. on Mount Sinjar “until the last terrorist is eliminated.”

“They will do everything they can do to take it out before it becomes P.K.K. headquarters No. 2,” Mr. Cagaptay said.

“I think this could be the basis of the Trump-Erdogan deal,” Mr. Cagaptay, who is Turkish, said after the Trump administration announcement about arming the Syrian Kurds. “Erdogan looking the other way as Trump moves to take Raqqa” with the Syrian Kurds, while Mr. Trump looks the other way, or even helps behind the scenes, as Mr. Erdogan strikes in Iraq.

A central contradiction now bedeviling United States-Turkey relations is that, while the United States agrees with Ankara that the P.K.K. is a terrorist group, American forces work with its Syrian affiliate so closely that the Kurdish fighters help call in U.S. airstrikes. And those Syrian militants will now receive heavy machine guns and armored vehicles from the Pentagon.

Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, said on Wednesday that “every weapon” that goes to the Syrian Kurdish group is “a threat against Turkey.”

Taking on the Syrian Kurds more forcefully would be difficult. Besides the militants’ close relations with the United States, the Turkish Army is considered too weak, and Kurdish militias in Syria too strong.

Militarily, “the Turks are not in a position to take this on,” said Naz Durakoglu, who helped develop Turkey policy at the State Department during the Obama administration.

After at least a dozen Turkish attacks on the Syrian Kurdish militants last month, the United States took emphatic steps to prevent further clashes, by moving troops to the border in Humvees as a buffer between Turks and Syrian Kurds.

They even flew American flags, a symbolic and provocative move usually avoided in Middle Eastern interventions.

That leaves Iraq, where Turkey would face fewer obstacles. The P.K.K. there does not operate under the cover of Syrian Kurds and would therefore not be supported by Washington.

Mr. Erdogan could likely count on the backing of the dominant Kurdish faction in northern Iraq, which controls Iraqi Kurdistan and has a difficult relationship with the main Kurdish groups in Turkey and Syria.

But if Turkey did move on Mount Sinjar, easing one geopolitical headache for Washington in Syria, it would create new complications for another American partner, the Iraqi government in Baghdad.

In yet another indication of the complexity of the battlefield, the United States works indirectly with Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militias against the Islamic State.

The Iraqi government, which balances ties between the United States and Iran, relies heavily on those Iran-backed militias to assist its military. Baghdad would not look kindly on a Turkish incursion into its territory, which it would see as a provocative act and a disruption of its fight against ISIS.

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The lead characters are a Norwegian couple who had Middle East experience and thought they might be able to broker an agreement. This was high-octane audacity. Yet the two of them — Terje Rod-Larsen, a social scientist, and his wife, Mona Juul, an official in Norway’s foreign ministry — pulled it off.

The play’s Mr. Larsen, portrayed by Jefferson Mays, seems a somewhat foggier professorial sort than the man I recall. More jarring is the Juul character played by Jennifer Ehle. She is the narrator and a near-constant stage presence. In 1993, her intimate involvement in the talks was not nearly so evident to outsiders. The differences in perception nagged at me.

After leaving the theater, I went home to reread a long reconstruction of the negotiations — a ticktock, in newspaper jargon — that I had written in early September 1993. I was startled to see I had made no reference at all to Ms. Juul, who is now Norway’s ambassador to Britain. Other newspapers at the time similarly gave her scant attention, if any. Was her onstage prominence a playwright’s invention? Or did we — did I — get an important element of the story flat-out wrong?

I asked Mr. Rogers about it. He had interviewed Oslo principals in researching his play. His sense was that “Juul didn’t really want to take credit for anything,” and at the time purposefully avoided the limelight. Back then, her major role was easy to miss, he said. But she was a key figure: “The men” — the negotiators were all men — “were really struck by her.”

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Some of the men on the Beaumont stage were barely recognizable. I’m thinking in particular of Uri Savir, a senior foreign ministry official who was the lead Israeli negotiator. In creating his character, Mr. Rogers exercised his dramatist’s license aerobically. He acknowledged that.

This Mr. Savir, played by Michael Aronov, is bearded and svelte, a live wire in a purple shirt who hops on the furniture spewing obscenities every second or third sentence. The real Mr. Savir was, shall we say, more roly-poly and less flamboyant — definitely unlikely to jump on a table or wear anything other than the standard-issue suit of a career diplomat.

But when it comes to the big picture — how the parties got to yes — “Oslo” nails it. Thus did it transport me back to those heady days.

Secrecy, as Mr. Rogers correctly shows, was essential. The two parties normally had a capacity to leak like a colander, especially the Israelis. “That was the difficult part — keeping our mouths shut,” Yair Hirschfeld, an Israeli negotiator (played by Daniel Oreskes), told me in 1993. Still, word about Oslo did leak out. In late August, I first heard hints of it from a well-connected Palestinian money-changer in East Jerusalem.

The playwright also grasps how atmospherics enhanced the chances of success. There is an element of onstage clownishness that some audiences might take to be an invention. I knew that it wasn’t. The Larsen-Juul team went out of its way to create opportunities for shared meals, shared drinks and even shared jokes. Each side saw the other as human.

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One other element, most important, stands out as what the American Middle East specialist Aaron David Miller has aptly referred to in a book title as “The Much Too Promised Land.” The past enshrouds almost everything there. Each side sees itself as history’s true orphan. A rule that the Norwegians imposed was that the negotiators set their sights on the future; rehashing the past was an invitation to resentment, friction and inevitable failure.

The strategy worked. As I watched the onstage drama, I reflected on the measure of optimism that had been kindled even in impoverished, overcrowded and bitter Gaza. Jericho, isolated though a mere 15 miles from Jerusalem, was definitely ready for better days. It had long been a backwater, probably ever since Joshua fit the battle. “This is our chance to prove that we can control our own lives,” a toy-store owner told me at the time.

Many Israelis, whose national anthem is titled “The Hope,” were ready, too. I sat with a group of them watching the Handshake on television in a suburb of Jerusalem. They were in awe, albeit tempered by a distrust of Arafat. One woman, no softy, had been a runner in pre-state Palestine for the underground paramilitary outfit known as the Stern Gang. Now, overwhelmed, she wiped away tears.

I said “Oslo” evoked the optimism I had once felt. Briefly, I also said. The sensation quickly vanished. There’s no need to relive here how the peace process crumbled under the weight of terrorism, assassination, settlement expansion, physical barriers, mutual accusations of bad faith and even a retreat from the notion of shared humanity. Peace now seems very distant indeed.

The hopeful Larsen character urges the audience to “see how far we have come.”

“If we have come this far — through blood, through fear, hatred — how much further can we yet go?” he says. The question is as tantalizing today as it was in 1993. But I left the Beaumont sadly aware that the rancorous past, not a hopeful future, rules for now in the much-too-promised land.

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By STEPHEN FARRELL and JOSEPHINE SEDGWICK | May. 10, 2017
| 3:02

In Syria, what lessons can America draw from its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Our Kabul bureau chief, Rod Nordland, discusses airstrikes with Stephen Farrell.

Israel was clearly trying to undermine the mass hunger strike, which prisoners say is aimed at better conditions in confinement. The strike is also meant to rally Palestinians, who have carried out numerous protests in support of the prisoners and plan another general strike in the occupied West Bank on Thursday.

In an interview here in the Palestinians’ administrative capital, Ms. Barghouti rejected Israel’s claim that the strike was also intended to bolster the standing of Mr. Barghouti within the divided Palestinian power structure. Mr. Barghouti, 57, is considered the most popular possible successor to Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority.

He is also in prison for life, convicted of five murders 15 years ago during the second intifada.

Referring to the hundreds of strikers, Ms. Barghouti asked skeptically, “All of them are there to raise the profile of Marwan Barghouti?”

“This is the most peaceful way of protesting,” she said. “And Israel has decided to respond by declaring a full-fledged war.”

Israeli officials have said they will not engage in negotiations with the prisoners, whose demands include more family visits, an end to solitary confinement, better health care and greater access to education.

The prisoners say they are surviving only on water and salt, although Israeli officials, in addition to accusing Mr. Barghouti of cheating, say some prisoners are taking vitamin supplements.

Again, accounts vary of the deteriorating health of the prisoners: Mr. Librati said that doctors were checking the prisoners regularly and that 12 prisoners were sent to the hospital for tests in the past two days. Only one remained, he said, as of Tuesday afternoon.

Qadura Fares, the director of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, said four prisoners were seriously ill at two prisons.

Ms. Barghouti said the past 23 days had been the most difficult of 32 years with her husband. She said she had had no contact with Mr. Barghouti, in solitary confinement at Kishon prison, since 10 days before the strike began.

“These are basic demands,” she said. “They could have been met by the Israeli prisons without the prisoners going through all the pain of a hunger strike.”

“We believe the Israelis are sending a message: ‘Even basic demands, we don’t intend to meet them,’” she added. “This is a reflection of the impasse we have reached with Israel in general.”

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The World Health Organization, the public health arm of the United Nations, reported 2,022 suspected cases of cholera and acute watery diarrhea in Yemen from April 27 to this past Sunday, including at least 34 deaths.

Cholera has long been an underlying risk in Yemen, but it subsided during the cold winter months this year. With the sudden spike of cases, health officials are fearing the worst.

“We are facing a reactivation of the cholera epidemic,” Dr. Nevio Zagaria, the World Health Organization’s representative in Yemen, was quoted by Reuters as saying.

The outbreak has affected Sana, the capital, where news agencies have reported on piles of garbage and clogged sewage drains related to a strike by sanitation workers exasperated over weeks of unpaid wages.

Spread by feces in contaminated water, cholera can cause severe vomiting and diarrhea, and it can lead to fatal dehydration within hours if untreated with fluids and antibiotics.

The danger of a cholera epidemic in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, has been greatly amplified by what amounts to a collapse in the public health system because of the two-year-old war between Houthi insurgents and the government, which is backed by Saudi Arabia.

Since the war began in March 2015, many hospitals, which have been damaged by airstrikes and other attacks, have closed, essentially denying medical access to vast portions of the country.

The outbreak only further compounds the acute deprivations in Yemen, where roughly 17 million people — about two-thirds of the population — are facing severe hunger and possible famine. An estimated two million Yemeni children under the age of 5 are considered acutely malnourished.

The International Rescue Committee, an aid group that responds to the most urgent disasters, has called Yemen “the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.”

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Turkey was informed of Mr. Trump’s decision, according to an American official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing private diplomatic communications.

The Turkish government had no immediate reaction, with officials declining to comment before Mr. Erdogan’s office did.

But the move was likely to anger Mr. Erdogan, who has been pressing the United States to lessen its support for the Syrian Kurds, which the United States considers its most reliable partner against the Islamic State but which Turkey views as terrorists allied with a Kurdish insurgency in Turkey.

While the Kurds are combat-hardened fighters, American officials have said that they will need antitank missiles, heavy machine guns, mortars and armored vehicles to take on Islamic State fighters in Raqqa, who are well equipped and have fortified their positions.

It is not clear how the Trump administration plans to avoid a backlash from Turkey. But American military officials have previously suggested that the United States might provide the Kurdish fighters with just enough weapons to take Raqqa while restricting the supply of arms and ammunition they would receive after that operation ends.

