Addressing the British House of Commons in August 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill paid tribute to the pilots of the Royal Air Force who were staving off an impending German invasion of the British Isles in what would be known as the Battle of Britain.

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” Churchill proclaimed.

When John A. Hemingway died in Dublin on Monday at 105 — the Royal Air Force announced his death — he was the last known survivor of the “few,” nearly 3,000 pilots and crew who saved Britain in the early stages of World War II.

Mr. Hemingway, who was known as Paddy, piloted Hurricane fighters in the battle, which took place in the skies above Britain between July 10 and Oct. 31, 1940.

Hitler had planned a September 1940 invasion of the British Isles, known as Operation Sea Lion. But he postponed it indefinitely when the R.A.F. — vastly outnumbered at the height of battle, with 749 fighter aircrafts compared with the Luftwaffe’s 2,550 — beat back German bombers and fighters, foiling his quest to establish the air supremacy that Germany needed to support invading ground troops. However, the Blitz, Germany’s bombing of London and other British cities, extended into the spring of 1941.

“Britain, facing a Continent dominated by her enemies, prepared for a fight to the death,” The New York Times had reported that June.

Flying over France, Britain and Italy in World War II, Mr. Hemingway was shot down four times between 1940 and 1945. He received Britain’s Distinguished Flying Cross in July 1941 for downing and damaging German planes.

“During the war, all my closest friends were killed, and my memories and thoughts about them I have always regarded as a private affair,” Mr. Hemingway told the British newspaper The Telegraph on the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Britain.

“But being the last of the Battle of Britain veterans has made me think of those times,” he said. “Fate was not democratic. New pilots with just a few hours in Hurricanes did not have the instincts of us more experienced pilots and were very vulnerable in combat. Many did not last long.”

John Allman Hemingway was born on July 17, 1919, in Dublin. After attending St. Andrew’s College there, he enlisted in the R.A.F. in 1938 and graduated from flight school.

He first saw combat in the spring of 1940 when he flew in support of the British Expeditionary Force’s ultimately futile quest to turn back the German invasion of France. He shot down a German bomber in May, but the next day he had to make a forced landing when his plane was hit by antiaircraft fire.

The British Army, routed by the Germans, returned home in the storied evacuation from the French port of Dunkirk in late May and early June. France capitulated to Hitler with the signing of an armistice on June 22.

Flying afterward in defense of Britain, Mr. Hemingway was intercepting German bombers over the English Channel on Aug. 18 when his Hurricane was shot up.

“Somebody clobbered me,” he told The Daily Mirror in 2018. “They hit me in the engine. It covered the inside of the cockpit with oil, and things got very smelly and hot. I had no hope of getting to England, so I bailed out and landed in the sea.

“There were jellyfish everywhere,” he continued. “I started swimming. Two hours later, a rowboat from a lightship bumped into me.”

He climbed aboard, grabbed an oar and helped the crew return with him to England.

Later in August, Mr. Hemingway survived a third close call, this time while pursuing a German bomber over southeastern England. As he told The Daily Mirror: “I got a Dornier in my sight and started to pull around and have a second go. That was it — ‘bang, bang’. There was smoke everywhere.” He bailed out. “I landed in the Pitsea marshes, where I faced the local Home Guard,” he said.

He added wryly, “I could speak reasonable English, so they didn’t shoot me.”

Mr. Hemingway was an Allied flight controller during the D-Day invasion of Normandy in June 1944. The next year, in April, he was a squadron commander in Italy when his Spitfire fighter was downed by the Germans. He bailed out again and was rescued by farm workers, who disguised him in peasant clothing and smuggled him to the British lines.

After the war, Mr. Hemingway held posts with Britain’s Air Ministry and its delegation to NATO in Paris. He retired from the R.A.F. in 1969 as a group captain, the equivalent of an American colonel, and lived in Britain and Canada before returning to Ireland in 2011.

The Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund, which assists current and former R.A.F. personnel and their families, announced on May 8, 2020 — the 75th anniversary of V-E Day, which marked Germany’s surrender — that Mr. Hemingway had become the last living veteran of the Battle of Britain after the death of William Clark a day earlier at 101.

“We owe so much to Paddy and his generation for our freedoms today,” William, the Prince of Wales, said on social media on Tuesday, paying tribute to Mr. Hemingway.

In its statement, the R.A.F. said of Mr. Hemingway, “He never saw his role in the Battle of Britain as anything other than doing the job he was trained to do.”

