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The meeting was supposed to be the prelude to the purchase of Finnish icebreaker ships.

But as United States President Donald Trump welcomed Finland’s President Alexander Stubb to the Oval Office on Thursday, he veered into a discussion of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) — and his ongoing feud with one of its members, Spain.

At a NATO summit in June, Spain was the most prominent holdout against Trump’s push to increase defence spending among member states.

Trump has long sought for all NATO members to commit 5 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) to building up their military assets. But Spain successfully pushed for an exemption at June’s meeting, allowing its expenditures to remain around the previous benchmark of 2 percent.

That resistance lingered on Trump’s mind at Thursday’s meeting, as he discussed the US commitment to NATO with Stubb.

“As you know, I requested that they pay 5 percent, not 2 percent,” Trump said of the NATO members.

“And most people thought that was not gonna happen. And it happened virtually unanimously. We had one laggard. It was Spain. Spain. You have to call them and find out: Why are they a laggard?”

He then mused about taking retribution: “They have no excuse not to do this, but that’s all right. Maybe you should throw them out of NATO, frankly.”

It was a bitter note in an otherwise friendly meeting with Stubb, whom Trump hosted in March at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Since his first term as president, Trump has wavered in his public comments about NATO, at times embracing the alliance and, at other moments, rejecting it as “obsolete”.

But seated next to Stubb and Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, Trump took a decidedly enthusiastic approach to defending Finland, one of the newest members of NATO. It joined the alliance in April 2023, followed by Sweden less than a year later.

Reporters at Thursday’s Oval Office meeting pressed Trump about what he might do if Russia expands its war in Ukraine to other countries in Europe.

In Finnish politics, the spectre of Russian interference looms large: The former Soviet Union invaded Finland in the 1930s, and since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, relations between the two countries have soured even further.

Finland closed its shared border with Russia in 2024, an international divide that stretches across 1,340 kilometres, or 841 miles.

“What if Russia and Vladimir Putin attacks Finland? Would you defend Finland?” one reporter asked Trump on Thursday.

Trump did not mince words in his reply. “I would. Yes, I would. They’re a member of NATO.”

He nevertheless cast doubt on the prospect of a Russian invasion under Putin.

“I don’t think that’s going to happen. I don’t think he’s going to do that. I think the chances of that are very, very small,” he said, turning to Stubb. “You have a very powerful military, one of the best.”

When pushed to specify how he might defend Finland in case of an attack, Trump offered one word in reply: “Vigorously.”

Those warm remarks offered a stark contrast with his approach to Spain. In the wake of the June NATO summit, for instance, Trump called Spain’s position “hostile” and threatened its economy, pledging to make it pay “twice as much” in tariffs to the US.

“I think Spain is terrible, what they’ve done,” he told reporters, accusing the country of taking a “free ride” at other countries’ expense. “That economy could be blown right out of the water with something bad happening.”

Khan Younis, Gaza Strip – For the first time in a long time, Palestinian mother Wiam al-Masri can clearly recognise the cries of her infant son, Samih, who is not yet two months old. His soft wailing rises in the quiet air of al-Mawasi, in southern Khan Younis, hours after Israel and Hamas agreed to the first phase of the peace plan brokered by US President Donald Trump to end the Gaza war – largely halting Israeli air and artillery strikes and ushering in an unfamiliar calm.

After two years of war that left more than 67,190 people dead – an assault the United Nations described as genocide – Palestinians in Gaza are beginning to celebrate a long-awaited silence. The agreement has dramatically reduced the constant shelling and the buzzing of warplanes that have dominated the skies since 2023 – although Israel has conducted some attacks, killing at least 29 Palestinians on Thursday, particularly in Gaza City.

Inside a worn tent where she has lived for five months with her firstborn, her husband and his parents, Wiam listens as the sea wind brushes through the fabric. She says softly, “Finally, the sound of the sea is no longer drowned out by the noise of war. This calm is a blessing only those who have listened to death’s roar for two years can truly understand.”

Wiam’s family fled to al-Mawasi after Israeli forces destroyed her husband’s apartment in Gaza City, just six months after their marriage in November 2024.

At 24, Wiam had been studying pharmacy at the University of Palestine before the war destroyed her campus and forced her to drop out.