“We would be transparent with them,” Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the commander of the United States Central Command, said of the Turks during a visit to Syria in February. “We could meter things like ammunition.”

Dana W. White, the chief Pentagon spokeswoman, announced the decision in a statement on Tuesday.

“We are keenly aware of the security concerns of our coalition partner Turkey,” Ms. White said. “We want to reassure the people and government of Turkey that the U.S. is committed to preventing additional security risks and protecting our NATO ally.”

In some ways, the announcement formalizes what had already been in practice. The United States has long been working with the Y.P.G., or People’s Protection Units, under the umbrella of the Syrian Democratic Forces. The Pentagon has always emphasized that the S.D.F. includes Arab fighters — and has played down the notion that the United States is working directly with the Y.P.G. — but in reality, the Y.P.G. is believed by both its supporters and its critics to be the dominant force in the S.D.F., providing the most experienced and cohesive fighters.

Still, it is a big step for the American military to be more open and formal about supporting a group with ties to the P.K.K., the militant group driving Turkey’s Kurdish insurgency.

Notably, the Pentagon statement did not list the Y.P.G. by name.

Syria analysts, as well as current and former senior American officials, said Mr. Trump’s decision was not surprising given the military’s insistence on arming the Kurds for the impending battle for Raqqa, but they warned it could damage broader relations with Turkey.

“This decision was probably necessary if the coalition to defeat the Islamic State was to take Raqqa without huge numbers of U.S. troops being directly involved,” said Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger and top Pentagon official for Middle East policy. “But this decision — to arm a group closely associated with a foreign terrorist organization, and one that has waged a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state — will likely reverberate through U.S. relations with Turkey for decades to come.”

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There are about 60 such light sources in the world, which have been become increasingly valuable as tools in medicine and engineering. In April, for example, scientists using X-rays from a light source at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California discovered new details about the structure of proteins that regulate blood pressure, raising the possibility of better treatments for hypertension.

Sesame, in short, could bring world-class modern physics to a region of the world lacking much in the way of facilities or research money, its proponents say. “Somebody with a bright idea could get a Nobel with this,” said Christopher Llewellyn Smith, an Oxford University physics professor and president of the Sesame Council, the governing body of the project.

But perhaps that might be the least of it, according to Eliezer Rabinovici, a theoretical physicist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem who has been pursuing a dream of Arab-Israeli cooperation, walking a political and technical tightrope past wars, treaties, negotiations, ultimatums, assassinations and other crises with his friends and collaborators for more than 20 years.

This is the story of an impossible dream, a journey to what Dr. Rabinovici calls a parallel universe of peace and cooperation in the Middle East. “We call it the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said recently.

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Sesame is following a path blazed by CERN, which was birthed by Unesco with the aims of reviving European science after World War II and fostering a spirit of cooperation on the Continent.

The only difference today, Dr. Llewellyn Smith noted, is that in Europe hostilities had already ended, while in the Middle East they are still very much alive.

Dr. Rabinovici traced the origins of Sesame to the 1993 Oslo Accords, when Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shook hands in front of President Bill Clinton.

At the time he was working at CERN. A short while later, he recalled, an Italian colleague, Sergio Fubini, walked into his office and told him it was time to put his “naïve idealism” to the test.

Science is a natural way to build bridges between cultures and nations, Dr. Rabinovici said, because of its common language.

He and Dr. Fubini went on to create a self-appointed Middle Eastern Science Committee, which in turn led to a meeting in November 1995 in a big red tent at Dahab, Egypt, in the Sinai Desert near the Red Sea, attended by scientists from around the Middle East and beyond. They escaped uninjured from a 6.9-magnitude earthquake. “We saw Mount Sinai shake,” Dr. Rabinovici said.

In another telling moment, the Egyptian minister of scientific research Venice Gouda, asked everyone to stand for a moment of silence in honor of Mr. Rabin, who had been assassinated just two weeks before.

“The silence echoes in my ears still today,” Dr. Rabinovici said.

The group got a mission when German scientists offered it an old accelerator known as Bessy, that had served as a light source in Berlin and was being replaced after the country was reunified.

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While the group was hesitant to accept such a relic because it might not attract first-class research, “it was clear that one has to take it because you cannot build a coalition of Arabs and Israelis around something which is air,” Dr. Rabinovici said.

Bessy was dismantled and shipped in boxes to the Jordanian desert, which had been chosen as the site for what was now called Sesame. “Jordan was the site. It was where everybody could come,” he said.

There, plans evolved. Bessy would become the booster, or first stage, of a newer, more powerful synchrotron propelling electrons to energies of 2.5 billion electron volts. (By comparison, the protons in the Large Hadron Collider are bumped to energies of about seven trillion electron volts.)

The idea behind synchrotron light sources is to turn what was once a liability and wasted energy into a scientific tool. As charged particles, in this case electrons, are accelerated around an electromagnetic racetrack in machines like the Large Hadron Collider, they radiate energy, so-called synchrotron radiation. The output of the machine can be tuned by inserting arrays of magnets called wigglers and undulators to make the electrons dance and produce very powerful pencil beams of any type of light.

How these beams are reflected or absorbed by the target materials can reveal the arrangements and shapes of molecules the way the double helix of DNA was revealed by X-ray photographs taken by Rosalind Franklin back in the 1950s.

As built, Sesame has room for seven different such beams, providing energy from X-rays to infrared, or heat radiation, to experiments.

When it opens for business, however, there will be only two.

The first is an X-ray beam that will be used, among other things, to study pollution in the Jordan Valley, by ascertaining the amounts of metals like chromium and zinc in soil samples.

Another beam will supply infrared waves for an infrared microscope that will employ the same principles as the night-vision goggles worn by soldiers or snipers to study, say, cancer cells and other biological tissues.

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A third beam planned for the end of the year will supply X-rays for crystallography, the study of the structures of proteins and viruses.

The group has already received 55 proposals for the use of those beams — more than they can accept, Dr. Llewellyn Smith said.

To the scientists, money has been as big a problem as politics. Dr. Rabinovici said, “It’s a miracle that we have all these people together — that’s nice. But ultimately this is going to be decided by the quality of the science. And this is where we need help.”

“We are working on a shoestring budget,” he added. “Good science costs money.”

In all, about $90 million has gone into getting the project going so far, according to Dr. Llewellyn Smith. That includes $5 million apiece pledged by Israel, Jordan, Turkey and Iran and another grant of 5 million euros from the European Union, which enabled CERN to help build the magnets and supervise construction of the Sesame machine.

“I saw that crew of Europeans working on it, and they were excited. You could see it in their eyes; their eyes were shining,” Dr. Rabinovici said. The latest piece of largess was a $7 million grant from Jordan for a solar power plant, which will make Sesame the first accelerator in the world powered by renewable energy.

One likely contributor to the cause is missing — the United States — much to the chagrin of many scientists and bureaucrats.

Franklin Orr, under secretary for science and energy in the Department of Energy during the Obama administration, and now a professor at Stanford, said the administration had tried to find funding.

“It didn’t jell, we didn’t have a source of money,” he said. The budget issues are not likely to get easier, he added. “Getting an appropriation through Congress would be tricky at best.”

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As with CERN, members pay dues based on the size of their economies for operating expenses estimated to be somewhat less than $6 million a year.

Originally formed through Unesco, the nine Sesame members each hold two seats, typically a scientist and a diplomat, on its council, which is led by Dr. Llewellyn Smith. The council appoints a director, presently Khaled Toukan, who is also head of the Jordan Atomic Energy Commission.

The project is not immune to the shadows of history. In 2010 a wave of attacks on Iranian scientists allegedly linked to Iran’s nuclear weapons program generated headlines around the world. Two who were assassinated had connections to Sesame: Masoud Alimohammadi, a professor at Tehran University and delegate to the Sesame Council, and Majid Shahriari, a nuclear engineer with the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.

Iran subsequently arrested and executed a man named Majid Jamali Fashi who confessed that he had been trained by Mossad, the Israeli secret service, to kill Dr. Alimohammadi.

Neither Dr. Rabinovici, who said he had met Dr. Alimohammadi once, nor Dr. Llewellyn Smith said they could see any connection between Sesame and the killings. The Sesame Council condemned the murders, insisting that its project had no military connections.

At present Sesame consists of about 50 scientists and technicians working in a building surrounded by a secure cyclone fence. Italy is building a hostel that will provide a place for visitors to stay and include that key ingredient of scientific life, a cafeteria. Accidental encounters and gossip glommed over lunch or coffee loom large in the mythology of scientific discovery.

In that regard, behind its secure fence, Sesame will be no different than any lab in the world, Dr. Llewellyn Smith said. “Working 20 hours a day and meeting in the cafeteria, that’s where a lot of science and discussion happens.”

As a theoretical string theorist Dr. Rabinovici won’t be found in the cafeteria or manning a beam line this summer; indeed he professed ignorance of the details of how they work. So why, he was asked over tea during a visit to The New York Times recently, has he been doing this?

The answer, of course, comes from string theory, where, he explained, it often (and controversially) comes out that there are many possible universes. “I must say that personally, I always wanted to visit some of these other universes, just to see how things are there.”

So with the Sesame project, he went on, “I actually got to live in a universe where Arabs, Israelis, Iranians, Pakistanies work together for the same cause for their own people, for humanity. And that definitely feels good.”

It is too grandiose, he said, to call Sesame a beacon of hope, “but we have shown a way.”

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Even so, Russia has sent signals it is hoping to gain support for the agreement from the United States despite their deep differences over the Syria war, now in its seventh year.

Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia will visit with his American counterpart, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, in Washington on Wednesday to discuss Syria and other issues, both sides announced on Monday.

Mr. Lavrov will be the highest-ranking Russian official to visit Washington since the Trump administration took office, and it will be his first trip there in years.

The de-escalation zones agreement, reached in Astana, Kazakhstan, on Thursday, is regarded as one of the more ambitious diplomatic undertakings by outside powers to halt the war, but it also has raised intense skepticism from insurgents and from some of their supporters, including the United States.

“Moscow has invested all of its cards in the Astana process,” Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said in a briefing posted on its website. “Russia has a great deal to lose should this initiative fall apart, which makes acquiring a more committed U.S. statement of support extremely important.”

The State Department has expressed concern about the role of Iran in the agreement and the history of failed cease-fires in the war, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and left millions of Syrians displaced.

But Defense Secretary Jim Mattis appeared to offer a muted expression of support on Monday, telling reporters during a visit to Denmark that the United States would closely examine the agreement.

“All wars eventually come to an end, and we’ve been looking for a long time how to bring this one to an end,” he told reporters. “So we’ll look at the proposal and see if it can work.”

Under the agreement, which is to last initially for six months, all combatants in the conflict are forbidden to use weapons in the de-escalation zones, including warplanes. The agreement also allows humanitarian aid to civilians in these areas.

The agreement does not apply to fighters loyal to the Islamic State or a Qaeda-linked group commonly known as the Nusra Front, which theoretically remains vulnerable to attack.

It is still unclear how the agreement might affect American airstrikes on Islamic State targets in Syria. A senior Russian diplomat, Aleksandr Lavrentiev, said on Friday that the agreement would effectively stop American warplanes from flying in Syria’s airspace. But a State Department spokesman, Edgar Vasquez, disputed that assertion, saying it “makes no sense.”

