Eliana Passentin delights in her house, which sits nearly 3,000 feet above sea level in a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, with a view from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean coast. The dining room looks out over ancient Shiloh, the Israelites’ first capital in ancient times.

But Ms. Passentin would feel even better if the area was annexed by Israel.

Some of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s staffing choices have raised hopes among settlers that that could happen. Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s contentious choice for defense secretary, went to ancient Shiloh for an episode of his “Battle in the Holy Land” series on Fox Nation. Mike Huckabee, Mr. Trump’s pick as the next ambassador to Jerusalem, has visited several times over the years and has argued that all of the West Bank belongs to Israel.

Nearly half a million settlers and roughly 2.7 million Palestinians live in the West Bank. The Palestinians, and much of the world, have long envisioned the territory as part of a future independent Palestinian state, alongside Israel, and consider the Jewish settlements to be illegal. After the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel from Gaza, and with the prospect of a more sympathetic administration in Washington, settler leaders say they are confident that a Palestinian state is off the agenda.

They also hope that Israel will extend its sovereignty over parts, or all, of the territory through annexation — a step it has formally avoided since capturing the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war amid opposition from much of the world.

“We want to live our lives in Israel,” Ms. Passentin said, adding, “I believe the new administration will support whatever Israel decides.”

The West Bank has grown increasingly volatile. Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians and their property have risen sharply, while Israel has carried out a series of deadly raids and drone strikes targeting armed Palestinian militants that have chewed up streets and left many Palestinian civilians in fear.

Nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the beginning of 2023, according to the United Nations. The Israeli authorities say that most were armed fighters, but at least some were uninvolved civilians. About 50 Israelis were killed by Palestinian assailants in the West Bank during the same period, 18 of them members of the security forces, according to U.N. data. Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, said it had thwarted more than a thousand attacks in 2024, including hundreds of shooting attacks.

On Monday, gunmen shot at a civilian bus and cars passing the Palestinian village of Al-Funduq in the northern West Bank, killing at least three Israelis — a police investigator and two women from a nearby settlement — in what the Israeli authorities described as a terrorist attack.

Some settlers express a wariness of Mr. Trump born of experience. He has not articulated clear plans for the region, other than a vague aim of bringing peace. But they nonetheless believe that the new administration will go along with the wishes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — the most right-wing in Israel’s history.

“Trump’s team was here, they saw the reality, and for me, that’s a total relief,” said Yisrael Ganz, the head of the Binyamin Regional Council, which governs the settlements around ancient Shiloh, including the adjacent settlement of Shilo. He is also the chairman of the umbrella council representing the rest of the settlements.

Mr. Ganz recently took Doug Burgum, Mr. Trump’s nominee for interior secretary, on a tour in the area. “I see the people he chose,” Mr. Ganz said of the president-elect.

Support for a two-state solution has been waning for years among Israel’s Jewish majority, and since the Oct. 7 attack, many Israelis fear that a Palestinian state would endanger their country. A recent survey found that nearly two-thirds of Jewish Israelis think Palestinians have no right to a state of their own.

But in his public statements, Mr. Ganz has avoided explicitly telling Mr. Trump what to do. To sound less provocative, instead of sovereignty, he uses vaguer terms like “changing the reality” in Judea and Samaria, the biblical names for the West Bank, which the Israeli government considers disputed, not occupied, territory.

During his first term, Mr. Trump showered Israel with diplomatic gifts, including moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv and recognizing the contested city as Israel’s capital. Mike Pompeo, then secretary of state, reversed four decades of U.S. policy by stating that settlements did not violate international law. (Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken returned to the traditional U.S. position in 2024, saying the American government considers settlements to be “inconsistent with international law,” in line with most countries.)

Mr. Trump’s administration also floated a peace plan that strongly favored Israel, discarding the longtime goal of granting the Palestinians a viable state with its capital in Jerusalem.

The proposal, which Mr. Trump called the “deal of the century,” called for Israeli annexation of about 30 percent of the West Bank, including its current settlements, and a disjointed Palestinian state with limited sovereignty. It was immediately rejected by Palestinian leaders and many settlers, who preferred continued ambiguity over what they saw as a patchwork of Israeli and Palestinian territory that would leave many settlements as isolated enclaves.

