President Biden signed a $460 billion spending package on Saturday to avert a shutdown of crucial federal departments, even as lawmakers continue to wrestle over a funding blueprint for many other agencies more than halfway through the current fiscal year.

The president completed the legislation before leaving his home in Wilmington, Del., to fly to Atlanta for a campaign rally. It will extend funding through the remainder of the fiscal year ending September 30 for about half of the government, including the departments of Agriculture, Energy, Justice, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Veterans Affairs.

But the rest of the government, including the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, remained on life support in the short term, leaving the prospect that the money would run out by March 22 unless Congress and the president could agree on a plan. During his short term in office, Chairman Mike Johnson has made clear that he wants to avoid a shutdown, even to the point of relying on Democratic votes, but the road ahead remains difficult.

In a White House statement, Mr. Biden made no mention of the outstanding issues, simply expressing gratitude to eight congressional leaders for defusing the crisis during the first half of the administration. “Thank you,” he wrote, crediting the eight “for their leadership.”

The $460 billion legislation, which included six of the 12 annual spending bills, passed 339-85 in the House of Representatives on Wednesday and 75-22 in the Senate on Friday, just in time to meet the midnight deadline. when the financing would expire. Mr. Biden ordered a halt to preparations for a partial shutdown until he could sign the bill on Saturday.

The measure will keep funding for affected agencies largely at the level of the debt limit and spending deal negotiated by Mr. Biden and Mr. Johnson’s predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, last year, keeping domestic spending relatively flat outside of programs of certain veterans.

Although Republicans managed to include some relatively modest policy provisions in the package, their most polarizing demands were rejected. Among the policies Republicans left out of the spending package was a measure to cut funding for a new Food and Drug Administration rule that allowed the abortion drug mifepristone to be distributed through the mail and in stores.

Congress now has 13 days to complete the six remaining spending bills unless it decides to give itself more time. A challenge for Mr Johnson, who is under enormous pressure from hardliners at his conference to press ahead with deeper cuts to domestic spending. programs, even though he has an extremely slim majority.

European leaders were expected to meet in Paris on Monday in an effort to show unity and determination in their support for Ukraine, as the embattled country faces a dire situation on the battlefield against Russia and in Washington, where Republicans in Congress are seeking much-needed financial block help. .

The meeting, convened by President Emmanuel Macron of France, is expected to include about twenty heads of state and top officials, including from Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine will attend the evening meeting by video conference.

“We are at a critical moment,” Macron said on Saturday during a visit to a major agricultural fair in Paris, adding that the meeting would “strengthen our position” and give Ukraine more “visibility” for the coming months.

“Russia cannot win in Ukraine,” he added.

A senior French presidency official, speaking on condition of anonymity, in line with French government practice, said the meeting was not expected to end with concrete announcements of new military aid.

Instead, the official said it was aimed at boosting support for Ukraine, better coordinating aid and sending a message to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that Europe was determined to see him fail.

There are growing concerns in Europe that little has been done so far to thwart Mr Putin. Russia captured the eastern city of Avdiivka, once a Ukrainian stronghold, about a week ago in its biggest battlefield victory in months.

Since then, the country has continued attacks along its 600-mile (1,000 km) front line, seizing small villages in the east and threatening to retake land in the south that was heavily captured by Ukraine during the summer counter-offensive.

Mr. Zelenskiy said on Sunday that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion began two years ago, acknowledging for the first time a concrete figure for Ukraine’s toll in the war. But his figure is much lower than US estimates, which put the death toll at around 70,000.

Military experts and Ukrainian officials say Ukrainian forces are hampered by shortages of ammunition and weapons, largely due to declining Western military aid, and that the situation will worsen if Ukraine does not receive more support soon.

“The coming months will be difficult for us,” Mr. Zelensky said at a news conference in Kiev on Sunday, noting that political wrangling in Congress, where a $60 billion aid package for Ukraine has stalled, has affected the position of undermined his country. war effort.

President Biden will meet with congressional leaders on Tuesday to try to unblock emergency aid to Ukraine, the White House said.

Referring to US lawmakers, Mr Zelensky said: “They know we need support within a month.” He praised Europe’s efforts to help fill the void left by the United States, saying the continent “has shown its ability to be a leader.”

