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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Universal jurisdiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new legal strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and his French counterpart, Jean-Noël Barrot, spoke on Wednesday in Paris of the challenges already posed to U.S. alliances by the imminent return of Donald J. Trump to the White House, and said they believed that an American takeover of Greenland was an impossible idea.

But they also asserted that their nations would try to continue working together through potential political turbulence in the coming years, including on the war in Ukraine and conflicts in the Middle East.

European leaders have been focused in recent days on what many consider inflammatory statements from Mr. Trump and his allies. The president-elect has said he would like to make Greenland part of the United States. The autonomous territory is controlled by Denmark, a NATO ally. And a senior adviser, the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, has declared his support for a far-right political party in Germany.

“The idea expressed about Greenland is obviously not a good one, but maybe more important, it’s obviously one that’s not going to happen,” Mr. Blinken said at a news conference with Mr. Barrot. “So we probably shouldn’t waste a lot of time talking about it.”

He prefaced that with advice clearly intended for Mr. Trump: “We’re stronger, we’re more effective, we get better results when we’re working closely with our allies, not saying things that may alienate them.”

Mr. Barrot agreed that he did not think the United States would invade Greenland, but said: “Do we think that we are entering a period in which we’re returning to the law of the jungle? The answer is yes.”

Later, in remarks on Ukraine, he put President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia squarely in that context, too.

“It is a matter of the future of international law,” Mr. Barrot said. “If we accept Ukraine capitulating, we would allow force to prevail. It is a matter of security for the French people, as well as for Europeans.”

Mr. Blinken’s stop in Paris is part of a final, whirlwind diplomatic trip in which he is visiting Asian and European allies. He met with officials in Seoul on Monday, in the middle of the biggest political crisis in South Korea in decades; had talks in Tokyo the next day, soon after the Biden administration blocked a steel-industry merger that Japanese officials wanted; and then flew overnight to Paris, going via Alaska to avoid Russian air space.

Mr. Blinken’s visits to South Korea and Japan were a reflection of the importance of those nations in the U.S. government’s calculus for establishing military deterrence against China and North Korea. Both are key allies that host U.S. military bases and troops. And France has been one of the most important allies in opposing Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and supplying the Ukrainian military with weapons.

Like other European officials, those in Paris are anxious about the return of Mr. Trump, though few were truly surprised by the outcome of the U.S. election.

In Mr. Blinken, President Biden has a diplomat well suited to trying to reassure the French: He grew up in an intellectual milieu in Paris and speaks fluent French, which he deployed here in an ornate room in the Foreign Ministry, in what was almost certain to be his final overseas news conference as secretary of state.

Both Mr. Blinken and Mr. Barrot underscored in their opening remarks the diplomacy their nations have done together during recent crises, notably the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and the war between Russia and Ukraine. Their nations have also tried to coordinate on policies toward Syria, where rebels recently toppled Bashar al-Assad, the longtime dictator.

“I am delighted that you will continue carrying the torch over the next months on these crucial issues for our two countries,” Mr. Blinken told Mr. Barrot.

The French minister praised Mr. Blinken, using language that appeared to carry veiled criticism of the America represented by Mr. Trump.

“You have embodied the face of the America that we love,” Mr. Barrot said. He spoke of a nation that built an “international order based on law” after World War II through “its lofty outlook, its visceral attachment to the values ​​of freedom.”

At one point, he said, “We survived some 59 American elections, and of course we’ll survive the 60th American election.”

Among their worries, European leaders are concerned about the possibility that Mr. Trump will impose new tariffs in a period of anemic growth in Europe compared with the United States.

Mr. Blinken’s visit comes at a time of intense domestic political division for France. It is a moment that François Bayrou, the centrist prime minister appointed last month, has called the “most difficult” situation for the country since the end of World War II. But for the time being, those divisions mostly affect France’s domestic policy, particularly its inability to pass a budget.

All of this has served to weaken the hand of President Emmanuel Macron at home. But under the French system, Mr. Macron, who considers himself a pragmatic centrist, still holds great sway when it comes to foreign affairs. That has provided a certain continuity in the French posture toward Mr. Trump.