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“We should all agree that in our constitutional democracy, the executive’s ability to attack another country is constrained by the law,” Justin Florence, the group’s legal director and a former Obama White House lawyer, wrote in an essay announcing the lawsuit. He added: “Some countries may tolerate a head of state launching a new conflict without offering a clear legal justification, but we should not.”

In a letter to Congress, Mr. Trump asserted, with little detail, that his constitutional powers as commander-in-chief gave him sufficient basis to unilaterally launch the attack to advance American interests, including deterring further use of chemical weapons.

Many presidents of both parties have claimed a right in domestic law to make unilateral use of limited force abroad to advance Americans interests. For example, former President Barack Obama did so in 2011, when he directed the American military to take part in the NATO intervention in Libya without congressional authorization.

Still, the Obama administration released a memorandum from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel laying out a rationale for why the American interests at stake in Libya were sufficient to justify his move.

Shortly after the Syria strike last month, the Trump administration distributed unsigned talking points among representatives in various agencies about the strike’s legal basis. They were never formally made public, but Martin Lederman, a former Justice Department lawyer in the Obama administration, obtained a copy and published them on the Just Security blog. An administration official later confirmed their authenticity.

“This domestic law basis is very similar to the authority for the use force in Libya in 2011, as set forth in an April 2011 opinion by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel,” the unused Trump talking points said.

However, as Mr. Lederman pointed out, the 2011 rationale relied in part on the need to bolster the credibility of the United Nations Security Council, which had authorized nations to use force to protect Libyan civilians. By contrast, the Security Council did not authorize a strike to punish Syria’s use of chemical weapons, so the Syrian intervention undermined the United Nations system for constraining war, he said.

The United Nations Charter, a treaty the United States ratified, recognizes only two legal ways for a country to use force on another soil without its consent: if the Security Council has authorized an attack, or in self-defense. The Trump talking points memo had a section labeled “international,” but it consisted of policy arguments, not legal ones, and did not mention the United Nations Charter.

There are some precedents. The United States bypassed the United Nations system in 1999, when the Clinton administration directed the military to participate in the NATO intervention in Kosovo. Still, that administration put forward something of a public legal rationale, citing a list of factors that it argued made the operation legitimate.

The Obama administration considered attacking Syria in 2013 for using chemical weapons, too, and during preliminary deliberations Mr. Obama’s legal team developed an argument that was similar to the Kosovo precedent. But in the end, in part because that international law argument was so thin — unlike Kosovo, not even the multilateral NATO alliance was going to be involved — Mr. Obama pulled back and asked Congress for authorization. The crisis was then resolved in a different way and no strikes were conducted.

Late last month, two Democrats in Congress — Representative Adam Schiff of California and Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia — sent a letter to Mr. Trump urging him to explain the legal basis for the strike. But the administration has not responded, aides said.

Now, Protect Democracy is hoping to shed some light with a lawsuit that, at the least, might identify whether legal memos exist, whether or not they are made public.

Mr. Florence wrote that the Trump administration’s silence suggests one of two “disturbing” possibilities: Either it is trying “to prevent informed debate and oversight of the president’s ability to take the country into a new armed conflict with another country,” or it “never rigorously made an assessment about the legality of the Syria strikes” in the first place.

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“Barghouti is a murderer and hypocrite who urged his fellow prisoners to strike and suffer while he ate behind their back,” Mr. Erdan said. “Israel will not give in to extortion and pressure from terrorists.”

Palestinian officials organizing the strike called the videos, filmed from above, “absurd.” Mr. Barghouti’s wife, Fadwa, told reporters in Ramallah, West Bank, that Israel was “trying to stop the strike in any way, resorting to despicable acts,” but that “this video will increase the prisoners’ insistence on continuing.”

The strikers’ demands include more family visits and access to education, an end to solitary confinement, and better health care.

Organizers say the prisoners, some of whom have fallen ill, have survived on only water and salt. Israeli officials allege that some are taking vitamin supplements.

While Mr. Barghouti and most of the other strikers belong to Mr. Abbas’s Fatah party, some belong to its rival, Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip. About 6,500 Palestinians are in Israeli prisons.

In Gaza, Maryam Abu Daqqa of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine called the videos “a false attempt to create chaos” in the movement. The strike “will continue until Palestinians’ just demands are met,” she said.

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The balance of power within Hamas, which Israel, the United States and much of the West defines as a terrorist organization, has been shifting to Gaza, according to experts. The group seized control of the Palestinian coastal enclave in 2007 after beating its main rival, Fatah, led by President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, in parliamentary elections a year earlier.

In the decade since, Hamas has fired thousands of rockets at civilian centers in Israel, survived three wars against the Israeli Army and, according to Israeli officials, continuously built up its military force.

The group first gained prominence for its terrorist acts, mostly deadly suicide bombings in buses and cafes in Israeli cities during the second Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s.

Juggling militancy with a desire for international recognition, Hamas last week unveiled a new document of principles that is said would guide the group. The paper, meant in part to improve ties with Egypt, waters down the anti-Semitic language of the group’s charter, and accepts at least a provisional Palestinian state, though it still rejects any recognition of Israel. Analysts said that in trying to create a compromise among opposing factions, the new document failed to fully satisfy any of them.

Mr. Haniya, as the leader of Hamas in Gaza since 2006, was associated with the political wing of the movement that, at least nominally, is more involved with diplomacy and governance and less directly with armed struggle.

In February, Yehya Sinwar was elected to succeed Mr. Haniya in Gaza. Mr. Sinwar is known as a hard-liner more closely associated with the group’s militancy.

“The composition of the political bureau in Gaza tends to radicalism,” said Hussam al-Dajani, a Palestinian writer and political analyst in Gaza. “Mr. Haniya is the balance here. He is a flexible person who supports peace and unity and stability in the region.”

Ibrahim Madhoun, a Gaza-based analyst who writes for a Hamas newspaper, said he expected Mr. Haniya in his new role to improve Hamas’s relationships with Egypt, Iran, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. He added, “The elections enhance the democracy and vitality of the movement and give a greater role to institutions, not to people.”

Mr. Haniya, a father of 13, began his rise to prominence in Hamas as a close associate of the group’s founder and spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who was assassinated by an Israeli airstrike in 2004. Mr. Haniya served several sentences in Israeli jails in the 1980s and ’90s, and briefly served as prime minister of a Palestinian unity government after the 2006 elections.

That government was short-lived, in part because Hamas refused, then as now, to fulfill international conditions for recognition, including renouncing violence, recognizing Israel’s right to exist and accepting signed agreements between Israel and the Fatah-dominated Palestine Liberation Organization.

Last year Avigdor Lieberman, a hard-line Israeli politician, issued a blunt ultimatum to Mr. Haniya. Mr. Lieberman said that if he were defense minister, Mr. Haniya would be dead within 48 hours if he did not return two Israeli men and the remains of two soldiers that Hamas is believed to be holding in Gaza. Mr. Lieberman became defense minister a month later. The threat has so far remained unfulfilled.

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Mr. Greenblatt got a very different message at an earlier dinner with two other prominent Palestinians, Salam Fayyad and Ziad Asali, and two American Jewish diplomats, Elliott Abrams and Dennis B. Ross. They all told him that a breakthrough was not realistic now, and that Mr. Trump would be better off pursuing incremental advances, like bettering the economic fortunes of the Palestinians.

“There is a perception that he’s fundamentally sympathetic, but there is an uncertainty about where he wants to go,” said Mr. Ross, a Middle East envoy for Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. “Among those who think there is no such thing as a deal, or that Israel is being asked to make troubling concessions, there is unease.”

So far, none of these objections are being made public. Conservative supporters of Israel view Mr. Trump as a vast improvement over Mr. Obama, whose blunt pressure on Israel to halt construction of settlements in the West Bank poisoned his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Mr. Trump has “done more in just 100 days than Barack Obama ever did in transforming the U.S.-Israel relationship into a U.S.-Israel partnership,” said Matthew Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

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But later this month, when Mr. Trump will test his ideas on his first foreign trip, to Saudi Arabia and Israel, one of his most powerful donors, the Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon G. Adelson, will be in Israel when the president is, according to people briefed on his schedule.

Mr. Adelson was disappointed that Mr. Trump had not fulfilled a campaign promise to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. He will be watching closely to see how the president squares his vow to be a stalwart friend of Israel with his peacemaking ambitions.

The deletion of Mr. Trump’s Twitter message calling it “an honor” to meet with Mr. Abbas was widely noticed by Israeli news media. Curiously, similar messages on other social media were not deleted. Michael Anton, a White House spokesman, said that no one knew what had happened to the Twitter post but that “we stand by the message.”

Mr. Trump has borrowed a few pages from Mr. Obama’s playbook. He, too, has leaned on Mr. Netanyahu to curb settlement construction to make it easier to pursue talks with the Palestinians. Mr. Greenblatt came to an understanding with Mr. Netanyahu that is not unlike the one between President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, under which Israel agreed not to approve further construction outside existing settlement boundaries.

After his promise to move the embassy to Jerusalem, Mr. Trump has set that issue aside for now, heeding the advice of King Abdullah II of Jordan and other Arab leaders, who warned him it could ignite violence among Palestinians. White House officials insist it may still happen; Mr. Trump must decide by June whether to renew the waiver of the congressional vote instructing that the embassy be moved.

David M. Friedman, the bankruptcy lawyer who is Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Israel, has told people he plans to divide his time between the ambassador’s seaside residence near Tel Aviv and the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where the State Department keeps an apartment for its envoy.

But Mr. Friedman, who is moving to Israel in the coming days, has been a less central figure in Mr. Trump’s peacemaking project than Mr. Greenblatt. An Orthodox Jew and an in-house lawyer who negotiated real estate deals for Mr. Trump, Mr. Greenblatt has impressed outsiders with his determination to learn the bedeviling history of Middle East peace.

Mr. Greenblatt has met with a wide range of Arab leaders, ambassadors, and other officials, in a crash course that hard-liners worry will leave him sympathetic to those officials’ arguments, for example, on settlements.

The president’s push on settlements unnerved Mr. Netanyahu, according to officials on both sides, though they avoided an open split over it. Mr. Netanyahu was determined not to antagonize another president, and the understanding on settlements was left unwritten, mitigating attacks on Mr. Netanyahu by pro-settler factions in his coalition.

One of the biggest cheerleaders for a peace deal is Mr. Lauder, a cosmetics heir who has known Mr. Trump for decades. His mother, Estée Lauder, was among the first of the Manhattan social elite to accept Mr. Trump when he arrived on the scene as a young developer from Queens.

Mr. Lauder’s enthusiasm for a bold new initiative has alarmed some in Mr. Trump’s circle, particularly his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon. Mr. Bannon speaks regularly with Mr. Adelson, who donated millions of dollars to outside groups to help Republicans in the 2016 elections.

How much direct influence Mr. Lauder has on Mr. Trump is a matter of debate: Some close to the White House insist their contacts are frequent; others say there have been just three meetings, one in the Oval Office and two at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Palm Beach club. But Mr. Lauder has an open line to Mr. Greenblatt; the dinner for Mr. Abbas testifies to his social clout.

