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Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado emerged from hiding on Saturday to appear at an anti-government rally in Caracas, despite a violent crackdown on dissent by the socialist government of Nicolás Maduro.

Machado, who had not been seen in public since Wednesday after Maduro and members of his inner circle publicly called for her jailing, waved a Venezuelan flag from atop a small lorry to the cheers of thousands of supporters.

“We have never been as strong as today, never,” Machado said. “The presence of every one of you here in the streets shows the world the magnitude of our strength and our determination to reach the end.”

Protests broke out in the South American country on Monday after Maduro claimed victory in a presidential election by a seven point margin over opposition candidate Edmundo González. The National Electoral Council, which is controlled by Maduro’s allies, has refused to publish a detailed breakdown of the results.

The opposition declared González as the real winner with 7.1mn votes compared to Maduro’s 3.2mn, and posted thousands of polling station receipts as evidence. The US on Thursday recognised González as the winner, a move followed by Ecuador, Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Panama. Maduro’s victory was recognised by key allies China, Russia, Iran and Cuba, among others.

González, a retired diplomat, stood as a surrogate of the charismatic Machado, who was banned from running in January, months after she won a primary in a landslide. The Carter Center, a US non-profit organisation and the only independent body in Venezuela to evaluate the election, said the vote “did not meet international standards of electoral integrity at any of its stages”.

Maduro has referred the election dispute to the supreme court, which is controlled by the government. On Friday González did not show up to a hearing in which all 10 candidates in the election were summoned.

On Saturday, supporters from poorer neighbourhoods and the middle classes turned out in the well-to-do Las Mercedes neighbourhood to see Machado, apparently unbent by a crackdown on sporadic protests that began in downtrodden neighbourhoods of the capital on Monday. 

Since Monday, at least 19 people have been killed according to rights group Provea, and Maduro has claimed that 2,000 people have been arrested. Machado wrote in US media on Thursday that she had gone into hiding amid fears of her imminent arrest. The opposition’s campaign offices were broken into and vandalised in the early hours of Friday morning.

“We are all scared, but what scares me more is continuing under this tyranny,” said Luis Guersi, a 43-year-old engineer at the rally on Saturday.

Colonia Pérez, 34, a street vendor and mother of three, said she had turned out “for the future of my children”.

Maduro, who has presided over an economic crisis, deepening repression, and the exodus of 7.7mn Venezuelans since succeeding the late populist Hugo Chávez in 2013, has framed the protests against his self-declared re-election as a Washington-backed “fascist” coup attempt.

“The extreme right means hatred, vengeance, foreign interventionism and war,” he told supporters and public sector workers at a rival rally in central Caracas on Saturday.

Earlier on Saturday morning, US assistant secretary of state Brian Nichols said cases of arbitrary arrest, vandalism of opposition officers and violence towards peaceful protesters will be referred to the UN Human Rights agency.

“Having seen the will of the Venezuelan people at the ballot box, Maduro and his representatives have resorted to repression,” Nichols wrote on X. “These acts are unacceptable and demonstrate Maduro’s reliance on fear to cling to power.”

At Machado’s rally, supporters said they would continue to demonstrate in support of González’s victory.

“We want a free Venezuela,” said Deysi Barrios, a publicist whose family has fled the country. “If we don’t rid ourselves of this dictatorship now, we never will.”

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Iran said Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed by a “short-range projectile” that was fired into the official residence where he was staying in Tehran, and vowed to “punish” Israel.

The country’s Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday that the assassination was “orchestrated and executed” by Israel and accused the “criminal” US of complicity in the strike by providing support for the Jewish state.

Haniyeh and his bodyguard died early on Wednesday morning, hours after he participated in the inauguration of Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian. Haniyeh, who lived in exile in Qatar but travelled regularly to Tehran, also met Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied carrying out the killing, and typically does not comment on its assassination attempts in the Islamic republic.

The attack on Haniyeh has stoked fears that the Middle East is at risk of sliding into a full-blown war.

It dealt a humiliating blow to the republic, which backs regional militants that have launched missiles and drones against Israel since Hamas’s October 7 attack triggered the war in Gaza.

The guards said an “appropriate” Iranian response to Haniyeh’s killing “will come at the time and place of our choosing”.

The day before Haniyeh’s death, Israel said it carried out an attack in Beirut that killed Fuad Shukr, the military commander of Hizbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant movement. Hizbollah has also promised retaliation for that assassination.