Now, she presses her ear, signalling the stillness around her – no explosions, no roaring aircraft. From just 400m (1,300 feet) away, she can hear the gentle breaking of waves on Gaza’s coast, once drowned out by the sound of bombardment.

The buzz of the ‘zanana’

“Since his birth, I never left my baby’s side,” Wiam recalls. “I could barely hear him cry over the shelling or the drones. The most terrifying were the quadcopters that flew right between and inside the tents – once, one hovered just above us.”

A quadcopter is a small, camera-equipped drone that Israel uses extensively for surveillance across Gaza and the occupied West Bank. It emits a distinctive, continuous buzz that Palestinians call “al-zanana” – Arabic for “the buzzing drone.”

She smiles faintly. “Now I hear birds chirping in the palm trees, the sea, and my baby’s cry – sounds I was deprived of before.”

As a breastfeeding mother, Wiam says, “My son’s cry gives me comfort. The real terror was when the [Israeli] tanks approached al-Mawasi – at least three times – or when a drone hovered so close we thought it would strike.”

Wiam pauses, then adds: “And al-zanana was the worst. You can’t hear anything else. It’s not just surveillance; it’s psychological warfare meant to break us.”

She dreams of returning to the rubble of her home. “The sounds of war were not just noise. They were constant fear – every roar could become death in a second. Today, only hours into the truce, the difference is enormous. We can finally hear each other again.”

During the war, she often played recordings of the Quran to calm her baby and herself. “Every sound around us meant death,” she says quietly. “We could barely stand from fear. Imagine living surrounded by the constant noise of destruction – you feel death breathing beside you.”

Memories of loss

The harshest sound Wiam remembers came 36 days into the war, when Israeli strikes hit her extended family’s home as she stood just metres away visiting her aunt. The blast killed six of her siblings, her father’s wife, and her niece, and injured several others, including her twin sister, Wisam.

“It was a sound I’ll never forget,” Wiam says. “A massacre in every sense. Thank God the war has stopped – even temporarily – so that these explosions and massacres won’t happen again.”

Not far away in al-Mawasi, Ahmed al-Hissi, 73, can barely believe the silence. “We’ve lived with the sounds of death chasing us day and night,” he jokes to his sons and grandchildren. “It will take time to get used to peace.”

He is a father of eight – the eldest, Mahmoud, is 50, and the youngest, Shaaban, 28. His son Khaled, 34, was killed on November 8, 2023, by an Israeli naval shell near Gaza’s fishing port. Khaled’s wife, Thuraya, 30, was killed days later when a neighbouring apartment was bombed.

Now Ahmed sits inside a borrowed tent, surrounded by some of his children and grandchildren – including Ahmed, 13; Ghazza, 11; and Shawq, 3 – the children of his late son. They survived because they were playing on the first floor when the third floor, where their mother stood, was hit.

“The sounds of war are unbearable,” he says. “Sometimes we jumped out of bed from the blasts, hugging the children as they shook uncontrollably. Those sounds were omens of death. That’s why today feels unreal.”

As he repairs a fishing net stretched between his knees, he adds, “Even now, my grandchildren flinch at the slightest sound – if I clap my hands, they cry. Here, every sound means something. It means survival or death.”

He looks toward the sea. “Tomorrow, I’ll return to fishing. We’ll hear the gulls and the vendors at Beach Camp again, not the cries of mourners or the rumble of tanks. Gaza is moving from the sounds of death to the sounds of life.”

Empty pots and quiet hunger

In northern al-Mawasi, Tawfiq al-Najili, 40, volunteers as a supervisor at a camp for displaced families. He scrapes the last grains of rice from a large pot donated by a local charity into a plastic bowl for a hungry child clinging to his leg. Exhaustion and sadness shadow his face.

He says the sound of an empty pot scraping its bottom is, to him, “as painful as an explosion”.

“When the ladle hits the bottom of the pot, I know there are families who won’t eat tonight,” he explains. “The war forced many sounds on us – the terrifying ones like jets and bombs, but also the heartbreaking ones: empty pots, children crying from hunger.”

Each time he hears that sound, sorrow fills his chest. “You see adults and children turn away in despair, some in tears. I pray never to hear that sound – or the sound of children crying – again.”

Displaced from northern Khan Younis five months ago, Tawfiq hopes the truce brings not only quiet skies but also food, water, and medicine.