Adding to the settlers’ wariness, the idea of Israeli annexation was abruptly dumped by both Mr. Trump and Israel’s leaders in favor of forging diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, a process known as the Abraham Accords. The Trump administration is expected to try to expand the accords to include Saudi Arabia, which would most likely require some kind of Israeli acceptance of a pathway to Palestinian statehood.

The settlers are far from homogenous. They include secular, middle-class Israelis seeking affordable housing as well as religious ideologues who believe settling the land is part of a Messianic plan ordained by God.

But in the hills around Shilo and the neighboring settlement of Eli in the central West Bank, the mission of Jewish settlement expansion is clear. Alongside official government-approved settlements, outposts have been built in recent decades without official permits. Some have been retroactively authorized by Israel and have come to resemble the more established neighborhoods.

Ms. Passentin, a mother of eight, came to Israel as a child from San Francisco. She and her husband, David, lived for 10 years in a trailer, then in a tent, helping to establish outposts, before settling in Hayovel, a satellite of Eli, parts of which are still unauthorized after years of court battles over the ownership and status of the land.

As the Binyamin Council’s international relations director, she has accompanied some of Mr. Trump’s close circle on tours and hosted Mr. Hegseth in her home.

One immediate request of the Trump administration from settler leaders is to cancel sanctions imposed by the Biden administration on more than 30 individuals and organizations accused of violence against Palestinians and destruction or seizure of Palestinian property.

Settler leaders like Mr. Ganz say they do not condone the violence, some of which is directed at Israeli forces who come to remove illegal settlement structures. But they say that it is a police matter and that it is a fraction of the anti-settler violence perpetrated by Palestinians.

For all of the enthusiasm in settler circles surrounding Mr. Trump’s election, expectations of what he will actually do once in office are tempered.

Citing an adage that marriage is often better the second time around, Aaron Katsof, a winemaker in Esh Kodesh, a hilltop outpost perched above Shilo, between the Palestinian villages of Qusra and Duma, said of a second Trump term: “You don’t come with the lovey-dovey infatuation of high school sweethearts. But you come with a lot more experience and maturity.” Esh Kodesh still lacks Israeli government authorization and permits for permanent housing.

Rivka Amar, 19, who is nine months pregnant, moved in the fall to Alei Ayin, a tiny outpost between Esh Kodesh and Qusra. She and her husband live in a lone quick-build home there, accompanied only by some young men who sleep in a tent, in what was open land.

Ms. Amar had been lunching at the Merlot Cafe in Shilo with her friend Rina Kohen, 18, who lives on a settler farm in the northern West Bank with her brother and 150 head of cattle. The idea, she said, was for a few settlers to control as much land as possible, to keep territory away from Palestinians.

“If I’m not there, my enemy will be there,” Ms. Amar said.

But, she said, she keeps her focus on the tasks at the hand, not on political shifts in Israel or the United States.

“I don’t wake up in the morning thinking of Biden or Trump,” she said, “but of where to graze the goats.”

A fresh injection of about 150 foreign officers arrived in Haiti this weekend to bolster an international security force charged with taking on the powerful and well-armed gangs that have inflicted so much misery on the country for months.

But if the past is any guide this latest infusion is unlikely to make much of a difference.

Back-to-back massacres that killed more than 300 people, followed by a Christmas Eve assault on Haiti’s largest public hospital have underscored the Haitian government’s increasing lack of control over the nation’s deepening crisis.

A news conference to announce the reopening of a public hospital that had been closed for nine months because of gang violence came under another gang attack, killing two reporters and a police officer.

More than two dozen journalists caught in the ambush were trapped for two hours triaging seven wounded colleagues before they were rescued. They ripped their own clothing to fashion tourniquets and used tampons to stanch the bleeding because, witnesses said, the few doctors at the hospital ran for their lives. Reporters escaped by climbing a rear wall.

“There was blood all over the floor and on our clothes,” said Jephte Bazil, a reporter with an online news outlet, Machann Zen Haïti, adding that the hospital had nothing “available to treat the victims.”