Aid pledges from European Union countries and institutions total nearly $150 billion, more than twice the amount pledged by the United States, the report said. Kiel Institute for the World Economya research organization.

European leaders have shown increasing willingness to support Ukraine’s fight against Russia as the war rages on and additional U.S. aid is in doubt.

The prime ministers of Belgium, Denmark and Italy, as well as the head of the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, recently visited Ukraine to mark the second anniversary of the war and to express their continued support.

Denmark and Italy have completed bilateral security deals with Ukraine, bringing to five the number of European countries that have signed such agreements with Kiev in an effort to deter further Russian aggression.

Yet it is unclear to what extent Europe can replace the United States as a guarantor of Ukraine’s ability to fight. The Kiel Institute said European Union members and institutions had so far allocated only half of the $150 billion pledged.

Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s defense minister, said on Sunday that every time aid did not arrive on time, “we lose people, we lose areas.”

Mr Zelenskiy said on Sunday that four brigades had not taken part in Ukraine’s summer counter-offensive because the army had not received the necessary equipment.

“Can you imagine how many guys would have fought but couldn’t?” he asked. “The ones who had to wait for the equipment they never got?”

Standing on the grand staircase of Lynda and Stewart Resnick’s lavish Beverly Hills mansion at a party last fall — where Diane Keaton, Bob Iger and Brian Grazer were among the celebrities chatting over crudités and Sazerac cocktails — the author took Walter Isaacson takes a moment to thank his hosts.

Not only did the Resnicks throw the party to celebrate his new biography of Elon Musk, they were also major supporters of his former professional home, the Aspen Institute, donating $36 million to the think tank over the years.

Isaacson wasn’t the only one in the room who had reason to be grateful. Walking around the house, where works by Picasso, Fragonard and Boucher line the walls, were museum directors Michael Govan of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (which has received $90 million from the Resnicks) and Ann Philbin of the Hammer ($30 million) and Michael Milken, the former king of junk bonds who later founded a think tank, the Milken Institute ($25 million).

Overall, the Resnicks — whose Wonderful Company business empire includes Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice, Wonderful Pistachios, Fiji Water, Halos tangerines and Teleflora, the flower delivery service — have donated $1.9 billion of their estimated $13 billion fortune to academic institutions and climate change initiatives. , cultural organizations and programs in California’s Central Valley. Their gifts landed them on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual list of the 50 largest donors three times.

“You really have to see them as one of the biggest proponents of investing in LA’s public institutions,” said Mr. Govan, director of LACMA.

Mrs. Resnick, 81, the driving force behind the couple’s charitable efforts, is focused on giving back in the Central Valley — especially Lost Hills, where one in two households contains a Wonderful Company employee.

Over the past decade, the Resnicks have invested about $580 million in Lost Hills and Delano, another Central Valley city, and created charter schools that electives robotics, yoga and mariachi; health, wellness and fitness centers; affordable housing; a park; and a new pedestrian bridge over Highway 46.

“It’s the most satisfying of anything I’ve ever done in my life,” Ms. Resnick said in a recent interview at her home. “You meet these young people. You see them going through school. You see them coming back to the valley, which was my dream. Some of them go into politics. Many of them have come back to work with us in middle management jobs, and not in the sector like their parents.”

But at a time when philanthropists are under increasing scrutiny — museums have distanced themselves from the Sackler family over their role in the opioid crisis, Warren Kanders stepped down as vice chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art after protests over the sale of tears through his company. gas, and climate activists have protested museum donors and board members – the Resnicks have discovered they are no exception.

They have come under scrutiny for their use of one of California’s often scarce resources: water. A 2016 investigation in Mother Jones found that the Resnicks’ farms were “thoughts that they use more of the state’s water than any other family, farm or business,‘ and their activities were criticized the following year in the documentary ‘Water & Power: A California Heist’.

Last fall, a few activists protested against the Resnicks at both LACMAwhich are named Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion in recognition of a $45 million giftAnd the hammer, which named its Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center in honor of the couple’s $30 million gift. One of the protesters, Yasha Levine, who has been working on a documentary called “Pistachio Wars,” carried a sign that read “Hamer celebrates climate criminals.”