“The war will have truly stopped,” he says, “when the cries of the hungry and the sick fall silent – when we no longer hear weeping or drones, only peace.”

US President Donald Trump pressed Israel’s prime minister to agree to a ceasefire deal.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, a longtime foe of US President Donald Trump, has been indicted for bank fraud, the Reuters news agency has reported, citing a person familiar with the matter, as the administration seeks to use government power against those who have pursued investigations into Trump or publicly resisted his agenda.

Reuters and The Associated Press reported the development on Thursday.

James was indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia on one count after a mortgage fraud investigation, AP said, citing an unnamed source. The James case remained under seal on Thursday, making it impossible to assess what evidence prosecutors have.

In a statement, James called the charges “baseless”. She added, “This is nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponization of our justice system. He is forcing federal law enforcement agencies to do his bidding, all because I did my job as the New York State attorney general.”

Trump, a Republican who campaigned for re-election in part on a vow of retribution after facing a slew of legal woes since his first term in the White House ended in 2021, has repeatedly assailed James, a Democrat, on social media and at political rallies as a partisan enemy.

The indictment of James comes after a grand jury in Virginia on September 25 indicted former FBI Director James Comey on charges of making false statements and obstructing a congressional investigation. Comey has said he is innocent. Trump has regularly assailed Comey’s handling of the FBI investigation that detailed contacts between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.

James is one of several Democratic state attorneys general who have sued to block Trump administration actions. She is best known for bringing a civil fraud case against Trump and his family’s real estate company in 2022. The case resulted in a $454.2m penalty against Trump after a judge found he fraudulently overstated his net worth to dupe lenders.

A New York state appeals court in August threw out the penalty, which had grown to more than $500m with interest, but upheld the trial judge’s finding that Trump was liable for fraud. Both Trump’s and James’s offices are appealing to the state’s highest court.

Trump denied wrongdoing. He has accused James’s office of bringing the case against him for political reasons.

In May, the FBI opened a criminal investigation into mortgage fraud allegations against James.

The probe was opened after Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte, a Trump appointee, sent a letter to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) alleging James “falsified records” to obtain favourable loans on homes she purchased in Virginia and Brooklyn.

James’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said at the time that those accusations were “baseless and long-discredited”.

The DOJ, after receiving referrals from Pulte, has also opened mortgage fraud probes into US Senator Adam Schiff, a Democrat who led the House of Representatives’ inquiry that led to Trump’s impeachment in 2019, and Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors appointed by former US President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

Neither Schiff nor Cook has been charged with a crime, and they both deny wrongdoing.

‘Weaponization of the justice system’

In August, the DOJ convened a grand jury and subpoenaed James’s office for documents about the lawsuit and a separate case she brought against the National Rifle Association (NRA), a person familiar with the investigation told Reuters at the time.

In the NRA case, jurors found its former CEO, Wayne LaPierre, and others liable for years of financial mismanagement, but a judge decided not to impose an outside monitor for the gun rights group.

The federal prosecutors looking into James were examining whether her cases deprived Trump and others of their civil rights, the person said.

Legal decisions are often appealed, but it is highly unusual for government lawyers to face criminal investigation over cases they have brought, especially those that have gone to trial and been sustained by courts.

Lowell called the civil rights probe “the most blatant and desperate example of this administration carrying out the president’s political retribution campaign”.

Washington, DC – In announcing the Gaza ceasefire deal, Hamas praised United States President Donald Trump in one sentence and called on him to compel Israel to live up to its obligations under the agreement in the next.

Trump has presented the ceasefire breakthrough, which he called “momentous”, as his own. And both the Palestinians and Israelis have given him credit for the deal.

But with details of the deal still opaque and the precedents of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu resuming the bombardment after previous agreements, analysts say Trump’s role is essential in making the ceasefire permanent.

“The US must ensure that this is not another one-phase ceasefire that Netanyahu unravels for political survival,” said Nancy Okail, head of the Center for International Policy (CIP) think tank.

“So, sustained US pressure is the only way to secure a full and lasting end of the war.”

Critics say Israel has been increasingly acting as a rogue state, daily violating the ceasefire with Lebanon and the disengagement agreement with Syria, in addition to its attacks across the region and well-documented breaches of international humanitarian law in Gaza.