An adviser to Mr. Lauder denied he was pushing an alliance with Mr. Abbas, but described Mr. Lauder as an optimist.

Mr. Adelson was frustrated that Mr. Trump did not fulfill his promise to move the embassy on “Day 1.” But people who have spoken to him said he was heartened by the White House’s silence when the Israeli government announced a new settlement to replace Amona, a settler outpost evacuated after it was declared illegal. A spokesman for Mr. Adelson declined to comment.

Aides to Mr. Trump said they are well aware of the hurdles to a deal. But they say the president has an obligation to try, suggesting that his unconventional approach to diplomacy might unlock some doors.

His hard-line pro-Israel supporters console themselves that Mr. Trump will soon recognize the futility of this undertaking. That pessimism, they note, is a view shared not just by hard-liners but also by most of the Israeli political establishment, left and right.

“The administration is likely to discover what its predecessors learned: that there is no deal to be had right now because the parties have unbridgeable positions on most of the issues,” said Noah Pollak, a Republican strategist who works with pro-Israel conservative groups.

“Obama used the impasse as a way to condemn Israel,” he continued. “We’re not worried Trump will follow suit. We simply hope the process of the administration proving to itself that no deal is possible will be quick and undramatic.”

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Significantly, the agreement to establish the de-escalation zones has not been accepted by all opposition groups, and it left loopholes for Syria to continue undiminished attacks on the rebels, factors that combined to hinder the last attempt by Iran, Russia and Turkey to forge a cease-fire.

Nevertheless, one of the representatives of the Syrian opposition groups at talks in Astana, Kazakhstan, Col. Ahmad Berri, sounded a strikingly optimistic note, saying he expected to see a full cease-fire in the designated zones once the plan takes effect on Saturday.

“The Russians this time are more serious, we sensed it, more than last time,” he said in a telephone interview. “The regime will be committed to the deal because the Russians are the guarantor, so if the Russians said no bombing, the regime will stop.”

No-fly zones have been a contentious issue in the Syrian conflict, now in its seventh year; they have long been requested by rebel groups and rejected by the government. Disputes about who can fly planes and when — “subtle professional issues,” the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, called them recently — are likely to continue under the new deal.

Confusion about the details of agreements in the Syrian civil war is nothing new, as disputes about the most basic facts and definitions have always made negotiations extraordinarily thorny.

The government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria said in a statement late Wednesday night that it “supports” the initiative on de-escalation zones, “including not shelling those areas.”

But the statement also said the Syrian military would continue to fight banned terrorist groups like the Islamic State, Qaeda-linked militants “and other affiliated terrorist organizations wherever they were all over the Syrian territories.” That language was interpreted by many government opponents as a signal that the Syrian military intended to keep bombing wherever it chose on the pretext of fighting terrorism.

“Aviation over these territories ceases,” Mr. Lavrentiev told reporters in Astana on Friday, where a memorandum laying out the plan for de-escalation zones was signed the day before between Iran and Russia, which back the Syrian government, and Turkey, which backs some rebel groups.

But in answer to a question about the United States-led coalition formed in 2014 to fight the Islamic State, Mr. Lavrentiev did not mince words: “The work of aviation, especially the forces of the international coalition, is absolutely not envisaged. With notification or without notification, this issue is now closed.”

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He added: “The only place where the international coalition’s aviation can work is on the objects of the Islamic State that are located in the Raqqa area, some populated areas in the area of the Euphrates, Deir al-Zour and further on the Iraqi territory.”

That suggests that the American military would no longer be allowed to fly over a number of critical areas where it already conducts operations and that it would be barred from all of the most important areas contested by the government and rebels not affiliated with the Islamic State.

The excluded area encompasses Idlib Province, where American warplanes have been carrying out an intensifying series of airstrikes against what officials say are Qaeda operatives. It also includes some of the areas where Turkey, a NATO ally, has skirmished with Kurdish militias also backed, sometimes with airstrikes, by the United States.

And it includes most of the Syrian government’s military installations, such as the Shayrat air base, which the United States struck with missiles in retaliation for chemical attacks that killed scores of people in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib last month.

The de-escalation zones are along Syria’s southern border with Jordan, in the eastern Damascus suburbs, in Idlib Province and in a pocket of the central province of Homs.

In some ways, such discussions are academic. The United States has never had Syrian government permission for its airstrikes on the Islamic State and on Qaeda targets on Syrian territory. The Syrian government calls the American strikes violations of its sovereignty.

And Russia and the Syrian government have liberally interpreted exceptions to previous cease-fire deals, continuing to carry out strikes, including some that hit rescue workers and hospitals and that were followed by declarations from Moscow and Damascus that terrorist groups had been present in the areas targeted.

Rebel groups, too, have argued about the meaning of provisions requiring them to separate from banned terrorist groups, asserting that they lack the ability to push out well-funded and well-armed extremists. But, at the same time, some rebel groups have entered into tactical alliances with the extremists.

Still, United Nations officials have held out hope that the new deal will fare better than others that have evaporated under the weight of those contradictions. American officials said they shared the stated goals of the plan but expressed skepticism that Russia could restrain the Syrian government and concern about the role of Iran.

What makes this agreement different is that some of the countries backing different sides in Syria have agreed at least on the possibility of bringing in outside military forces to monitor a cease-fire. Those could be United Nations peacekeepers, troops from Arab countries, or forces from countries friendly to both Russia and Turkey, like the former Soviet republics.

Some analysts, on both the government and on the opposition sides, have complained about precisely those attributes of the agreement: that it could be a first step to the de facto division of the country along existing conflict lines and that it is being imposed by outside powers.

Mr. Putin said on Wednesday that aircraft would not operate over the designated zones, “provided that these zones show no sign of military activity.”

“These are all subtle professional issues,” he said.

Government opponents said that a real end to bombings across the country was the top demand of their supporters.

But they saw the deal as something else: a pretext to make sure that there would be no repeat of the strikes ordered by President Trump and to shore up Mr. Assad politically. They said the latest deal recalled the agreement to remove Syria’s chemical weapons that Russia and the United States struck as an alternative to punitive strikes for chemical attacks in 2013.

“This deal is like when the Russians rescued Bashar in 2013, and now they’re trying to rescue him again with plastic surgery agreements,” said Hisham Marwa, a member of an opposition coalition.

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Iran responded angrily on Thursday to criticisms by Saudi Arabia’s defense minister, accusing him of acts that violate the United Nations Charter and calling his kingdom an instigator of “dangerous ambitions in the region and beyond.”

The Iranian response came in a formal protest letter sent to the United Nations Security Council and to Secretary General António Guterres by Iran’s ambassador, Gholamali Khoshroo.

The latest exchange could further exacerbate tensions between Shiite-led Iran and Sunni-led Saudi Arabia, which compete for religious and political influence in the Middle East and stand with opposite sides in the Syria and Yemen conflicts.

Mr. Khoshroo’s two-page letter, shared with news agencies, came two days after Mohammed bin Salman, the powerful deputy crown prince and defense minister of Saudi Arabia, said in a television interview that the Saudis would never talk with the Iranians, slamming the door on the prospect of dialogue between them. He accused Iran of coveting dominance of the Muslim world.

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The prince also said in the interview, with a Saudi broadcaster, that “we won’t wait for the battle to be in Saudi Arabia.”

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White House officials said foreign leaders would be more willing to help the United States if disagreements over human rights and other issues were aired in private. They cited the recent release of an Egyptian-American aid worker detained in Egypt, which was negotiated in quiet talks with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

“Obama’s approach was to build support with the Arab public through his Cairo speech,” said Martin S. Indyk, the executive vice president of the Brookings Institution. “Trump’s approach is to deal with the Arab leaders, not speak to their people, which is much more comfortable for the leaders.”

For the first international trip by a president who is something of a homebody, Mr. Trump’s itinerary is ambitious. Aides said he would leave Washington on May 19 and stop first in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, before moving on to Jerusalem and then Rome. He will attend a NATO meeting in Brussels that opens on May 24 and then fly to Sicily, where the leaders of the Group of 7 will meet starting May 26.

By this point in his tenure, Mr. Obama had already taken three overseas trips, visiting nine countries. Mr. Trump is upending the recent presidential tradition of visiting Canada or Mexico before venturing elsewhere. He has hosted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada at the White House, but relations with both neighbors are tense because of Mr. Trump’s focus on trade disputes and renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In one way, he is hewing to tradition. Mr. Trump’s aides said it was important for the president to go to Israel right after Saudi Arabia, both to support a close ally and to begin the process of negotiating a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, which Mr. Trump, like Mr. Obama and other presidents before him, has made a major goal of his foreign policy.

The trip was announced a day after Mr. Trump hosted President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority at the White House, the latest of his meetings with Middle Eastern leaders, including those from Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. While in Jerusalem, Mr. Trump is considering a side trip to Bethlehem to meet with Mr. Abbas again.

White House officials have shared little about their specific plans to broker a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, though there are reports that Mr. Trump hopes to convene a summit meeting of Israeli and Arab leaders, perhaps in the summer. The president has asked his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to oversee the effort and appointed one of his lawyers, Jason D. Greenblatt, to carry out the negotiations.

While Mr. Trump declared during his meeting with Mr. Abbas that making peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians would not be as hard as some thought and that “we will get this done,” his aides were more measured.

“You have to try something,” one aide said. “You have to take shots.” The aide said that Arabs were more engaged in working on the problem than in the past, but that the president had an obligation to try, even if he cannot succeed: “Whether we can or can’t, it’s our job to try.”

One major change, the aides noted, is the strengthened position of Iran, which they said had encouraged Israel and its Arab neighbors to find common ground. They said Mr. Trump’s hard line against Iran during the campaign had restored the confidence of Persian Gulf countries about America’s leadership role. Mr. Trump plans to meet with leaders from across the Muslim world while in Saudi Arabia, his aides said.

By going to Jerusalem after Saudi Arabia, Mr. Trump will avoid Mr. Obama’s stumble in deciding to skip Israel. Many Israelis never overcame their suspicion of him after that, and his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deteriorated into mutual loathing. Some of Mr. Obama’s aides came to regret his decision, which was made after fierce internal debate.

But Mr. Trump could also learn from Mr. Obama’s experience in Saudi Arabia. Mr. Obama, too, traveled there first, in an effort to extract reciprocal gestures from the Saudi monarch at the time, King Abdullah, that the White House hoped would facilitate new peace talks with Israel.

Mr. Obama, however, was rebuffed by the king, who told him, “We will be the last to make peace with the Israelis,” according to two White House officials who were on the trip.

Mr. Trump’s aides laid the groundwork for his visit in March, in a long meeting and lunch with Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. A senior White House official said he was surprised by the willingness of the Saudis to work with the United States.

The Saudi stop will consist of three meetings for Mr. Trump: one with the current monarch, King Salman; a gathering of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which consists of Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries; and a broader meeting with Arab and Muslim countries.

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, who was in Washington for meetings, said he believed Mr. Trump’s “fresh approach” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “could have a very high probability of succeeding.” He seemed satisfied but not especially impressed that Mr. Trump had chosen Saudi Arabia over traditional destinations, like Canada, for his first trip.