That posture is a mix of concern, caution and Mr. Macron’s belief that he has a clear-eyed view of the American president-elect and his mercurial governing style. Mr. Macron was elected president in 2017, the same year that Mr. Trump took office for his first term.

Over the years, the French president has sought to preserve the French-American relationship while preparing his country — and Europeans more generally — for the possibility that the continent may increasingly have to fend for itself militarily, given Mr. Trump’s skepticism about the U.S. role in NATO.

At a campaign event last year, Mr. Trump implied that he would not abide by NATO’s collective defense provision, known as Article 5, and even said he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to countries that had not contributed sufficiently to the alliance.

During his yearly New Year’s Eve speech, Mr. Macron, reiterating a position he has taken many times before, said that Europe could no longer “delegate to other powers its security and its defense,” vowing to continue to invest in French “military rearmament.”

On Monday, Mr. Macron raised concerns about Mr. Musk, who recently used his social media platform, X, to praise a German far-right party and assail Britain’s Labour Party prime minister.

Without mentioning Mr. Musk’s name, Mr. Macron said: “Ten years ago, if we had said that the owner of one of the largest social networks in the world would support a new international reactionary force and would intervene directly in elections, including in Germany, who would have imagined it?”

On Wednesday, when asked at the news conference about Mr. Musk, Mr. Blinken said, “Private citizens in our country can say what they want, what they believe, and everyone else can draw their own conclusions and take their own positions on the matter.”

Mr. Barrot said the same about Mr. Musk. Soon afterward, Mr. Blinken got into a convoy to go to the Élysée Palace to meet with Mr. Macron and to receive the Légion d’Honneur, given by the French to people they consider true friends.

Catherine Porter contributed reporting.

In the days after Donald J. Trump was re-elected president, one of his most high-profile stops was at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event at Madison Square Garden.

Mr. Trump’s appearance in the front row was notable, as was the presence of some of his closest confidants, like Elon Musk, who sat alongside him. But few in attendance for the fights would have recognized the other man sitting beside the president-elect.

Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s vast sovereign wealth vehicle, the Public Investment Fund, watched the action from ringside, and is getting even closer to being part of the action. A company owned by the fund is close to creating a boxing league with TKO, the owner of Ultimate Fighting Championship. A deal for what would be a new competition, featuring up-and-coming boxers tied exclusively to the league, could be announced within weeks, according to three people familiar with the matter.

TKO said in a statement on Wednesday that it had “nothing to announce,” but that it “would evaluate any unique and compelling opportunity that could fit well in our portfolio of businesses and create incremental value for our shareholders.”

The wealth fund did not comment.

The potential investment in TKO follows a Saudi Arabian effort in June to create a multibillion-dollar boxing league that would aim to unite the world’s best boxers, who for decades have been divided by rival promoters and fighting for titles controlled by an alphabet soup of sanctioning bodies. That effort, while not completely abandoned, had proved complicated and expensive, even for a country like Saudi Arabia, which for the past half decade has disbursed billions to become a player across some of the world’s biggest sports.

The investment in the new league will be made by Sela, a subsidiary of the Public Investment Fund. TKO — which is majority controlled by the entertainment and sports conglomerate Endeavor and embodied by Dana White, the U.F.C. empresario, a longtime friend of Mr. Trump’s — would be a managing partner. In return, TKO has been offered an equity stake and a share of the revenue, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity ahead of the official announcement.

Saudi Arabia has backed some of the biggest and richest boxing bouts in history in recent years. It has played host to major title fights, most recently a face-off between Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury, which ended with Mr. Usyk as the first undisputed heavyweight champion in more than a generation. Fights like that, which for years proved almost impossible to negotiate, have taken place thanks to the millions of dollars put on the table by Turki al-Sheikh, a government official with close ties to the kingdom’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

Mr. al-Sheikh, a former security guard, has become perhaps the most powerful man in boxing, seen at ringside and even inside the ring for the biggest bouts. He is also a frequent recipient of messages of thanks from some of the best-known fighters and boxing promoters, who refer to him as “His Excellency.” He pushed for a partnership with Mr. White, who over the last two decades has turned the U.F.C. from a $2 million company into one worth more than $10 billion. Talks have been taking place for more than a year in the United States, Europe and Saudi Arabia.

