The mediating country Qatar on Saturday announced a time for the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas to take effect the next day, setting off final preparations for a truce that much of the world hopes will end 15 months of destruction in Gaza.

The deal should go into effect at 8:30 a.m. local time on Sunday, said Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry of Qatar, which spent months alongside the United States and Egypt struggling to broker an agreement.

Israel’s government approved the deal early Saturday morning after hours of deliberations and amid internal rifts in the governing coalition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The approval cleared a final obstacle, raising hopes for Israelis who want to see loved ones returned and Gazans who have survived one of the most intense bombing campaigns of the 21st century.

“It’s a mix of joy, sadness and longing for a new beginning,” said Mariam Moeen Awwad, 23, who has been displaced from her home in northern Gaza six times since the war began.

Ms. Awad had planned to move into her newly furnished apartment with her husband in November 2023. The war derailed those plans, leaving the couple in an overcrowded property and eager to return home, she said, “if it’s even still there.”

In Israel, the authorities have started preparations to welcome home dozens of hostages, without knowing whether they will return malnourished, traumatized or dead.

In his first remarks since the cease-fire’s approval, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an address on Saturday night that 33 hostages would be released in the first phase of the deal, “most of them alive.”

Defending the deal, he also listed that Israel had made major strategic gains over the past several months, including the killing of top Hamas leaders. “As I pledged to you — we have changed the face of the Middle East,” he said.

Three reception points have been established to receive the hostages along the Gaza border, according to an Israeli military official. Those will be staffed by Israeli soldiers, as well as doctors and psychologists, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in accordance with protocol.

The hostage release is expected to be the first such major exchange since a weeklong cease-fire early in the war.

“The ones who were freed back then were already poorly nourished,” Hagar Mizrahi, a senior Israeli health ministry official, said of the hostages freed during the 2023 truce. “Imagine their situation now, after an additional 400 days. We are extremely worried about this.”

Of the women, older men and other hostages set to be returned, many are believed to have been held in Hamas’s network of tunnels in Gaza, under conditions likely to leave physical and psychological scars. Israeli hospitals are preparing isolated areas where the hostages can begin recuperating in privacy.

“Last time, we saw the Red Cross transferring the hostages, and some of them were running to the relatives, hugging them,” said Einat Yehene, a clinical psychologist working with the Hostage Families Forum, an advocacy group. “It’s not going to be easy and similar this time, given the physical and the emotional conditions we expect.”

In exchange, hundreds of Palestinian prisoners are to be freed. The total number of prisoners to be released and their identities were among the many contentious points involved in the negotiations for a deal.

The new deal also calls for allowing 600 trucks carrying aid to enter Gaza daily and negotiations on the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territory and a permanent end to the war.

Those negotiations are likely to be bitter and difficult, like the months of talks that yielded this week’s cease-fire agreement. Mr. Netanyahu is already facing an internal revolt within his governing coalition, which his far-right partners have threatened to quit over their opposition to the deal.

They have called for the war to continue to eradicate Hamas, which led the October 2023 attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, took another 250 hostage and started the war.

Mr. Netanyahu also faces pressure from the many Israelis who want all the hostages returned, and from the outgoing U.S. president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., and the president-elect, Donald J. Trump, who both want the war ended.

In his address, Mr. Netanyahu said the agreement preserves Israel’s right to return to the war against Hamas if it so chooses. The agreement also allows Israeli forces to remain in a buffer zone along Israel’s border with Gaza and Gaza’s border with Egypt, he added, at least during the initial phase.

“If we need to go back to fighting, we will do it in new ways and with great might,” he said.

Another uncertainty in how the deal might unfold arises from the chaotic, ruined conditions within Gaza, where tens of thousands of people have been killed since the war began and hundreds of thousands of others live without homes, clean water or ready supplies of food or medicine.

Israel’s campaign has left a power vacuum across much of Gaza, and lawlessness has proved a dangerous factor in efforts to get aid to people in need. Organized looting has repeatedly stripped trucks of supplies, including from a convoy of 100 trucks holding U.N. aid late last year.

Israel has continued striking Gaza since the cease-fire was announced, and over the past 24 hours, 23 Palestinians were killed and 83 others wounded, Gaza’s health ministry said on Saturday morning. More than 46,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to the ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

Desperately needed aid is expected to pour into Gaza once the cease-fire begins. Egypt, which shares a border with the enclave, was intensifying preparations on Friday to deliver assistance including food and tents, according to Al Qahera News, an Egyptian state broadcaster.

