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When Leonid Volkov, a longtime associate of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was brutally attacked with a hammer outside his home in Lithuania in March, it initially seemed yet another case of the Kremlin hunting down its enemies abroad.

The assailant smashed open Volkov’s car window and struck him repeatedly with a hammer, breaking his left arm and damaging his left leg. Western officials and opposition figures assumed the attack, which took place a few weeks after Navalny’s mysterious death in prison, had been orchestrated by the Kremlin.

Then, last month, Navalny’s team released an explosive investigation that cast doubt on that version of events.

In the video, Maria Pevchikh, the head of Navalny’s investigation department, accused the wealthy businessman and outspoken Kremlin critic Leonid Nevzlin of hiring the men to beat up Volkov outside his home, claiming the attack was triggered by a personal dispute.

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A 21-year-old woman kidnapped by Islamic State militants in Iraq more than a decade ago has been freed from Gaza in an operation led by the US.

The operation this week also involved Israel, Jordan and Iraq, according to officials.

The woman is a member of the Yazidi religious minority, which saw more than 5,000 members killed and thousands more kidnapped in a 2014 campaign that the UN has said constituted genocide.

Silwan Sinjaree, the chief of staff of Iraq’s foreign minister, said she was freed after more than four months of efforts including several attempts that failed because of the difficult security situation resulting from Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.

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Local police in the cartel-dominated city of Culiacan, Mexico have been pulled off the streets after the army seized their guns, officials announced Monday.

The move came just one day after about 1,500 residents of Culiacan, the capital of the northern state of Sinaloa, held a march Sunday though the city’s downtown to demand peace after weeks in which cartel gunfights have killed dozens of people in and around the city.

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Historically, the Mexican army has seized the weapons of local police forces they distrust, either because they suspect some local cops are working for drug gangs or because they suspect they are carrying unregistered, private sidearms that would make abuses harder to trace.

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Ukraine has said that its forces have withdrawn from the eastern city of Vuhledar, a defensive bastion that had resisted repeated Russian attacks since Vladimir Putin’s 2022 full-scale invasion.

The military command in Kyiv said its troops left late on Tuesday. They had retreated in order to preserve personnel and combat equipment, it said, adding that Russian combat units had attacked from three directions and were close to “encircling” the city.

The fall of Vuhledar is a boost for the Kremlin and comes as Russian troops advance across the eastern Donetsk oblast. In February they captured the city of Avdiivka, outside the regional capital of Donetsk, occupied in 2014.

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Israel seems ready to respond in a much more forceful and public way with Iran after Tehran launched its second massive missile attack on Israel this year, analysts and officials say.

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.

“We are in a different story right now,” said Yoel Guzansky, a former senior security official who oversaw Iran strategy on Israel’s National Security Council. “We have a consensus in Israel — among the military, the defense experts, analysts and politicians — that Israel should respond in force to Iran’s attack.”

To many Israelis, there is now little to lose: Iran’s efforts to strike the urban sprawl around Tel Aviv crossed a threshold that Tehran has never previously breached, even during its earlier missile attack in April, which targeted air bases but not civilian areas.

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Security analysts and former officials said the damage Israel had inflicted on Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia, had stripped Tehran of much of its deterrence against a wider Israeli attack.

Israel has a freer hand to respond forcefully to Iran’s missile barrage on Tuesday than it did in April, security analysts and former officials say, when its retaliation for the previous Iranian attack was a largely symbolic strike against an air-defense installation in Iran.

In April, Israel was worried that issuing too intense of a response would prompt Iran to order its proxy militias — particularly Hezbollah in Lebanon — to retaliate extensively.

But after launching a bombing campaign that killed Hezbollah’s leader and other commanders last week, along with a ground invasion overnight Tuesday, Israel has weakened Hezbollah, stripping Iran of much of its deterrence against a wider Israeli attack, said Danny Citrinowicz, a retired Israeli intelligence officer who specialized in Iran.