The hospital shooting followed two massacres in separate parts of the country that killed more than 350 people and have shined a harsh spotlight on the failures and shortcomings of local authorities and an international security force deployed to protect innocent civilians.

One of the massacres unfolded last month in an impoverished, sprawling, gang-controlled Port-au-Prince neighborhood where a lack of any police presence meant that for three days older people were dismembered and thrown to the sea without the authorities finding out. At least 207 people were killed between Dec. 6 and Dec. 11, according to the United Nations.

At about the same time, another three-day killing spree took place 70 miles north in Petite Rivière. Community leaders say 150 people were killed as gang members and vigilante groups attacked one another.

The violence is part of a relentless string of bloodshed that has befallen Haiti in the last two months, exposing the fragility of its interim government, raising concerns about the viability of a U.S.-brokered security mission and leaving a planned transition to elections and more stable leadership on the verge of collapse.

With President-elect Donald J. Trump about to assume the reins of an international deployment that has been criticized as ineffective and underfunded, the future of Haiti has never seemed so bleak.

Justice Minister Patrick Pelissier said he believed the 150 soldiers, mostly from Guatemala, should help turn the tide. He stressed that some gang-controlled areas had been retaken and that the government is tending to displaced people.

“The state has not collapsed,” Mr. Pelissier said. “The state is there. The state is working.”

But many experts believe Haiti is a failing state, with various factions of the interim government embroiled in political bickering with no apparent strategy for tackling the worsening violence and providing a path to elections, which were supposed to be held this year.

“Political disputes translate into violence,” said Diego Da Rin, a Haiti analyst with the International Crisis Group. “The gangs are very aware of when is the right moment to shift from defensive mode to offensive mode. They flex their muscles when they need to.”

The gang attacks have also drawn attention to the weakness of the U.S.-backed Multinational Security Support mission, a detachment of several hundred mostly Kenyan police officers that began arriving in Haiti last June.

The mission was supposed to have up to 2,500 officers, but with little international financing, the force numbers far less and lacks the staffing to tackle the many gang-entrenched areas.

Several experts said the Christmas Eve killings gave a sense that the government was inept. The event announcing the hospital’s reopening was held in a gang stronghold, with virtually no security. Even as people came under attack, the police took at least an hour to respond, though their headquarters are nearby.

The country’s heath minister, Dr. Duckenson Lorthe Blema, who was sick and running late, believes he was the intended target.

“I am not crazy — I wanted to do well, and it went badly,” Dr. Blema, who was fired in the aftermath of the attack, said in an interview. “It turned into a fiasco. The scapegoat is me.”

Dr. Blema insisted that he had asked for police deployments at the event and did not know why there was so little protection. He defended the hospital’s dearth of supplies, saying he had intended to open the facility “gradually” as an outpatient clinic, which would not have been for treating gunshot wounds.

The justice minister acknowledged that there was no coordination between the ministry of health and the police, nor was a proper security assessment done in advance.

“Neighborhoods are controlled by gangs, and the police are working to recover them,” he said, noting that while the crisis is severe in the capital and the rural Artibonite Valley, much of the country was operating normally.

Haiti’s descent into chaos was largely triggered by the assassination in July 2021 of its last elected president, Jovenel Moïse. Gangs earning income from illegal checkpoints, extortion and kidnappings used the political vacuum to expand their territories.

With no elected national leaders, the country is ruled by a transitional council made up of rival political parties, with an interim presidency rotating among its members.

The latest surge in violence began Nov. 11, when the council replaced the prime minister, and gangs took advantage of the political upheaval to fire on U.S. commercial aircraft and escalate their brutality. Haiti’s main airport has been closed since.

More than 5,300 people were killed in Haiti last year and the total number of people forced to flee their homes now exceeds 700,000, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Gang checkpoints and ambushes have disrupted food supplies and the nonprofit group Mercy Corp, estimates that nearly 5 million people — half the country’s population — are facing severe food insecurity.

The new prime minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, in his only news conference since taking office nearly two months ago, announced pay increases for police officers and said he was committed to restoring the rule of law.

