When thousands of Hamas-led gunmen breached the Gaza border last Oct. 7 and overran Israeli communities, army bases and a music festival, victims of the surprise assault sent desperate messages to loved ones from their hiding places and safe rooms.

“Where is the army?” they asked as they waited long hours to be rescued. For the many hundreds of those killed, the army came too late, if at all.

A year after perhaps the worst military and intelligence debacle in Israel’s history, the military is rehabilitating its image as a formidable regional power. It has penetrated the most secret and secure bastions of its archenemies with intelligence-based precision strikes, eliminated key leaders, pounded away at their assets, and largely thwarted their efforts to mount a response.

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The Jaguar, a tanker the length of nearly five Olympic-size swimming pools, left a port near St. Petersburg, Russia, last year, bound for India and loaded with Russian oil.

Its trip that spring came as Western authorities were frantically trying to piece together the network to which it belonged: one of shadowy ships with hidden owners on whom powerful Russians relied to transport the nation’s valuable oil.

But by a quirk of the shipping industry, the Jaguar had ties to the West. The tanker flew the flag of St. Kitts and Nevis, which has its maritime registry just outside London — some 20 miles from the very British authorities who chase Russia’s assets around the world and chart its oil shipments.

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A former government minister in Singapore was sentenced to one year in prison on Thursday in a rare graft case that has transfixed the affluent city-state.

The minister, S. Iswaran, who oversaw transportation, last week pleaded guilty to accepting gifts as a public servant and to obstructing justice. He had been accused of accepting tickets to the play “Hamilton,” for soccer games in England and for a Formula 1 race in Singapore, along with other items. In total, he accepted gifts valued at 403,000 Singapore dollars, about $312,000.

It was the first conviction of a former cabinet member in Singapore in nearly 50 years. Mr. Iswaran’s sentence exceeded the six- to seven-month term that prosecutors had sought. He has to surrender to the authorities on Monday.

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Britain said on Thursday that it would hand over the Chagos Islands, a necklace of tropical islands in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius, ending lengthy, sometimes acrimonious negotiations that raised questions about Britain’s colonial legacy, as well as about geopolitical rivalries in a contested part of the world.

Under the terms of the agreement, announced by the governments of the two countries, Mauritius is to assume sovereignty over the remote archipelago, but the United States and Britain will continue to operate a strategically valuable military base on Diego Garcia, the largest of the more than 55 islands in the chain.

“The United Kingdom will agree that Mauritius is sovereign over the Chagos Archipelago, including Diego Garcia,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain and Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth of Mauritius said in a statement.

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For years, Israel and Iran avoided direct confrontation, as Israel secretly sabotaged Tehran’s interests and assassinated its officials without claiming responsibility, and Iran encouraged allies to attack Israel while rarely doing so itself.

Now, the two countries seem prepared to risk a direct, prolonged and extraordinarily costly conflict.

After Israel invaded Lebanon to confront Iran’s strongest ally, Hezbollah, and Iran’s second massive missile attack on Israel in less than six months, Israel seems ready to strike Iran directly, in a much more forceful and public way than it ever has, and Iran has warned of massive retaliation if it does.

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