“It’s historic,” Mr. Jubeir said, “but it shouldn’t be a surprise, given the nature of the relationship.”

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Under the memorandum they signed as guarantors of a cease-fire, fighting between government forces and insurgents is to stop in four zones that include rebel-held territory in the north, central and southern parts of the country.

It remains unclear precisely how the guarantors will monitor compliance with what they are calling “de-escalation zones.”

Aleksandr Lavrentyev, the Russian negotiator at the Astana talks, was quoted by Russian news media as saying Russia was prepared to send observers to these zones and “work more closely” with other countries that back the rebels, including the United States and Saudi Arabia.

There was no immediate comment from the United States, which sent an emissary to the Astana talks after a telephone conversation on Tuesday between President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who vowed to renew efforts to collaborate on ending the Syria conflict.

The zones exclude any areas held by the Islamic State and a Qaeda affiliate commonly known as the Nusra Front, extremist groups that are not participating in the talks and that have been targeted in aerial assaults by forces of Russia and the United States.

Osama Abu Zeid, a spokesman for some of the rebel groups at the Astana talks, said in a statement that they had rejected the memorandum partly because creation of the zones implied a fragmentation of the country and the pact contained no guarantee of “the unity of the Syrian territory.”

Mr. Zeid also said the groups he represented opposed any role as a cease-fire guarantor for Iran and the pro-Assad militias it supports because “they are aggressors.”

Mr. Lavrentyev said at a news conference in Astana that the agreement would go into effect on Saturday and that the Syrian Air Force was expected to avoid the protected zones.

He also said the Syrian government would abide by the agreement, unless rebel groups carried out attacks in the zones — ambiguous language that critics called a loophole that allows violations committed by Mr. Assad’s side.

Many of Mr. Assad’s opponents in the conflict say the Syrian government has no credibility to honor any cease-fire agreement because it has violated all previous such pacts since the conflict began in March 2011.

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Still, the Iraqi forces face hundreds of militants who appear determined to fight to the end in neighborhoods still teeming with hungry and increasingly desperate civilians.

The new operation will also require careful synchronization among the Iraqi Army, Interior Ministry troops and the Counterterrorism Service, which report to different authorities in Baghdad and sometimes seem to be fighting separate wars.

Tensions among Iraq’s disparate forces came to the fore in a closed-door meeting that Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi convened in mid-April in Hamam al-Alil, a town nestled on the Tigris River about 15 miles southeast of Mosul. Outfitted in the black uniform of the Counterterrorism Service, Mr. Abadi warned his commanders that prolonging the battle for the city would only play into the hands of the Islamic State and signaled that it was time to pick up the pace.

But that was followed by sharp debate among frustrated Iraqi commanders about which of their units have been making the greatest sacrifice and who should shoulder the burden of the next stage of the battle.

Lt. Gen. Raed Shaker Jawdat, the commander of the Federal Police, which have suffered many casualties as they advanced from the south along the Tigris, complained that his force was fighting hard but that the Iraqi Army had yet to push into a city filled with snipers and car bombs.

But Lt. Gen. Abdul-Amir Rasheed Yar Allah, the head of the operations center in Nineveh Province who is overseeing the Mosul battle, pointed the finger at the Federal Police, complaining that their once audacious assault was no longer gaining ground.

Underscoring the stakes, the meeting hall was decorated with the portraits of Iraqi troops killed in the campaign against the Islamic State.

“The point of the meeting was to ask if the Federal Police have done their job and how to get the army to participate more in the fighting inside the city,” said Lt. Gen. Abdul-Wahab al-Saadi, a senior commander with the Counterterrorism Service, who attended the meeting.

“Each of the leaders was trying to say his force had done the best, but let’s see the reality on the ground,” General Saadi added, asserting that his Counterterrorism Service had reclaimed the most territory from the Islamic State.

In the days of consultations with his fellow commanders that followed, General Amir appeared to have overcome many of the strains and built a consensus on a new plan. It gives the Ninth Iraqi Army Division a new role and has been quietly supported by Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, who commands the American-led task force that is fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The Ninth Division had positioned itself to the north of Mosul after fighting its way along a dusty ridge west of the city to cut the Islamic State’s supply lines and potential escape routes to the west.

The division’s southward push is being reinforced by troops from the Emergency Response Division, which answers to the Interior Ministry, and army brigades that had been pulled from security duties in eastern Mosul and near Tal Afar.

The theory is that attacking from the north will force the Islamic State to split its defensive operations and make it easier for the Counterterrorism Service to make headway from the south. The Federal Police are also holding their position in the southern part of western Mosul.

The operation has been timed to coincide with clear weather so that American Apache attack helicopters, armed drones and warplanes flown by the United States and allies can provide ready air support.

Once they clear much of the western part of the city, the Iraqi forces can turn their attention to the densely packed old section of Mosul, which still looms as the most difficult battlefield.

Col. John L. Dorrian, a spokesman for the American-led command in Baghdad, said on Wednesday that the Islamic State force in Mosul was “well short of a thousand fighters” but added that they were “going to be very difficult to get out.”

“When in that type of dense urban terrain, a small number of fighters can control that territory,” he added.

The Iraqi Counterterrorism Service was established by the United States soon after the 2003 invasion to conduct raids to capture or kill militants. It reports directly to the prime minister and has assumed a lead role in large-scale urban operations against the Islamic State because it is the best trained and most capable of Iraq’s fighting forces.

The Iraqi Army, which the American-led coalition has worked to rebuild after the loss of Mosul to the Islamic State in 2014, reports to the Defense Ministry. The Federal Police and the Emergency Response Division both report to the Interior Ministry.

“The organizations involved in the Mosul campaign have different reporting chains,” said David M. Witty, a retired Special Forces colonel with the United States Army and a former adviser to the Counterterrorism Service. “The various ministries that the units report to are competing fiefdoms, each struggling for power, influence, prestige and resources.”

The Iraqis struggled to synchronize their forces when they began their offensive to retake the eastern half of Mosul in October. But officials with the United States military insist that coordination among the Iraqi forces later improved with the help of American advisers.

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The insurgent groups suspended participation in the talks on Wednesday to protest what they described as heavy bombing by the Syrian government’s Russian-backed forces the day before that killed dozens, including civilians.

The Russian proposal does not specify measures to prevent government warplanes from carrying out such bombings. Rebels said they remained suspicious of Russian guarantees, regardless, because Russia has been unable or unwilling to curb government attacks on civilians.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said on Wednesday that the proposal had the backing not only of Russia but also of Iran, another ally of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and Turkey, which backs some anti-Assad groups.

“We as guarantors — Turkey, Iran, Russia — will do everything for this to work,” Mr. Putin said in remarks carried on Russian television, speaking in Sochi, Russia, after meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

The proposal was made as the United States, another supporter of some anti-Assad groups, appeared to be re-engaging in the negotiations after a prolonged absence.

Stuart E. Jones, the acting assistant secretary of state, was in Astana, the most senior American official to participate in Syria talks since President Trump took office.

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He arrived after Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin held a phone conversation on Tuesday about renewing efforts to resolve the conflict, which has left hundreds of thousands dead and half the population displaced.

The draft proposal calls for “de-escalation zones” of safety to be established in four areas: Idlib Province, almost entirely held by jihadist and other rebel groups; Eastern Ghouta, a large area of the Damascus suburbs besieged by government forces; a besieged pocket north of the central city of Homs; and southern Syria along the Jordanian border, where rebel groups backed by the United States and its allies have made gains in recent months against both Islamic State and government forces.

Under the proposal, checkpoints ringing those areas would be maintained by both government and rebel forces to allow the free movement of civilians and relief aid. That provision could offer respite from siege warfare, which has been a main weapon of the government.

The proposal also says rebel groups would be required to fight the Islamic State and the formerly Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, now called Tahrir al-Sham, which are not part of any peace process.

But the proposal offers few details on how fighting would be thwarted inside the secure zones.

An earlier draft circulated by some opposition members included a provision that Syria’s air force would be grounded in those zones — but no mention is made of that provision in a longer draft. It was removed, participants said, because of Syrian government objections. But without that provision, rebels would probably reject the proposal.

Analysts in Damascus close to the government of Mr. Assad said the government had rejected any proposal that would accept rebel control of any area, even temporarily. The government has long insisted that it aims to take back all of the country, and it has so far refused any territorial or political compromise with its opponents.

The proposal raises the possibility of outside forces helping to guarantee a cease-fire. It says military units or “guarantors” would be deployed as monitors.

Rebel representatives said they would not accept any from Iran or Russia. Russian news outlets, including the news agency Interfax, said the forces could be from former Soviet states — Kazakhstan was floated as a possibility — or members of the block of emerging economies that include Russia, Brazil and India. Those reports also mentioned Arab countries, leading to speculation that Egypt could contribute. Egyptian officials have denied any intention of sending forces to Syria.

Changes on the ground in Syria have given credence to the possibility of cease-fire zones as outlined in the Russian proposal. On Tuesday, pro-government militias opened a new commercial corridor between government and rebel-held areas in the town of Khirbet Ghazaleh in southern Syria, imposing a tax of 20 percent. The tax essentially formalized smuggling routes that have profited militants on both sides and could presage the opening of routes in other areas.

Hisham Skeif, a former member of the opposition council in Aleppo and now a political spokesman for a rebel faction, was skeptical of the Russian proposal, saying it needed clarification on the precise boundaries of the cease-fire zones and the identities of the monitoring forces.

“It was thrown by the Russians as a step in the air,” he said. Russia and the government have typically described rebel fighters as jihadists as a justification to bomb them, he said, “so we are back to the same vortex.”

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Mr. Abbas, 82, who was among the negotiators on hand for the historic signing of the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn in 1993, indicated that he did feel optimistic that nearly a quarter-century later Mr. Trump might be the president who finally builds on that initial agreement to forge a final resolution to the conflict.

Praising Mr. Trump’s “courageous leadership,” “wisdom” and “great negotiating ability,” Mr. Abbas said, “We believe that we can be partners with you to bring about a historic peace.”

Mr. Abbas implored Mr. Trump to understand the Palestinian perspective. “It’s time for Israel to end its occupation of our people and of our land,” he said. “After 50 years, we are the only remaining people in the world who still live under occupation. We are aspiring and want to achieve our freedom and our dignity and our right to self-determination.”

But the scale of that challenge was quickly made clear as Mr. Abbas repeated the conditions Palestinians have insisted on for years — the creation of an independent Palestinian state based on the borders that existed before the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital; the right of return for refugees; and freedom for prisoners in Israeli cells. As a package, that formulation has been a nonstarter for Israel, which itself has shown no sign since Mr. Trump took office of backing off any of its own longstanding fixed positions.

Mr. Trump has made clear that the details do not matter much to him, and he has abandoned the longtime American commitment to the so-called two-state solution. Hosting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in February, Mr. Trump said he would be fine with a two-state or a one-state solution as long as the two sides were satisfied.

During last year’s campaign and then the transition to office, Mr. Trump presented himself as Israel’s staunchest ally.

But since his inauguration, he has backed off some of his more provocative promises after being told they would inflame the region and make it harder to make peace — among them a pledge to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem, which would be taken as implicitly backing Israel’s claim to the whole city. Where Mr. Trump once said he would do that right after taking office, Vice President Mike Pence told an Israeli Independence Day reception at the White House on Tuesday that the president was “giving serious consideration” to such a move.