As president of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol lived in a luxurious hilltop mansion, threw parties and had a small army of personal guards. These days, he is alone in a 107-square-foot jail cell, eating simple food like noodles and kimchi soup, and sleeping on the floor.

This will be his new reality for a while yet, after he was formally arrested on insurrection charges early Sunday as part of an investigation into his ill-fated declaration of martial law last month.

Mr. Yoon, 64, has been in the Seoul Detention Center, a government-run jail south of Seoul, since Wednesday, when he became the first sitting president in South Korean history to be detained in a criminal investigation. When a district court in Seoul issued the warrant to arrest him, he went from being a temporary detainee to a criminal suspect facing an indictment and trial.

That change in status meant that Mr. Yoon was unlikely to leave jail any time soon. Within the next 18 days, criminal investigators and prosecutors were expected to indict him on charges of leading an insurrection during his short-lived martial law last month. If he is convicted, he will face life imprisonment or ​the death penalty.

Mr. Yoon’s new circumstances were symbolic of his dramatic fall from grace: from a swaggering head of state to an impeached president to an inmate accused of committing one of the worst offenses in South Korea’s criminal code. He is the first South Korean to face insurrection charges since the former military dictator Chun Doo-hwan, who was convicted in the 1990s.

As president, Mr. Yoon loved to throw parties, often inviting like-minded politicians to evening drinks and even cooking and serving ​rolled egg and barbecue to his presidential press corps. He showed off his well-honed entertaining skills ​abroad when he belted out “American Pie” during a White House dinner in 2023.​

Now, ​Mr. Yoon will wake up ​not to presidential aides and chefs catering to his needs, but to a simple jail breakfast usually made up of dumpling soup, bread or cereals. ​An average meal in jail costs $1.20.

The dramatic political upheaval he unleash​ed appears to have stunned him as much as everyday South Koreans.

“Ironically, it was after I was impeached that I truly realized​ that I am, indeed, the president,” Mr. Yoon said in a lengthy statement on Wednesday.

Many South Korean politicians and dignitaries​ — including two former presidents and Lee Jae-yong, the head of the Samsung conglomerate​ — have been held at the Seoul Detention Center in Uiwang, a city south of Seoul. When he was a prosecutor, Mr. Yoon helped put one of the two former presidents, Park Geun-hye, there on corruption charges. The jail also holds some of the country’s most infamous death row inmates​, including serial killers.

​Government officials said Mr. Yoon would get no special treatment, except that he ​would be kept in a room of his own, away from other detainees and inmates.​ After his formal arrest, he was expected to go through a simple medical checkup and receive a toothbrush and other necessities for ​jail life​. He would be assigned an inmate number​ and a pea​-green​ jail uniform.

His cell will have a TV set, a sink, a small cupboard, a reading desk that doubles as a dinner table, and a foldable mattress for sleeping. The cell has a toilet but no shower. The space will be monitored around the clock through closed-circuit television.

Mr. Yoon has been an avid follower of right-wing YouTubers who supported his government and spread conspiracy theories ​that depicted his domestic enemies as dangerous sympathizers with North Korea and China. Since he declared martial law on Dec. 3, Mr. Yoon has said his action was inspired ​in part by the same fear, indignation and suspicions spread by the extremists on YouTube.

The ​jail TV shows only programs authorized by the Ministry​ of Justice. ​Inmates have ​no access ​to the internet, including YouTube. At rallies calling for Mr. Yoon’s arrest in recent weeks, some protesters held signs that read: “Yoon Suk Yeol: It’s time for a digital detox!”

Yang Kyeung-soo, ​a labor union leader who had spent time in a solitary cell in the Seoul Detention Center​, posted jail survival tips on X. “You have to learn how to save warm water because you wash your own dishes​. If you eat everything they serve, you will gain weight quickly.”

​Mr. Yoon was expected to meet frequently with his attorneys in a visiting area to prepare for his trial​s. ​Separately, the country’s Constitutional Court is deliberating whether the National Assembly’s vote on Dec. 14 to impeach ​him was legitimate and if he should be formally removed from office.