“They have made a lot of improvements, but it is not all glitter and gold,” said Rosanna Esparza, an activist from Kern County. pronounced against the Resnicks over their water use, said in an interview.

In response to such criticism, Ms. Resnick said, “We have been attacked over water for generations. We don’t get anyone’s water from the tap. I have nothing to do with the municipal water supply.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said this despite criticism of their farming practices, and years of lawsuits that have taken place to date failed to cancel the water agreements they benefit from, that the Resnicks had simply made the most of a good business deal.

“These are the rules of the road and the rules that we put in place, and they are parroting them,” Mr. Newsom said. “If we are going to point fingers, as policymakers we also need to think about the system we have created.”

The Resnicks’ charitable efforts, he added, were authentic, consistent and impactful. “I know a lot of fancy rich people,” said Mr. Newsom, to whom the Resnicks, along with other Democratic candidates, have given generously. “Many of them use their philanthropy. Many of them are looking for a big name on the building. This is something different. They are the real deal.”

On a recent afternoon in the Central Valley, Naomi Cruz stood in the classroom at Wonderful College Prep Academy, where she teaches high school Spanish, years after graduating from the school herself in 2018. Manpreet Kaur – who won a Wonderful Fellowship that helped her complete her degree – is now Wonderful’s corporate social responsibility program manager and was elected to the Bakersfield City Council last year. Andy Anzaldo, the grandson of an undocumented farm worker, started working at Wonderful Company’s pistachio factory straight out of college and is now Chief Operating Officer for Corporate Social Responsibility.

“One day there will be no more Stewart and Lynda Resnick. So what’s going to happen is happening to this community?” Anzaldo said, adding that the company therefore wants to build a sustainable model that will “last for hundreds of years.”.”

The Wonderful Company said the impact is measurable: the rate of prediabetes among Central Valley employees has dropped, more than 90 percent of Delano students graduate each year and about 70 percent go on to a four-year college. (The Resnicks award more than 300 scholarships to graduating seniors each year.)

The environment was also among the Resnicks’ priorities. In 2019 they gave $750 million to Caltech for research on climate change and sustainability, the second-largest gift to an American university at the time, behind Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion donation to Johns Hopkins. A new Resnick Sustainability Center will open at Caltech next fall.

“If you can’t solve climate change and sustainability, what’s the point of curing cancer?” Mr. Resnick said. “This is a long-term problem.”

The couple has donated more than $110 million to other universities over the past five years and is now announcing a $20 million gift to California Polytechnic State University to establish a career services hub for first-generation college students.

In Los Angeles, a city without a long tradition of philanthropy, the Resnicks have set the example of major giving and served as a glamorous nexus of Hollywood, art and politics. They are close to Nancy Pelosi, who hosted Norman Lear’s 100th birthday party (attended by Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda, among others) and recently co-hosted a Los Angeles fundraiser with Steven Spielberg, Shonda Rhimes and others for President Biden.

“The Resnicks have set a great example,” said the Hammer’s Ms. Philbin, who plans to resign in November. “We didn’t ask them directly for our building campaign, but Lynda reached out and offered the largest gift we have ever received.”

And while Mr. Govan worried that when the economy collapsed in 2008, the Resnicks might abandon their naming rights for LACMA’s new pavilion, which had just begun construction, he said Ms. Resnick told him that support now more than ever necessary. .”

Raised in Philadelphia – where she regularly visited the Philadelphia Museum – and Los Angeles, Ms. Resnick founded her own advertising agency at age 19. (She helped Daniel Ellsberg copy the Pentagon Papers onto her advertising agency’s Xerox machine.)

In the years since, she has applied her market research approach to charities like those in the Central Valley, where she heard from focus groups and questionnaires that residents feared for their children’s futures.

“You can’t come in and build a school and walk away, you can’t come in and build a hospital and walk away,” Ms. Resnick said. ‘If you are going to help, you have to go and stay. You have to stay, because staying is the most important thing. And so we stayed.”

Over many years of art collecting – Mrs. Resnick is a life trustee at LACMA and a trustee emeritus at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – the couple has amassed a treasure trove of paintings, sculpture and decorative arts from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Art fills their offices and their homes in Beverly Hills and Aspen.