Mr. Trump has also pressed Mr. Netanyahu to hold back on new settlements in the occupied West Bank to avoid additional complications in any negotiations. But he made no mention of any such issues in his public comments with Mr. Abbas on Wednesday.

He did encourage Mr. Abbas to do more to discourage Palestinian incitement against Israelis. “There can be no lasting peace unless Palestinian leaders speak with a unified voice against incitement to violence and hate,” Mr. Trump said. “There’s such hatred. But hopefully there won’t be such hatred for very long.”

Mr. Abbas insisted that Palestinians were not preaching hatred. “I affirm to you that we are raising our youth, our children, our grandchildren on a culture of peace,” he said, a contention that Israeli officials would vehemently reject.

Mr. Trump did not publicly press Mr. Abbas to end financial payments to the families of suicide bombers and to other Palestinians who attack Israelis and Americans, a practice that Israel and its supporters say amounts to subsidizing terrorism. Republican senators have introduced legislation to cut off American aid to the Palestinian Authority unless the Palestinians stop making such payments, and in recent days they had urged Mr. Trump to raise the matter during his meetings with Mr. Abbas. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Trump later raised the issue in private.

Intrigued by the possibility of succeeding where no president before him has, Mr. Trump has devoted a lot of his time to meeting not only with Mr. Netanyahu but leaders from Jordan, Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. He and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser who has been assigned to play a leading role in negotiations, have discussed what aides call an outside-in approach in which the United States works with Arab states around the region to help bring Israelis and Palestinians together.

Such an approach has not worked in the past, but Mr. Trump has supreme confidence in his own negotiating skills after a lifetime in the real estate business. He may visit Israel and Saudi Arabia later this month as part of an overseas trip to attend NATO and Group of 7 summits in Europe.

“Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve always heard that perhaps the toughest deal to make is the deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” Mr. Trump said before lunch with Mr. Abbas. “Let’s see if we can prove them wrong.”

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“All the Rivers,” the new English title of the book, was published last week in the United States by Random House, and Ms. Rabinyan, 44, seemed a little nervous. She wanted Americans to read the book for what she said it is — a story of a specific love and its boundaries — and not because of the free speech controversy here or the backdrop of a conflict that will not heal, now 50 years since Israel took control of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

The book’s main character, Liat, a dutiful young Israeli translator, falls for Hilmi, a Palestinian painter, and must decide how far to take a love she knows her family and friends will disapprove and will even see her as a traitor to her upbringing, her Jewishness.

“She takes him out of the multitude and acknowledges his humanity, her humanity,” Ms. Rabinyan said. “He’s not the Palestinian people. He’s one person.”

Still, the book is tightly woven around the conflict. “This is what we call ‘the situation.’” she said. “It’s like the climate. Another season of the year, a fifth one.”

The book opens with Liat, who, like Ms. Rabinyan, is of Iranian Jewish descent, being questioned by terror investigators. To them, Liat looked Middle Eastern, not necessarily Jewish. Soon after, she meets Hilmi. He is from Hebron and Ramallah, the Palestinians’ de facto capital; she is from Tel Aviv, its own bubble of sea and secularism in Israel.

Hilmi tells her three things about himself, all of which end up mattering: He can’t drive. He never shot a gun. He can’t swim, partly because the West Bank, unlike Israel, does not have the sea Liat loves so much. (The book is dedicated to Ms. Rabinyan’s former lover, the artist Hassan Hourani, who drowned in 2003. She wrote a poignant farewell to him a year later in The Guardian.)

The romance intensifies quickly, though Liat is concerned from beginning to end, less about him, but that her relationship goes against all she was taught.

“Cut this off quickly,” Liat tells herself after their first night together. “Decide with a heavy but determined heart that it’s better this way, better for both of us. And never see him again.”

Needless to say, she does.

“In New York they became more like each other, same land, same experiences,” Ms. Rabinyan said of her characters. “They went into this bubble.”

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The couple find that their similarities and differences are very complicated. Liat, a high-minded, educated woman of the left, sees the only solution as two states, fair but in the end separate. Hilmi thinks there is no dividing the two people on the same land. (This argument, of course, has only intensified.)

The book is too finely drawn for easy symbolism, but at one point Liat sums up what nearly all Israelis have thought, knowingly or not, of their Palestinian neighbors — sometimes not so much antagonism as the wish it simply was not an endlessly prodding problem.

“Only 10 minutes,” she scolds. “Just disappear from my life for 10 minutes.”

The book is also very much of a place and time: People called each other primarily on landlines, without the distracting screens of smartphones. There was no Facebook, Twitter or Tinder. When Liat returns to Tel Aviv, she is disturbed that she has no photograph with Hilmi.

“It seems impossible now,” Ms. Rabinyan said. “Everyone is taking selfies, couple selfies, selfies after sex. If you said ‘hashtag’ in 2002, people would have thought it was a breed of dog.”

Ms. Rabinyan, in person both fierce and pleasant, found success at an early age. Her first novel, “Persian Brides,” based on two days of her Iranian grandmother’s memories, brought her acclaim at 22. Her wishes, she said, “came true even before I had the chance to ask for them.”

Her second novel, “Strand of a Thousand Pearls,” also did well. In 2002, Ms. Rabinyan attended the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which she summed up, in quite American terms, as “awesome, quite beautiful, encouraging.”

She worked on a third novel, which she shelved after six years. It took six more years to write “All the Rivers.”

Though love stories between Israelis and Palestinians are not uncommon, this one caught the ire of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud government. Popular among younger readers, the book was recommended as high school reading, then suddenly and publicly pulled for possibly encouraging intermarriage.

“Intimate relations, and certainly the available option of institutionalizing them by marriage and starting a family — even if that does not happen in the story — between Jews and non-Jews, are seen by large portions of society as a threat on the separate identities,” Dalia Fenig, an Education Ministry official, told Ynet a leading Israeli news site, in December 2015.

The backlash came quickly, at a time when many of the nation’s leading, if leftist, literary idols — including Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua and David Grossman — were under attack by a right-wing group for being “moles in culture,” not sufficiently dedicated to the Israeli cause.

The ministry backed off slightly, allowing some teachers to use the novel in classrooms. What Ms. Rabinyan found disturbed her: It was the students, amid the nation’s palpable drift to the right, who did not want to read the book, which had generally been popular.

“Nowadays kids in Israel and in Palestine are so swept up with this wave of nationalism, exploitative of their instincts,” she said. “The kids themselves rejected the book. They said: ‘It’s a lefty book. I don’t want to read it.’”

Prospects for peace look as bleak as ever, though President Trump has, to some surprise, been pushing early in his administration for what he called the “ultimate deal.” He is scheduled to meet on Wednesday with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, in the White House.

Ms. Rabinyan said she would not give up hope, no matter how remote a deal might seem now (which, spoiler alert, are about as remote as the chances were that Liat could ever give in to Hilmi completely).

“I refuse to let go of my instinct of being in contact with others’ pain,” she said. “This is turning your back. I refuse.”

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TEHRAN — Dozens of miners were trapped on Wednesday after a large explosion at a coal mine in northern Iran, state-run news media reported.

Ambulances, helicopters and other rescue vehicles were sent to the site of the accident in the province of Golestan as the authorities tried to determine the scale of the disaster at the mine, which has more than 500 workers.

The head of the provincial emergency management department, Sadeq Ali Moghadam, said that 40 to 50 people were believed to have been trapped in the mine, which is near the town of Azadshahr, the news agency IRNA reported.

A provincial spokesman, Ali Yazerloo, said the blast took place at about 12:45 p.m. local time. Several news reports said the explosion had occurred while workers were changing shifts.

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A big part of that is its watering down of the anti-Semitic language of the original Hamas charter in 1988, with its talk of war between Arabs and Jews. “We are making it clear that ours is a liberation project — not about religion or the Jews,” Mr. Meshal said in an interview on Tuesday in Doha, his latest home.

His offer found few takers. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel immediately rejected the overture as an exercise in insincerity. “Hamas is attempting to fool the world, but it will not succeed,” his spokesman said Monday. Hamas is loathed in Israel for bombings and rockets launched indiscriminately into civilian areas, and critics say the group spends too much money preparing for war and not enough on Gaza’s besieged residents.

The document was also greeted with silence by Western countries, a reflection of the fact that Hamas failed to bend on any of the factors that have caused it to be branded a terrorist organization — and has not even formally repudiated the 1988 charter, with its talk of “obliterating” Israel and creating an Islamic State on “every inch” of historic Palestine.

The failure to achieve even that cosmetic gesture offers a telling indication of how Hamas is hamstrung by its own deep-seated ambivalence toward reform, said Nathan Thrall, an analyst with the International Crisis Group who is based in Jerusalem, who noted that the original charter has long been a source of quiet embarrassment among more reform-minded Hamas leaders.

“On one hand, they are attempting to appeal to hard-liners by not giving up their core principles,’’ said Mr. Thrall, the author of a forthcoming book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “The Only Language They Understand.’’

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“On the other, people like Meshal were hoping the document could lead to openings with Sunni Arab states and the West. It attempts to please everyone, and in so doing pleases no one.”

Yet the attempted rebranding of Hamas comes at a moment of sudden change in the Middle East. Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the rival Palestinian Authority, is due to meet with President Trump in Washington on Wednesday.

Mr. Trump has spoken of his desire to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but his interlocutor, Mr. Abbas, who is 82, is seen as politically depleted, and his rivals have started maneuvering to succeed him.

Hamas is changing, too: Secret elections now underway will decide who succeeds Mr. Meshal as leader in the next two weeks. That in turn raises the question of what Hamas might become.

In an hourlong interview, Mr. Meshal, wearing his usual dark suit with an open-neck white shirt, demonstrated the political polish he has brought to the organization over two decades, as it has developed from a localized fighting group, blowing up buses and cafes in Jerusalem, to a force that now posits itself as a potential leader of all the Palestinian people.

When the document was released on Monday night, he was giving interviews in a hotel ballroom until 1 a.m. — an unusual flurry of publicity for a secretive organization.

He said the document — the product of four years of dialogue among leaders in Gaza, in prison and in exile — at the very least showed that Hamas was open to changing its ideas.

In recasting itself as a national liberation movement, rather than as part of a wider Islamist struggle, Hamas appears to be distancing itself from the Muslim Brotherhood, which was conspicuous by its absence from the text.

That omission has been interpreted as an attempt to curry favor with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, whose troops control part of the border with Gaza and whose intelligence service determines when and which Hamas leaders can leave Gaza.

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Just as important, Mr. Meshal said he hoped the document would bring Hamas closer to Saudi Arabia, which, like Egypt, is staunchly opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood. “We already hold dialogue with Western parties, and if we do so with the West, we might as well be doing this with our Arab brothers,” he said.

Yet in the next breath, Mr. Meshal acknowledged that such a rapprochement could be tricky with Hamas’s main arms supplier, Iran, which is engaged in proxy wars against Saudi Arabia in the region’s most explosive conflicts.

“We are keenly aware of the amount of anger toward Iran because of the burning conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Yemen,” Mr. Meshal said. “Our priority is to serve our own cause without getting tangled in internal disputes.”