The Netanyahu government also unilaterally nixed the Gaza truce deal that was in effect earlier this year.

Trump is seen as the ultimate guarantor of the current deal. He was the first to announce it late on Wednesday. The agreement is also based on a 20-point proposal he put forward last week.

“We ended the war in Gaza, and – really on a much bigger basis – created peace, and I think it’s going to be a lasting peace, hopefully,” Trump said on Thursday.

US assurances

Hamas’s chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya also appeared confident that the Israeli assault on Gaza is ending.

“We have received assurances from the brotherly mediators and the US administration who have confirmed that the war is completely over,” he said in a video statement.

While Israel has said that it agreed to the deal, some officials are already casting doubt about committing to ending the war.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said the country has a responsibility to “continue to strive with all its might for the true eradication of Hamas” after the captives are released.

The Israeli war machine is largely dependent on Washington’s backing. The US provided Israel with more than $21bn in direct military aid over the past two years.

Trump and nearly all his top foreign policy aides are staunch Israel supporters, raising concerns about the risk.

So, some analysts say worries that Israel may blow up the truce once its captives are released are not unwarranted.

Yousef Munayyer, Head of the Palestine/Israel programme at the Arab Center Washington DC, said Trump is the “centrepiece” of the deal and must hold “Netanyahu’s feet to the fire” to maintain a lasting ceasefire.

“The entire deal hinges on a convicted felon convincing an indicted war criminal to do the right thing,” said Munayyer, referring to Trump and Netanyahu. “If you are sceptical, you have every reason to be sceptical.”

‘We’ll see’

It’s not entirely clear what the sides have agreed to so far. Trump announced that a deal over the first stage of the ceasefire, which will see the release of all Israeli captives in Gaza in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians held by Israel, has been reached.

What happens next remains to be seen.

Earlier this year, Israel restarted its offensive and a deadly siege on Gaza with the end of the 60-day first stage of the ceasefire deal.

Munayyer noted that the US president’s primary focus in Gaza has been the Israeli captives.

Indeed, whenever Trump has been asked about the atrocities and famine in Gaza over the past months, he would pivot to the captives, taking credit for the release of dozens of Israelis in Gaza during the truce between January and March.

“He’s never really said we need to stop this because of the horrors that it’s inflicting on the Palestinian people. His empathy, his focus is entirely on the Israelis that are being held captive there,” Munayyer told Al Jazeera.

“So once there is a release – and this is the dangerous part about this deal being so front-loaded – will he continue to be interested in ensuring its implementation, ensuring that reconstruction happens, ensuring that humanitarian aid gets in, ensuring that there is an actual ceasefire?”

Trump reasserted that his top priority is the release of the captives on Thursday and did not appear fully committed to permanently ending the war.

Asked whether there are guarantees that Hamas would disarm and Israel would not return to bombing Gaza, Trump said: “First thing we’re doing is getting our hostages back … After that, we’ll see.”

‘Recalibration in Washington’

Okail, of CIP, said the only “durable path” to disarm Hamas is to resolve the root causes of the conflict – the Israeli occupation.

“It’s through Palestinian self-determination,” she said.

Okail added that the US should “stand its ground” and make sure that Israel does not go back to war while also addressing the broader issues of continuing occupation and settlement expansion.

Absent that, “this deal will be as fragile as the ones that preceded it”, she told Al Jazeera.

The White House’s 20-point Gaza plan, released last month, acknowledges that Palestinians are seeking a state, not that they have a right to one.

It floats the possibility of discussing Palestinian statehood, but only after the Palestinian Authority (PA) implements US-required reforms.

“While Gaza re-development advances and when the PA reform programme is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognise as the aspiration of the Palestinian people,” it said.

But even that vague mention appears to be a break with Netanyahu’s insistence that Israel would never allow a Palestinian state to be established.

Trump and Netanyahu appear to have strong personal ties, but Okail said the Israeli strikes on Qatar last month – which prompted international and regional outrage – were a turning point for the US president.

“That backlash forced a recalibration in Washington and demonstrated the limits of unconditional support for [Israel] because it showed that it has a political liability directly on Trump, who has been praising and having good relations with Qatar,” she told Al Jazeera.

Bottom line: Can Trump be trusted to enforce the ceasefire?