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Israel has vowed to retaliate after Iran launched a barrage of ballistic missiles at targets across Israel in a dramatic intensification of a conflict that appeared to be escalating out of control.

“Iran made a big mistake tonight – and it will pay for it,” Benjamin Netanyahu told a meeting of his security cabinet late on Tuesday. “The regime in Iran does not understand our determination to defend ourselves and our determination to retaliate against our enemies.”

The unprecedented Iranian salvo of more than 180 ballistic missiles came less than 24 hours after the Israeli prime minister ordered the largest ground incursion into southern Lebanon in a generation.

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The barrage of missile fire came after much debate among Iranian leaders, officials there say.

After days of sharp debate at the top levels of government, Iran’s senior military commanders prevailed, and almost 200 ballistic missiles were sent speeding toward the heart of Israel.

The direct military strike on Tuesday came after senior military commanders of the Revolutionary Guards Corps convinced the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that it was the only course of action if Iran wanted to appear strong, according to three Iranian officials.

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Iran’s senior military commanders had concluded that it was essential to establish deterrence against Israel — and quickly — to turn or at least slow the tide of its onslaught on Hezbollah. Still more important, they argued, Iran needed to act to prevent Israel from turning its attention toward Tehran.

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Intelligence agencies concluded that granting Ukraine’s request to use Western missiles against targets deep in Russia could prompt forceful retaliation while not fundamentally changing the course of the war.

U.S. intelligence agencies believe that Russia is likely to retaliate with greater force against the United States and its coalition partners, possibly with lethal attacks, if they agree to give the Ukrainians permission to employ U.S., British and French-supplied long-range missiles for strikes deep inside Russia, U.S. officials said.

The intelligence assessment, which has not been previously reported, also plays down the effect that the long-range missiles will have on the course of the conflict because the Ukrainians currently have limited numbers of the weapons and it is unclear how many more, if any, the Western allies might provide.

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The findings may help explain in part why the decision has been so difficult for Mr. Biden to make, and show the internal pressures on him to say no to Mr. Zelensky’s request. U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters and internal deliberations, said it remained unclear what Mr. Biden would decide to do.

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Israel’s preparations to strike homes and buildings in southern Lebanon where it claimed Hezbollah was storing weapons included calling and texting Lebanese residents to evacuate areas that would come under fire, according to Lebanese and Israeli government officials.

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The message was also heard on at least one Lebanese radio station, where Israel managed to seize control of the airwaves.

Israel was able to send the calls and texts by hacking into Lebanon’s telecommunications systems, a practice they have perfected over the last decade in Lebanon and in Gaza, according to two Israeli intelligence officers.

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Israeli warplanes carried out dozens of strikes across southern Lebanon late on Thursday, hours after Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, threatened “tough retribution and just punishment” for the wave of attacks that targeted the organisation with explosives hidden in pagers and walkie-talkies.

The Israeli military said it had hit hundreds of rocket launchers which it said were about to be used “in the immediate future”.

The bombardment included more than 52 strikes across southern Lebanon, the country’s state news agency NNA said. Three Lebanese security sources told the Reuters news agency that they were the heaviest aerial strikes since the conflict began in October.

As Israeli jets roared over Beirut in a show of force earlier in the day, Nasrallah threatened retribution against Israel “where it expects it and where it does not”.

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The Israeli government did not tamper with the Hezbollah devices that exploded, defense and intelligence officials say. It manufactured them as part of an elaborate ruse.

In Lebanon, as Israel picked off senior Hezbollah commandos with targeted assassinations, their leader came to a conclusion: If Israel was going high-tech, Hezbollah would go low. It was clear, a distressed Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, said, that Israel was using cellphone networks to pinpoint the locations of his operatives.

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Israeli intelligence officials saw an opportunity.

Even before Mr. Nasrallah decided to expand pager usage, Israel had put into motion a plan to establish a shell company that would pose as an international pager producer.

By all appearances, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the operation. They said at least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.

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