The guards said the investigation into Haniyeh’s assassination revealed that a short-range projectile, with a warhead weighing about 7kg, was used. It said in Iran’s first official account of the attack that the projectile caused a powerful explosion “from outside the area where the guests’ residence was located”.

The republic was certain to “avenge the blood” of Haniyeh and deliver a “severe punishment” to the “adventurous and terrorist Zionist regime”, the statement said.

Khamenei had previously said “we consider it our duty to avenge the blood of a revered guest” killed “on the territory of the Islamic republic”.

The assassinations of Haniyeh and Shukr have increased the risk of a co-ordinated response from the so-called axis of resistance, which in addition to Hizbollah and Hamas includes the Houthis in Yemen and Shia militias in Iraq and Syria.

Israel and Hizbollah have exchanged fire regularly since Hamas’s October 7 attack. But tensions rose sharply after a rocket strike killed 12 youngsters on a football pitch in the occupied Golan Heights last week, which Israel blamed on Hizbollah.

The US, which had pledged to defend Israel, has boosted its military presence by deploying warships and fighter jets to the Middle East in anticipation of an attack against its ally.

Haniyeh’s assassination on home territory is considered a security breach for Iran and has revived fears about enemy agents penetrating the country’s intelligence apparatus.

Hosseinali Haji Deligani, an Iranian lawmaker, said the possibility of “hired agents having played a role in Haniyeh’s assassination cannot be ruled out”.

The latest incident has raised the stakes in the stand-off between the Islamic republic and Israel. In April, after a decades-long shadow war, Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones against Israel, in a widely telegraphed attack in response to a deadly Israeli strike on its consulate building in Syria. Israel responded with a raid on a military base near the Iranian city of Isfahan, but tensions had eased since then.

Ismail Kosari, a member of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, insisted Tehran would respond more forcefully this time.

“Exacting revenge is a question of [defending] our honour and territory,” he said on Saturday. “Avenging Haniyeh’s blood will entail a heavier response.”

NPR is in Paris for the 2024 Summer Olympics. For more of our coverage from the games head to our latest updates.

PARIS — In 2021, when the gymnast Simone Biles first began to publicly perform the vault that now bears her name — the Biles II — her ability to land the incredibly difficult routine awed the world of gymnastics.

But soon after, Biles was robbed of her chance to perform it at the Tokyo Olympics when she was beset by a sudden and unexplainable loss of her ability to control her body through the air known as the “twisties.” The affliction forced her to withdraw from most of her events that summer, including the vault final.

On Saturday, the dream deferred finally became reality. In the Olympic vault final, the Biles II helped to win its namesake her third gold medal (and counting) of the Summer Games in Paris.

The routine was one of two vaults Biles performed in the event, in which final scores are calculated by taking the average of two different routines. The Biles II, the higher-scoring of the two, looked like this: Biles sprinted down the runway, then cartwheeled into a backward handspring onto the vaulting table, an approach called a Yurchenko. Then, she pushed off so high into the air that she was able to complete two full flips as she held out her flexed legs in a pike position.

The momentum she generates is so great that she rarely sticks the landing, more often taking a step or two as she did Saturday.

The vault, also known as the Yurchenko double pike, was officially named after Biles when she became the first gymnast to land it at an international competition in 2023.

In gymnastics, a final score is based both on the difficulty of the gymnast’s attempted routine and the quality of her execution. The difficulty of Biles’s vault is currently the highest in the women’s sport, worth 6.4 points — which helps to offset the fractions of a point lost due to an extra step.

Simone Biles after finishing her vaults during the the Olympic gymnastics women’s vault final on Saturday.

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On Saturday, her Biles II vault earned a 15.7 after a tenth of a point was deducted when she stepped one foot slightly out of bounds. Her second vault earned a score of 14.9, giving her a final score of 15.3 — a third of a point more than her closest competitor, Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade.

Andrade, widely considered the world’s second-best gymnast, had won gold at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 after Biles withdrew from the event, then bested Biles in vault at last year’s World Championships. Saturday’s silver medal is Andrade’s third medal of these Olympics, after she won silver in the individual all-around event and helped lead Brazil to a team bronze earlier in the week.

“I’ve never had an athlete that close, so it definitely put me on my toes,” Biles said Thursday. “It brought out the best athlete in myself, so I’m excited and proud to compete with her.”

Another American gymnast, Jade Carey, won the bronze medal with a final score of 14.466.

Biles has two events remaining in Paris, the balance beam and floor exercise finals. They represent an opportunity to match her historic medal total from the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, in which she won four golds and a bronze as a 19-year-old.