Mr. al-Sheikh had suggested in interviews that he was planning a new boxing venture. And he has made no secret of his frustration at the way the sport has been run, with the best fighters rarely meeting in their prime. In November, he purchased Ring Magazine — the century-old bible of the sport — and vowed to re-establish its prominence.

Mr. al-Sheikh has also teamed up with the World Boxing Council, a sanctioning organization, to create the Boxing Grand Prix, a tournament for young boxers.

For TKO, which owns both the U.F.C. and World Wrestling Entertainment, the venture has little risk, given that the Saudis are footing the bill. “If we were to get involved in boxing, we would expect to do so in an organic way, not an M&A way,” said Mark Shapiro, TKO’s president, on an earnings call in November, referring to mergers and acquisitions.

He added, “So, i.e., we’re not writing a check.”

Should the deal be completed, TKO will earn management fees of close to $30 million a year. Saudi Arabia is expected to pay significantly more in hosting fees to the league than any other country, according to details of the plan reviewed by The New York Times. Two fights there will bring in more than $40 million in fees. Other bouts are planned for the United States and Europe, where the hosting fees will be far lower.

TKO has also been talking with other parties, including other Arab nations, about the boxing league, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.

Endeavor, TKO’s parent company, has at times had a strained relationship with Saudi Arabia, and this potential partnership suggests that it has largely been repaired. In 2019, after the killing of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Endeavor returned $400 million that the Saudi sovereign wealth fund had invested in the company.

For the Saudis, getting a partner like Mr. White would come at an opportune time. He joined the board of Meta this week, and has spoken at the last three Republican National Conventions. Mr. Trump regularly hosted U.F.C. events at his properties in the organization’s early years, and he has attended many fights. Mr. Trump and Mr. al-Rumayyan are also close, with the Saudi-owned LIV golf championship holding several of its events at Mr. Trump’s courses, including one scheduled for April in Florida.

Saudi officials have described sports and entertainment as major pillars of a strategy, known as Vision 2030, to pivot their economy away from its reliance on oil exports, and as a part of efforts to liberalize society. Critics have described those efforts differently, positioning them as a way of using sports to distract the focus from Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, a tool known as sportswashing.

What TKO would get is a partnership with the biggest sports investor in the world. Saudi Arabia has invested in teams, talent and events across a wide range of sports, most recently securing rights to the 2034 men’s soccer World Cup, the most-watched event on the planet.

The U.F.C.’s U.S. media rights agreement with ESPN expires this year, as does the network’s deal with Top Rank, a top boxing promoter. TKO could try to bundle the rights to its new boxing league with the U.F.C. rights to help shore up the fledgling boxing league.

But applying the U.F.C. playbook to boxing will be extremely difficult. Boxing is a much more heavily regulated sport than mixed martial arts, with the federal Muhammad Ali Act mandating a separation in boxing between the role of manager and promoter, and the public listing of purse figures.

Unlike U.F.C., the league would not include the most prominent boxers. And they may not think there is an upside to joining it. While the fractured nature of boxing means its earning potential isn’t maximized for promoters and managers, top boxers earn far more than top M.M.A. fighters.

In October, the U.F.C. settled an antitrust lawsuit filed by former fighters — who claimed that the company illegally suppressed fighters’ pay — for $375 million. Documents submitted as evidence in that suit showed that the U.F.C. paid less than 20 percent of its revenue to its fighters.

In boxing, those figures are reversed, with fighters combining to earn well over 50 percent of the revenue from any fight.

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

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

Israeli soldiers seized the three shortly after the airstrike, leaving it unclear whether they were alive or dead, said Mr. Asad. Israeli officials later informed their Palestinian counterparts that the three had been killed, he added.

The Palestinian Authority’s Civil Affairs branch, which handles coordination with Israel, announced on Wednesday evening that Israeli officials had handed over the bodies of the three cousins for funeral rites.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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