Since 1993 they have had their own full-time curator, Bernard Jazzar, who previously worked at the Getty Museum.

Ultimately, their artwork will go to public institutions such as LACMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Ms. Resnick said. To this end, she recently allowed museum directors to visit and express their preferences.

“I’m not building my own museum,” she said. “This all goes to museums. I think you borrow it while you’re alive, and then you give it back to the people when you’re done.”

And then there were two.

With Democrat Tom Suozzi's victory in a special House election in New York on Tuesday, the shrinking Republican majority in the House of Representatives has shrunk even further, leaving the Republican Party with only two deviations from the party line if all members are present .

That gives them virtually no buffer to deal with the inevitable absences caused by illness, travel delays, weddings, funerals and unforeseen events that could keep Republicans away from the House for votes. It comes as Congress faces a slew of issues, including early March deadlines for funding the government and a pending national security spending bill to send aid to Ukraine, Israel and other U.S. allies.

It also gives each individual Republican in the House of Representatives even more influence over Speaker Mike Johnson, who is already struggling to steer his uncontrollable majority.

“I would be constantly on the defensive, I would try to avoid defeats, and I would be very, very careful,” former chairman Newt Gingrich said in an interview.

The dangers of the slim margin were evident Tuesday night, even before Suozzi won the Long Island seat previously held by George Santos, the Republican lawmaker who was expelled from the House of Representatives in December.

In their second attempt to oust Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas, Republicans succeeded by just one vote after three of their members broke with the party to oppose it. If either of the two absent Democrats had shown up, the impeachment that Republicans had been promising their voters for more than a year would have failed again. (The two Democratic absentees were Rep. Judy Chu of California, who said she was isolating after testing positive for the coronavirus, and Rep. Lois Frankel of Florida, who was grounded due to a delayed flight.)

“That impeachment resolution cannot be passed now,” said Aaron Fritschner, a longtime adviser to Representative Don Beyer, Democrat of Virginia, who said the reversal of Mr. Suozzi's seat would “impair the ability of both Republicans to House of Representatives in November if it jeopardizes their ability to govern. until then.”

“Under Republican control, the House of Representatives has seen historic amounts of chaos and paralysis, and it's about to get a little crazier,” Mr. Fritschner added.

After Mr. Suozzi is sworn in, Republicans will hold 219 seats to Democrats' 213, three fewer than when they won a narrow majority in November 2022, due to a combination of coincidence, scandals, health concerns and political unrest.

On Wednesday, watching their majority shrink even further, some Republicans blasted their colleagues' decision to expel Mr. Santos, who served as a reliable Republican voice in Congress despite being a fabulist, a figure of national mockery and the subject of a 23-count federal indictment.

Rep. Byron Donalds, Republican of Florida, told CNN that Mr. Santos had not yet been found guilty of any crimes when he was deported and that “it was stupid to prejudge that to score political points.”

The minuscule majority will be Chairman Mike Johnson's reality in the coming year. In April, Democrats will likely fill a safe seat occupied by Rep. Brian Higgins, Democrat of New York, who left Congress earlier this month to become president of the Shea Performing Arts Center. That seat won't change the margin of control, but it will leave even less room for Republican absentees.

There will be some modest relief for Republicans in late spring and early summer, when they are likely to fill two safe seats vacated by Representative Bill Johnson, the Ohio Republican who left Congress to become president of Youngstown State University. become; and former Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who resigned from his California seat late last year after being removed from the speakership.

But with a Republican conference more often divided against itself than as a united front, it will remain difficult for Mr. Johnson to pass bills that rely strictly on votes from his own party.

Mr. Gingrich said the only way forward for Mr. Johnson was to vastly lower expectations of what Republicans in the House of Representatives could achieve.

“Johnson needs to sell the country that having Republicans in the House of Representatives who use the investigative tool and block those bad ideas is the only thing you can get until the election,” he said. “And then we will see if we have a better future. He should not exhaust himself doing things he cannot do.”

Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota, said the Republican Party had made a bad situation worse because of deep internal divisions.

“At the beginning of this Congress, you might have imagined that the tight margins would push Republicans to unite,” Mr. Weber said. Instead, he said, the slim majority had encouraged the hard right to stage internal uprisings to push its own agenda, rather than lining up to help the party put up a united front against President Biden and the Democrats.