Mr. Yoon’s martial law lasted only six hours because the opposition-dominated National Assembly voted it down. But during that brief ​period, he ordered military commanders to ​seize the Assembly​ and arrest his political enemies, according to prosecutors who have ​arrested and indicted the military generals accused of helping Mr. Yoon commit insurrection.

Mr. Yoon ​and his lawyers insisted that his imposition of martial law was a legitimate use of presidential power.

After they detained Mr. Yoon on Wednesday, officials from the country’s Corruption Investigation Office For ​High-ranking Officials ​questioned him until he was sent to rest in a cell at the Seoul Detention Center at night. He has since refused to leave his cell to face more questioning.

But on Saturday, he attended a hearing at the Seoul Western District Court, where a judge deliberated on whether to issue a warrant to arrest him. He argued his innocence while thousands of supporters gathered outside demanding his release. Some of them later surrounded two cars carrying the investigators who sought to arrest Mr. Yoon, shouting insults and damaging their vehicles.

Early Sunday morning, the judge issued the arrest warrant, saying that Mr. Yoon could destroy evidence if he was released.

When Ms. Park, the former president, was held in the detention center, die-hard supporters ​gathered near its walls every morning and shouted “Good morning, President Park Geun-hye!”

Since Mr. Yoon’s arrival, some supporters have camped outside, calling his impeachment and his arrest ​“null and void.​”

Over the past year, a pair of legal bombshells have put India’s growing relationship with the United States to one of its biggest tests yet.

Just as the two sides were announcing unprecedented expansions in defense and technology ties, U.S. prosecutors accused Indian government agents of plotting to assassinate an American citizen on U.S. soil.

Months later, the Justice Department filed fraud and bribery charges against India’s most prominent business mogul, whose enterprises have soared to dizzying heights on the back of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s power.

Still, the relationship has held. After decades of mutual suspicion between the two countries, said Eric Garcetti, the departing U.S. ambassador to India, the fact that now nothing seems to derail their ties is proof of their strength.

“I don’t think there is anything out there big enough to threaten the trajectory of the U.S.-India relations,” Mr. Garcetti said on Saturday in an interview at the embassy in New Delhi, two days before President Biden leaves office and Donald J. Trump is sworn in as his successor.

“This is incredibly resilient and almost inevitable,” Mr. Garcetti added. “It’s really the pace and the progress that’s not inevitable, like how quickly we get there.”

The Biden administration’s doubling down on the relationship with India came after nearly two decades of efforts to shed Cold War-era suspicions that had culminated with U.S. sanctions on India’s nuclear program in 1998.

Washington sees great potential in India as a geopolitical counterweight to an increasingly assertive China. Already the world’s largest democracy, India took over from China as the world’s most populous nation in 2023. India’s demographic advantages and growing technological capacity could help diversify global supply chains away from China, a priority of the United States and other major powers.

Now comes Mr. Trump’s second presidency, with its America-first orientation and threats of steep tariffs on trading partners. While leaders of many countries are unnerved, Indian officials insist that they are not among them.

S. Jaishankar, the foreign minister, has said India enjoyed “a positive political relationship with Trump” that it hopes will only deepen. As he attended the opening of a U.S. Consulate on Friday in the tech hub of Bengaluru, also known as Bangalore, Mr. Jaishankar quoted Mr. Modi as saying that the two countries were overcoming “the hesitations of history.”

Mr. Modi has enjoyed a strong rapport with Mr. Trump, an important factor because of the incoming president’s personal approach to international relations. During Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Modi hosted him at a grand rally in his home state of Gujarat, as well as at a large gathering in Texas of the Indian diaspora — an increasingly crucial extension of the Indian influence in American politics.

But some analysts cautioned that Mr. Trump’s unpredictability and transactional approach could pose risks for India.

Two issues in particular are bound to test the relationship, and most likely soon. During the campaign, Mr. Trump criticized India as gaining an unfair advantage in trade by maintaining high tariffs. And India could be swept up in the controversy if Mr. Trump follows through on his promise of mass deportations of illegal immigrants.

Indians make up the third-largest group of illegal immigrants in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center. If Mr. Trump sends large numbers of Indians back to their home country, it could be a major embarrassment for Mr. Modi.

Amita Batra, a New Delhi-based economist and trade expert, said that India should see warning signs in Mr. Trump’s threat of higher tariffs even against America’s traditional allies, as well as his stated willingness to unravel deals with countries like Mexico and Canada that his own first administration had put in place.