Mr. Hemingway’s survivors include three children, Susan, Michael and Brian. His wife, Bridget, died in 1998. He died in a nursing home in Dublin.

“I am here because I had some staggering luck and fought alongside great pilots in magnificent aircraft with ground crew in the best air force in the world at that time,” Mr. Hemingway told The Irish Independent in September 2020. “It was just a matter of taking each day at a time. Others write the history — we were doing our job.”

Lynsey Chutel and Ash Wu contributed reporting.

Israeli forces on Tuesday launched the largest and most deadly attacks on Gaza since a cease-fire with Hamas that began roughly two months ago. The barrage killed hundreds of people, according to health authorities in the enclave.

As of midday Tuesday, it remained unclear whether the strikes were a brief attempt to force Hamas to compromise in cease-fire talks or the beginning of a new phase in the conflict.

Just before 2:30 a.m. local time, the Israeli military announced that it was conducting “extensive strikes” on Hamas targets. At least 400 Palestinians, including children, were killed in the strikes, according to the Gaza health ministry. The ministry’s figures do not differentiate between civilians and combatants.

Hamas publicly announced the deaths of at least five senior officials among the group’s Gaza leadership. Two were officials in the group’s political bureau, and three others — including Bahjat Abu Sultan, the director of Hamas’s feared internal security agency — held senior security roles.

When Israel launched the strikes, some people were preparing a special meal before the daily Ramadan fast. Others were jolted out of their sleep. After two months of relative calm, the widespread explosions left Gazans with an unmistakable message: The war had returned, at least for now.

Why did Israel resume airstrikes on Gaza?

The Israeli authorities explained the assault as a response to intransigence by Hamas in talks over extending the cease-fire.

The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel also said that Hamas had demonstrated a “repeated refusal” to release the rest of the hostages that it seized during its raid on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Around 1,200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage in that attack, which began the war. “From now on, Israel will act against Hamas with increasing military strength,” it said in a statement.

That message was echoed by Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, who said that the cease-fire talks had reached a dead end and that Israel had “no alternative but to give the order to reopen fire.”

How did cease-fire negotiations break down?

The talks stalled because of disagreement over fundamental issues. Hamas, which has attempted to use the hostages as leverage throughout the conflict, has refused to release significant numbers of additional captives until Israel promised to permanently end the war.

Israel and Hamas had been negotiating the next steps in the truce. The next phase is supposed to end the war and free more hostages. But Mr. Netanyahu’s government has refused to agree to end the war unless Hamas gives up control of Gaza or dismantles its military wing.

Israel’s hand in the talks has been strengthened in recent weeks by backing from the Trump administration, which has delivered more weapons to the country. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said Israel had consulted the White House before launching the strikes.

To increase pressure on Hamas, Israel halted the delivery of aid and humanitarian supplies into Gaza earlier this month. That decision exacerbated hardships faced by civilians in the shattered enclave, where Palestinian health authorities say more than 46,000 people have been killed, a majority of them women, children or the elderly.

The cease-fire deal, which came into effect on Jan. 19, was designed to unfold in several stages toward a comprehensive end to the conflict. Under the initial phase, which lasted six weeks, Hamas released 30 Israeli and foreign hostages and handed over eight bodies. In exchange, Israel released 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

How did Hamas respond to the Israeli airstrikes?

Hamas accused Israel of deciding to “overturn the cease-fire agreement, exposing the prisoners in Gaza to an unknown fate,” referring to the remaining hostages.

Hamas has not yet responded militarily to the attacks.

How many hostages remain in Gaza?

Of the 250 people seized, more than 130 have been released, including more than 100 during an initial cease-fire in the early months of the war and 30 more during the truce that began in January. The hostages were exchanged for hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

The Israeli military has also retrieved the bodies of at least 40 others. Less than half of the 59 who remain in Gaza are alive, according to the Israeli government.

The main advocacy group for the families of hostages held in Gaza accused the Israeli government of effectively abandoning those still held there with its decision to launch large-scale airstrikes.

Reporting was contributed by Patrick Kingsley, Yan Zhuang, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Aaron Boxerman.

Russia significantly stepped up its sabotage campaign over the past two years as it sought to pressure Europe and the United States to curb their support for Ukraine, according to a new study released on Tuesday.

The report, by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is one of the first that try to quantify the scale of Moscow’s covert campaign that targeted undersea cables, warehouses and railways. It found that Russian attacks in Europe quadrupled from 2022 to 2023 and then tripled again from 2023 to 2024.