Mr. Johnson, like Mr. McCarthy before him, has responded by finding ways to sidestep right-wing rebels and work with Democrats to pass critical measures. Mr Johnson recently did this by relying on a procedural motion that allows him to temporarily suspend House rules and speed up legislation, but requires a two-thirds majority.

Mr Johnson has recognized the limiting reality of wielding such a vulnerable majority.

“We deal with the numbers we have,” he said on CBS's “Face the Nation.”

But as his first failed attempt to oust Mr. Mayorkas humiliatingly demonstrated, with inevitable absences, he won't always know what numbers he's up against.

Republican leaders in the House of Representatives have stepped up efforts to monitor the whereabouts of their members, but that can sometimes seem like herding cats. Lawmakers often travel without informing leaders of their plans, despite the obligation to provide notice whenever possible. Sometimes a leader only learns where an MP is when he or she posts a video or photo on social media.

“Illnesses, funerals, weddings – all these things need to be taken into account in a way that they weren't before,” Mr Weber said. “Members are not used to always being accountable for where they are. The House of Representatives is primarily a group of individual entrepreneurs. They don't like having to tell someone where they will be and when they will be there.

For major votes, members said, it is now clear that everyone will be there unless they have said they cannot be there. On Tuesday, for example, Rep. Brian Mast, Republican of Florida, informed leaders that his flight was delayed and that he would not vote.

It was uncomfortably close for Republicans.

“Fortunately, despite mechanical failures on my flight, we still had enough votes to depose him tonight,” Mr. Mast posted on social media after the vote against Mr. Mayorkas.

The race was dominated by an international migrant crisis and attracted $15 million in outside spending. But Tuesday's special election for the House of Representatives to replace George Santos in New York could come down to the most local of problems: an ill-timed snowstorm on Election Day.

Forecasters called for a half-foot or more of snow to blanket parts of Queens and Long Island, much of which would fall during key voting hours. Local leaders warned motorists to stay off the roads.

The winter mess left both parties scrambling to rewrite last-minute campaign plans and advanced modeling to understand how the storm could affect turnout. But with the outcome expected to be extraordinarily close, the most useful tools were suddenly old-fashioned shovels and snow plows — which wary Democrats feared would be used by Nassau County Republicans to their constituents' advantage.

“For partisans on both sides who believe in divine intervention, the weather will decide whether God is a Democrat or a Republican,” joked Steve Israel, a former Democratic congressman from the district, before the flakes began to fall.

“And whether he votes in a special election,” he added.

Democrats have pinned enormous hopes on the district, an affluent and largely suburban area that voted for President Biden by eight points in 2020 before flipping to Santos and Republicans two years later.

The party has outspent Republicans by more than two to one and has nominated a 30-year political veteran, Tom Suozzi. A former congressman who himself held the seat, Mr. Suozzi vowed to restore normalcy to the district after the expulsion of Mr. Santos, a serial liar who faced 23 federal felonies.

But Suozzi's campaign has faced intense pushback from suburban voters who soured on Mr. Biden and especially his handling of the migrant crisis at the border and in New York City.

His opponent, Mazi Pilip, a Republican lawmaker, has run a relatively low-key campaign, attacking Suozzi as a supporter of open borders while defending himself against attacks from Democrats who say she is a threat to abortion rights.

Democrats entered Election Day with a theoretical advantage based on early and absentee voting, a potentially dangerous position for Republicans if turnout plummets on Tuesday.

About 80,000 people had already cast ballots through Sunday, when the early voting period ended, a robust turnout for an off-cycle election. About 11,000 more registered Democrats cast ballots than registered Republicans, according to Democratic leaders. Mr Suozzi's advantage could be smaller, depending on how many voters break with their party and the distribution of independent votes.

“I'd rather be us than them,” said Democratic Party Chairman Jay Jacobs.

But many Republican voters still prefer to vote on Election Day, and their party is used to closing a gap. The party has won virtually every major election on Long Island since 2021, thanks in part to its turnout operation.

Peter T. King, a former Republican congressman, admitted that the snow could cost his party a few percentage points. Still, he predicted that the newly revived Republican machine in Nassau County was up to the task.