The prime minister and members of the presidential council declined to comment for this article.

In a New Year’s Day speech, the president of the council, Leslie Voltaire, insisted that elections would still take place this year, but likened the current situation to war. A police spokesman said he had no comment.

The commander of the Kenyan-led mission, Godfrey Otunge, who also did not respond to requests for comment, has complained that the mission’s successes have not been sufficiently touted.

In a recent message posted online, he said “the future of Haiti is bright.”

The U.S. State Department, which has committed $600 million for the Kenya mission, defended its record, noting that a recent operation with the police led to the death of a high-profile gang member.

Two police stations recently reopened and the Kenyan mission now has a permanent presence near the main port, which has long been controlled by gangs, the State Department said.

The U.S. government sent several shipments of materials in December, the agency said.

But absent significantly greater outside help, experts say Haiti’s worsening trajectory is unlikely to be reversed.

“The Haitian government is really not clear on what they are doing,” said Sophie Rutenbar, a visiting scholar at New York University, who helped run United Nations operations in Haiti until 2023. “Unfortunately right now they are faced with not good choices and worse choices.”

Some of the injured journalists blamed gangs — and the government — for a debacle that cost precious lives.

“If the state had taken its responsibilities, none of this would have happened,” said Velondie Miracle, who was shot seven times in the leg, temple and mouth. “The state is a legal force and should not give bandits access to places where the state cannot respond.”

André Paultre contributed reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Five months after storming across the border into the Kursk region of southern Russia, Ukrainian forces were making a renewed push on Monday to drive deeper into Russia, even as they appear to have lost a strategic town in eastern Ukraine.

While the scale of the renewed Ukrainian offensive in Kursk remains unclear, both Russian and Ukrainian officials reported heavy fighting on Sunday night. Combat footage geolocated by military analysts indicated that Ukraine was trying to break through Russian defenses in at least three directions.

It is the first significant attempt by Ukrainian troops to advance in Kursk since the original incursion in August. Since then, Russia has regained roughly half of the territory it lost.

At the same time, the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed on Monday that its forces had seized control of Kurakhove, an important but shattered industrial town, further closing in on Ukrainian forces in the southern Donbas region after more than two months of withering bombardments and heavy fighting.

The Ukrainian military command in the east did not comment on the Russian claim that Kurakhove had fallen. Soldiers fighting in the area, and a local Ukrainian military official, said when reached by phone that while there were pockets of resistance in the factories on the outskirts, the town was essentially lost. They requested anonymity to discuss sensitive military information.

In a statement, the Kremlin said its defense minister, Andrei Belousov, had congratulated the Russian soldiers for capturing the town on Monday,

The fall of Kurakhove and surrounding towns could allow Russia to broaden its assault on the city of Pokrovsk, 21 miles to the north, military analysts said.

Russian forces are trying to encircle Pokrovsk, a focal point of the war in recent months, from the south, hoping to avoid brutal and prolonged urban combat. They have advanced to within about a mile of a vital supply road to the southwest of the city, according to several analytical groups, including the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research group.

Despite the fact that both sides are battered and exhausted after nearly three years of war, the fighting along the front has only intensified.

The dueling offensives — with the Ukrainians on the attack, albeit modestly, in Kursk and the Russians continuing to launch headlong assaults in eastern Ukraine — underscored how both the Kremlin and Kyiv are seeking to demonstrate strength as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to take office, analysts said.

Mr. Trump has vowed to bring the war to a quick end without saying how.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a three-hour conversation with the podcaster Lex Fridman, expressed confidence that Mr. Trump could fulfill that promise.

“I think that President Trump not only has will, he has all these possibilities, and it’s not just talk,” he said. “I really count on him, and I think that our people really count on him, so he has enough power to pressure him, to pressure Putin.”

The appearance with a podcaster popular in Trump circles — including with Elon Musk, who highlighted the interview on his social media network, X — appeared to be an attempt to communicate directly with Trump supporters.

Mr. Zelensky also reaffirmed his belief that there can be no lasting peace unless Ukraine is militarily strong and supported by the United States.