“This is an important tool that the Russians are using in coordination with their conventional war in Ukraine,” said Seth G. Jones, the author of the study and a former adviser to the U.S. military. “It makes very little sense now for Russia to push troops across the border to the Baltic States or Finland. But their payback for these countries that are providing weapons is going after their companies, assassination plots against officials and threatening critical infrastructure.”

Amid the push by Washington to halt the war in Ukraine, Russia has tamped down its sabotage efforts in recent weeks, according to a Western official. But experts believe the campaign against European targets could continue once governments put in place new plans to support Ukraine with weapons or peacekeepers.

Anger at Russia’s sabotage efforts has the potential to influence European reactions to the U.S.-led push for an end to the war in Ukraine. Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland noted in a social media post on Monday that Lithuanian officials had confirmed his assessment that Russia was responsible for a series of fires in shopping centers in Warsaw and Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. “Good to know before negotiations,” Mr. Tusk wrote. “Such is the nature of this state.”

The message to countries supporting Ukraine has been that Russia can impose costs — and increase them. There is little evidence that the Russian campaign was effective last year. But as the United States apparently retreats from its backing of Ukraine and European allies, the question will be whether a covert Russian campaign can become more successful at pushing countries to reconsider their support.

The report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that about 27 percent of Russia’s attacks were against transportation targets, 21 percent against industrial targets and 21 percent against undersea cables, pipelines and other infrastructure. Overall, the study tracked 52 separate acts of sabotage from 2022 to the present.

Russia has tried to control its campaign and not escalate too much. It tried to cap the level of violence to avoid inadvertently driving up support for Ukraine, Mr. Jones said.

“We don’t see a lot of people dying right now,” he said. “If a train was derailed carrying weapons, that would be one thing. If it were full of people, that would be a whole different thing.”

People who have been killed as part of the covert campaign, such as a former Russian helicopter pilot in Spain, were mainly defectors. While Russia has tried to avoid killing foreigners, Western intelligence officials said last year that it had sought to kill the chief executive of a prominent German arms maker.

American and European officials have been concerned about miscalculation by Russia and its inability to precisely control some of its own operatives.

After Russian intelligence plotted to place incendiary devices on DHL cargo planes last year, the Biden administration warned President Vladimir V. Putin that sabotage that brought down aircraft would elicit a serious response. European leaders and NATO have repeatedly called out the attacks, issued warnings and expelled Russian diplomats and spies over them. But the report found that those efforts “failed to coerce Russia” from stopping its campaign.

The effort is part of a Russian tradition of covert sabotage, known as active measures, that the K.G.B. honed during the Cold War. Russian military intelligence, known as the G.R.U., has led the current campaign, The New York Times reported in May.

The operation intensified last year, when the Kremlin approved a push after Britain and Germany announced new support for Ukraine, according to the Western intelligence official. The German publication WirtschaftsWoche reported the decision to expand the sabotage campaign, including the use of other Russian intelligence services.

The new study found no recorded attacks in European countries friendly to Russia, such as Serbia and Hungary. On the other hand, Poland, which has been the hub of Western aid flowing to Ukraine, has been repeatedly targeted.

“They are clearly making concrete decisions of whom they go after and whom they don’t go after,” Mr. Jones said of Russia.

While the cutting of cables by Russia’s shadow fleet of ships trying to evade sanctions has received much of the attention in recent months, Mr. Jones said a majority of attacks were explosive or incendiary devices causing fires at factories, warehouses and other facilities.

He added that there had not been any instances of sabotage around U.S. bases in recent weeks. Last year, as the sabotage campaign stepped up, military officials ordered U.S. bases in Europe to raise their alert level.

“I have not seen a U.S. target in the last couple weeks,” Mr. Jones said, “so they appear to be holding off from U.S. targets right now.”

The German Parliament is set to vote on Tuesday on a plan to loosen government borrowing limits in order to spend heavily on defense and infrastructure, in an effort to offset America’s pivot away from Europe and to lift the country out of years of economic stagnation.

If the measure eventually becomes law, it will radically reorient Germany’s relationship to government debt — and, its authors hope, allow Germany to shoulder a more powerful leadership role at a critical moment for Europe.

The center of the plan is a push led by Friedrich Merz, the likely next chancellor, to relax what is colloquially known as the “debt brake,” a limit on government borrowing that Germany enshrined in its Constitution.

That brake has reduced German debt, but it has also kept the government from investing in roads, software, bridges, tanks and other areas. Lawmakers say that spending is now urgently needed to address declining German competitiveness and shrinking American security guarantees.

Here is a quick guide to the debt brake, how Mr. Merz and his allies want to change it, and the challenges they will face.