“You may say we are on great terms with Trump, we have an easy relation with the United States, but how Trump views that at a particular time is a different question altogether,” Dr. Batra said at an event at the Center for Social and Economic Progress in New Delhi. “India has to be very cautiously approaching Trump 2.0.”

During the interview, Mr. Garcetti described the bilateral relationship as “the most compelling, challenging and consequential” for both countries.

A former Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Mr. Garcetti arrived in New Delhi in April 2023, after the mission had remained without an ambassador for two years. His confirmation process had hit a wall over accusations that he had overlooked complaints of sexual harassment by an aide when he was mayor.

He made up for the time lost with a burst of energy and outreach like that of a politician in campaign mode.

He was everywhere, from cricket grounds to cafeterias to cultural programs. Sporting a leather jacket, he even got behind the piano to open for the jazz legends Herbie Hancock and Dianne Reeves, who had come to perform at the Piano Man Jazz Club in New Delhi.

But by the time Mr. Garcetti tried his hand at dancing to a viral Bollywood tune at a Diwali celebration, relations between the two countries had hit major obstacles.

In India, right-wing trolls had seized on the U.S. allegations of Indian government involvement in a plot to assassinate an American citizen advocating a separatist cause in India. That, along with the U.S. indictment of Gautam Adani, the business mogul, was evidence that the United States was trying to dampen India’s inevitable rise, the nationalist online voices argued.

The Biden administration appeared intent on addressing the assassination episode quietly with New Delhi, demanding accountability without allowing it to become a major diplomatic sore point.

“On Capitol Hill, within the White House, I think with those in the know it was a real moment of reflection and pause,” Mr. Garcetti said of the assassination case. “It didn’t pause the momentum — you know, relations between countries are always multifaceted and simultaneous and not just between governments. But I think it was an immediate gut check.”

Mr. Garcetti said that the Biden administration had been reassured by India’s response. New Delhi had accepted the U.S. demand, he said, “not just for accountability but for systemic reform and guarantees that this will never happen again.”

An Indian government inquiry that concluded last week recommended legal action against an unnamed person with “earlier criminal links.” It said that the action “must be completed expeditiously,” in what analysts saw as an attempt to begin the Trump era with a clean slate.

“If we want to cooperate in other areas that are important to us, intelligence sharing, et cetera, trust is the basis of everything,” Mr. Garcetti said. “But I’ve been pretty blown away with how trust can deepen through a challenge.”

One question hovering over the deepening ties between the two countries is whether India can truly emerge as an alternative to China in global supply chains — something that Mr. Garcetti also wondered.

India has reaped only a smart part of the windfall from the moves away from China, with businesses preferring places like Vietnam, Taiwan and Mexico, where it is easier to set up operations and where tariffs are lower.

Mr. Garcetti said India had made dramatic leaps after opening up its economy only in the 1990s, years after China. He picked up his iPhone to illustrate a widely highlighted recent success: About 15 percent of iPhone manufacturing now happens in India, a figure that could continue growing rapidly, he said.

More broadly, though, India still struggles to attract foreign investment, despite improvements in infrastructure and some streamlining of regulations. Manufacturing is not growing quickly enough to bring India the jobs it desperately needs.

“Where India’s leaving a lot of progress and jobs and growth on the table is figuring out a better way to make it seamless and frictionless to invest here for export,” Mr. Garcetti said. “Because it’s still, you know, for so many components of manufacturing, one of, if not the, highest tariffed economies.”

“They’re not wrong to look and say it used to be 95 percent worse,” Mr. Garcetti said. “But if that 5 percent is still double your competitor or 10 times your competitor — companies, you know, are like water. They flow where gravity takes them.”

After Iran elected a more moderate president last year, Cecilia Sala, an Italian journalist, thought something may have changed in the country, which she had been covering from afar.

For two years, Iran had rejected her application for a journalist visa, but it granted her one after the election. Colleagues and friends told her Iran’s new government seemed more open to foreign reporters as it sought to repair relations with Europe.

Ms. Sala, 29, had not traveled to Iran since 2021, before an uprising led by women and girls demanded an end to clerical rule. So she took a plane to Tehran, the capital.

“I wanted to see with my eyes what had changed,” she said in an interview recently in Rome.