Mr King said party committee members were already making arrangements to get elderly people in need of help to the polls. Mr. Suozzi's campaign made a similar offer: “Do you need a ride to the polls?,” he said. wrote on Xwith a link to a self-made taxi service.

“It's fucking crazy, we haven't had a real snowstorm in a long time,” he said Monday. “This one seems to just list voting hours!”

Forecasts late Monday suggested the heaviest snow would fall on Long Island's north shore, with smaller amounts further south in communities like Massapequa, which tend to vote heavily Republican.

Because this is Long Island, a vast suburban area where politics and public works have a history of intermingling, Democrats were suspicious that Republicans who control Nassau County government and each of the three townships would selectively clear the way for their voters.

“Of course we're concerned about where they're plowing the roads,” Mr. Jacobs said.

Delia DeRiggi-Whitton, the Democratic minority leader of the Nassau County Legislature, took it upon herself Monday to write letters warning Bruce Blakeman, the county's Republican executive, and others not to let county employees loose on ” snow days” so they could help. the campaign effort.

Mr. Blakeman responded that he was “personally offended” that Democrats would question the integrity of his administration and vowed to clean up the streets with justice.

“I have told everyone involved directly that no community should be favored and that they should do their work according to their usual practices, except starting earlier,” Mr. Blakeman wrote.

Ellen Jan reporting contributed.

Zvi Zamir, who as director of Israel's Mossad spy agency led a violent campaign to crush Palestinian terrorism after 11 Israelis were killed at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich – and who a year later warned his government that Egypt and Syria was about to start the Yom Kippur War, but it was not taken seriously – died on January 2. He was 98.

His death was announced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office. The announcement did not say where he died.

“Zamir led a determined and initiative-driven approach in the State of Israel's fight against Palestinian terrorism, which was going from strength to strength at that time.” Netanyahu's office said in a statement.

Terrorism was an increasing concern for Israel when Mr. Zamir was appointed director of the Mossad in 1968. No incident expressed this threat more than the Palestinian terrorist group Black September's attack on the Israeli delegation in its dormitory in the Olympic Village in Munich on September 1, 2011. 5, 1972.

Two Israelis were killed and nine taken hostage during a daylong siege.

Prime Minister Golda Meir sent Mr Zamir to Munich. But he had to watch helplessly as inexperienced snipers moved into position for a rescue operation, which was postponed when the West German authorities gave in to the terrorists' demands: they provided helicopters to transport them and the hostages to the military airfield of Fürstenfeldbruck, and then, probably to Cairo.

“Then I saw a scene that I will never forget for the rest of my life,” said Mr. Zamir said in the 2017 documentary series “Mossad: Secret Service of Israel.” “With their hands and feet tied together, the athletes trudged past me. Next to them the Arabs. A deathly silence.”

Later, at the airport, where the Germans planned to ambush the terrorists, Mr. Zamir next to one of the snipers. “They used old rifles without telescopic sights,” he recalled in the documentary. “Without anything. It broke my heart.”

In the ensuing firefight, all hostages and five of the eight terrorists were killed. The three surviving terrorists were captured but released a few weeks later after Palestinian guerrillas hijacked a Lufthansa flight with twenty passengers and crew on board.

Until Munich, Mr. Zamir said, Ms. Meir had been reluctant to approve plans to kill Palestinian agents in Europe because she believed — wrongly — that European governments would take effective action against them.

“In some of my conversations with Golda,” Mr. Zamir told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2006 “she expressed her concern that our people could be involved in illegal actions on European soil. It was indeed unavoidable, but illegal.”

But after the Israelis were killed, Ms. Meir put Mr. Zamir in charge of a campaign, called Operation Wrath of God, to destroy the Palestinian terror network that could easily operate from Europe.

In that operation, Israeli agents have killed a number of terrorists over at least a decade, including the mastermind of the Munich attack, Ali Hassan Salameh, who was killed in a bombing in Beirut in 1979, five years after Mr. Zamir left Mossad. A previous attempt to kill Mr Salameh ended in an embarrassing mistake: the murder of a waiter in Norway.

Mr. Zamir said revenge for the Munich killings was not Mossad's motive.

“What we did was concretely prevent terrorism in the future,” he told Haaretz. “We took action against those who thought they would continue to commit acts of terror.