Looking back over his time in charge, Mr. Meshal lists sheer survival as one of his greatest achievements.

“It gives me pride that the people of Gaza have remained steadfast under Hamas despite three devastating wars,” he said. During the last conflict with Israel, in 2014, 1,462 Palestinian civilians in Gaza were killed, according to a United Nations report, and Palestinian rockets killed six Israeli civilians. But the relative peace of recent years — with comparatively few rockets fired into Israeli territory from Gaza since 2014 — also presents challenges.

In the latest chapter of the long-running fight between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, Mr. Abbas recently slashed salaries for Palestinian Authority employees in Gaza, the latest blow in a territory whose miserable living conditions are often compared to a giant prison camp.

The Egyptian and Israeli blockade of Gaza means that its two million inhabitants feel trapped, Mr. Thrall, the analyst, said. “Students on scholarships, people wishing to travel abroad — nobody can leave. It’s one of the greatest pressures the people of Gaza feel.”

Doggedness comes with a price, and Mr. Meshal is trying to balance that toughness with the need to open up, in a reflection of the shifting political landscape — and just maybe tilt toward more expansive politics that might one day bring Hamas out of the cold.

The favorites to succeed Mr. Meshal are Ismail Haniya, a Hamas leader in Gaza, and Abu Marzouk, who is said to be living in exile in Cairo.

It is widely assumed Mr. Meshal will take another senior role in Hamas after stepping down. Typically tight-lipped, he said only, “A resistance fighter never retires.”

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Mr. Abbas’s visit to the White House will present Mr. Trump with the Palestinian viewpoint more directly than he has ever heard it as president. But at 82, Mr. Abbas is a weakened political figure facing public discontent and divisions at home.

His Palestinian Authority operates in the West Bank, while the more militant rival Hamas faction rules in Gaza. Despite an effort by Hamas this week to present a somewhat more moderate face to the world, the two factions remain at odds. Even if they did reconcile, Israel has refused to deal with any coalition that includes what it and the United States consider a terrorist organization.

The issue of payments to families of suicide bombers and others who commit violence has become a frequent complaint by Israel and its supporters. The Palestinian Authority spends about $315 million a year to distribute cash and benefits to 36,000 families, according to Sander Gerber, a New York hedge fund executive and fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, who has studied the issue and brought his research to American lawmakers.

“The P.A. orchestrated one of the great diplomatic deceptions of the last 30 years,” Mr. Gerber said. “It’s only being exposed now. President Trump has the opportunity to let the world know that the sponsorship of terror is intolerable and will have consequences.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel raised the issue on Tuesday, making clear it will be a point of contention in any talks. “The payment of money to terrorists by a sliding scale — the more you kill the more you get — that’s the opposite of peace,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “It sends exactly the wrong message to young Palestinians. We want them to move towards peace.”

In an Op-Ed piece Monday in The New York Times, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s minister of public security and strategic affairs, called the payments “the most insidious form of encouragement to violence,” one effectively subsidized by American taxpayers and other countries that finance the Palestinian Authority.

Palestinian leaders defend the payments, saying they are meant to help widows and orphans of “martyrs,” as they call suicide bombers and others killed in attacks, as well as destitute families of prisoners, not to promote terrorism. They say Israel effectively subsidizes violence by encouraging settlers in the occupied West Bank. “I think the worst kind of terrorism is the occupation,” Jibril Rajoub, a top Palestinian official, said in an interview during a recent trip to Washington.

But Mr. Rajoub also signaled that Palestinian leaders would be willing to reconsider the payments as part of a broader negotiation. “We will discuss everything with an open mind,” he said.

The legislation sponsored by Mr. Cotton and other Republican senators like Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Marco Rubio of Florida is named the Taylor Force Act after an American graduate student who was killed while visiting Israel last year.

Mr. Force, 28, was a combat veteran studying at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt when he joined other students on a March 2016 trip to Israel to learn about global entrepreneurship. He was stabbed by a Palestinian member of Hamas on a coastal promenade near Tel Aviv. His family has been working with American lawmakers like Mr. Cotton to curb the practice of financial payments to relatives of such attackers.

Khaled Elgindy, a former adviser to the Palestinian leadership on negotiations with Israel, and now a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the bill reflected a typically one-sided view of the conflict by American lawmakers of both parties. “Congress’s role on this issue does not have a strong track record on being objective,” he said. “There isn’t really a fair or even honest hearing of the issue in Congress.”

On Tuesday, Israel celebrated its 69th independence day, and the White House hosted a reception to reinforce its support for an ally.

“If the world knows nothing else, the world will know this: America stands with Israel,” Vice President Mike Pence told guests. “President Trump stands with Israel for the same reason that every freedom-loving American stands with Israel — because her cause is our cause. Her values are our values. And her fight is our fight.”

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BEIRUT, Lebanon — Islamic State militants attacked a checkpoint on Tuesday used by refugees fleeing fighting in Syria and Iraq, killing more than three dozen people, according to local Kurdish militants and monitoring groups.

It was one of the largest recent attacks in the area, Hasaka Province in northeastern Syria, by the Islamic State, which has been under pressure in its main urban centers of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

The attack took place near Al Hol refugee camp, which hosts nearly 17,000 people, most of them Iraqi refugees but also including displaced Syrians, according to the International Rescue Committee. The group said several children were among the dead and injured.

The battle began with an Islamic State assault on a checkpoint controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a mostly Kurdish force that works with the United States against Islamic State militants, according to Kurdish militia representatives, who said attackers had also targeted civilians in a temporary camp for the displaced.

Islamic State forces also attacked S.D.F. forces in the nearby town of Shadadeh with suicide bombers, the S.D.F. said.

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Saudi-Iranian relations hit a low in 2016 when the Saudis severed diplomatic relations with Iran after the Saudi Embassy in Tehran was stormed by Iranian rioters, outraged over the Saudi execution of an outspoken Shiite cleric.

Signs of a Saudi-Iranian thaw emerged a few months ago when the Saudis said Iranians would be able to participate in this year’s hajj, the pilgrimage to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. No Iranians attended the 2016 hajj, partly because of tensions over a human crush at the 2015 hajj that left more than 2,400 dead, including nearly 500 Iranians.

But the Saudi prince appeared to douse any prospect of further improvement in the interview with the Saudi-owned MBC television. Excerpts were distributed to Western and Arab news agencies before the broadcast of the full interview Tuesday night.

Asked if a direct dialogue is envisioned with Iran, the prince said that would be impossible because of what he described as the Iranian religious conviction that Shiites were destined to take over the Islamic world.

“How do you have a dialogue with this?” the prince said.

He was referring to the Shiite belief in Imam Mahdi, the so-called hidden Imam, said to be a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad who will return to save the world from destruction.

The prince said Iranians believe that “the Imam Mahdi will come and they must prepare the fertile environment for the arrival of the awaited Mahdi and they must control the Muslim world.”

Roughly a quarter of the global population of 7.5 billion are Muslims, the vast majority of them Sunnis.

There was no immediate response to the prince’s remarks from Iran. Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, said recently that his country has no fight to pick with Saudi Arabia, but he accused the Saudis of “fueling tensions in the region through their policies and stances.”

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Mr. Ghasemi’s remarks, at a regular weekly news conference reported by Iranian media, did not suggest a negotiation was underway for the release of the Americans, all of them dual citizens of the United States and Iran.

Mr. Ghasemi did not identify any of them by name. At least four Americans of Iranian descent are known to be held in Iranian prisons on dubious charges.

His public acknowledgment that the imprisonment issue had been raised appeared to signal that Iranian leaders were at least open to the idea of negotiating with the Trump administration, despite its avowed hostility toward Iran.

The United States has repeatedly called for the prisoners’ release. Iran regards them as its citizens, with none of the rights to diplomatic access afforded to foreigners arrested in the country.

Iran has long used prisoners as bargaining leverage with the United States in the more than three decades of hostility that have prevailed since diplomatic relations were severed after the 1979 revolution.

When the nuclear agreement was put into effect in January 2016, Iran released a number of dual nationals from the United States that it had arrested on spying and other charges, including Jason Rezaian, who was The Washington Post’s Tehran bureau chief.

The most prominent dual nationals currently imprisoned are Siamak Namazi, a businessman who had advocated improved relations with the United States, and his father, Baquer Namazi, a former United Nations Children’s Fund official. Others include Karan Vafadari, an art gallery owner, and Afarin Niasari, Mr. Vafadari’s wife.

Another dual citizen, Robin Shahini, a San Diego State University graduate student arrested last July and later sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment, was released on bail in March after he began a hunger strike.

The United States also has repeatedly asked Iran about Robert Levinson, a former F.B.I. agent who disappeared in Iran a decade ago. The Iranians have said they know nothing of his whereabouts or fate, despite suspicions by Mr. Levinson’s family that he is a captive.

Advocates for the Namazis have been especially outspoken about calling for their release. Last week during the Vienna meeting, Baquer Namazi’s other son, Babak Namazi, joined with their lawyer, Jared Genser, at a news conference to denounce what they called the “intense, unrelenting, cruel and inhuman treatment” of the Namazis.

Babak Namazi also said he was counting on Mr. Trump to “take personal responsibility for the lives of my father and brother.”

In a Twitter message in October, when the Namazis were both sentenced, Mr. Trump vowed, “This doesn’t happen if I’m president!”

Mr. Trump has also denounced the Iranian nuclear accord as “the worst deal ever” and has hinted that he would seek to renegotiate or scrap it. But political analysts have suggested that he will honor terms of the deal, which eased sanctions on Iran in exchange for its verifiable pledge of peaceful nuclear work.

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Leaders of Nahdlatul Ulama’s youth wing, known as Ansor, say that elements of Shariah, which Muslims consider divine law, are being manipulated by groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaeda to justify terrorist attacks around the world, invoked to rally fighters to battle in the Middle East and elsewhere, and distorted by movements that seek to turn Islam into a political weapon.

“The classical Islamic perspective is dominated by views that position non-Muslims as enemies or, at best, as suspicious figures not worthy of trust,” H. Yaqut Qoumas, Ansor’s chairman, said in an interview.

“Fiqh,” or the body of jurisprudence that applies Shariah to everyday life, “explicitly rejects the possibility of non-Muslims enjoying equal rights with Muslims in the public sphere, including the right to occupy certain positions,” he said. “This classical Islamic perspective continues to possess an extraordinarily powerful authority in the eyes of most Muslims, and is regarded as standard, orthodox Islam.”

Some interpretations of classical Islamic law teach that Muslims have a duty to seek out and fight Christians, Jews and followers of Zoroastrianism until they either convert to Islam or submit to its rule and pay a head tax.

These interpretations have been enthusiastically adopted by the Islamic State.

Also, some interpretations of classical Islamic law, and of certain passages in the Quran, forbid Muslims from having non-Muslim political leaders. Medieval Islamic jurisprudence, still regarded as valid by some, is used to justify slavery and the execution of prisoners.

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Some predominantly Muslim countries have been moving to reinterpret Islamic law within their borders, with some sending delegations to a 2016 international conference of scholars, religious leaders and clergy members in Morocco on protecting the legal rights of religious minorities living among them.