Instead, she got firsthand experience of what had not changed.

On Dec. 19, as she was preparing an episode of an Italian podcast that she hosts every day, two agents from the intelligence wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps came to her hotel room in Tehran. When she tried to grab her phone, she said, one of them threw it to the other side of the room.

They blindfolded her, Ms. Sala said, and took her to the notorious Evin prison, where most of Iran’s political prisoners are held and some are tortured.

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An unidentified gunman killed two high-profile judges outside Iran’s Supreme Court on Saturday in what the authorities are calling a terrorist attack, according to state-run media.

The attacker opened fire on a square near the Supreme Court headquarters in the capital, Tehran, the Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

The judges, Ali Razini and Mohammad Moqiseh, had long careers and had presided over cases involving national security, espionage and terrorism, according to a statement by the judiciary and published by state media.

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Migrants used to gather by the hundreds in encampments in Ciudad Juárez, on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, waiting for a chance to cross into the United States. But as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to take office on Monday, few people could be found this past week on the once-teeming embankments.

All that remained were extinguished campfires, discarded shoes, shirts and toothbrushes.

One Mexican city after another has reported a similar situation along the border with the United States, where the number of migrants has steadily dropped in recent months. The decline has been attributed largely to hardened restrictions introduced by the Biden administration and by Mexican and Panamanian officials meant to deter migration.

As President Biden came under increasing pressure during his re-election campaign to curb migration flows, he issued in June an executive order effectively blocking undocumented migrants from receiving asylum. That month, U.S. border officials recorded 83,532 illegal crossings, a significant drop from the previous month’s 117,905.

Despite the decline, illegal crossings remain higher than during much of Mr. Trump’s first term, fueling calls by the new Trump administration, and even by some Democrats in Congress, for more severe restrictions on migration to the United States.

Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Mr. Trump’s pick to run the Homeland Security Department, told senators on Friday that she planned to reinstate a Trump-era policy forcing asylum seekers to stay in Mexico for the duration of their U.S. cases and reduce temporary immigration relief for people from countries experiencing unrest.

“Border security must remain a top priority,” Ms. Noem said.

Some officials in Latin America are pushing back, arguing that the tougher restrictions on both sides of the border have worked to stem the crisis.

“The flow of migration from the south of Mexico toward the border has diminished in the last few months,” said Enrique Serrano Escobar, who leads the Chihuahua State office responsible for receiving migrants. “There is no crisis,” he said of Ciudad Juárez. “There is no problem.”

The quieter border these days contrasts with the recent years of frequent tragedies along the frontier, including family separations and the 2023 fire at a migrant detention facility in Ciudad Juárez that killed dozens.

Thousands of migrants are still trying to make their way north even as the authorities on both sides of the border harden restrictions. But overall, movement through the Darién Gap, the inhospitable land bridge connecting North and South America, and shelter capacity in U.S.-Mexico border cities like Ciudad Juárez and Matamoros have become indicators of how migration flows are easing.

“Normally, we would have around 150,” said Lucio Torres, who has been overseeing a shelter in Nuevo Laredo, across the Rio Grande, for three years. The shelter has capacity for 300 people. This week, the facility housed only seven.

Mr. Serrano Escobar said that migrant shelters run by government and civic organizations in Ciudad Juárez, with capacity for about 3,000 migrants, are currently only about 40 percent full. “The city is calm,” he added.

In November, more than 46,000 people crossed the border illegally, the lowest number during the Biden administration. December saw more than 47,000 illegal crossings. By comparison, in December 2023, illegal crossings surpassed a record of roughly 250,000.

Mexican security forces said that they detained more than 475,000 migrants in the last quarter of 2024. That is nearly 68 percent more detentions compared with the same period a year earlier, according to government data.

Solsiree Petit, 44, a Venezuelan teacher in Ciudad Juárez, said she had tumors in her breasts that require surgery. She said her sons, 10 and 17, had turned themselves in to the U.S. authorities seeking asylum about a week ago. She said she had an appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in El Paso to submit her own asylum application on Jan. 29.

She said she hoped that her appointment would still be honored under the Trump administration. “I prefer not to think otherwise about that,” she said, “because it depresses you more.”

CBP One, the phone app that Ms. Petit used to schedule her appointment, allowed U.S. immigration authorities to process nearly 44,000 migrants in December at ports of entry.