“I am not saying that those involved in Munich were not put to death,” he continued. 'They certainly deserved to die. But we weren't dealing with the past; we focused on the future.”

Zvicka Zarzevsky was born on March 3, 1925 in Lodz, Poland, and emigrated as an infant with his family to what was then known as British Mandatory Palestine. His father drove a horse-drawn wagon for an electric company. According to one account, he changed his surname at the request of a teacher who Zarzevsky could not pronounce.

He began his military career as a teenager with the Palmach, a Jewish underground defense force, and later served as a battalion commander during Israel's war of independence. He rose to the rank of major general within the Israeli army and headed the southern command of the armed forces, which defends the country's largest region.

He also served as IDF attaché in London before being appointed leader of the Mossad by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol in 1968.

Mr. Zamir raised the alarm twice about an impending attack in 1973 by Egypt and Syria, thanks to critical information provided by a high-level informant: Ashraf Marwan, a disgruntled son-in-law of President Gamal Abdel Nassar of Egypt, who had been conducting high-level provides intelligence to the Mossad.

“Zamir was extremely effective,” Howard Blum, the author of “The Eve of Destruction: The Untold Story of the Yom Kippur War” (2003), said in a telephone interview. “He led an agent – ​​​​with a handler – as we would lead an agent in the Kremlin. It was a coup.”

Uri Bar-Joseph, the author of a book about Mr. Marwan, “The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel,” told The Weekly Standard in 2016 that Mr. Zamir had seen Mr. Marwan as “the best source we ever had'. had.”

In April 1973, Mr. Marwan sent an urgent message to his handler with the code word for impending war, “radish,” Mr. Blum wrote in The New York Times in 2007. Mr Zamir left Tel Aviv to meet Mr Marwan at a safe house in London.

The attack, Mr. Marwan told Mr. Zamir, would begin on May 15. Israel responded by calling up tens of thousands of reservists and sending brigades to the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights in the north.

But the attack never came.

On October 5, Mr Marwan sent another message and Mr Zamir returned to London. He called his bureau chief in Israel to relay what Mr. Marwan had told him: the attack would take place at sunset on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. The agency head conveyed the warning to Ms. Meir's aides and Moshe Dayan, the defense minister.

But the warning was not fully heeded.

At an Israeli Cabinet meeting on the morning of Oct. 6, Mr. Blum reported that Mr. Dayan told Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff David Elazar: “You don't mobilize an entire army based on reports from Zvicka. .”

The alarm led to a partial mobilization of the IDF that failed to alleviate heavy Israeli losses early in the war, which started around 2 p.m. and not at sunset. According to a historical census by the Jewish Agency for Israel, 177 Israeli tanks faced 1,400 Syrian tanks on the Golan Heights, and Egyptian troops easily crossed the Suez Canal.

Israel eventually turned the tide – with weapons and other military assistance from the United States – and had the upper hand by the end of that month. Yet it was known for early intelligence failures and the uncertainty caused by near losses.

On October 7, 2023, almost exactly 50 years after the start of the Yom Kippur War, Hamas and other Gaza-based militant groups crossed the border into Israel – surprising Netanyahu's unprepared government – ​​and killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis. Israel has retaliated by vowing to destroy Hamas in a war that has so far killed about 23,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians.

At Mr. Zamir's funeral, David Barnea, the current Mossad director, said the spy agency “must hold accountable the killers who invaded the Gaza border area on October 7 — the planners and those who sent them.”

He added: “Zvicka's spirit will accompany us in this mission.”

Mr. Zamir left Mossad in 1974. He became general manager of a construction and civil engineering company and later served as chairman of the Institute for Petroleum and Geophysics Research and the Israel Petroleum and Energy Institute.

Information about survivors was not immediately available.

The Mossad's post-Munich operation was the subject of the 2005 film “Munich,” directed by Steven Spielberg. Mr. Zamir, who was played by Ami Weinberg, hated it, telling Haaretz that it was a “cowboy movie” that deserved “libel.”

“The 'sages' behind the film do not explain the blow, the shock that Munich has inflicted on all our beliefs,” he said. “Those things were pushed out of the film to make room for operational depictions based on the director's fertile imagination.”