What is the debt brake?

Like most wealthy nations, Germany borrows money to help balance its annual federal budget. But unlike some peers, most notably the United States, Germany has a Constitution that limits its yearly borrowing to just 0.35 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. There are exceptions for economic downturns and natural disasters.

German lawmakers have voted in recent years to circumvent the limits with some special pots of money, including emergency pandemic spending starting in 2020 and a recent bump in military spending. But by and large, the debt brake has constrained borrowing.

In 2009, when the debt brake was introduced, Germany, the United States and Britain had roughly similar levels of debt as a share of their economies. Since then, that share has soared in Britain and America, but fallen in Germany.

Why does Germany have it?

The debt brake was added to Germany’s Constitution after the country’s budget deficit grew during the 2008 financial crisis. It became a signature economic policy and a point of national pride.

But the country’s aversion to large deficits and debt predates the crisis. Its leaders borrowed heavily to help smooth reunification between West and East Germany in the early 1990s, with mixed economic effects. More notoriously, high government debt helped drive hyperinflation in the Weimar government of the 1920s, aiding the rise of Hitler.

That historical trauma has remained a neuralgic pain that has defined the public and political debate around government debt in Germany for generations.

Why change it now?

The debt brake didn’t just depress borrowing. Its critics say it also handcuffed German’s ability to spur its economy, invest in its future and lead in European security affairs.

German spending has lagged well behind its needs to upgrade its transportation networks, digitize its public services and make a host of other investments essential to its global competitiveness.

The country’s net public investment has been negative for the last 25 years, holding back economic growth, said Marcel Fratzscher, the president of the German Institute for Economic Research.

The brake was also a major reason German lawmakers spent relatively little on their military for decades, under the belief that the United States would continue to protect their country as it has since the end of World War II.

Now, releasing the debt brake has become urgent as the German economy continues to shrink and President Trump threatens to scale back or remove America’s security role in Europe.

“It’s now or never for a big spending increase,” Mr. Fratzscher said.

Even officials at Germany’s staid central bank, the Bundesbank, have called for changes to the debt brake to free up money for government investment to drive growth.

“Rarely in Germany’s postwar history has government investment been as necessary as it is today — and rarely since reunification have the potential returns been so promising,” economists at the Deutsche Bank Research Institute wrote last week. “Germany has successfully used the good years of the past decade to create fiscal flexibility for more challenging times. And times will likely remain challenging for the rest of the decade.”

After resisting calls for debt-limit changes during the recent election campaign, Mr. Merz, of the center-right Christian Democrats, now says the brake much be changed. So do many center-left lawmakers.

“The reform of the debt brake is of central importance in view of the epochal change that the U.S.A. is no longer Germany’s reliable ally,” Anton Hofreiter, a member of Parliament for the Green Party, said in a text message this week.

With it, he said, “It is now possible to finance satellites, intelligence services, cyberdefense and support for Ukraine alongside the urgently needed upgrading of the Bundeswehr” — the German military.

What changes are lawmakers contemplating?

The agreement Mr. Merz struck with the Greens and the center-left Social Democrats would create an exemption from the debt brake for all spending on defense above 1 percent of gross domestic product. It would define “defense” broadly, to include domestic intelligence, aid to allies and other measures alongside weapons purchases. Effectively, Germany lawmakers could borrow whatever sums the government bond market would allow to fund those items.

Mr. Merz also agreed to create a new infrastructure fund of 500 billion euros — almost $550 billion — spread over 12 years, outside of the debt brake’s limits. Of that, €100 billion would be earmarked for projects to fight climate change.

What are the chances they succeed?

Good, but hurdles remain.

Having decided to change the Constitution to allow extra borrowing, Mr. Merz has taken the unusual step of passing the measure in the final days of a lame-duck Parliament, before he can even become chancellor.

On Tuesday, with the help of the Greens and Social Democrats, Mr. Merz hopes to get two-thirds of the Parliament’s vote needed to change the Constitution. The margins are slim, and they will depend on some lawmakers who will leave office after this week.

If the vote passes, the change will still need to be approved by the Federal Council of the States on Friday before it can go into effect. That, too, could turn out to be very close.

Even then, the plan faces legal challenges, including from the far-right party Alternative for Germany. Courts have refused to stop the vote thus far.

Lawmakers from the three big centrist parties supporting the package say they are confident they will prevail.

“We should not let this opportunity pass us by — it’s a big opportunity for our country and also a real change in politics,” Mr. Merz said on Sunday.