While the Biden administration created the app to incentivize migrants to avoid crossing into the country illegally, Ms. Noem, the Homeland Security nominee, said she would wind down use of the app, reflecting concerns among Republicans that it was used to allow migrants into the country who should be barred from entry.

Similar to the tense calm seen in Ciudad Juárez, the Pumarejo shelter in Matamoros, which can accommodate 1,500 people, currently has only 260, according to shelter officials. In Tijuana, three notable shelters indicated that they were only 50 percent full.

Shelters in Guatemala City have also all but emptied of migrants heading north, said Karina López, a social worker at the city’s Casa del Migrante shelter. Several years ago, the shelter struggled to care for more than 3,000 weary migrants with just over 100 beds. Those numbers are unheard-of today, Ms. López said. That is partly because people are staying only a few hours in their rush to get to the border before the inauguration, she said.

Fear of violent crime and extortion is also thought to be keeping some migrants away from shelters targeted by organized crime in Mexico. Instead of seeking refuge there, some are choosing to stay with acquaintances, in rented rooms or with their smugglers as they try to make their way to the border, legally or illegally.

“I don’t care if the devil himself is in my way, I’m going forward,” said Juan Hernández, a handyman from Honduras. Mr. Hernández, 45, said he had lived in the United States for 23 years and had been deported five times. He arrived six months ago in Monterrey, a major industrial hub in northeast Mexico, after being deported to Honduras following a conviction in North Carolina for drunken driving.

He said he planned to cross the border again soon in a bid to reunite with his two children living in Raleigh, N.C.

For now, migrants like Mr. Hernández appear to be a minority. Not long ago in the historic center of Guatemala City, the sidewalks were filled with people begging for spare change or a meal for their children, many of them draped in the Venezuelan flag. This week, they were mostly absent.

In the Darién Gap, the number of migrants fell sharply after the Panamanian government introduced tougher restrictions to complement the Biden administration’s new asylum policies.

Two years ago, boatloads of people trying to get to the jungle would leave every day from Necoclí, a Colombian beach town at the southern end of the jungle. Migrants would often photograph the boat journeys and share pictures on social media, where they came to symbolize the migrants’ last moments of safety before entering the perilous Darién Gap jungle.

Now, days go by when there are not enough migrants to fill a single boat. Instead, the boats are leaving every two or three days and not always full.

In August 2023, a record 80,000 migrants passed through the Darién in a single month. In December, just under 5,000 people went through, according to Panamanian officials.

Yet, as the Trump inauguration approaches, smugglers have continued to urge migrants to get to the border and avoid a potential crackdown. Fearing it could be their last chance to make their way to the United States, some have resorted to begging friends to loan them money or to turning over the deeds to their homes to smugglers as collateral, shelter operators say.

One option offered by smugglers and referred to by migrants as the “V.I.P. route” shuttles migrants from Guatemala to Cancún, Mexico, by land, and from Cancún to Ciudad Juárez by air using false Mexican passports, according to Ms. López, the social worker. The price of a one-way flight on this route peaked at around $450 this week.

After the inauguration, the price drops to about $100.

Reporting was contributed by Annie Correal from Guatemala City; Julie Turkewitz from Bogotá, Colombia; Chantal Flores from Monterrey, Mexico; Edyra Espriella from Matamoros, Mexico; Aline Corpus from Tijuana, Mexico; Emiliano Rodríguez Mega and Rocío Gallegos from Mexico City; and Hamed Aleaziz from Washington.

When Hamas militants led a deadly cross-border raid on Oct. 7, 2023, they triggered a war with Israel that has devastated Gaza. They also set off shock waves that have reshaped the Middle East in unexpected ways.

Powerful alliances were upended. Long-established “red lines” were crossed. A decades-old dictatorship at the heart of the region was swept away.

Fifteen months after the October attacks, with a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas set to start on Sunday, here is a look at how the region has been radically transformed.

Israel

Israel has reasserted its military dominance but may face heavy diplomatic and domestic costs.

The country’s leaders treated the Hamas-led attacks as an existential threat and have been determined to defeat Hamas and weaken its main backer, Iran. Israel has not only succeeded in debilitating Hamas in Gaza, but has also decimated the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah and dealt a heavy blow to Iran’s network of Middle Eastern allies.