“If we do not have security guarantees, Putin will come again,” he said.

Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, echoed those concerns wile traveling in South Korea on Monday.

“There is going to be, at some point, a cease-fire. It’s not going to be in Putin’s mind ‘game over’,” Mr. Blinken told reporters. “His imperial ambitions remain, and what he will seek to do is to rest, refit, and eventually reattack.”

Mr. Blinken also said that Ukraine’s campaign in Kursk would play a critical role in any peace talks.

“The positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Kursk region are very important,” he said, “because, of course, this is something that will be relevant to any negotiations that may take place in the coming year.”

North Korea has dispatched more than 11,000 soldiers to fight alongside the Russian in Kursk, Ukrainian and American officials have said, and Mr. Blinken said the partnership between the two countries continues to grow. He reiterated previous assertions that Moscow was prepared to supply North Korea with advanced space and satellite technologies in return for weapons and equipment to aid its war efforts in Ukraine.

Despite the introduction of North Korean troops to the battle for Kursk, Ukraine has managed to hang on to more than 150 square miles of land inside Russia — a bit less than half the amount of territory it initially seized.

However, the amount of territory Ukraine holds inside Russia is less important than the message the campaign sends to the world, military analysts said.

“Kursk is a strategic shift in the narratives of the war,” said Taras Chmut, a former military officer and the head of Come Back Alive, a charity that supports the Ukrainian military. “It’s about the fact that Russia can lose territories, its own territories. It’s about the fact that Ukraine can implement some unexpected actions and unconventional asymmetric approaches.”

But Ukraine’s renewed offensive in Kursk comes as it struggles to stabilize defensive lines.

The loss of Kurakhove, which covers only about three square miles of land, underscored problems with the way Ukraine is managing and deploying its forces, Ukrainian analysts and soldiers said.

Under pressure to address those concerns, Ukraine’s defense minister, Rustem Umerov, has ordered a comprehensive review of the military command.

“Victory requires a deep analysis of experience, and an honest understanding of mistakes,” he said in a statement on Thursday.

The issues run deeper than a simple lack of personnel, analysts and soldiers have said in interviews over the past year.

“When undermanned brigades lose positions, it’s not always due to insufficient recruitment,” the Ukrainian analytical group Frontelligence wrote in a report released on Friday.

“Poor organizational decisions, such as funneling new draftees into new units rather than reinforcing depleted, veteran brigades, are often to blame.”

The report added: “The window of opportunity to address these identified issues is closing fast, and inaction is not an option.”

A scathing report by the Ukrainian journalist Yuriy Butusov about the newly created 155th Anne of Kyiv Brigade, which was trained in France and equipped with Western weapons, raised concerns about problems in Ukraine’s military and helped fuel calls for urgent changes.

The State Bureau of Investigation opened a criminal case in December regarding the management of the brigade, which has experienced high levels of desertion and issues related to staffing and management.

Russia is also facing steep challenges even if they remain obscured from public view, military analysts said. The Kremlin keeps tight control over information and dissent is punished but it has yet to achieve an operationally significant breakthrough despite its superiority in both personnel and arms.

Over the course of 2024, Russia captured 4,168 square kilometers — or about 1,600 square miles — of territory, most of it fields and small villages, the Institute for the Study of War reported.

Even though Russian forces have recently been advancing as quickly as at any point since the first months of the war, the research group said that it would still take more than two years at their current rate of advance for the Russians to seize the remainder of the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine still under Ukrainian control.

Liubov Sholudko contributed reporting.

As Israeli and Hamas officials continued indirect talks on Monday for a cease-fire and hostage release deal, Hamas representatives indicated that the group had approved an Israeli list of 34 hostages to be released in the first stage of an agreement, conveying a sense of momentum.

But the Israeli government quickly dampened any notion that Hamas’s acceptance of the list constituted a significant breakthrough toward ending the war in Gaza.

Here’s what we know about the list of hostages and the state of the talks, after months of false starts and failed rounds.

What Hamas is saying

A Hamas representative briefed on the negotiations told The New York Times on Monday that if a deal is reached, Hamas agrees to release the 34 hostages whose names appear on a list that Israel provided via mediators. The representative spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks are being held in secrecy.