The Indonesian initiative, however, aims to directly approach governments around the world, both Muslim-majority and otherwise, as well as at the United Nations, to achieve a global consensus on reforming what it views as archaic interpretations of Islam.

“The challenge we face is not confined to religious views that emerged through an intellectual process conducted a thousand years ago. We are also confronted by religious and political authorities whose institutions are deeply intertwined with these views, and thus continue to inculcate such teachings among each new generation of Muslims,” Mr. Yaqut said.

Nonetheless, some Islamic scholars and experts note that because there are so many diverging interpretations of Islamic law and the Quran, it would be difficult to reach an international consensus on reforms.

“There’s a whole library of interpretations of jihad — Muslims must fight non-Muslim states to expand territory, for example,” said Ruud Peters, an emeritus professor of Islamic law at the University of Amsterdam. “But since the 19th century, there have been interpretations followed by many Muslim states to only defend against attack from non-Muslim states.”

Another problem, scholars and experts said, is the cultural differences among predominantly Muslim countries in interpreting Islamic law. Indonesia, in Southeast Asia, for example, practices one of the most liberal forms of Islam in the world, while simultaneously having a secular government and Constitution, with full rights for Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and other religious minorities.

Saudi Arabia, in the Middle East, however, practices the conservative Wahhabi Islam, and its government does not officially recognize any of its citizens as being Christian.

“If you want to have only one universal interpretation, you have to deal with the cultural differences and also find an international central authority. This is impossible,” said Abdel Rahman El Haj, a professor at Ankara Social Sciences University in Turkey.

He added that while Indonesian Islamic leaders had good intentions, substantive changes would be successful only if support for them emerged within the Arab world.

The Ansor initiative is seen as another move by young Muslims in Indonesia, as well as Islamic clerics and other Muslim organizations in Europe and the Middle East, to push back against extreme, conservative interpretations of Islam.

“The general impression we sometimes get in the West about Islam is one of radicalization,” said Raphaël Lefèvre, a nonresident political Islam scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center, “while an equally if not more important trend is the ongoing struggle by Muslim clerics to redefine what Islamic law has to say about society and politics in ways deemed more compatible with modern life.”

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The Syrian government and its main ally, Russia, deny that it uses such tactics.

At a news conference held at United Nations headquarters in New York to release the report’s findings, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, ridiculed what he described as “preposterous” assertions by the Syrian and Russian governments denying responsibility.

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Mr. Roth said it was time for them “to stop these transparently false diversionary claims and come clean.”

He also said the pattern of attacks as described in the Human Rights Watch report amounted to “a level of culpability and horror that cries out for prosecution.”

On Saturday, an attack on a headquarters of the White Helmets civil defense rescue group in the town of Kafr Zita killed eight of its members, the group and other witnesses say. And medical organizations working in Syria have tallied 10 government attacks in April alone on hospitals and clinics in rebel-held areas, part of a pattern of hundreds of attacks on medical workers and facilities that United Nations investigators have described as war crimes.

Human Rights Watch corroborated claims of two suspected nerve gas attacks on Dec. 12 that initially went relatively unnoticed. This was in part because they took place when the world’s attention was focused on the battle over Aleppo, and in part because of the difficulty of verifying information in the Islamic State-held areas where they occurred.

Medical organizations and social media accounts that day shared images of dead children bearing no visible wounds, as if sleeping, like those killed by a nerve agent in Khan Sheikhoun and in 2013 attacks near Damascus. But because people can be killed for sharing information online from Islamic State-controlled areas, it was difficult to verify them at the time.

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Human Rights Watch said its investigators interviewed four residents by telephone and two medics through intermediaries. It said they gave consistent accounts of chemical weapons attacks in two villages in eastern Hama Province, amid clashes between government and Islamic State forces, that killed residents sheltering in caves and in their homes.

The report also provides new details about the Khan Sheikhoun attack, as well as about an intensifying series of recent government bombings and shelling illegally using chlorine gas, with barrels dropped from helicopters and, in a new method, with improvised ground-to-ground missiles.

In those cases, too, the findings coincide with accounts residents and witnesses gave to The Times and with a Times analysis of public information online.

Human Rights Watch corroborated eight chlorine attacks this year, out of a larger number reported by residents. Possession of chlorine, unlike sarin, is not illegal under international law, but its use as a weapon is. The attacks took place in areas where government forces were clashing with rebel forces, near the cities of Damascus and Hama.

The intense battles around Hama led to three attacks, two believed to be with chlorine and one believed to be with a nerve agent, in the two weeks before the Khan Sheikhoun attack. All of them were in al-Lataminah, a town in Hama Province between Khan Sheikhoun and the front line.

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On March 25, ordnance crashed through the roof of a clinic that, because of previous attacks, had been reinforced with a metal roof covered with earth. Yellowish gas smelling of bleach filled the facility, killing a doctor, Ali Darwish, as he performed surgery, as well as his patient and another person, according to the Human Rights Watch report and other witnesses. On April 3, munitions with a similar smell again hit the village, injuring at least a dozen.

On March 30, a bomb fell without the usual intense explosion — chemical weapons typically contain a smaller explosive charge, to disperse but not destroy the agent — injuring 169 people, many but not all of them believed to be combatants. They reported symptoms similar to those from a nerve agent, including pupils constricted to pinpoints.

In the Dec. 12 attacks, two villages, Jrouh and al-Salaliyah, were hit, Human Rights Watch said. It quoted a Jrouh resident who said he found his wife, three children, brother, brother’s wife and brother’s three children dead in his basement. He said his neighbors, his uncle and the families of his uncle’s two sons also died.

“Everyone within 100 meters died,” he told the rights group. “There was no one left.” He buried his family and fled, and was interviewed by Human Rights Watch after finding refuge outside Islamic State territory.

Human Rights Watch interviewed 32 residents of Khan Sheikhoun and reviewed available evidence, corroborating previous accounts that one bomb containing a chemical agent fell after a warplane passed over before 7 a.m. on April 4, followed by three or four explosive bombs dropped in a second bombing run.

It found that bomb fragments from the scene of the suspected chemical bomb matched those of a Soviet-made munition that delivers sarin, the KhAB-250.

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Mr. Abbas was scheduled to meet with Mr. Trump in Washington on Wednesday as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. He has sought in recent weeks to rein in Hamas, cutting salaries and refusing to pay for electricity, in a bid to undermine the group’s authority. Gazans now have only a few hours of power a day.

“Whether it’s a coincidence or it’s connected, I have one thing to say: The Palestinian leadership is afraid of this Hamas moderation,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University in Gaza. “Because the P.A. and Fatah are afraid that by this moderation, Hamas presents itself as the true representation of the Palestinian people,” he said, referring to the Palestinian Authority.

The document is a distillation of various public statements over the years signaling an attempt by Hamas to appear more pragmatic since it seized broad control in 2007 after winning parliamentary elections a year earlier. Four years in the drafting, the document represents the consensus of Hamas’s top leadership.

The paper calls for Hamas to distance itself from the Muslim Brotherhood in an effort to build stronger ties with Egypt, which controls the Gaza Strip’s southern border; reiterates the view of Hamas leadership that it is open to a Palestinian state along the borders established after the 1967 war, though it does not renounce future claims to Palestinian rule over what is now Israel; and specifically weakens language from its 1988 charter proclaiming Jews as enemies and comparing their views to Nazism, though the new document does not replace the original charter.

“Hamas does not have a conflict with the Jews because they are Jews, but Hamas has a conflict with the Zionists, occupiers and aggressors,” the new document states.

Experts on all sides of the endlessly complex struggle here say the new document is unlikely to immediately change Hamas’s position, especially because the group recently chose a hard-liner, Yehya Sinwar, as its new leader in Gaza, and because it in no way recognizes Israel or renounces violence.

But the move highlights the deepening struggle between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, both internationally and among Palestinians. Hamas is considered a terrorist group by much of the West, including the United States, a status that has led to its exclusion from wider international talks about the Palestinians’ future, and the document aims to make Hamas better heard on the international stage.

Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said the group had to move beyond its original charter to achieve its goals. “The document gives us a chance to connect with the outside world,” he said. “To the world, our message is: Hamas is not radical. We are a pragmatic and civilized movement. We do not hate the Jews. We only fight who occupies our lands and kills our people.”

Mr. Abbas, 82, is increasingly unpopular at home, though he is the recognized conduit to the wider world, and his rivals are already publicly vying to succeed him.

Marwan Barghouti, a popular figure among Palestinians who is serving five life sentences for murders in the second intifada, is leading a hunger strike in Israeli jails, now two weeks old, that some experts say is aimed at raising his credibility as a leader.

Mr. Trump has expressed a desire for a peace process that brings in Sunni Arab states that are aligned against Shiite Iran, itself allied with Hamas, even as Hamas seeks to become closer to those same Sunni states.

“The P.A. and Hamas compete to get embraced by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab states, but it seems the Arab embrace is not enough for two women,” said Fayez Abu Shamala, a Palestinian writer and political analyst close to Hamas.

The new document, however, reveals a greater pragmatism and willingness to engage with the outside world, he said. “Hamas will be an influential political body in the next phase.”

In Israel, which has fought three wars with Hamas since 2008, the document was greeted with skepticism.

“Not even one mind” will be changed in Israel, said Yossi Kuperwasser, a retired Israeli brigadier general who leads the army’s research arm. “Nobody will be affected by this.”

Mr. Kuperwasser called it “sugarcoating” on old positions that do not renounce Hamas’s original charter and do not recognize Israel’s right to exist. He did say, however, that it could be problematic for Mr. Abbas because the Palestinian Authority and Hamas platforms appear to be growing closer.

In the document, Hamas says Palestinians who fled or were expelled during wars with Israelis have the right to return — largely a nonstarter in successive peace negotiations with Israel. And it does not renounce violence; “resistance” continues to be a main source of strength and credibility.

“Hamas refuses to hinder the resistance or its weapons, and confirms the right of our people to develop resistance tools and equipments,” the document says. “Hamas confirms that the resistance leadership can decide the level of resistance and can utilize a variety of the different tools and way to administrate the conflict, without compromising the resistance.”

In distancing itself from the Muslim Brotherhood, analysts said Hamas was likely to improve its often-strained relationship with Egypt, even if it was unlikely to open the border between Egypt and Gaza for trade.

“It’s a huge step for Hamas, but I think they should temper their expectations about the reaction from the Egyptians,” said Abdelrahman Ayyash, a researcher on Islamist movements based in Istanbul.

Under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Egypt frequently accuses Hamas of aiding Islamist militants in attacks against Egyptian security forces in Sinai and Egypt’s main cities. Egyptian security officials and pro-government news media accuse Hamas, often without proof, of providing militants with training and guns.

At the same time, Egyptian intelligence has quietly renewed its relationship with Hamas in recent years, in an effort to secure Sinai and to bolster Egypt’s role as a mediator in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Ahead of Mr. Abbas’s visit to Washington, the Egyptians are keen to establish their role as potential peacemakers. After a meeting between Mr. Sisi and Mr. Abbas in Cairo on Saturday, the Egyptian president’s office issued a statement that noted Egypt’s “pivotal role,” and urged Palestinian unity as “essential to put an end to the plight of the Palestinian people.”

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