The United States has long been pushing for a deal and is trying to facilitate one with the help of Qatar and Egypt, the two main countries mediating between Israel and Hamas.

The Reuters news agency reported on Sunday night that Hamas had approved the list presented by Israel. The report cited an unnamed Hamas official who added that any hostage deal was contingent upon Israel agreeing to a timetable for withdrawal from Gaza and a permanent cease-fire, in line with Hamas’s longstanding demands.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has refused to openly declare any willingness to end the war, vowing to eradicate Hamas as a military force and governing power in Gaza.

Roughly 100 hostages are still being held in Gaza out of some 250 people taken captive during the Hamas-led attacks in October 2023 that prompted the war. At least a third of the captives are presumed to be dead, according to Israel.

A weeklong truce in November 2023 allowed for the release of 105 hostages in exchange for some 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israel. Only a few hostages have been rescued alive by Israeli forces, and the bodies of dozens of others have been recovered. Israeli soldiers accidentally killed three hostages whom they misidentified as fighters.

Subsequent efforts to reach a cease-fire have faltered amid gaps in the two sides’ demands, with each side blaming the other for thwarting efforts to reach a deal.

What Israel says

Israel sent the original list of hostages to be released in the first phase of any deal to the mediators in July 2024, according to a statement released on Monday by Mr. Netanyahu’s office.

But the list has since been updated because three of those who originally appeared on it — Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American-Israeli dual citizen, and two Israeli women, Carmel Gat and Eden Yerushalmi — were killed by their captors in late August. The newer version of the list was published by the BBC on Monday, and Mr. Netanyahu’s office appeared to confirm its authenticity.

In this latest round of talks, Israel has demanded information from Hamas about which hostages remain alive. Without that, Israeli officials say, there can be no agreement on how many Palestinian prisoners Israel would be willing to release in exchange for them.

“As yet, Israel has not received any confirmation or comment by Hamas regarding the status of the hostages appearing on the list,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in its statement, adding, “Israel will continue to act relentlessly for the return of all of our hostages.”

The Hamas representative who spoke to The Times said the group would not give Israel details on the status of the 34 hostages on the list without getting some things in return.

The list includes 10 women, five of them soldiers; 11 older male hostages aged between 50 and 85; two young children who Hamas previously said had been killed in an Israeli airstrike, but whose deaths have not been confirmed by the Israeli authorities; and other male hostages whose release Israel considers urgent.

In addition to Israel’s demand for information on the status of the hostages, other sticking points remain in the negotiations, according to Israeli and Hamas officials. An Israeli official familiar with the matter, who was not authorized to discuss the negotiations publicly, said on Monday that the talks were progressing and that the sides were closer than they have been in a while. But the official cautioned that they have also been at a similar point before.

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.

Former President Nicolas Sarkozy of France on Monday went on trial in Paris over accusations that his 2007 campaign received illegal financing from the Libyan government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

The trial, which is scheduled to last three months, is far from the first for Mr. Sarkozy, 69, a conservative politician who led France from 2007 to 2012, but it represents one of the most serious legal threats to the French politician since he left office.

Just last month, Mr. Sarkozy exhausted his final appeal in a separate corruption and influence peddling case, making him the first former French president sentenced to actual detention, though he will serve his time under house arrest with an electronic bracelet.

But of all the legal cases against Mr. Sarkozy, the Libya one is among the most sprawling, convoluted and explosive. It involves accusations that his campaign illegally accepted vast sums of money from Colonel Qaddafi, the former Libyan strongman who was killed by opposition fighters in 2011.

Mr. Sarkozy, who arrived in court without making any comments, has denied wrongdoing. He could face up to 10 years in prison and be fined nearly $400,000.

Here is what you need to know about the case.

What is the trial about?

Mr. Sarkozy is facing charges of illegal campaign financing, criminal conspiracy, concealing the misappropriation of public funds and passive corruption (a charge that applies to people suspected of receiving money or favors).

The case against him involves a complex web of political and financial ties between Mr. Sarkozy’s advisers, officials who were part of Colonel Qaddafi’s government, and businessmen or bankers who acted as intermediaries.

Twelve other people were also ordered to stand trial on similar corruption, embezzlement or illegal campaign financing charges.

“Our thesis is that of a corruption pact,” Jean-François Bohnert, France’s top financial prosecutor, told RMC radio on Monday.

Prosecutors say that Mr. Sarkozy and his allies sought financing from Libya, in violation of election funding rules, and that the Libyan government promised to provide it. In return, they said, it wanted economic deals, diplomatic recognition and possibly assistance from France in rescinding an arrest warrant against a top Libyan official.

Mr. Sarkozy visited Libya shortly after he was elected, then welcomed Colonel Qaddafi for a widely-criticized state visit in Paris, where the Libyan strongman memorably pitched his Bedouin-style tent.

How did the case start?

In 2011, as Libya was roiled by fighting between the army and rebels, Colonel Qaddafi and his son said in media interviews that Mr. Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign had taken Libyan money.

Then, in 2012, the investigative news website Mediapart published a document, presented as a note by Libya’s secret services, that mentioned a deal to fund Mr. Sarkozy’s campaign with up to 50 million euros, or about $52 million. That same year, as part of a separate investigation, Ziad Takieddine, a French-Lebanese businessman, made a similar allegation.

In 2013, prosecutors opened an investigation. It lasted a decade and involvedover 20 countries, 50 police raids and 70 volumes of case files.

How has Mr. Sarkozy responded?

Mr. Sarkozy has repeatedly and strenuously denied the accusations, which he argues were driven mostly by allies of Colonel Qaddafi seeking revenge.

Under Mr. Sarkozy’s leadership, France played a prominent role in the NATO-led campaign of airstrikes that ultimately led to the toppling of Colonel Qaddafi and his death at the hands of Libyan rebels.

There have been conflicting accounts about the sequence of events and the amounts of money involved, and some of the defendants have shifted their versions of what happened.

Some Libyan officials have even denied that Mr. Sarkozy’s campaign received any funding, and Mr. Sarkozy’s legal team has seized on the vagaries of the case.

“We don’t even have the amount of this alleged illegal financing,” Christophe Ingrain, Mr. Sarkozy’s lawyer, told RTL radio on Sunday. “Sometimes it’s in euros, sometimes in dollars, sometimes in dinars, sometimes 2 million, 3 million, 50 million, 400 million. This isn’t serious.”

Mr. Sarkozy’s official records for the 2007 campaign indicated that he spent over €21 million, and any illicit financing from Libya would have enabled him to skirt France’s strict spending cap for presidential campaigns. Prosecutors have not clearly laid out how much Libya actually sent or how much they believe was actually spent on the campaign. But under French law, prosecutors do not have to prove that a corrupt deal was carried out to secure a conviction — only that one was agreed upon.

Mr. Sarkozy no longer holds public office. But his memoirs are best-sellers, he is still popular with the base of his conservative party and he retains some political influence.

Has Mr. Sarkozy been convicted before?

Yes, twice. Mr. Sarkozy has faced multiple accusations of financial impropriety since he left office.

In 2021, he became the first former president in France’s recent history to be sentenced to actual detention after he was convicted of trying to obtain information from a judge about a court case against him.

Mr. Sarkozy has exhausted his appeal options in that case, but he will not be incarcerated. Instead, he will serve one year under house arrest with an electronic bracelet, although a judge has not yet ruled on the practical details.

Mr. Sarkozy was also convicted in 2021 to a year of house arrest for illegally financing his unsuccessful 2012 re-election campaign, which wildly exceeded France’s spending limits. An appeals court last year upheld the conviction but halved his sentence, and that case is still going through the appeals process.

Other cases against Mr. Sarkozy have been dropped, including one in which we was accused of manipulating the heiress to the L’Oréal fortune into financing his 2007 campaign.

And some cases are still being investigated, including an offshoot of the Libya case. In 2023, Mr. Sarkozy was placed under formal investigation on charges of witness tampering, after allegations that his allies pressured Mr. Takieddine, the French-Lebanese businessman, into retracting his accusations.